A Year with God

Selection Taken From:
A Year with God by R.P. Nettelhorst

Make this the year you let God's Word "dwell in you richly"---and marvel at the results! Each entry in this 365-day devotional features Scripture verses in which God speaks, accompanied by insights and applications to enhance your understanding. Learn what God says about hope and fear; perseverance and quitting; companionship and isolation; and more! 384 pages, softcover from Nelson, Copyright 2010.

My Deliverance Will Be Forever

Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.
For the moth will eat them up like a garment, and the worm will eat them like wool; but my deliverance will be forever, and my salvation to all generations.
Awake, awake, put on strength, 0 arm of the LORD!
Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago!
Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep; who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over?
So the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. - Isaiah 51:7—11 NRSV

God promised Isaiah, and the remnant who had remained faithful to him, that they need not fear what their enemies said about them. The idolaters would soon be history. Even the Babylonians would someday be gone, just as every other enemy in the past had gone away. God had taken care of the Egyptians, and he would take care of the current bad guys too.

God used a familiar old story well known to the ancient world to make his point. It was a pagan story. Rahab was a mythological beast, a dragon in charge of chaos, that had become a symbol for Egypt in Isaiah's day. (This Rahab was not the Rahab of Jericho.) In the myth, this Rahab was chopped to bits by God, allowing God to then create the universe. In a similar way, Egypt had been overthrown by the plagues that God had sent against it, allowing God to make his people into a new nation. So God repurposed this old story and reapplied it.

God promised his people that just as he had delivered them from Egypt, so he would deliver them from the Assyrians and the Babylonians who had taken them captive. The current oppressors would meet the same end as all other oppressors who dared to rise up against God's people. Remembering how God has helped in the past can help us fight discouragement today.