Today, I am reading and commenting on  Isaiah 48-51.

Since I am going to be on vacation from July 31-August 9 I have already written my blog posts for these days and scheduled them to be posted.  However, I may not be able to post a link to them on FaceBook, Gab.com, or MeWe.com during every day (or any day) during this time period.  So, please continue to visit my site to read my daily devotional.

Once again, I am not sure how the points I want to make from this passage fit together. So, I will start writing about them and see where the Spirit leads me (and if it makes no sense whatsoever I suspect that means I did not truly listen to the Spirit of God as I wrote).

An important theme which appears throughout the Book of Isaiah (and the entire Bible, for that matter) is that God does not speak in secret. So, if someone claims to have secret knowledge of God, or of His will, they are lying.  God has not communicated secret messages to anyone (the only exceptions are the visions which a few prophets have seen and been told not to describe to anyone).  God speaks openly with mankind because He seeks to teach us what is best for us.  God is not like those who lie to us in order to get us to do what they believe is in our best interest.  God does not attempt to deceive us in to doing what He knows in our best interests, which gives us a hint as to whether those claiming to act in our best interests are actually doing so: those who are genuinely acting in our best interests have no reason to deceive us.

Isaiah’s prophecies concerning God speaking openly lead up to him prophesying about the coming Messiah.   God told Isaiah that He did this so that no one could claim that the Messiah was predicted by man made gods (although, as I pointed out the other day, they try to do anyway).  In his prophecy of the coming Messiah Isaiah “quotes” Him as saying, “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing at all. Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand,  and my reward is with my God.”  And if we look at Jesus’ life from a human perspective and only look at what He accomplished in His lifetime, it certainly looks like He had not accomplished much.  At the time of His death, Jesus had, at most, a few hundred followers in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.  And yet, what Isaiah wrote a few verses later is true of Him, “Kings will see you and stand up, princes will see and bow down,…”  Look at the history of the world since Jesus’ death and you will see how true that is of Him.

 

 

Before I was born the Lord called me;
    from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.