the Fourth Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Our Daily Homily - Volume 2
Isaiah 34:8—The day of the Lord’s vengeance, the year of recompense. (R.V.).
These chapters remind us that there is a God that judgeth in the earth. The tendency of the present day is to reduce all things to the operation of natural law, and to crowd God out of his own world; as though He had no longer as much power as a judge or magistrate to inflict punishment! Here He comes out of the silence of eternity to avenge the wrongs of his people perpetrated upon them by Edom. The Jews could never forget that when they were in the extremity of their conflict with Babylon, Edom rejoiced and said, "Rase it, rase it to the foundation thereof." Now, at length, God would vindicate his people, and punish the proud land whose sins cried to Heaven.
Let us remember that God works not only through natural law, but by sudden manifest interpositions of his providence; and when He arises on behalf of the meek, the result is not only terrible but lasting. It seems as though God’s judgment on Edom and other peoples, which has left their lands as desolate scars on the face of the earth, are instances of the permanence of God’s decrees, and of their irreversibleness: "The smoke thereof shall go up for ever; from generation to generation it shall be waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever." It was often told by the Waldenses, how the prince that broke the covenant with them and drove them across the Swiss mountains, died of a broken heart at the death of his first-born.
God does not appear always to avenge the wrongs of his people in the present life. The wicked pass away amid their ill-gotten prosperity, but in the next world their evil deeds come back to roost in their own hearts.
