Isaiah 62, 63, 64
When God did awesome things we didn’t perceive it. We didn’t look or acknowledge Him and His works. But that is why He came down, in the power of His Spirit, in the Person of His Son. For since the beginning of the world men have not heard nor perceived by the ear, nor has the eye seen any God besides You, who acts for the one who waits for Him. (Isaiah 64:4)
Lord help us to wait for You as we are living here on this earth awaiting Your final salvation.
It is a hard thing to wait for God sometimes, because He has created us with a free will and therefore we have the freedom to think freely. All this thinking leads to much anxiety in our soul, our heart, and our mind. We become apprehensive in believing that God is not with us, or that what is yet to come in our future is going to be impending doom. These are needless fears, and yet they plague the Christian brothers as much as sin lying at the door of Cains life plagued him because he did not rule over it. Some of us are convinced today that there is no God besides the God Jehovia (YHVH) and yet others have formed their own beliefs. It is in these ways that men have gone astray from God and need to be saved. When we do come to You, You meet us and we rejoice in Your salvation. (Isaiah 64:3-5) However, that anxiety controls the unsaved as much as the saved, but this is not God’s will for our lives. God’s will for our life is to be saved and to lift up each other in prayer so that we too can be encouraged when we are being sifted as wheat by Satan. (Luke 22:31-32)
Encouragement and praise of God is what gets us through the tough times. The world alone can grind us down to dust if we are not constantly acknowledging the Lord’s work in our life. (Luke 20:17-18) Life is such a difficult balance and we think that this rest and peace is something that we some day achieve and never have to deal with anything bad. This is not the case, the Lord Jesus told us that in this world we would suffer and face persecution. I believe that the balance of life must include sifting, rejection, and persecution. However, I also believe that in this life we can have joy and peace and happiness, I just don’t count on that happening all the time.
The words of Isaiah 62:10-12 encouraged me this morning in prayer and I hope they encourage you who are reading this now.
10 Go through,
Go through the gates!
Prepare the way for the people;
Build up,
Build up the highway!
Take out the stones,
Lift up a banner for the peoples!
11 Indeed the Lord has proclaimed
To the end of the world:
“Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Surely your salvation is coming;
Behold, His reward is with Him,
And His work before Him.’ ”
12 And they shall call them The Holy People,
The Redeemed of the Lord;
And you shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken.
The Lord encourages us through His word, this is the first thought and point we need to consider when we go through our day. There are times of waiting in life, and being patient for the Lord to do His work, we will get to that. But there are also times the Lord calls us to move. This is why He said “Go through…Go through the gates!”, and “Build up, build up the highway!” This is work that needs to be done on our behalf. It is our response to the Lord’s working in our life. However, this is not the work that the Lord cursed all mankind with in the garden after we sinned, this is the work where we join God where He is already at work. This type of work is a joy, because we are simply being obedient to Him and following His lead. (v. 11 “and His work before Him.”) The Lord has a great work to do, and He will continually do that work. What is encouraging to me about the Lord doing this work is that we can encourage God to not rest in doing this work in our lives and in His children!
Isaiah 62:7
And give Him no rest till He establishes
And till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
We can challenge the Lord to continue to pursue peace with Jerusalem and with us, and He will do it, because He is God, and He never stops working.
The Lord encourages us by telling us that we are His children, and He loves us. He tells us in these few verses that we are “The Holy People”, “The Redeemed of the Lord”, “Sought Out”, “A City Not Forsaken”. How encouraging to hear that the Lord calls us that. We are our own worst critic aren’t we? We get so down on ourselves that we forget that the Lord has saved us, redeemed us, and called us Holy! This is perhaps due to the anxiety in our hearts and minds that tends to rule our days. But we need to remember back to our salvation because the Lord just didn’t save us at ‘one point in time’. He saved us for ALL TIME, and His salvation is continually working in our lives, not just once for all. Though our ways are not always the Lords ways, nor are our thoughts the Lords thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9) we can be assured that He will continue to save us.
Isaiah 64:5
You meet him who rejoices and does righteousness,
Who remembers You in Your ways.
You are indeed angry, for we have sinned—
In these ways we continue;
And we need to be saved.
The human mind is so fickle as well. Even the prophet wrote here in the next verse how we are unclean things, and that all our righteousness is like filthy rags. So back and forth are our thoughts. We must fix our eyes on Jesus first and foremost. When we do this it will be easier to rejoice in the work that God has done, is doing, and will do in our lives.
Before we were saved we focused on other things besides Jesus, and it got us into a pit where we needed to be saved. I remember the day of my salvation, and I remember thinking then that I knew I was saved but there were also the thoughts about the things I still needed to be saved from, of which there were many. The past continued to haunt me even as I tried to walk in the ways of God. This same sort of anxiety and fear was found in so many of the old testament prophets, and it continues to be a force we reckon with today in our lives. Long before we came around Satan was setting his trap for the human race to forget about God and worship him as it is implied in the text in Isaiah (14:2). But even before that God had a plan that involved His only begotten Son Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit to save mankind from the trap which the devil would play on His saints.
Isaiah 63:8-9
8 For He said, “Surely they are My people,
Children who will not lie.”
So He became their Savior.
9 In all their affliction He was afflicted,
And the Angel of His Presence saved them;
In His love and in His pity He redeemed them;
And He bore them and carried them
All the days of old.
Lastly, the remembrance of God is from everlasting to everlasting. As the text above says, “all the days of old”. He has not created us to destroy us, how unlike God to do such a thing. God has created us first because He loves us, and furthermore because He desires to be with us always. That is why He came up with this crazy plan from the very beginning and spoke it to Eve in the garden. (Genesis 3:15) God has said in His word that “surely they are My people” and that promise is one that the Lord will never forget. Isaiah said of Him “so He became their Savior…and the Angel of His Presence saved them.” (63:9). This Angel, this Jesus, is our Savior and it is only through Him that we have this salvation. It has always been true, and it will always be true. There are just too many new testament examples to quote on this and I have a desire to show the old testament examples sometimes as it hit home the point that the God we serve has always been the same, it is the same God in the new testament as it was in the old testament.
Isaiah 63:11
Then he remembered the days of old,
Moses and his people, saying:
“Where is He who brought them up out of the sea
With the shepherd of His flock?
Where is He who put His Holy Spirit within them,
God has given us His Holy Spirit and redeemed us, let us never forget that. We need not fear the world or any other thing that would come against us. God is for us and He has given us His Holy Spirit to fight against all things that war against the knowledge of God. Be encouraged today and remember to praise the Lord and lift up others around you as you go out into the world which God has placed you in.
Isaiah 62:10
10 Go through,
Go through the gates!
Prepare the way for the people;
Build up,
Build up the highway!
Take out the stones,
Lift up a banner for the peoples!