Next week is Christmas!!!

Christmas is a season of hope, of peace, of rejoicing.  It’s a season where we are more aware and intentional about serving the needs of those around us and showing loved ones just how much we care.

It’s a season where there is a heightened expectation of the miraculous to occur.

The miraculous arrival of Jesus came during a time of darkness and hopelessness.  For about 400 years, not much is recorded in regard to any prophetic words form the Lord.  The gap between the Old and New Covenants is a season of essentially silence from God.

Life for God’s people is challenging as the Roman Empire continues to grow and with it, the pressure to abandon their faith and identity in God and to embrace the culture of the world around them.  There’s growing pressure to abandon their sovereignty and desire to obey the Lord and to instead surrender it to the rule of the Roman government.

Around 700 years before this took place, God gave prophetic insight through Isaiah that speaks to the world that Isaiah was living in just as much as it did to the time when Jesus was born to fulfill it and it still speaks very clearly today to the world that we find ourselves living in now.

Within the book of Isaiah, we find a back and forth of dark and dreadful warnings about God’s judgment on His people by rising up the nations around them to overtake them as well as encouraging words of God’s coming salvation that would destroy those very same enemies.

It can at times read like a paradox and can even cause us to wonder how it can be the same Lord speaking both. 

However, His word clearly reveals His heart and will for His people.  He desires to be a safe place of refuge and to provide peace and prosperity for them.  He wants to keep away from them all of their enemies who want to destroy them.

However, He won’t force that to happen.  It is the choice of His people to either come under that protection that He offers through obedience or to instead reject that protection through disobedience.

The choice for most of His people was a choice to disobey.  There was an exception only of a small remnant of His people.  When all that God said would happen if they continued to walk in disobedience happened, it caused them  to wonder what was happening and to seek out answers from everywhere except the Lord.  Conspiracies and false prophesies were running rampant!

Sound familiar today?  This prophetic word of the coming Christmas season certainly still rings true a few thousand years after it was spoken as God’s word often does!

Isaiah 8:11-22

11 This is what the Lord says to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people:

12 “Do not call conspiracy    everything this people calls a conspiracy;do not fear what they fear,    and do not dread it.13 The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,    he is the one you are to fear,    he is the one you are to dread.14 He will be a holy place (or sanctuary);

    for both Israel and Judah he will bea stone that causes people to stumble    and a rock that makes them fall.And for the people of Jerusalem he will be    a trap and a snare.15 Many of them will stumble;    they will fall and be broken,    they will be snared and captured.”

You see, a stepping stone can serve two purposes.  To the one who sees it and stands firmly upon it, it provides strength and a firm place to rise up onto safely away from danger.

To the one who does not see it or the one who just hesitantly and untrustingly steps onto it, it causes them to stumble and fall and can even cause broken bones or far worse.

That same stone or rock can either become a safe place of refuge or a dangerous snare.  It’s all up to the person and their view and belief about that rock.  That stone or rock is unchanging.

This is how Jesus is to us today.

He is the same Jesus yesterday, today, and forever; unchanging!

To some, He is a firm founda