The day of the Lord is at hand, at hand:
The storms roll up the sky;
The nations sleep starving on heaps of gold:
All dreamers toss and sigh;
The night is dark as before the morn,
When the pain is the sorest, the child is born,
And the day of the Lord is at hand.
                                                    Charles Kingsley.

I want to share a piece from Oswald Chambers that I read while studying Isaiah in light of what is going on around us at this very critical moment in history. The question is are we in front or behind?

“Isaiah ‘s message needs to come home to us today. Visualize that God is behind the devil, not the devil behind God; all the great world forces are in front of God, and they cannot do a thing without His permission. Today we are so emphasizing the freedom of the human will that we are forgetting the sovereignty of God, consequently when we come up against the forces at work in the world that we are paralyzed by fear and get into despair, which we need never have done if we have been built up in faith in God. 

Never minimize what you do not understand, and never knuckle under to the world forces; stand strong in faith in God. I do not understand this, But I know God is behind it. Weigh the force and stand true to God at all cost. Too often we rush in where angels fear to tread. Let God place you by His Providence where He will; the tendency is to “wobble” out of it … I would rather stand for God somewhere else. 

We have the idea that we ought to separate ourselves from the world and its enterprises. That is foreign to Isaiah and to our Lord. We are to be “in” the world while not of it, and to denounce by lip and life the things that are wrong.

John 17:15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. ESV

Landscape

World forces are not foreign to us, they are at our very doors today – civilization being pushed under the name of Christianity, communism, socialistic blether [long-winded talk] full of all kinds of promise, and commercialism, binding every nation under heaven into one. Isaiah faced these forces fearlessly, and we have to do the same. There is no cowardice about Isaiah or about his message. He never lost faith in God or got discouraged, and when the things he foretold happened, he did not desert the people.” Oswald Chambers

 This could have been spoken today but Chambers delivered it in the midst of World War II … December 10, 1941 … America was quickly learning that it “could not separate itself from the world and its enterprises.” Are we in the midst of relearning past lessons today?