One of the habits that shapes me is starting each day with Scripture. My first 7–12 minutes after waking are spent with an app that offers a short opening prayer, a prayer of confession, two Scripture readings, the Lord’s Prayer, and a blessing for the day. It’s not Bible study or sermon prep. It’s what I do for my own spiritual practice. Bleary-eyed, I simply read it, pray it, let it pass through me. It’s part of my routine as I move on to a workout, then cup of coffee and the day’s tasks. But sometimes a verse lingers. Sometimes the Holy Spirit won’t let it pass by. It rattles around in my head until I have to sit down with it. That happened this week and the verse that rose to the surface wasn’t even in my assigned readings! It was Isaiah 5:20:
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”
Isaiah spoke these words to a people who had inverted God’s ways. Leaders in Judah were cloaking injustice in the language of righteousness, redefining moral categories for their own gain. The prophet’s cry was not against people who were simply confused; it was against those who knowingly blurred the lines between truth and falsehood, justice and oppression. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
I want to be careful here. My goal is not to stir up more political outrage. God knows we have plenty of that already. But if Scripture is going to shape us, we need to be honest about where we see Isaiah’s words playing out in our world.
- When outrage becomes a business model. There are entrepreneurs who use social media algorithms fine-tuned to provoke anger, framing themselves as prophetic truth-tellers while mostly profiting off our division. Comparing that to the moral courage of leaders like Dr. King, who risked everything for justice, reveals the inversion. To be clear this is not the same thing.
- When violence against civilians is called “protection.” The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas is unbearably complex, but even in complexity we can name this: starving babies, bombing hospitals, and displacing entire populations cannot be justified as self-defense when you are the most advanced military ever known to humankind. I think Isaiah would call it what it is: darkness mistaken for light.
- When the poor are blamed for what the powerful create. We are told by some that the middle class is being squeezed because of immigrants or the poor. Meanwhile, the wealthiest are making the highest percentages of profit in history! That’s just bitter passed off as sweet.
Isaiah’s words sting because they are timeless. The human temptation to rename things: to call darkness light, to call greed good, to call cruelty necessary is as old as Scripture itself.
It would be easy to stop here, shaking our heads and scrolling on. But Isaiah didn’t just leave his people with “woes.” The prophets spoke hard truths so that God’s people might wake up and return to the path of justice and life.
And in Jesus, we see God’s final word on all of this. Rome called crucifixion “justice.” The empire called its heavy hand “peace.” Evil was dressed up as good, darkness as light. Yet God overturned it all. The resurrection exposed the lie. The bitterness was made sweet again.
I think that’s why this verse rattled around for me. It’s not just a critique of our world; it’s a reminder of who God is. God doesn’t abandon us to our inversions. God brings truth to light. God unmasks falsehood. God restores what we’ve twisted.
This is one reason I keep up my daily Scripture reading practice. Not because I expect every morning to come with divine revelation or Spirit-inspired clarity. I’ll be honest that most days it just passes through me. But every now and then, a verse sticks like the one I’ve shared above.
I want to encourage you to try the same. You don’t need a seminary degree. You don’t need hours of study. You don’t even need an app. Just a simple rhythm: a prayer, a reading, a moment of silence. Let the Scripture form you. Let it sharpen your vision so that when the world calls evil good and good evil, you can see through the inversions when they happen.
God of light and truth,
help us to see clearly.
Guard us from the temptation to call evil good
or to mistake bitter for sweet.
When the world gets it upside down,
form us by Scripture until our hearts beat with your justice,
our lives reflect your mercy,
and our voices speak your truth.
Amen.
