Christmas 2018 – Day 19

 

As part of my 25 for 25 (25 devotionals leading up to 25 December), here is Day # 19: Yesterday (12/18) marked exactly one week until Christmas! We’re finishing up our mini-series in Isaiah today by looking at Isaiah 40:3-5. It says,

 

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
Make straight in the desert
A highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted
And every mountain and hill brought low;
The crooked places shall be made straight
And the rough places smooth;
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
And all flesh shall see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’”

For those of us who have read the gospels, we know that this was prophecy fulfilled by John the Baptist (John 1:23) who preached the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. But what does Isaiah mean when he talks about valleys being moved up and mountains made low? What about “crooked places shall be made straight”?

There are multiple levels to this: physical and spiritual representations. The physical one was that Rome had made roads that were flat and wide and good for traveling. This was the first time in history that interconnected highways had existed and Jesus was born into that time.

The spiritual side was that Jesus was the consistent and good road to heaven. He had broken down the barriers and revealed the “glory of the Lord.” When we consider that the people of Isaiah’s time would never have been able to imagine Roman roads or how exactly the Messiah could come and fulfill all these prophesies we must be humble enough to recognize that there are things that we can’t fully understand in God’s future timeline. And yet, God has given us knowledge and wisdom. I just self-published a book titled Biblical Knowledge, Understanding & Wisdom which talks about how much God wants to help us understand the Bible and help others understand it also. We must have faith in Jesus, the Lord of Christmas, that He will reveal to us what we should know, since He has made a perfect road to heaven!