Isaiah Chapters 25-27

25:1 - Good challenge for me: if God is truly my God...if I truly love and trust in Him - then I will respond to Him every day with exaltation and praise. Do I view my life as an act of praise used to honor my awesome God? Not very often...that needs to change.

25:4 - Here Isaiah continues to share the hope that rests in God. He is a stronghold, a fortress, for the poor and the helpless...for those who have nowhere else to turn. The ruthless people of the world through themselves over and over at God's people and at His earthly kingdom, yet they are as useless as breath trying to blow down a wall. None can stand against the will of God.

25:7-8 - There is this covering laying over all people - this blanket of death and hopelessness...we all know it is coming...it is inevitable...we run from it in fear and fight it with everything we have. Yet Isiah says, there is hope - God will devour death. And we know that God destroyed the power of death over our lives by dying for our sins on the cross. He took our sinfulness upon himself and destroyed it through His perfect sacrifice. Though our bodies will die, we know that death has been conquered and that there will be a resurrection into eternity with God.

26:3 - The key to finding and keeping peace in this crazy world, is to keep our minds fully focused on God. He is unchanging...He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the stability of His character gives us peace to handle the instability of this world.

26:7 - Those who allow the righteousness of God to change their lives and make them righteous do not live constantly on emotional roller coasters. They down go up and down - feeling really close to God and then feeling far from God. When we allow the righteousness of God to wash over out lives we can be content in any circumstances - good and bad.

26:11 - When people finally comprehend the love that God has for them and for His people - the love that He has always had for them - they are ashamed that they ever doubted or rejected Him.

27:3-4 - The Lord is the keeper of His vineyard - His people - and He takes care of them. But any good gardener knows that for the sake of the garden, sometimes you have to pull weeds and prune the plants to keep the garden healthy. God is also willing to do this to His people as we have seen throughout the book of Isaiah. The pruning may be painful and hard, but it is for the sake of the garden - His people.

27:6 - The garden grows healthy as a result of God's pruning, and the fruit the people of God will produce grows abundant and impacts the entire world positively.

27:7 - Again Isaiah wants to remind us and offer us hope - God has struck His people...He has disciplined them, but not like He has disciplined their enemies. He has not brought utter destruction down upon them...He has done what He needed to do to bring them back into relationship with Him. God has done what He had to do to make them healthy again so that they can produce fruit. Very similar to the role of a father in the lives of His children. If somebody was trying to hurt my children, I would react very swiftly with whatever amount of violence that was required to keep them safe. There are times that I also "bring the pain" to my kids (i.e. spank them), but this is done as a means of helping them to become better people. One is an act of righteous anger, and the other is an act of discipline. God has poured His righteous anger out on the enemies of the Israelites and on the other hand He has poured out loving discipline on His people.

27:9 - Through the punishment that God brings, their sins are atoned for...their guilt is removed. As the sinfulness is cut away, the people are freed to once again produce fruit in the midst of their relationship with God. The only problem is that the people keep going through the same cycle. They sin and rebel, they are punished and their sins are atoned for, and then they return to God. Over and over this takes place in the scriptures. God brought an end to this cycle by offering Himself as an atoning sacrifice, once for all.