Daily Devotion

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.

Fading Flowers

Our God has said:
"Encourage my people! Give them comfort.
Speak kindly to Jerusalem and announce:
Your slavery is past; your punishment is over.
I, the LORD, made you pay double for your sins."
Someone is shouting:
"Clear a path in the desert! Make a straight road for the LORD our God.
Fill in the valleys; flatten every hill and mountain.
Level the rough and rugged ground.
Then the glory of the Lorw will appear for all to see.
The LORD has promised this!"
Someone told me to shout, and I asked, "What should I shout?"
We humans are merely grass, and we last no longer than wild flowers.
At the LORD'S command, flowers and grass disappear, and so do we.
Flowers and grass fade away, but what our God has said will never change. - Isaiah 40:1—8 CEV

Payback time, with interest. With this chapter; the prophet Isaiah shifted gears. Where before he had predicted the necessary punishment against God's people Israel, he suddenly predicted what would come after the punishment. He told them that God intended to restore the relationship their idolatry had destroyed.

God promised his people that he would restore them just as surely as he had punished them. God was offering comfort to the Israelites. He was letting them know that their time in captivity was ending and that they would soon return to their land. Their sins had been paid for; their punishment was completed. Compared to God, the life of a human being was remarkably short. But God's purposes and promises, like God himself, would last forever.

The New Testament authors of the Gospels identified John the Baptist as the one calling in the wilderness to make a straight way for God. The one for whom John made a straight way was Jesus: the Messiah and the Son of God, whom the Gospel writers and John, by the use of this passage from Isaiah, identified with Yahweh, the God of Israel. How could that prophecy be applied by the New Testament authors to John the Baptist and Jesus? Just as God had rescued his people from exile in Babylon and forgiven them for all their unfaithfulness to him, so Jesus would rescue his people—all humanity—and forgive them. The forgiveness God offered to Israel he extends to all of us.