Isaiah: Hope for Today's Exiles

We've been studying the Prophet Isaiah here at First Baptist since September and will continue on through November. We have looked at key passages that instill a sense of hope in the face of the Israelite despair at being taken into exile. The Babylonians had destroyed their temple, captured their king, and destroyed their city. Today, we too face a metaphorical exile of sorts with severe feelings of dislocation from cultural identity and disconnection from one another is more real despite the hyper technological connections found within our phones and social media. Studies show that Americans are literally dying of loneliness. And yet, out of the darkest of nights, hope remains possible with God! Then suddenly, in the midst of a desolate refugee camp of despair, far from home in a foreign land, Isaiah speaks: a change is finally going to come! They are not forgotten; in fact the opposite is true – the dawn of a new day is breaking!
Isaiah helped the Hebrew people to imagine reality differently, the possibility of a different world, a world that God has waiting for us! Jesus embraced this dream of a new reality. I am inspired to image the Body of Christ that is compassionate to the world’s forgotten and left behind. Whether that’s a dozen refugees on a rubber boat in the Mediterranean, a scared and lonely child separated from her family at our southern border, hungry kids in our community, a family huddled in a Syrian basement praying to survive another night … “For unto them a child is born, unto them a son is given.” (Isaiah 9:6). That’s the Gospel. That’s the dream God has for our world.
 
That calls to my mind the hopeful song, A Million Dreams, from the musical, The Greatest Showman –
 
I close my eyes and I can see
The world that's waiting up for me
That I call my own
Through the dark, through the door
Through where no one's been before
But it feels like home
They can say, they can say it all sounds crazy
They can say, they can say I've lost my mind
I don't care, I don't care, so call me crazy
We can live in a world that we design
'Cause every night I lie in bed
The brightest colors fill my head
A million dreams are keeping me awake
I think of what the world could be
A vision of the one I see
A million dreams is all its gonna take
A million dreams for the world we're gonna make
There's a house we can build
Every room inside is filled
With things from far away
The special things I compile
Each one there to make you smile
On a rainy day
They can…
 
However big, however small
Let me be a part of it all
Share your dreams with me
You may be right, you may be wrong
But say that you’re bringing me along
To the world you see
To the world I close my eyes to see, I close my eyes to see!
                                                                (by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul)
 
Do you see the world that Isaiah and Jesus dreamed? Pray that you might be open to the realities of the undying dawn of God’s Kingdom to enter our world through Christ in you! God has a beautiful vision “for the world were gonna make!”