AP

Isaiah 15:3 In the streets they wear sackcloth; on the roofs and in the public squares they all wail, prostrate with weeping. 

Moab had in many ways been blessed by the LORD.  They were Semites, but having an odious origin, being descendants of Lot’s older daughter by her incestuous one-night-stand with her father, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, having made him drunk for the purpose (Genesis 19:37), but, unlike the Edomites who had a much closer relationship with the Israelites, they had allowed their refugee Israelite cousins to pass through their territory on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 2:27-29).  They, therefore, had enjoyed times of prosperity and prestige, and had even been chosen by the LORD to have a part in the ancestry of Jesus the Messiah (Ruth 4:10-17; Matthew 1:5)!

But, in the end, every nation must realise there is a Day of Reckoning.  In the reign of Hezekiah, some 300 years after David, Isaiah was commissioned to pronounce their imminent judgement (Isaiah 15-16).  This was a thinly veiled warning to his own people Israel, and to every nation since then, that we will all be held accountable, nationally as well as individually, for our response to God’s revealed truth, and to the blessing which, by his grace, he continues to shower upon us.

Do we take our responsibility seriously to act as salt and light in our nation in the light of God’s Judgement?  Are we praying earnestly for our nation, for those elected to leadership, and that God in his mercy will raise up others to serve as leaders who will acknowledge him in public office and call us to repentance?  Yes, we are presently greatly blessed by God as a nation, but, considering the way our culture has gone, and continues to go, let us not presume that a time of ‘weeping in the streets in sackcloth’ is not pressing in upon us!

The prophet Amos, a predecessor and contemporary of Isaiah, was commissioned with a similar message: “Therefore this is what I will do to you, Israel, and because I will do this to you, Israel, prepare to meet your God” (Amos 4:12).  “Great God, what do I see and hear, the end of things created!   The Judge of all the earth comes near on clouds of glory seated; the trumpet sounds, the graves restore the dead which they contained before – prepare, my soul, to meet him!  The dead in Christ shall first arise at that last trumpet’s sounding, caught up to meet him in the skies, with joy their Lord surrounding; no gloomy fears their souls dismay, his presence brings eternal day to those prepared to meet him.  But sinners, filled with guilty fears, shall see his wrath prevailing; for they shall rise, and find their tears and sighs are unavailing!  The Day of Grace is past and gone; they, trembling, stand before the throne all unprepared to meet him!” (W.B.Collyer)

– Bruce Christian