Isaiah 29 – 33
Sometimes when I read prophecies that are negative, I quickly get lost in the words. The meaning goes away and I just am reading each word individually and not as a whole thought. Does that ever happen to you? With that said I will try to bring logic and understanding to these chapters.
Jerusalem is under siege and although many of the people profess God, their actions speak otherwise. Verse 13 really sums up the hearts of the people in Jerusalem:
And the Lord said:
“Because this people draw near with their mouth
and honour me with their lips,
while their hearts are far from me,
and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men,
How many people you know like this? How many times have you personally been like this? We tend to get things upside down like Isaiah describes in verse 16 where the “potter be regarded as the clay.” Things get quickly mixed up and suddenly what we drive or wear makes us whole and not our relationship with God.
It actually gets worse for the people of Jerusalem as they turn to the people of Egypt who were their masters. Often times we go back to what is known instead of working for something difficult. Personally, my engineering career has been like this, where I shun new technologies to remain in something known. The software world has past me by with the advent of Java and Object Oriented Design, where I still think in bits and bytes. Sometimes we need to be comfortable with change, but ensure the change is for God!
Chapter 30 verses 12 – 14 interested me:
12 Therefore thus says the Holy One of Israel,
“Because you despise this word
and trust in oppression and perverseness
and rely on them,
13 therefore this iniquity shall be to you
like a breach in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse,
whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant;
14 and its breaking is like that of a potter’s vessel
that is smashed so ruthlessly
that among its fragments not a shard is found
with which to take fire from the hearth,
or to dip up water out of the cistern.”
This says to me pay attention and don’t drift or things we go sour!
Notice in reading Chapters 30 and 31 they both offer the people warnings about going to Egypt? Why did he repeat this twice? It may be because they were already starting down the wrong path and many times this needs more attention than just one warning. Also, thing about how this may apply today where we don’t seem to be making any progress in life or our relationship with God. Many of our finances are in ruin and we feel like a hamster running on a wheel.
Sometimes going back to something that’s easy and know is not necessarily the right thing for our lives. We lean on the final two chapters for the Lord to lean on our faith in him by asking to be gracious and help us as 33:2 states:
O LORD, be gracious to us; we wait for you.
Be our arm every morning,
our salvation in the time of trouble.
Just remember many times God has us wait not to punish us, but to allow us to dig deeper and really know Him better. I believe that is what was going on during this period, and many were not digging but retreating back to their past wicked ways. Take heart that God is there for you and often we just need to dig a hair deeper to really see what He is up to.