Isaiah 26
8 Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws,
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.
9 My soul yearns for you in the night;
in the morning my spirit longs for you.
When your judgments come upon the earth,
the people of the world learn righteousness.
10 But when grace is shown to the wicked,
they do not learn righteousness;
even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil
and do not regard the majesty of the Lord.
11 Lord, your hand is lifted high,
but they do not see it.
Let them see your zeal for your people and be put to shame;
let the fire reserved for your enemies consume them.
Sometimes the only way we learn is by paying the consequences of our deliberate sins.
Verse 10 above says it right - if there's too much grace and leeway given - we don't learn.
A simple illustration of this is with our dog Roki. He would get away with all sorts of mischief if we never disciplined him. Sometimes he has to be punished and corrected in order to learn who is the pack leader in the house.
As a human race, we have dismissed the Lord and gone our own way to the destruction of our world and the detriment of our souls - tinkering with the building blocks of humanity, and we are in big trouble.
Eventually, the judgements of the Lord will be released. Perhaps even now something of the sort is going on, but we don't see it [as it says in verse 11].
The Lord does not delay and is not tardy or slow about what He promises, according to some people’s conception of slowness, but He is long-suffering (extraordinarily patient) toward you, not desiring that any should perish, but that all should turn to repentance.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will vanish (pass away) with a thunderous crash, and the material elements of the universe will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.
2 Peter 3:9-10
A day is coming when the Lord will put an end to the wicked and the arrogant as He did with Sodom and Gomorrah:
Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, overabundance of food, prosperous ease, and idleness were hers and her daughters’; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
And they were haughty and committed abominable offences before Me; therefore I removed them when I saw it and I saw fit.
Ezekiel 16:49-50
I guess the inhabitants of those cities carried on their everyday selfish, unconcerned lives - unaware of the impending disaster about to be rained down on them.
The Lord is extremely patient with us, but that mustn't be mistaken for weakness and the inability to act.
Time to set our "house in order" while there's still time.
He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.’
Psalm 46:10
Thought
The Lord won't be ignored forever!
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