“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: See, the virgin will conceive, have a son, and name him Immanuel.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Sometimes, the same scene, viewed through two different lenses, can look very different. You’ve perhaps heard or even witnessed something like this before. You see a man push an old woman down in the middle of the street. What should we think? If that’s all we know, then he’s a scoundrel. If, however, he is doing it to get her out of the way of an oncoming car, he’s a hero. What we see here in Isaiah is subject to the same sort of interpretive conundrum.
“I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Brokenness was never supposed to be the state of things. When God designed the world and everything in it, to a certain extent it all reflected His image. It was all good. All of it. So good. As Moses describes God creating one thing after another, you can almost hear Him whistling while He worked He was so tickled at the goodness of it all. It’s like you felt when you were working on a big project and every single detail was falling exactly into place only on a much, much grander scale. It was all so good. And then it wasn’t. But brokenness was never supposed to be the state of things.
The season of Advent is finally here! For the next month followers of Jesus around the world will be setting aside some time to give special attention to preparing for the arrival of Jesus. Our celebration is not simply for His birth, though, but for His return when He will make all things new. With that in mind, I want to help you get ready for the arrival of Jesus into your lives. Each Monday will bring a new sermon exploring the story of His arrival through a different lens. Each other week day will bring a new reflection on the Advent season that I hope will set your season in the right terms. Blessings to you as you preparing for the coming King!
A Good Story
That was a
moment right there, wasn’t it? I don’t
know about you, but that song is one of my favorites. There is power in this proclamation, “it is
well!” There is strength in being able
to declare that though sin or storm or suffering may loom dauntingly large in
front of us, nonetheless, “it is well with my soul.” Maybe you are in a season when that
declaration is little more than a faint whisper, but nonetheless, to
stand…perhaps to sit…maybe even to simply fall to your knees and with even a
mustard seed-sized faith in the God who alone has the power to push back the
darkness and, with defiance in your spirit, breath out, “it is well with my
soul,” can have the effect of throwing on a floodlight in a dark room.
“He answered them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea so that it will calm down for you, for I know that I’m to blame for this great storm that is against you.’ Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they couldn’t because the sea was raging against them more and more.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
When I was growing up, we had a board game called Bonkers. The idea was that the game was different every time you played. The board didn’t have any instructions on the path you followed. Instead, you added them as you went. The results varied, but the roll of the dice could result in the loss of several points, or a turn that went on for several minutes. It was bonkers…kind of like the story of Jonah the further into it we get.
“The captain approached him and said, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up! Call to your god. Maybe this god will consider us, and we won’t perish.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever met someone from a different religion than you practiced who struck you as more committed to their faith than you were to your own? There is something really attractive about that. As followers of God, our level of devotion sends a message to the world around us about how worthy He is of their devotion. As we talked about Friday, Jonah gives us a great example here of how not to do this well.
The Nexus 