Those Were The Days

But there is hope. Isaiah says, “We are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of you hand.” Isaiah says that they are willing to be molded into what the Lord wants them to be molded.

The people were broken. They were in a difficult position as far as international politics go. They were going through the motions. No one was calling to God. God had turned His face from them. They were wasting away in their sins. Isaiah pleads with God to take them and turn them into something new.

In verse 9, Isaiah prays for the forgiveness of the sins of the people. Isaiah acknowledges God’s right to be angry, in saying, “Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord.” In other words don’t be angrier than you have to be. God has a right to angry when we sin, the same way we, as parents, have the right to be angry with our children when the act in direct defiance of something we have instructed them. He then pleads with God to not remember the sins of the people. When we experience the forgiveness of God, our sins are deleted from His memory. They are not remembered against us.

Last Memorial Day weekend, I took my new toy to a family reunion. I had just bought a digital camera. I was a madman taking pictures. I took pictures of everything. I couldn’t wait to get home and load them on my computer. I was going to e-mail them to the family. I was going to load them into my family tree program. Something happened while I was trying to upload them to my computer. They were gone. That stupid computer had eaten my pictures. Or so I thought. The next day I realized that it wasn’t the computer that was stupid, I was stupid. I had inadvertently deleted the pictures. They were gone forever. That’s how God treats our sins that are forgiven. They are deleted from His memory, and there is no way to recover them.

We have hope as we enter this advent season. God has dramatically intervened at several points in history. There was Noah, Mt. Sinai, the Red Sea crossing, the battle of Jericho and others that Isaiah recalled. God intervened later as well. We can think of Daniel in the lion’s den, the Hebrew children in fiery furnace (Rack, Shack and Benny for those familiar with Veggie Tales), Nehemiah rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, Esther, and the biggest of them all. The biggest of course is the sending of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this season.

This is not the end of the story. Christmas is not the main focus of the Christian year. Commercialism has made Christmas the most important day of the year. The thing to remember is that the story doesn’t end with the manger of wood; the story ends with a cross of wood and an empty tomb. The forgiveness that God offers is was not accomplished in the manger. It was accomplished on the cross. Jesus became the perfect sacrifice for our sins. He conquered death and rose again to life.

What we celebrate this season is the invasion of God into human history. Isaiah pleaded for God to “rend the heavens and come down,” he wanted God to “cause the nations to quake.” God invaded human history on that night in Bethlehem, although it was not with a mighty earthquake, but with the gentle coo of little baby.