God With Us

Wednesday 1/9/2013 6:24 AM

My psalm for the week is Psalm 24 and each time I read the first verse I think back to a visit I had to Rod and Kathy’s in Tucson.  I was running cross-country and I went to the top of a hill overlooking Tucson.  As I neared the summit the Spirit of God instructed me to shout Psalm 24:1 at the top of my lungs, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”  I did so and, when I looked over the city to the horizon, the images of the run down part of the city through which I had driven the previous day and the scarred earth caused by strip mining met my eyes.  I began to weep, wondering what God must think when he looks down upon his world and its inhabitants.

This morning I read Isaiah 6 in which Isaiah has a vision of the Lord with the train of his robe filling the temple.  After crying out because of his own sin and the sin of his people, an angel touches his mouth with a live coal, which atones for his sin.  Isaiah then hears the Lord asking who could be sent to the people on his behalf and Isaiah volunteers.  God tells him the message he is to bring and Isaiah asks how long he must bring the message.  God responds with the words of verses 11-12, “Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”  I wonder if Isaiah would have volunteered if he knew that the message he would bring to the people would go unheeded and he had to keep bringing the message until the bitter end, when all was lost or destroyed.

Of course, God doesn’t leave Isaiah in that kind of hopeless situation.  In the next chapter there is the promise of Immanuel, God with us.  When I wept over the city of Tucson God was standing next to me, weeping with me.  When my heart breaks because of the brokenness in my students’ lives, God’s heart is breaking too.  God calls me to proclaim the good news that God is reconciling a broken world and broken individuals to himself.  He is not aloof and unconcerned; he is with us, in the form of me and the rest of his people.  I pray that we, the people of God, will live in such a way.