Context for Isaiah 20:1-22:14
Isaiah’s prophecy of judgment continues, and no nation surrounding Israel or Judah is spared God’s wrath.
But see, there is joy and revelry, slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine! “Let us eat and drink,” you say, “for tomorrow we die!”
The LORD Almighty has revealed this in my hearing: “Till your dying day this sin will not be atoned for,” says the Lord, the LORD Almighty.
Isaiah 22:13-14, NIV
What greater audacity and conceitedness can a people show than to make such a statement as the one described in Isaiah 22:13. Even as Isaiah and the prophets of his age prophecy doom against Jerusalem and Judah, the rich and powerful make light of God’s judgment, turning to revelry instead of repentance.
Yet, how is our modern society any different? How are we any different? We should be different in the simple fact that we are in the world but not of it. Our goal is different from the world’s goal, for surely the world sees nothing wrong with partaking of as much of life’s pleasures before we die because the world ignores what happens after we die.
Our goal, then, should be to preserve ourselves by our faith in Jesus Christ by pursuing God’s will and way. God wants humble, repentant servants always ready to do His will wherever it may be found. There will be time for feasting and indulgence, but it will be in God’s time not ours.
DLH
“but it will be in God’s time not ours”
Well said.
Too many people see Christianity as an ascetic, dreary, legalistic existence characterized by kowtowing to a cold, distant, and capricious deity. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. Christianity is peace, but not as the world gives it. Christianity is joy and love, too, but certianly not as the world defines those terms.
C.S. Lewis, in his fine essay “The Weight of Glory,” speculates that the main problem of men is not that we’re too zealous for pleasue, but that we’re not ambitious enough in our search for it. He says that the Joy God has in store for us is so fantasic that we can scarcely imagine it; yet too often we content ourselves with making “mudpies of our own imagining” in the backyard of our own fantasy than taking God up on his offer of a holiday at the ocean.
“There will be time for feasting and indulgence, but it will be in God’s time not ours.”