A Devotional Thought From Isaiah

In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction. Isaiah 24:12
At the noise of the tumult the people fled; at the lifting up of thyself the nations were scattered.   Isaiah 33:3

In his sermons, the prophet Isaiah gives us the clear understanding that God is in control of the future of the nations. They do not determine their futures except in the sense that their wicked and sinful societies can bring forth the judgment of God.

Isaiah tells us that Moab, Damascus, Tyre, Judah, Israel, Assyria, Egypt, and even Babylon, the great, lost their power and faced destruction under His hand. They could not stop it.

The news hounds and political junkies, politicians and military leaders, of that day, viewing many of these nations from the earthly perspective, would never have expected them to be flattened and desolated as they were. They were, so to speak, too big to fail. They were too great to fall. They were too powerful to be overpowered. So it seemed, so they just went on their merry, sinful way. They did not expect that their behavior could bring down their country, but it did.

If God still rules in the affairs of the nations, and He does, the modern countries have obligations to govern themselves and be righteous according to God’s biblical directives. Present day nations could fall just as remarkably as those of Babylon’s time.

A Devotional Thought From Isaiah

Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts. Isaiah 6:5

“Woe is me!”

What brought on this lamentable exclamation from the prophet Isaiah? What terrible thing had occurred in his life that caused him to see himself this way? What circumstance had brought him to this revelation? Was he just diagnosed with some dread disease? Had he lost a lawsuit and the payout would bankrupt him? Had his son decided to marry outside the faith? Had any one of a myriad of awful or tragic things happened to him?

No.

Isaiah had experienced something so spectacular that it had shown him how pitiful and sinful he was. Isaiah had been at the Temple, and there he had a vision of the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.

When Isaiah saw the glory of God, in that moment he saw himself and his people for the unclean, sinful, unglorious beings he, and they, were.

When that happens to anyone, he/she sees the LORD, it is the beginning of moral and spiritual reformation. A modern word, still in vogue, is renewal.

The people of this country, much less the world, need this! They need to see God as He has revealed Himself. That revelation of Himself, as we know, is in the Bible. Real improvement, personal and national, begins with this experience.