Survivors

DEVOTION

ISAIAH

SURVIVORS

Isa 1:7-9

7 Your country is desolate,  your cities burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners right before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers. 8 The Daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a field of melons, like a city under siege.  9 Unless the LORD Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah.

NIV

We do have to remember this is a vision given to Isaiah from the Lord. It is not a history of what is actually happening at the time Isaiah is speaking these visions, it is what will happen, and what did happen at some time later. We would have to do a side by side comparison with these events spoken of with verses in either or both the books of Chronicles and Kings to find times that might correspond to this vision. That would take hours, perhaps days or even months of study which we are not inclined to undertake, besides that is not what we are after here. We want to see any truths we can gleam in order to enhance our understanding of our relationship with the Lord. What we can know is that these people were a stiff-necked group, disobeying the Lord although they have such an almost supernatural history with him. Over the course of their history as a people they had miracle after miracle from the hand of God. They were and still are his chosen people, not because of them, but because of him. He chose them to reveal himself to all the peoples of the world. They are the people who he chose to demonstrate his power, his sovereignty, his love, patience, compassion, mercy, and justice to all the world.  This is not actually a story of Israel, but a story of God. When a country turns its back on God, it will be desolate. We can also see that when we turn away, or live in disobedience, which in essence is not living by faith, not trusting him, our lives are desolate. This is not about how much stuff we have, or how much money we have, or how well we live in the physical realm of this world. The desolation, the feeling of being desolate is within our spirit, we do not feel the presence of the Lord. The country we live in is being burned with fire, which is what we think about when we think of hell, burning fire. Our country has corrupted itself under the influence of hell, Satan. It is becoming worse as the years roll by. It is being stripped of anything which bears a resemblance of a Christian nation. It has been overrun by strangers, by people who do not know God. What we have to also be aware of is that we must always be on guard that we are not overrun and overthrown by strangers. These are the things, the ideas, and the ideology of worldly thinking which is foreign to the ways of God. If we allow ourselves to become more and more like the people of the world, in our thinking and our actions, or behaviors, our lives will be like nothing more than living in a shack in the vineyard of God. Within our soul, we will be desolate, empty, without the joy of the Lord, without the benefits of his hand at work in our lives. It always come back to the idea of not trying to serve two masters. We need to be among those survivors, those handful of faithful servants of the Lord. We can see how dangerous it is to dance with the devil, to embrace the ideas of the world. We can see how disastrous it was for Sodom and Gomorrah because of their perverted lives. Our world is not far behind those cities in its ways. Let us not get ourselves trapped into any thinking which could be seen as acceptance of this behavior of ideologies. It comes down to whether we are being an influence in the world or the world is being an influence in our lives. We need to be among the survivors.