Very Soon My Anger Will End

Sustaining Hope
The Days Are Surely Coming
A New Future

Isaiah 10:20-27 The Message

^20-23 And on that Day also, what’s left of Israel, the ragtag survivors of Jacob, will no longer be fascinated by abusive, battering Assyria. They’ll lean on God, The Holy—yes, truly. The ragtag remnant—what’s left of Jacob—will come back to the Strong God. Your people Israel were once like the sand on the seashore, but only a scattered few will return. Destruction is ordered, brimming over with righteousness. For the Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, will finish here what he started all over the globe.

^24-27 Therefore the Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, says: “My dear, dear people who live in Zion, don’t be terrorized by the Assyrians when they beat you with clubs and threaten you with rods like the Egyptians once did. In just a short time my anger against you will be spent and I’ll turn my destroying anger on them. I, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, will go after them with a cat-o’-nine-tails and finish them off decisively—as Gideon downed Midian at the rock Oreb, as Moses turned the tables on Egypt. On that day, Assyria will be pulled off your back, and the yoke of slavery lifted from your neck.”

For Reflection

To see God's promise embedded in God's anger is sometimes difficult.  Destruction, it seems, is the order of things when we turn from obedience to God's will and take matters into our own hands.  Though I don't like to think about it, God's anger has provoked harshly retributive action.  We are consoled in God's grace and never ending overture of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Pray

for a life obedient to the will of God.  Pray prayers of confession.  Pray for God's compassionate mercy.