A Blog of Encouragement from our Pastors
The WEekly Word
weekly word – 3/20/2025
Isaiah 2
In Isaiah 1, God condemned Israel as an unfaithful nation but promised to redeem it one day.
Chapter 2 expands this vision to include all nations. Verses 2-4 declare that Yahweh will one day reign as King from Jerusalem, bringing world peace and justice.
Yet verses 5-11 point out Israel is currently far from this ideal. It’s lost in idolatry, pagan alliances, military reliance, and national pride. Israel is mirroring the world they were supposed to lead to God. Because of this, judgment is coming.
At this point, a major theme of the book emerges: God’s reign requires the humbling of human pride. As verse 12 states: “Yahweh of hosts will have a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and high and against everyone who is lifted up, that he may be made low.” God will bring down everyone who lifts themselves up.
God lists the things the world’s nations take pride in in verses 13-20: trees, mountains, hills, towers, walls, ships, idols of silver and gold. Not realizing the totality of our dependence on God, we celebrate our nation’s land, buildings, and technology as evidence of our power and glory.
If you think about America’s great songs, we glory in our skies, grain, mountains, our forefathers who built the nation, our flag, our brave soldiers, and our freedom. Instead of thinking about these things with national pride, we should be grateful to God for them, realizing He could justly take them away any time.
When God returns, this chapter tells us three times how people in every nation will respond, in verses 10, 19, and 20-21:
- “Enter the rock and hide in the dust from the dread of Yahweh and the splendor of his majesty” (10)
- “Men will go into caves of the rocks and into holes of the ground before the dread of Yahweh and the splendor of His majesty when He arises to make the earth tremble.” (19)
- “In that day men will cast away…their idols of silver and their idols of gold…in order to go into the caverns of the rocks and the clefts of the cliffs before the dread of Yahweh and the splendor of His majesty, when He arises to make the earth tremble.” (20-21)
One day, it will be known worldwide that God is much more powerful and majestic than we are.
What’s the message for Isaiah’s people and for us? It’s summarized perfectly for us in the final verse of the chapter: “Stop regarding man, whose breath of life is in his nostrils; for why should he be esteemed?” (22)
We must stop thinking we, frail humans, are great. We aren’t. Everything great we have is either directly made by God or given to us by God through the abilities and energy He bestows on us.
Rather than being proud, let us humbly thank our heavenly Father for “giving us every good and perfect gift,” and that “in the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth, so that we would be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.” (James 1:17-18)
Pastor David
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