Isaiah 16

Isaiah continues to paint a picture of the gloom in Moab.  Not a pretty sight.  God had given this message earlier: “In three years….Moab’s impressive presence will be gone….”  The end was told and it has come to pass.  Things are pretty well destroyed.  As a farm boy, the description that jumped off the page at me had to do with the harvest.  “fields dried up….vineyards withered….crushed and torn out the famous grapevines….ripped out the crops”.  What a big change that is for these people who depended upon the land to provide for them.  They had experienced bountiful harvests and now, it is all gone.  Rather than “song and celebration” scripture describes things in the vineyards like this: “no more boisterous laughter in the orchards….no more hearty work songs in the vineyards….deathly and deadening silence”.  What a change that would be.  Harvest is what every farmer dreams of.  It is what we are waiting for.  It keeps us going through the long summer months because we believe there will be a yield in the fall.  But these folks lost all that.  They have experienced a total crop failure in every way, and their joy is gone.  Why?  Remember that God told them this would happen so it should have been no mystery.  They were praying to foreign gods, they were living their own prideful lives, they thought it was all about themselves.  Things don’t go well when we make that decision – to cut God out from His rightful place and put ourselves on the throne.  Their “balloon will be punctured” as the Message version writes it.  That is what happens when we let ourselves believe that we are the center of the universe.  The hot air will escape and reality will occur and we will crash and burn.  Is God on the throne of your life?  Have you got Him front and center in all you do?  Don’t make the mistake of the Moabittes.  God is God and we are just people.  He is in control!