I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Isaiah 1-4.

    I am hesitant to apply passages which were addressed to the ancient nation of Israel to any nation or people today. However, there are ways in which this applies to people throughout history. Modern western civilization is built upon principles of justice and truth. These principles derive from God’s word. I want to pause here and note that this idea has been misused time and again to violate those very principles. This very passage lays out what those principles are:

Learn to do good.
Seek justice.
Help the oppressed.
Defend the cause of orphans.
Fight for the rights of widows.

Or to quote something which I consider to be another way of stating this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There is a third quote which I want to include which I believe is another way of expressing part of this basic truth:

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.

The man responsible for that second quote fell well short of living up to that ideal. If we do not follow the path laid out in that first quote than all of our attempts at righteous living are meaningless and serve no purpose except to anger God (and our fellow man). At no point does this passage, or God Himself, tell us to demand that the government do these things. God expects each and every one of us to seek justice, to help the oppressed, to defend the cause of the orphan, and fight for the rights of the widow.

    If we allow our wealth to become our god, God will allow us to suffer the results of our folly. I believe in many ways we are seeing this in our society today. Our leaders behave like children and the common people strive to oppress their fellows. All too often we as a people strive to address this by seeking new leaders, but until we address the core issue the new leaders will be worse than those they replace. We must, each one of us for ourselves, obey God and seek His will. He has promised us that, despite the fact that our sins are red as crimson, He will make us pure if we seek to do His will. Our nation, our society will not be restored by having the right leaders. It will be restored by justice, and any of its people will be revived by righteousness if they repent of their sins. That means even you and me. We must genuinely regret our sins and stop committing them. Not just our sins of commission, but our sins of omission as well. Once more, I want to emphasize that we cannot place the blame for the ills of our society on our leaders, although they do indeed share in that blame. And we must not look to them, or their replacements to fix it. Each and every one of us must do, not just our part, but everything within our power to change things, not by changing the laws of the land, but by asking God to change our hearts and setting an example for others to follow.