Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near. – Isaiah 55:6

Today’s Scripture Reading (December 29, 2013): Isaiah 55

On Sunday, December 15, 2013, Joan Fontaine died. But in the days following her death, the headlines did not talk about all of the great things that the actress had accomplished during her life. I did not see one headline that said “Oscar Winning Actress from ‘Suspicion” Dies.” Instead, the headlines chose instead to proclaim the end of a life-long feud between Fontaine and her older sister, Olivia de Havilland. And I couldn’t seem to help but feel sad about the headlines, and also to think that the headlines were wrong. The truth is that the feud between the two sisters didn’t stop because one of them died. In fact, the reverse is true. Because the feud was never settled during the lives of the sisters, when Fontaine died it just cemented the feud as a permanent feature of history – forever. Death never solves a feud – it actually does the exact reverse, death makes a feud unsolvable.

Isaiah’s tells his readers to seek the Lord while he may be found; we need to call on him while he is near. And sometimes the pushback is that don’t we believe that God is always near and that he always wants to be found. And the answer is yes, but there are limitations on that belief, not because of God – because he is unlimited – but rather because of us – because we are limited. And one of the barriers for us is death. We cannot change the way life is lived after life is done. In many ways, everything that we have believed and the acts that we have committed ourselves to simply becomes permanent after death. Hitler is not remembered for his generous spirit, because at the moment that he died the cause that he had committed himself to was one of hate. And there is absolutely nothing that can be done now to change that. When you die, everything about you becomes permanent; none of it can be changed.

But there is another reality, and that is that sometimes we die early. No, it is not that we stop breathing and life ends – life actually goes on, but we are dead because we have become unchangeable. The Bible sometimes speaks of this as the “hardening of our hearts.” We come to believe so strongly that we are right in the various aspects of our lives that it is impossible to consider change. I know people who are so wrapped up in hate; they have worked so hard at making that hate a part of their lives, that they no longer believe that there is any reason to change. For Fontaine and de Havilland, their feud was like that. Both sisters were right and so it is quite possible that change had become simply unattainable. Isaiah is saying that our spiritual lives are the same way – yes, God is near and he wants to be found, but we have convinced ourselves that that is not true and so we stop reaching out toward him – not because God is no longer there, but because we no longer believe that God is there.

Reaching that point in our lives is tragic – the inability to repent and change is death before the end of life. Bitterness rages and there is nothing available to us to try and tame it. So Isaiah’s instruction is this, if you are experiencing God now, make the most of this moment. Because if you don’t, you might find that you have trained yourself not to experience him in the next.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 56