He humbles those who dwell on high, he lays the lofty city low; he levels it to the ground and casts it down to the dust. – Isaiah 26:5

Today's Scripture Reading (April 4, 2023): Isaiah 26

In 1901, a Christian pastor ministering in New York wrote a hymn that has become one of our favorites. Rev. Maltie D Babcock penned, "This is My Father's World," basing his composition on Genesis 1:1, that "In the beginning," God created everything. Babcock was a frequent visitor of the Niagara Escarpment. This ridge runs primarily east-west from New York State, through Ontario, and then to Northern Michigan before turning south into Wisconsin. The Niagara Escarpment is most famous for being the ridge over which the Niagara River plunges, forming Niagara Falls. And from that vantage point, it is hard not to consider all of our Father's world's beauty. And so, Babcock writes these words;

This is my Father's world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world:
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought (Maltbie D. Babcock).

I remember singing the song at the funeral of a friend who died in a car accident when I was in High School. Funerals of someone so young are always hard, but hers was even more significant. She had been sitting in the middle seat of a pickup truck when the driver lost control of the vehicle. Unbelted, she flew through the truck's windshield before, somehow, she got stuck and was pulled back through the window a second time. There was absolutely nothing beautiful in this circumstance, and the body of this beautiful seventeen-year-old girl was so disfigured that she would have been unrecognizable.

If I am honest, this world I live in often looks more like the world I had to confront as a kid in High School mourning the death of a friend than it does the world that Maltbie Babcock writes about as he walked the Niagara Escarpment. It is an ugly world, often filled with corruption instead of the singing of nature, a place where the lofty take advantage of those who live without power. And sometimes, it is tough to see the wonders created by the hand of God.

Isaiah seems to see the world I live in, not the one about which Maltbie Babcock writes. But he also sees the day in which all of this will turn around. The lofty and the corrupt will be laid low, allowing the beauty of the world that Babcock saw to finally emerge. It is this day that Jesus spoke of when he taught that "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Isaiah 27