Year 9, Day 19: Isaiah 35

Theological Commentary: Click Here

As bleak as Isaiah 34 is, Isaiah 35 is filled with hope. In this chapter we have creation celebrating.  Happiness abounds.  Order is reset.  Life seems to go on as it was meant to be.

This is the way of all good love stories.  Every Hallmark movie ever made follows this plotline: Boy meets girl, relationship happens, there is a crisis point, busting through the crisis reveals a greater relationship, the movie ends happily.  For the record, every Disney movie typically has the same sequence: Main character is living normally, along comes something of interest (usually a person of the opposite gender, a crisis threatens the main character’s normal life, bursting through the crisis reveal a new and improved life.  It is the way that stories are told.  Human beings learn best by bursting through moments of crisis.

The Bible is no different.  God knows this about us, He created us!  Isaiah is giving the Hebrew the full picture, because they are in the middle of the story and cannot see it completely.  They entered a relationship with God.  For a while, life was great.  Then the Hebrew people fell away from God and the crisis of the Assyrians (and later, Babylonians) would come.  The part that they can’t see is after the Assyrians and Babylonians come there will be restoration and an even better relationship with God.

This is true on a much bigger scale for all of us.  God gives us His relationship with the Hebrew people as an example for us to learn from.  We will all go through life, reaching several crisis points along the way.  We will have social crises, emotional crises, physical crises, spiritual crises.  When we overcome these crises, though, we will find a new and deeper life waiting for us on the other side.

What is neat about this chapter of Isaiah is His desire to not only teach us this pattern but to also include creation.  Isaiah ties the world around the people into the story.  The world around the Hebrew people will rejoice and celebrate when the crisis is past.  So does the world around us celebrate when our crisis is past.  As poets and storytellers often reveal to us, once we find a new and deeper existence, the colors are always brighter, the sounds are always clearer, and world is just a better place.  Human beings encounter crises all the time; we are better for them once we are able to proper get through them and learn what it is that God would have us learn.

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