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 39-42.

    The first thought came to me about what to write came when I read Isaiah 40:6-8. Here Isaiah reminds us that people are here for just a short period of time. They flourish and bloom, but soon wither and fade. But God’s words stand forever. This made me think about how our society wants to throw away the guidelines God gave us in favor of human guidelines. God’s rules and guidelines last forever. Those of mankind are just temporary. We hear people talk about “social justice”, “injustice”, and “inequity”. They claim that we need these new rules in order to address these things. However, you cannot have justice if the rules keep changing. Only by following the unchanging guidelines given to us by God can we attain justice and equality.
    Part of me thinks that the above is reading into the passage something which, while true, goes beyond what the prophet intended with what he wrote. Another part of me sees how that connects to the verses just before that which speak of a voice calling us to “Make a straight highway through the wasteland for our God!” The call for straightening the curves and smoothing out the rough places is a call to trim away the human distortions of God’s guidelines. Every generation adds addendum and clarifications to God’s guidelines to help others see how they apply. Over time we mistake those aids for the guidelines. When that happens we need to strip the human additions away and go back to what God actually told us. However, all too often people mistake the guidelines God has given us for the add-ons which humans created and try to live without those as well.

    Isaiah goes on to inform us that there is no one and nothing which can be compared to God. As a matter of fact, he is reminding us that by comparing God to people or things we often lose track of the directions He has given us. As I read this I was reminded of how images representing Jesus as a blue-eyed blonde has led some people to mistake European cultural norms for God’s directions and others to mistake God’s directions as merely European cultural norms. When we begin to think that God is more like us than He is like other people we have lost the story. While we should constantly strive to be more like God today than we were yesterday, we should never think that He will favor us over others. The fact of the matter is that the more we become like God, the more we want Him to favor others over ourselves.