Isaiah 25:6-9
Conquering More than Death

On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples,
	A banquet of aged wine--
	The best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain He will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
	The sheet that covers all nations;
	He will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces;
	He will remove the disgrace of His people from all the earth.
	The LORD has spoken.
In that day they will say,
	"Surely this is our God;
	We trusted in Him, and He saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in Him;
	Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation."

New International Version

Nothing better represents the frailty and hopelessness of our lives on earth as death. No matter what we do, no matter how successful or famous we become, we will die. Whatever respect or honor we had earned from others as we lived fades as the memories of our lives fade. We can work diligently to delay death by exercise, diet, and medicine, but we cannot keep death from coming.

We cannot, but God already has. Isaiah proclaimed that God will defeat death, will "swallow up death for all time," just as God conquers the hopelessness and strengthens the frailties of our lives. God's love means our lives are never meaningless, for we are God's!

But God, through Jesus, did not merely conquer death. Isaiah also told us that God will defeat ignorance, too. The "covering over all the people" is a symbol of what keeps us from seeing clearly who God is, and keeps us from recognizing the nature of who we are. Surely, if we could see how sin separates us from our Creator and Sustainer, we would never sin! Instead, we wrestle with that ignorance, struggle to make daily decisions on what is right, and fight to contain our emotional reactions of hate, anger, and selfishness.

Isaiah also promised that God will "remove the disgrace from His people." This, to me, is the most surprising of these three victories. After all, death comes as part of our physical nature, and every living thing in God's earthly creation dies. Ignorance is Satan's most potent tool, twisting the Truth to lead us away from God. But we ourselves have earned our disgrace in how we have fallen short of God's Way. The truth of who we are and what we have done means that, if there is justice, we deserve disgrace.

The good news from Isaiah is that none of this matters to God! Neither the physical temporality of our bodies, the ignorance of our minds, or the outcomes of our failings and sins are enough to separate us from God's extravagant love.

This is the gift of the Crucifixion and Resurrection! God made an infinite sacrifice in the perfect person of Jesus to banish anything and everything that would separate us from God.

This feels like an impossibility to us, for most of our human existence is spent struggling with barriers. We push ourselves to overcome fatigue. We reschedule and shuffle to overcome a lack of time. Every choice we have made meant there were options we abandoned, and we cannot go back to rescue what we gave up. We can't move as fast, see as well, or remember as clearly as we could when we were younger. We don't know all we feel we need to know to make intelligent decisions. We still are deceived; we still reject God's ways; we are still ashamed of our weak, sinful nature; we still face the decline and death of our bodies. When we focus on the barriers, we can see the barriers clearly--and we lose our focus on the One who has overcome the barriers.

Isaiah's instruction to us is to focus, instead, on God! Put your trust in God, and God will make a perfect Way for us where our ignorance and fallibility are certain to fail. Rejoice in all that God is, celebrating with the children's hymn that "we are weak, but He is strong!"

Our command, our charge, our response to God's Grace, is truly that simple: "be glad in His salvation."