“O Lord our God, others have ruled us, but you alone are the one we worship. Those we served before are dead and gone. Their departed spirits will never return! You attacked them and destroyed them, and they are long forgotten. O Lord, you have made our nation great; yes, you have made us great. You have extended our borders, and we give you the glory!”
Isaiah 26:13-15 NLT
We cannot go far in this life without, sooner or later, finding that we have to answer to someone. As soon as a child is old enough to understand, they have to answer to their parents. At school, they answer to a teacher. Then, as a teenager, they might find that a policeman isn’t too impressed by their behaviour. In a workplace, an employer will tell them what to do. When they’re sick, a nurse or doctor will provide advice, quite strongly if necessary. Someone receiving benefits has to answer to the government agency to keep receiving them. The list goes on. But in a spiritual sense, there are two masters: one we pilgrims know well, God Himself, and it is a joy to be able to serve Him. The other is the devil, whom most inhabitants in the UK follow, although they would probably deny it. As Bob Dylan wrote, “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed / You’re gonna have to serve somebody / Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord / But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”.
Isaiah wrote, “O Lord our God, others have ruled us, but you alone are the one we worship”. The Israelites had many different rulers, as we can read in the Book of Judges. In this Bible book, we find that time and again, the Israelites “did evil in the Lord’s sight” and found that judgement soon followed, with foreign nations overpowering their nation. In Judges 4, we find the story of a Canaanite king, Sisera, who “ruthlessly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years”. Then two chapters on, we find, “The Israelites did evil in the Lord’s sight. So the Lord handed them over to the Midianites for seven years” (Judges 6:1). Then on another occasion, “Again the Israelites did evil in the Lord’s sight. They served the images of Baal and Ashtoreth, and the gods of Aram, Sidon, Moab, Ammon, and Philistia. They abandoned the Lord and no longer served him at all. So the Lord burned with anger against Israel, and he turned them over to the Philistines and the Ammonites, who began to oppress them that year. For eighteen years they oppressed all the Israelites east of the Jordan River in the land of the Amorites (that is, in Gilead)” (Judges 10:6-8). As we read further, we find the story of Samson and the Philistines, with the same pattern continuing.
So when Isaiah wrote, “others have ruled us”, he wasn’t wrong, and in his days, the threat was from Babylon and the cruel and unstoppable Assyrian army. But Isaiah could see a day coming when “those we served before are dead and gone”, and he celebrated the time when the Lord would make the nation of the Jews great again. Any student of history could see that even though the Israelites sinned and were subject to a foreign ruler for a time, the Lord saved them. This happened frequently, and even in Jesus’ time, the Romans were the occupying force, with the Jews subject to their rule. Today, the nation of Israel is self-ruling once again, although the land they live in is a fraction of what God promised them through Abraham. Will we one day see their border expanded as Isaiah prophesied?
We pilgrims were once ruled by a power that Jesus destroyed on the Cross at Calvary. Hebrews 2:14-15, “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying”. Colossians 2:15, “In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross”. We were once ruled by the enemy of God, the devil, and we served him without realising it. Think of the lives we lived and the sins we committed. Think of the ways we offended God through our actions, our speech and our thoughts. But Jesus came to set us free from all that and through God’s grace, we are free indeed.
But we pilgrims are soldiers on the front line of the battle between God and the devil. We are harassed and attacked on many fronts, but mostly in our minds. Paul wrote, “For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). A spiritual battle continues to rage, but we know that we are on the winning side. So we equip ourselves for the battles ahead with all of God’s armour, assured of the Lord’s support in the difficult times. Yes, we will occasionally fall, but God is quick to forgive, and He picks us up and dusts us off before sending us back to the conflict. And all the while we are being sanctified, made holy for the day when we will find ourselves in Heaven in God’s presence. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, “That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”.
Yes, one day we will see the greatness and glory of God shine out in a world where the devil is no more. Isaiah could see it. Can we? A few days ago, we delved into Psalm 73 and found how the Psalmist found his way back into God’s presence. Too often, we pilgrims fail to lift our gazes in a Heavenly direction. But we have read the end of the Book, and we know what will happen. We don’t know when, but what we do know is that God will keep His promises. But we are not a people who are “too Heavenly minded to be of any earthly good”. We pilgrims are a people who bring the message of our hope in God into the lives of our friends and families, those who are otherwise heading to the wrong place. We are the means by which Heaven will touch earth. In the Lord’s prayer, we pray for God’s Kingdom to come and for His will to be done. Do we think we can just sit back and wait for God to do something through some divine process? I suspect this process involves willing and able servants like us, serving as His hands and feet. So what has God asked us to do today? Come to that, have we asked Him? Hmmm..
Dear Father God. We reach out to You this morning in prayer, asking for the next assignment You have for us. We pray for willing ears to hear what You have to say, and for grace and compassion to equip us as we obediently do Your will in the lives of those around us. And above all, we thank You for Jesus and all that He has done for us, bringing Your Kingdom into our lives. We pray in Your name. Amen.
