Isaiah 30:15-18
The passage begins with God making a generous proposal to His chosen people;
In repentance and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength.
But they turned it down. Instead they elected flight and even though they used the the swiftest horses their choice was in vain.
The result was a chaotic scene where a paranoid mob of a thousand are fleeing from a single enemy. Obviously this enemy had his bluff in and in response to whatever he has done or said, Judah is overreacting badly. It seems the end result of Israel’s response was being left alone and dangerously exposed.
We no longer use swords and spears and we may not be carried into battle on horseback but still there may be some characteristics of our battles that have not changed which this passage may speak to. When God made his offer to save using repentance, rest, quietness and trust, I am picturing a composed heart – a kind of grace-saturated inner-life that is oriented rightly to Truth. Do we consider our hearts all that important in our battle? Are we even aware we are in a battle? Is it possible that we too have turned God down his offer to save and redeem us on these terms?
We still have a diabolical enemy who would love to destroy us. As far as we know his chief weapon is deception. He is referred to as the prince of the power of the air. When I think of the war he is waging I picture the spiritual equivalent of that atmosphere where radio waves travel unseen through walls carrying their messages of advertising, news and entertainment. I see the prince of this age overseeing these unseen transmissions of carefully blended amounts of truth and lies that pass unseen (and usually unchallenged) through our hearts and minds. I picture a day, a glorious one to be sure, where Satan’s lies have been filtered out of the spiritual atmosphere. On that day I think we will be astounded that this singular master lier, by way of his custom-crafted deceit, had put us to flight and provoked so much bondage, misery, chaos and paranoia for so long. The passage concludes with;
Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him.
It is not easy to wrap up, in the concluding paragraph of a devotional, how to compose our hearts for our war with the father of lies except to remind ourselves that light exterminates darkness. Ours is the Father of Lights and we are children of light. Our spirits were formatted for Truth and Light. The purpose of the Blue Book network was to help us in personally developing the best practices of watching over our hearts. The spirit of the Blue Book is all about the vital strength that can only be discovered in our experience with quietness, rest and trust.
Father, may it not be said of us that we rejected your means of saving and redeeming us. May we establish our secret places of retreat and prayer and fellowship with You. May we become adept in discerning spiritual reality; in distinguishing religion from relationship; in separating Truth from error. May you help us to cultivate longing where there is complacency. We long to see Your justice exercised against Your enemy and ours. Amen.