Day 254

Isaiah 27:1-28:29, 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, Psalm 106:40-48

I preached the other day on Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch. The Eunuch was sat in his chariot reading the entire book of Isaiah. now that takes guts! I’ve already commented on how it can be hard going but what we have to remember is that this was never one continuous stream of prophecy, the compilation of Isaiah took years, across three writers and many great political events, what we are reading now is extremely out of context so it would have made far more sense at the time.

Yet scripture still, somehow, manages to reach across time and context and hit us write between the eyes. We may ask who or what Leviathan is, well think of the loch ness monster, think of the scariest film that you have ever watched and then merge the two, then times it by ten. Leviathan was some mythical sea creature that was the epitome of evil. Early Christian used it as a symbol of the devil and even in the original context it had links with hell..

Sometimes we may feel like hell, or feel we are in hell, and yet Isaiah's passage is all about the deliverance of Israel by the God who can slay this monster of the sea. When we get into “do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule” I was lost about the salvation thing. I am never lost by the God who slays the dragons in my life, by the God who reached down into the depths of hell and pulled me out.

God didn’t just deliver the people of Israel, by the cross he delivered us and through his resurrection he keeps on fighting for us. The church is never perfect, you wouldn’t expect an institution of sinners to be perfect, but in our weakness Christ’s power is made perfect, for his grace is sufficient.

Know that he has fought for you and claimed you as his own today.