God speed, all the way home

The Word for today:
Isaiah 40

My sons run. They run hard and fast, the way we were made to run.

So I watch a lot of high school track meets. I used to be that runner. Now I'm the watcher.

You wouldn't know it, seeing me leaning against the fence that encloses the track, but I--my essential self--am out there still, after all these years.

I still know the hell of the third lap, the next-to-last lap, of a mile contested by highly trained athletes unwilling to concede an inch.

And I can feel--not just hear--that bell or gunshot that sounds the beginning of the fourth, the final circuit.

A form of hell, of separation from God, is coming upon Israel in the time of the prophets. First the glory of God--which had hovered over the tabernacle and in the Temple--will depart from Jerusalem before it can be extinguished by the sewage of their sin (1). Then banishment is upon them, and overtakes them.

They would soon live out a collective nightmare,
by the rivers of Babylon,
where we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion,
hanging our harps upon the willows in the midst of it (2).

And so we've wandered with them, disaster impending, through Isaiah chapter 39.

But now in chapter 40--as if a curtain were drawn aside--their long night has passed. Their winter is over; fragrance and sound caress the senses:
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come.
The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance (3).

Isaiah 40 is where your Bible turns for home.

A certain sound--a voice?--gathers distinction, separating itself from the gray Babylonian drone. The heart quickens; the world turns a somersault on its axis and hell's behind us now.

The voice of the forerunner, John the Baptist, rings out,
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken." (Isaiah 40:3-5)

The forerunner's voice means the King is drawing nigh! (4)

I don't know what night you've endured, or what wilderness you've crossed on the way to your own Babylon. It wouldn't surprise me to find we were both there--by the same river, at the same time.

The forerunner's voice means that all our Babylons are behind us now:
Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the LORD's hand
double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40:1-2)

And the King will bring a quickening:
No longer bound, we will need to retrieve the harps we'd hung in the midst.
No longer former runners forced to concede to the evil years (5), we shall be so effortlessly swift that the poet must look for our likeness in the sky:
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:29-31)


(1) see Ezekiel 10, 11; (2) Psalm 137:1-2; (3) Song of Solomon 2:11-13; (4) 1 Kings 18:46; (5) Genesis 47:9