WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR US TO LOOK TO THE LORD?
The prophet Isaiah received this word from the Lord concerning the people of Israel. They had lowered their eyes from the Creator to the creation, looking to their idols for help and worshiping the work of their own hands. As a result, a day was coming when their cities would fall, their crops fail, and the glory of Israel grow dim. Yet in that day, the people would pull their eyes off of their idols and look again to the Lord.
Someone has said that true worship is pulling our affections off our idols and putting them on God. The Israelites of Isaiah’s day had broken the first two commandments of the Decalogue. They had put other gods before the Lord and they had made and worshiped graven images. The Lord would not allow His chosen people to continue in this way. His discipline was sending first the Assyrians, and later the Babylonians, to help Israel remember their God.
What will it take for us to pull our affections off of our material manmade stuff and put them on God? Will it take another event like 9/11 or the devastation of a hurricane to pull our eyes off of the temporal to consider the eternal? The word that the Lord gave Isaiah for his people is just as true for us today, as it was for them.