Today’s Scripture Reading (June 20, 2017):
Isaiah 44
I love Ghost Towns. They are great windows to the past and what happened
yesterday. As a teenager, there was a house I loved to visit. The house was inaccessible by car but could be accessed either by a relatively strenuous hike or, during the
winter, by snowmobile. The yard of the house was
littered with old equipment that
had been just left behind at some point in the past. Inside the house, which
was a mess, there were old newspapers that littered the floor. It was fun just to wonder what happened to make the family
move out – or maybe how the house was built
in the first place. Maybe at some point in the past,
there had been a road that gave access to the property that had now long since
disappeared. The house existed in, what at least seemed like, the middle of
nowhere. The small town I lived in was not far from the house, just over the hill, but from the house, there was not another building in view.
No farm land approached the house. The house existed among the trees on a hill
and was long forgotten by time.
Ghost towns
and ghost houses are not about the future, but the past. As has been mentioned,
I believe that this section of Isaiah was written almost two centuries after
the original Isaiah wrote his book in the later part of the eighth century B.C.E. (Isaiah 1-39). And it is
passages like this one that seems to
confirm that conclusion. As God speaks to Isaiah, he indicates his intention to
restore Jerusalem and the towns of Judah. But during the ministry of the
original Isaiah, the Jerusalem and the cities
of Judah were not empty. Is it possible that God gave a vision to Isaiah that
featured an empty Jerusalem? Yes, but the easiest answer is that this was written to the exiles after the fall of
Jerusalem by a second Isaiah.
The truth was that an empty Jerusalem
and the ghost towns of Judah had a past. The big question that mattered to the
exiles was merely this - did they have a
future? And God speaks directly to Isaiah to send this message to the exiles.
Jerusalem has a future because I will repopulate her, and I will restore the
towns of Judah. The ghost towns of the Southern Kingdom had a future because
God had decreed that they did. Their future depended on the hand and movement
of God.
The future has always been held in the hands of God, but that fact
seems more apparent amidst the desolation and emptiness that is dominated by
the past. Jorge Luis Borges makes this observation. “The future is inevitable
and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.” For an abandoned
Jerusalem, the future was bleak. But God was lurking
in the gaps.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 45
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