May 8, 2025

GOD’S WORD FOR TODAY:

“Behold, the LORD has proclaimed to the ends of the earth, ‘Say to Daughter Zion: See, your Savior comes! Look, His reward is with Him, and His recompense goes before Him. And they will be called ‘the Holy People, the Redeemed of The LORD; and you will be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.’” (Isaiah 62.11-12)

TODAY’S REFLECTION ON GOD’S WORD TO US:

Recompense is the amends made to someone who has been harmed or suffered a loss. Have you ever considered that you are Jesus’ “reward and recompense”? We are a gift, the result of His sacrificial offering. When we keep our faith in God or when we recognize that we haven’t and now we do, we are presenting to Jesus the fragrant offering and gift of “reward and recompense.” His effort on our behalf for the glory of God is worth it. Even if only one person recognizes their salvation, then there is joy in Heaven. There is more than one. Paul writes, “We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.” It is true. Listen to what Isaiah declared is the name of the Savior’s “reward and recompense.” That name is “The Holy People, the Redeemed of the LORD; who will be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.” We have already heard this promise of a new identity in previous chapters. We are aware of the reality of name changes in scripture such as Abraham who was Abram, Israel who was Jacob, Paul who was Saul. The name change was an indication of a new nature and new reality which came to a person because God became the centering of their lives with their acts of faith. Putting our trust in the Lord is reward enough. When we gather in faith to promote this identity which has been given to us by God there is a powerful witness to those who are not a part of this transition. That transition is the testimony of our discipleship. Our discipleship is growing into the name which is given to us. We know the power of that name in Paul’s writing to the community of faith in Christ founded in Philippi, “At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that He is Lord.” We are His legacy and His namesake. It is written on our hearts and in our minds. It is etched in us just as “the word of God, the Law of the Lord” was scribed into tablets of stone for the sake of Israel. What value God has placed in us and on us to redeem us with His Son so that we might be known as “sons and daughters of the Most High God.“

Let me take a moment to be reminded of the power of the cross. When Isaiah made this declaration as the call to prayer which he and the watchmen were to utter without fail, it was for the nation of Israel that was suffering in the midst of exile, both foreign and domestic. The call for Zion, the daughter of God, to recognize the end of the exile and the beginning of their freedom came with the return of the exiles out of Babylon. As those exiles were approaching, they were the sign of the work of the Savior. For them, it was the hand of God which had set the captive free just as He had done so in Egypt. It was not Cyrus the Great of Persia who was the savior of the people of Israel. He was God’s instrument for reconciliation and restoration. Did he know that is what he was? Was he doing it because he believed in the God of Israel? That we cannot be certain of. We do know that he was struck by the testimony of Nehemiah who had been the cupbearer of Cyrus. It was the testimony of his faith in God that moved Cyrus to restore the exiles back to their homeland. The witness of faithfulness is its own reward and recompense. The cross is one of those witnesses. The cross was a transitional moment in the faith history of God’s people. It established the greater meaning of Zion to represent far more than just the Jews who were descendants of Adam and Eve by blood and Abraham by faith. Zion became, was meant to become, the sign of where God established His covenant with the entire world. This is the power of the cross. Jesus did not die just for some. Jesus died for everyone. He became the “reward and recompense” for each one of us so that we might know the righteousness of God by becoming the righteousness of God. We become that by faith, our faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Yet, it is only truly and fully known by those who receive this gift for themselves and then share the gift with others. This is why Jesus calls those who follow Him to “take up their cross.” The cross is the sign of self-sacrifice, the giving of one’s life for the sake of another. We know this to be the evidence of the greatest love humankind can know. In the words of Jesus, “No greater love is there than this that one would lay down their lives for another; love one another.” This is the new command which is threaded in with the two great commands: love God and love neighbor. Paul would say that following the new command satisfies the great commands. It does not, however, nullify them nor silence them. Neither does the resurrection of Jesus nullify the signs of the empty cross and the empty tomb. They bear witness to the resurrection. The resurrection bears witness to them. One cannot happen without the other. The witness comes before and surrounds the moment of faith. It is in that thinking I can hear Paul declare, as I mentioned before, “We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.” Mighty ones of God, we are a part of that cloud alongside of so many others throughout the history of faith. They bore witness before the event as we bear witness after it. That event was “the cross, the grave and the resurrection.” In our witness now, we join together to precede another moment in the history of faith: the return of the Savior at the Last Day. Let us not be silent. Let us claim our voice of transition from a person of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips to being one redeemed with lips declaring the perfect word and promise of God. We are modern Isaiahs and harbingers of freedom which only God can give and has given in Jesus the Christ.

TODAY’S PRAYER IN RESPONSE TO GOD’S WORD:

Father, in these days we are finding the need to believe even more than ever before. We all have known trouble, some in greater ways than others, but You are offering us the assurance that we will not be consumed by it forever. Regardless of the “time” we are in and the “time” we have been given, we ask for Your Holy Spirit which Jesus asked You to share with us, to lead and guide and direct us in the paths we should go. Teach us what we still need to learn. Empower us to put that learning into action. Bless our actions not as a works righteousness which we know is folly but righteous works which declare Your glory and further witness the truth that can set all who believe free from death. So may we live by the name of Jesus our Christ in whose name we pray. AMEN.