Lift up your eyes to the heavens, look at the earth beneath; the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants die like flies. But my salvation will last forever, my righteousness will never fail. – Isaiah 51:6

Today’s Scripture Reading (June 27, 2017): Isaiah 51

In Michael Crichton’s novel “Micro,” a novel that Crichton left unfinished at the time of his death in 2008, a group of kids get shrunk down to a “Micro” size and have to survive against the multitudes of bugs that live in the earth on which we travel on a daily basis. One of the marvels early on in the book is that the earth is made up of so many of these bugs that the soil is literally crawling with life. The world that the kids are forced to survive in is filled with life that, as bigs, we just don’t see. The earth is also not as solid as we sometimes seem to believe that it should be.

Still, to us, the earth seems stable – and often immovable. And so are the heavens that we look at when we peer up into the sky. Yet, from the standpoint of God, all of these things are temporary. The “Big Bang Theory” (the theory, not the comedy sitcom) is the friend of the Christian faith. It postulates that everything was born in a flash out of nothing, or a cosmic filament, and then, in the end, collapses back into nothing. What seems to us as permanent was born at the command of God, and will collapse again at the command of that same God.

For those trapped in Babylon, it was a description of the political elements of the day. Nebuchadnezzar rose because God allowed him to advance. And even though the Babylonian empire was big and scary to those that had to live through that period, its permanence became temporary at the command of God when it was replaced by Cyrus the Great, who rose at the command of God. There was no permanence, and yet God was still in control

And the promise that God wanted the exiles to hold onto was this – even when the end comes and the earth and the heaven pass away, the salvation of God is still sure, and his righteousness will never fail. Even in the moments of greatest chaos, God is still present to provide the order that we need. And he will never fail.  He exists in both the micro and the macro of this life. Every kingdom bows to him.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 52