July 16 - Isaiah 18:1-23:18

Good morning everyone,

Today as we come back to the prophet Isaiah the first thing we read is, “Woe to.” Yikes!! “Woe,” by definition, is great sorrow or distress. I am pretty certain I would never want to see “woe” followed by my name anywhere, much less a direct message from God. Right!? In the NKJV of the Bible, Old Testament, ”woe" occurs 71 times in 69 verses. In the New Testament, 40 times in just 33 verses, and 32 of those 40 were spoken by Jesus! While Israel of old used the word to mourn the death of friends or loved ones, God used it to threaten judgment, today we will read about some of those judgements.

In chapter 18, the message was sent to Ethiopia, who was a major world power at the time, ruling Egypt and a chief arch rival to Assyria. Ethiopia had sent “their people” to talk to “Judah’s people” asking them to join in an alliance against Assyria. God was so not good with that and basically said, “Don’t do it,” he would to deal with them himself as He wanted Judah to be aligned with Him. 

Recently I had some work done on my car. One of the first things they did, when I pulled it into the port, was run an alignment on the tires. They have a really neat (as in cool, groovy, I liked it) machine that was able to put up on a computer screen what my tires looked like, the “alignment” of them in perspective to my vehicle. I was more than a little amused at how all four of them were facing, and tilted, in different directions, none of which were the correct one. I remember the confusion in my head and asking the service person, “what’s up with my tires?” he assured me it was “normal” all tires go out of alignment some more quickly than others, those being the ones that have to travel bumpy dirt roads riddled with pot holes ..… like mine. He went on to say that regular checking and rotation was recommended to prevent any unnecessary wear and tear or unwanted grooves that would cause them to have to be exterminated (okay, maybe just replaced, but you get the idea).

Our lives are like that, when we are aligned with God, when we are like minded and traveling the the same straight path He is, we will most certainly encounter wear and tear but we can save ourselves a lot of grief, unnecessary rutting, if we would follow the straight and narrow road, you know ….. the one with the small gate. It’s recommended you don’t, that we don’t, go off 4x4’ing through the wide gate that leads to certain rocky terrain and destruction, that is to say intentionally going against God’s will for our lives with blatant, unashamed sin. Every single time we tell God “no” or even “wait” we are taking ourselves a little bit more out of alignment, and it doesn’t take much for those grooves of sin to start wearing a hole on our soul. Make sense?  

In God’s economy there are only two ways, right and wrong, good and evil. You need to know that when you die you will go to to heaven or, and this is a big “or”, you will go to hell. There is no middle place for the soul, no “Switzerland” to spend eternity. Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23 both say, "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Don’t let yourself be caught up with the scattered. Now is the time to choose, now is the time to get in alignment. Choose, for your eternity, heaven. Choose Christ. Amen?

Have a good day and to God be the glory.

God bless you all….