Isaiah 2:1-5 – Living for that great hope

The message presented in the first chapter of Isaiah was essentially a wake-up call from God to the people of Judah and Jerusalem. Instead of living a glorious relationship and God centred life, the people chose to live a life without regard for Him. They had fallen so far that they failed to realize and appreciate their God-given privilege. Being faithful, God would not abandon them. Through a series of tough dealings, God sought to make them realize how far they had fallen. Reasoning with them, God was calling on them to return to their privilege.

When we come to Isaiah 2, we see the prophet began a second message declaring what God was going to do in the future. This second message will take us to Isaiah 4. Here the prophet began and ended God’s message with a promise. And in between, he gave a series of scathing indictments from God against His people.

In the opening promise what Isaiah saw was God establishing His righteous kingdom where the temple would once again be the centre of worship. In prophecy, the word “mountains” is always used to refer to kingdoms. Hence what Isaiah spoke concerning the mountain of the house of God, he was talking about a spiritual kingdom, which would be exalted above all kingdoms of the world. The day would come, he asserted, when the Gentiles would be drawn to that holy mountain of God. There would be a deep longing to know the ways of the God of Israel.

The God that Israel worships would one day be the desire of the nations. People would want to live their lives according to the precepts and principles that God would give. Here Zion would become the centre of religious instruction. Isaiah also saw a time where fighting among the nations would cease and weapons of war would be made into farming equipment. The Gentiles would go on to use the principle of God’s Word to settle their dispute.

Ironically, in the day of Isaiah, the people of God had chosen to abandon the true God for the false gods of the nations. Here Isaiah speaks of a day in the future where the nations would abandon their false gods and idols to come to the mountain of the Lord and embrace the true God whom Israel had abandoned.

What was Isaiah doing? He was painting a glorious picture of the future where their God, the true and living God, would take pre-eminence and become the desire of the nations. His instruction would be the standard by which the world would live by. Since they had such a privilege to know Him and have a relationship with Him, shouldn’t they seize it and begin to live their lives in the light of the LORD?

Like them, we believers of God have a great and glorious hope in Christ Jesus and the coming eternal kingdom. Hence, we must live our lives in the light of that hope. While the world may be in despair and fainting for fear, our focus must be set on Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the hope of all nations. We must seek to live our lives for Him every moment that we have!