I Set My Face Like A Flint

¹“For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God. Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow.” (Isaiah 50:7,10-11). Flint is an incredibly hard and durable stone. Sometimes, doing the right thing means that we must go completely against the grain. Choosing to tell the truth when everyone else has bought into the lie can open us up to all kinds of attacks. We have to be like flint if we're going to survive the onslaught. We like to think that if we just follow Jesus, then our lives will be pretty easy. But why should we think that? Jesus made people so angry that the Jews and the Romans started working together to take Him down, and they hated each other intensely, but they hated Jesus more. It's one thing to sit there and take the heat and try to be like flint and let all of the insults bounce off of us, but what about when we have to face such intense opposition and God also leaves us in the dark? How do we keep walking alone and attacked and without any clear light to guide us? Well, other than being hard, one of the main things that flint is known for is emitting sparks and starting fires. Getting struck by a hard piece of steel can't be fun for the flint but a flash of light does come from it. What does Isaiah tell us to do when we are walking in darkness and beset on every side by opposition? We are to set our faces like flint and compass ourselves about with the sparks of all of those strikes, that our walk through the darkness may be illuminated by the light of the fire and the sparks that we have kindled by our flinty determination to trust in the name of the Lord, no matter how many times we are attacked for it. What's the alternative? To give up? To lie down in sorrow? As C.S. Lewis has said, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity). If we find ourselves in darkness, it is tempting to just lie down and wallow in self pity and wait until the light comes back. But if we will just set our faces like flint and walk through the darkness anyway, then every time we stumble into some hard object in the darkness, we will create a little spark and see our way forward just a little bit. And the fiercer the opposition, the more sparks we will kindle and the greater our light will be. We can lie down in sorrow or we can blaze forth in the fire of opposition and the glory of God.