" H E A R, O E A R T H ! "

"I Call Heaven And Earth To Witness..."

It seems the prophet Isaiah had nobody anymore to complain to; no one would give him audience, so he turned prophetically to nature to be witness in the controversy between God and His people Israel.  The language in verse 4 makes it all the more apparent that the prophet had been reporting the people of Israel to the earth and the heavens over Israel.  The sinners he was referring to were not the earth and the heavens he was addressing, else he would have said, “Ye have forsaken the LORD, ye have provoked the Holy One of Israel.” But he said, “they have forsaken the LORD....”

The prophet was also not metonymically referring to the people of the earth when he said, “Hear, O earth.” Ditto for “Hear, O heavens.”  He was directly addressing the earth and the heavens.  When men would no more hear the word of the Lord, the prophet had to turn to and preach it to trees and  streams and stones and the heavens.  We find a similar situation in Jeremiah 6:19-20:

19  Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not harkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it.

20  To what purpose come there to me incense from Sheba...?

Two things were happening here: God, through His prophet, was both complaining to the earth, and also calling it to witness, because His people had failed, and He was going to bring judgment upon them.  Tomorrow they could claim that they were innocent; that God was punishing them unjustly.  Then He would need to call upon His faithful witnesses, in this case, the earth.

Jesus was teaching His disciples the same lesson when He told them that if they went anywhere to preach, and the people rejected them, they should shake off the dust (or sand) from off their feet, and it would stand against those people in witness on the day of judgment (Mark 6:11).  Nature hears what is happening among men, and it is recording it all, for one great day - the judgment day.

There are other instances in the Bible when nature, or the elements in nature, were called upon to be witnesses in a controversy between God and man.  In Deuteronomy 4:26, for instance, Moses called upon “heaven and earth to witness” against Israel, that the Lord would deal terribly with them if they should forsake Him.  In Genesis 31:44-45, Jacob, and Laban his uncle, made a covenant over a heap of stones which they called to be witness against whoever of them was going to break the terms of the covenant.  That would not have been possible unless they thought of the heap of stones as 'living’ in a certain spiritual way.  God Himself, it is stated in Psalm 50:4, will call upon the heavens and the earth to witness in the day that He will judge His people.

The earth can bear witness