The word the Lord gave me was from Isaiah 29, and though He
took me through the whole chapter, I’ll share only pieces of it here – it is
too long and too sad to write more. Look it up for yourself when you have time –
it won’t be the warm and fuzzy love of God you’ll find, but it will be His
justice which can be comforting when we are dealing with situations that make
us feel alone and powerless.
“The Lord says, ‘These people come near to me with their
mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their
worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught. Therefore I
will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will
perish, and the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish. Woe to those who
go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in
darkness and think, ‘Who sees us? Who will know? You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall one who is formed say
to the one who formed it, ‘You did not
make me?’ Can the pot say to the potter, ‘You know nothing?’ In a very short
time, will not Lebanon be turned into a fertile field and the fertile field
seem like a forest? In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and
out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see. Once more the humble
will rejoice in the Lord; the needy will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. The
ruthless will vanish, the mockers will disappear, and all who have an eye for
evil will be cut down – those who with a word make someone out to be guilty,
who ensnare the defender in court and with false testimony deprive the innocent
of justice.” (Isaiah 29:13-21)
If we believe the promises of God, we have to understand
that we also need to know that everything He says will come to pass. We can’t
be singing about His faithfulness and then be lying and depriving innocent people
of justice. The passage I used above is from the New International Version, but
the New King James has this at the end of the last line, “Who make a man an
offender by a word, and lay a snare for him who reproves in the gate, and turn
aside the just by empty words.” the Bible that I normally read is a New King James, and when I read that yesterday morning on the subway, I had to stop
reading because I was so overcome and filled by the healing power of the Holy Spirit. I have
been dealing with something so stressful for months now and it just keeps
getting worse and worse, and no matter how I pray for the person who is causing
the stress, they just keep getting worse and worse and doing more and more that
causes pain and sorrow. The pain and sorrow come more from disappointment that
people can act in such ugly ways, and it has been hard to keep praying blessings
when my life and peace are under constant attack. When I read that passage this
morning, the power of the Holy Spirit filled my heart and let me know that He
knows what I am going through.
The Book of Isaiah is for me one of the most astonishingly
beautiful and powerful books in the Bible. When I read it, I see the glory of the
Lord, I see His mercy and love, and I see that He makes all wrongs right again.
In chapter 30, after we have heard the judgment in chapter 29, we hear these
comforting words begin to emerge from out of the gloom, “In returning and rest,
you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” (verse
15), and “Therefore the Lord will wait, that He may be gracious to you; and
therefore will He be exalted, that He may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a
God of justice; blessed are those who wait for Him. For the people shall dwell
in Zion at Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will be very gracious to you
at the sound of your cry; when He hears it, he will answer you.” (verse 19)
When Isaiah is called to be a prophet, he has a vision of
the Lord and thinks at first that he will die because he has seen the Lord. He
cries out, “Woe is me for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and
I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the
King, the Lord of Hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5) But his lips are touched with a coal
from the altar, and he is made clean. Then the Lord tells Isaiah, “Go, and tell
this people, ‘Keep on hearing but do not understand; keep on seeing but do not
perceive. Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and shut
their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and
understand with their heart, and return and be healed.” At the end of that
chapter, there is a word that the Lord gave to me five years ago, when I was
dealing with a situation where people had been lying and causing pain and injustice
with their lies. As is usually the case, it was because of money – that is why
the Lord tells us that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (1
Timothy 6:10).
The word that the Lord gave me comes right after Isaiah asks
the Lord how long the people will live in darkness of their own choosing, and the
Lord answers in Isaiah 6:13, “Until the cities are laid waste and without
inhabitant, the houses are without a man, the land is utterly desolate, the
Lord has removed men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of
the land. But yet a tenth will be in it, and will return and be for consuming, as
a terebinth tree or as an oak, whose stump remains when it is cut down, so the
Holy seed shall be its stump.” When a word comes to me, the Holy Spirit tells
me, spirit to spirit, what it means for me. When I read that at the time, I
knew that the people I was dealing with would be slowly and completely brought
to a place of destruction, but that there would remain a small place of
restoration that was possible for them when they finally returned to Him, and that good would come out of the
devastation eventually. I asked the Lord why He was showing me that – did He
want me to tell them? And He told me that it wasn’t for me to tell them, it was
so that I knew what would happen before it happened. He does that sometimes,
just so that we know that He is Lord and that He does speak to us if we're listening.
When the Lord gave me that passage, He showed me the same thing
in one of my plants. I have a jade tree plant that I brought back as a few very
small leaves from a very big tree in Los Angeles many years ago. It thrived
over the years and then would get a disease sometimes and die back, and then it
would come back to life again. But this one time, while I was in the process of
moving into the apartment where I live now, the plant got sick again, and this
time it didn’t revive no matter what I did, but just kept getting sicker and
sicker. Then one warm summer day I decided to put it outside because I wanted
to see if the fresh air might revive it, and if not I wanted to re-use the pot
and the soil and I was hoping that fresh air would clean those and make them ready
for use again. It died down to nothing, and I was just letting it sit there and
be cleaned up by the sun, when one day I came home and I saw something green
growing out of a piece of the trunk that was still left. Now you have to
imagine, a jade tree plant is very moist and fleshy inside, it’s called a
succulent plant because of all the moisture. It had been rotted through with
disease and was sitting in the sun drying out, so the place where I saw a green
shoot growing was really just a dried up piece of stump. There was no life in
it at all, but then there it was, a small green shoot, a Holy seed.
The jade tree plant is thriving again, and here I am
receiving another word about what happens when people don’t respect and care
for others. Just as the cycles in Isaiah move between judgment and mercy, so
the cycles of life will bring us through times of adversity and blessing.
Isaiah 30:20-26 tells us, “And though the Lord gives you the bread of adversity
and the water of affliction, yet your teachers will not be moved into a corner
any more, but your eyes shall see your teachers. Your ears shall hear a word
behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ whenever you turn to the
right hand or to the left. You will also defile the covering of your images of
silver, and the ornament of your molded images of gold. You will throw them
away as an unclean thing; you will say to them, ‘Get away!’ Then He will give
you the rain for your seed with which you sow the ground, and bread of the
increase of the earth; it will be fat and plentiful. In that day your cattle
will feed in large pastures. Likewise the oxen and young donkeys that work the
ground will eat cured fodder, which has been winnowed with the shovel and fan.
There will be on every high mountain and on every high hill rivers and streams
of waters, in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. Moreover
the light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun
will be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord binds
up the bruise of His people and heals the stroke of their wound.”
As I read that just now, I thought of the seven days of
creation, when God created the earth and the heavens. God created light on the
first day, and when I read this now I see that the light of seven days is the
light that has been since the beginning. We go in cycles throughout our lives,
blessing to adversity and back again. When we walk away, when we forget that
God cares about others and that he asks us to care for them also, when we think
that our own words can protect and save us, when we are only concerned about ourselves, He will bring us to a place of adversity to show us that He is
Lord. But when our ears finally start hearing and our eyes finally start seeing, we will return and we can be healed, we can find rest, strength and peace,
and at those times, when we recognize that He is Lord, we can find our own
place in creation and have a glimpse of heaven.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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