NOTES for Isa 30:23-26
Speaking of messianic times, Isaiah describes the spiritual life of an inhabitant of the Kingdom as an unwavering walk along the path of righteousness. Should someone happen to stray to the right or to the left, they will hear a voice warning them of their mistake. At first glance, it might seem that such supervision deprives a person of freedom altogether. In practice, however, things turn out to be less simple. Of course, to someone unaccustomed to following any commandments at all, this situation may seem like a kind of spiritual slavery—and not only spiritual slavery. What sort of life is this, after all: as though one were under guard all the time, a guard invisible yet utterly real!
If the commandments and the Torah as a whole were merely something like a legal or even a moral code, that would most likely be the case. Any code, even a moral one, remains an external constraint upon a person. The only difference is that a legal code restrains a person from without, by the force of law, while a moral code does so from within, by the force of moral authority. But in both cases a person has to compel themselves to observe the standards laid down in the code concerned.
Yet Jewish tradition also has a concept of the inner Torah, reflected in the Book of Psalms and the Book of Proverbs, and to some extent in the prophetic books as well. This is the Torah whose commandments a person perceives not as standards proposed from outside but as an inner imperative—as something they cannot live without, because commandments understood in this way form a kind of inner spiritual core of their personality, without which they can no longer imagine their spiritual life, or indeed their life at all. Observing the commandments of the inner Torah becomes something a person takes for granted: they simply cannot live any other way.
Why, then, in the messianic Kingdom does a person still sometimes hear a voice that will not let them stray either to the right or to the left from the path of the Torah? Can that desire really remain despite the inner Torah? The best answer to this question is given by Paul, who describes in his Epistle to the Romans how he himself tried to follow the inner Torah even before meeting the Risen One on the road to Damascus. He did everything he could, but he could not walk the path of righteousness without straying to the right or to the left: his sinful nature asserted itself.
It is no accident that Isaiah mentions the Teacher who will no longer hide Himself (v. 20; the Hebrew text has “teacher,” not “teachers” as in the Russian Synodal translation): without His help, without the support of the Messiah promised by God, the path of the Torah, the path of righteousness in all its purity and fullness, is beyond human strength. But if He is near, His voice will indeed keep the person seeking righteousness and the Kingdom from straying “either to the right or to the left.”