Isaiah 40:3-5

Listen! It’s the voice of someone shouting, “Clear the way through the wilderness for the LORD! Make a straight highway through the wasteland for our God! Fill in the valleys, and level the mountains and hills. Straighten the curves, and smooth out the rough places. Then the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together.”

I’m no lover of airports, but I do love flying. Having flown to many parts of the world, I have always been amazed by the huge expanse of mountainous areas so was not surprised to discover that mountains form nearly a quarter of the earth’s land surface. As I have flown over them for hours on end, I have tried to imagine the way of life for the people who live in such areas. Mountains are beautiful, but they must make travel incredibly complicated for the people who have them as their home.

In today’s dramatic reading we hear that our mighty God can flatten the mountains and fill in the valleys. What Isaiah is telling us is that we should never put a limit on what God can do. However mountainous our problems may be, God can blast a path through them. That should come as a great encouragement to all of us, because we are probably all confronting situations that we feel could never be solved. Humanly speaking, we cannot imagine a way of overcoming them. But God looks at things in a very different way.

Today’s verses are probably most familiar to us from the New Testament, where we hear them in connection with John the Baptist (Mark 1:3). He fulfilled this prophecy when he came as a voice in the wilderness, preparing the way for the coming of Jesus, the saviour of the world. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection brought a complete transformation to human history. Only by God becoming man in Jesus could the mountainous challenges of sin and death be overcome. Jesus won the greatest victory of all time through his death upon the cross. Truly we should never put a limit on what God can do.

Question

What mountainous problems have you seen God overcome in your life?

Prayer

Dear Father God, help my confidence in you to grow day by day. Amen