Isaiah 55:1-13
Invitation to the Thirsty
1 “Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
2 Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and you will delight in the richest of fare.
3 Give ear and come to me;
listen, that you may live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
my faithful love promised to David.
4 See, I have made him a witness to the peoples,
a ruler and commander of the peoples.
5 Surely you will summon nations you know not,
and nations you do not know will come running to you,
because of the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel,
for he has endowed you with splendor.”
6 Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
7 Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
12 You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
13 Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the Lord’s renown,
for an everlasting sign,
that will endure forever.”
When I read these verses of Isaiah and especially the verse that says that God's thoughts are not man's thoughts, and neither are your ways My ways...The heavens are both literally ans more important Spiritually higher than the earth, so God's ways are higher than man's ways and God's thoughts are higher than man's thoughts...And in these verses of Isaiah, I think of the Story of His Son and how His Son's Story came to be...
Christianity has one of the most unusual stories to surround it and to explain it...And it is all because of the Man that Christianity is named for...His name is Jesus Christ...Jesus changed many lives when He walked the earth...And as one reads those He touched, we see and can read how He changed their lives and how really very odd the Story of His Life really is...After all, one might describe Him as a Miracle Worker...And yet there are people who believe in this story, and His miracles...They believe this story, because they believe in Him...They believe that He is an historical figure and Man...
Christianity has this Miraculous Mystery of faith which surrounds all around Jesus...Faith is almost synonymous of Jesus...From His beginning He was born of a virgin...How can One be born of a virgin, and it is written that this virgin was impregnated by the Holy Spirit of God, after an angel had talked to her?...Yet, John, one of the original Twelve Disciples, writes that (even before this) that Jesus was with God in the beginning (before Jesus' birth, He was with God)...And Jesus Himself says that before Abraham lived , I AM...Meaning that not only is He claiming to exist before the first Patriarch Abraham, but He calls Himself I AM, which is the name of God...So Jesus calls Himself God...
Then as Jesus ages, He goes on to learn much about the Scriptures at the young age of twelve...But His young age does not stop Him from growing in wisdom and stature...He goes on not only to know the whole Bible, but to fulfill the Scriptures of being the Messiah...He tells a Samaritan woman that He is the Messiah that was to come...And He tells the Chief Priest before His death that He is, in fact, the Son of the Blessed One...
And in the meantime in His early career and work years, He becomes a Carpenter and then later a Minister...He chooses twelve different men that He calls His Twelve Disciples, when He starts His ministry...And these twelve men would forever be changed by His teachings...And one of the twelve would betray Him, even though He was taught by the Greatest Teacher ever to walk the earth...Students do not normally betray Someone who has taught them and shown them so much, but this happened...The other Eleven plus a Pharisee would go on to help start this brand new religion called Christianity after His death...So One Special Man, started a new religion, and it is called Christianity...Christianity has been around for two thousand years...His words have not passed...
Jesus is able to heal people of their health problems and do other things like walk on water and calm raging storms...He can even resurrect the dead...He would resurrect someone who was dead in all four gospels...People follow Him, because He has this natural charisma, which is a Divine Charisma -and maybe also because what He can do (like heal people and do miracles)...But He does not just go around doing miracle after miracle, nor does He heal everyone in Israel (even though He could have done both things, if that had been God's Will)...Instead He leads as natural and common life as He can being that He is the Son of God...
And it becomes the will of the religious officials and those who supposedly know much about religion and Scripture, who decide to have Him killed and have Him crucified on a cross because of the attention and power He is attaining through the people...Most of these religious officials saw what He was doing and wondering different things about Him...Many wonder who He is and how does He know so much, and who has given Him this authority...Where did His wisdom come from?...Two Pharisees, who knew the Scriptures well, get to know Him and better understand Him...One is Nicodemus, who tells Him that He must have come from God because no One could perform the miracles He has been doing had He not come from God...And another Pharisee, who originally opposed Him named Saul, later would be named and become Paul, would meet Him after His death on the road to Damascus and that meeting would change his life, that is Paul's life, forever...Paul would work with the original disciples and Jesus' Brother James to help Christianity get off the ground and be spread throughout the entire world...Paul would go on to write thirteen New Testament books about Jesus...And He would write about this Man was the Messiah from the Old Testament, and would die on the cross for our sins, and then He would be resurrected from the dead and live again...Nicodemus, the other Pharisee, would help bury Jesus in an empty tomb after His death on the cross...His death on the cross would save us from our sins...Three days after Jesus was placed in His burial tomb, the tomb is empty and is found empty by the women who were also following and believed in Him...And women had very little to say in His time, but they went out to see and be at His graveside...The women are the first to see Him back alive...And so a dead man is back to life, after being dead for three days...God has risen Him from His death and back to life...He appears to His Disciples after His death, then to His Brother James, and then to Paul, and then to five hundred other people...This continues to help the number of His followers to grow...His followers grow in number over time, and more people after His death believe in Him than they did when He was alive...
He stays alive for forty days, and then He ascends back to God and back to heaven...He has left earth, but says He will come back at some time in the future...
This Miraculous Man goes on to have the New Testament, part of the Bible, written exclusively about Him...And each New Testament Book would have at least one miracle (though the four gospels write about many of His miracles) in it...And that one basic miracle is that Jesus is still alive and well...Hallelujah!!!...He has risen from death!!!...What Glory...And Jesus is still changing lives today...
This is really some unusual and odd story when you think about it...Who would have the ideas and thoughts for a story like this one?...It would have to be One whose thoughts are not man's thoughts, and whose ways are not man's ways...