What a beautiful vision!
This love letter is similar to the Song of Solomon (or Songs if you
prefer). It is God's love letter to His
people whom He has punished and is the promise of not only better days to come
but days that are better than any they have ever known. It seems incredible at the moment but they
are to enlarge the place of the tent, make room for more and more. The Lord's blessing is going to be restored
to them because of one thing, His love for them. His covenant is everlasting and His love for
them is immeasurable and never-ending.
They have done absolutely nothing to deserve this love or the blessing. Not once in this passage or any other in
Isaiah is there any indication that the people have done anything to restore
His love or His confidence. It is a
sovereign act of one who has covenanted with a people to love them
forever.
What have you done for me today? That is the question the Pharisees ask
Jesus. Did you notice His reaction,
"He sighed deeply in His Spirit."
Exasperation and pain. After all,
He has just fed 4000 people miraculously in a deserted place, how can they now
ask. In the boat, the disciples
misunderstand Jesus' words about leaven and begin to search for bread, have
they too forgotten the feeding? We are
meant to live by faith, trusting in His Word, but we get five minutes away from
Him doing something to bless us and we begin to doubt Him and His love for
us. We are, in the end, materialists, we
need something tangible to prove that love.
Most of our life in Christ, it seems, is spent in losing that
mind-set. With the blind man, notice
that Jesus took him out of Bethsaida to perform the miracle and cautioned him
not to enter the village afterwards, why?
The miracle here points to the reality that faith is a journey for us
all, we aren't there yet, we see by degrees into the truth of all things.
Paul makes what would certainly be an offensive
comparison. He is comparing Hagar, the
slave woman with whom Abraham fathered Ishmael, to modern Jerusalem. The Jews, in Paul's metaphor, are enslaved to
the Law and Jesus has set us free from that bondage. If the Galatians go back to the old covenant
system, they have chosen bondage rather than freedom. Is Paul saying that the Jerusalem above is
the realization of the promise of Isaiah?
He uses the first few verses from our Isaiah reading in this comparison
and points to that Jerusalem above, the one which will come down in the renewal
of all things. Paul's point seems to be
that this new Jerusalem, the fulfillment of the prophetic word, awaits the
eschaton. That city is eternal, we are
not waiting for the fulfillment prior to judgment of the world. Then, it will be realized forever.
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