Isaiah 26:8-13
Yes, we wait for You, O LORD;
we walk in the path of Your judgments.
Your name and renown
are the desire of our souls.
My soul longs for You in the night;
indeed, my spirit seeks You at dawn.
For when Your judgments come upon the earth,
the people of the world learn righteousness.
Though grace is shown to the wicked man,
he does not learn righteousness.
In the land of righteousness he acts unjustly
and fails to see the majesty of the LORD.
O LORD, Your hand is upraised,
but they do not see it.
They will see Your zeal for Your people
and be put to shame.
The fire set for Your enemies
will consume them!
O LORD, You will establish peace for us.
For all that we have accomplished,
You have done for us.
O LORD our God, other lords besides You have had dominion,
but Your name alone do we confess.
As kids, mostly the only way we learnt wrong from right was through discipline from either a parent or a teacher.
We all can look back and recall the hard lessons we grasped via a smack, being denied our freedom, staying in at playtime, a hundred lines, or even the cane!
It wasn't much fun, but it trained us that doing the right thing was the best policy.
In the nations, no one likes to see evil go unpunished.
Here, in Isaiah, the prophet cries out to God for His judgements to come upon the earth. He is so disturbed at the way wickedness has gone unpunished that his prayers are constantly being offered up.
Why? So that earth's population will learn what is the right way to live.
When evil governments reign and ride roughshod over the poor, it appears that God isn't interested in sorting things out.
For years, I'm sure the real Christians in Germany, during the Nazi era, despaired of what was happening to their nation. Right before their eyes, evil was rampant and seemed invincible. Any one speaking out was shut down and even imprisoned.
Yet, when the time was ripe, those who had imposed their iron will on the world, were taken down and suffered the ignominy of defeat. They ran like rats from a sinking ship and were executed, resorted to suicide or fled like cowards for the anonymity of faraway foreign climes.
Although it may look like evil has triumphed, if we could look with supernatural vision, we would see God's hand upraised ready to bring down the lofty from their heights.
The wickedness that was devised as a weapon becomes a net to catch the oppressor.
To quote the poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.
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