I am doing my annual listen to
Handel’s Messiah. I was struck this year by the first words
sung in the opening tenor recitative: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” Those are the opening words of Isaiah 40. These words appear to have been spoken to
people who were not in comfortable circumstances. They viewed themselves as faithful followers
of God, who were about to be handed over to a culture, society and political
system that despised God. Why should
anyone in circumstances like this find comfort?
The end of Isaiah 40 says it:
Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the
everlasting God, the Lord, the
Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no
searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint;
and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall
faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait
upon the Lord shall renew their
strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be
weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
Those words resonate within me at
the end of this year. A week before
Thanksgiving I was informed that my current employment might end within a
year. On the very day this was announced
to me, The Upper Room daily
devotional I receive via email was titled “A Better Future.” The text was Isaiah 43.15-21, which includes
these words: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of
old. I am about to do a new thing; now
it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert” (18-19). I am
hopeful. I am trying to live in excited
anticipation to see the way in the wilderness and rivers (notice it is plural)
in the desert.
Isaiah says that the new thing has
already sprung forth: the way in the wilderness and the rivers in the
desert. He asks us “do you not perceive
it?” I need those kind of eyes, like the
shepherds at Jesus’ birth who saw the multitude of angels.
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