Isaiah Day 147 - Talk About It. Sing About It. Proclaim It!
17 Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer,
The Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
Who teaches you to profit,
Who leads you by the way you should go.
18 Oh, that you had heeded My commandments!
Then your peace would have been like a river,
And your righteousness like the waves of the sea.
19 Your descendants also would have been like the sand,
And the offspring of your body like the grains of sand;
His name would not have been cut off
Nor destroyed from before Me.”
20 Go forth from Babylon!
Flee from the Chaldeans!
With a voice of singing,
Declare, proclaim this,
Utter it to the end of the earth;
Say, “The Lord has redeemed
His servant Jacob!”
21 And they did not thirst
When He led them through the deserts;
He caused the waters to flow from the rock for them;
He also split the rock, and the waters gushed out.
22 “There is no peace,” says the Lord, “for the wicked.”
If I went out and laid down on
the highway in front of my home every night the chances are high that I would
be seriously injured or killed. To intentionally live outside the counsel of
God it will only hurt me sooner or later. There is no peace outside His Word.
His laws are not arbitrary. Even those that seem so wouldn't seem so if we
understood the setting in which they were given.
As we have clearly seen Judah was
in a mess, a mess of their own making and predictably they had no peace. There
is another kind of suffering though. Not all suffering is self-inflicted. God
hints at that reality here in Isaiah 48 even though it is subtle. He tells
Judah to proclaim how God gave them water in the desert, how He split the rock
and water gushed out. That event was long before their time. It happened to
their ancestors after they fled from slavery in Egypt.
Why bring it up? A few reasons:
1. The slavery they were escaping
was not self-inflicted. It wasn't caused by their own bad choices or
wickedness.
2. The people that were going to
escape Babylonian tyranny and return to Jerusalem to rebuild would not be those
directly responsible for their captivity. It would be a future generation
suffering under the bad choices and consequences created by their ancestors.
3. To have the courage to return
and rebuild they would need faith in a God their ancestors abandoned but who
never abandoned them. They would need to remember the things He had done in the
past so they would have courage to face their own future.
4. God is not just our God. He is
timeless. He is the God of an ancient past we never experienced and a glorious
future we can't even imagine. If we don't hold to both those unseen realities
we will give up in the present.
5. Remember Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho who
his the spies and chose to become part of God's people? She recited to those
spies all the miracles God had performed for Israel and they all happened
before she was born! Is it possible that others watching our journey with God
are more aware of His goodness to us than we are?
6. There is no permanent peace to
be found in the circumstances of this life even if we are trying our best to
follow His counsel. Jesus was perfect and He was dogged at every step. However
He slept through life threatening storms because He had a peace that
transcended present circumstances. He passed through crowds seeking His life
because He was unafraid. He knew His life and ultimately His death were all in
His Father's hands. The same Father who split the rock in the barren wilderness
so thousands upon thousands of fleeing slaves could drink and live.
7. Because He wants to provide
for us in our unique places of need. We don't know what the future holds but we
can know the One who will carry us through it.