I have no doubt that lots of Scripture written two thousand years ago (or more) … will have its fullest impact in days yet to come! I personally believe Jesus’ famous “Olivet Discourse,” for example (Matthew chapters 24 and 25 in its largest New Testament Form) gives detailed instructions to those alive during the Tribulation when the Anti-Christ commits that infamous “abomination of desolation.” (Jesus teaching: “When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, whoso readeth let him understand: then let them which be in Judaea FLEE into the mountains.” Get out of town! Danger looming! Escape! I’ve reprinted here Matthew 24:15-16.)
Wow, this is another way the Bible is a miraculous Book!
Even the “Plan of Salvation” in some of those unusual Texts (meaning “Tribulation” oriented) are likely designed to tell the Jews (evangelizing lost souls) about our Lord’s Saving Grace and specifically how to be “born-again!”
“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come: and it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Acts 2:20-21 quoting Joel 2:31-32, God still saving the lost … at an unprecedented (difficult) time!
Well, I think I have found one of those “encouraging verses” in Isaiah 25. A Millennium Chapter, for sure.
That little saved “remnant” of Israelites … worshipping the great God Who has spared them (somehow) throughout the Tribulation … opine: “For thou (God) hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat.” Isaiah 25:4, King James Version.
Why “poor,” Jews?
Because they have been deprived of everything, fleeing for their very lives, refusing the “Mark of the Beast,” under a death watch imposed by that wicked Anti-Christ!
Poor because persecuted! (To the tortured Church in Smyrna, Jesus says: “And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; I know thy works, and tribulation, and POVERTY.” Poverty stricken, living in total penury, financially bankrupted, Revelation 2:8-9 … yet spiritually wealthy, “but thou are rich.”)
To those (especially in the coming Tribulation) who will have suffered so (and miraculously will have been rescued by Jesus’ Second Coming to earth) … God has been such STRENGTH!
Back to Isaiah 25:4 … “For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress.” Pretty clear, isn’t it?
“Distress,” simply (and obviously) meaning “affliction, tribulation!”
Both the substantives “poor” and “needy” imply “beggary,” that starkly destitute! They are synonyms to that extent.
Yet they (though lowly and despised by the world) have been born-again and are praising God Almighty, and the Lord Jesus Christ!
Then our Text Verse, in closing, describes the God-hating “wicked” in those future dark days … “When the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall,” Isaiah 25:4, where the expression “terrible ones” re-names the enemies of the Jews, all of them being anti-Semitic to the core! The Devil (Dragon) and his cronies!
These poor Jews have been pursued and if caught, brutally executed “en masse!”
“A storm against the wall” pictures how a violent rainstorm with its resultant torrents of rushing water (flooding) washes away the earth, often literally destroying “walls,” barriers of all kinds!
And yet the Lord Jesus has (for His children) halted the flood, tamed wild waters once again! Remember during His first Visit to earth? “Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.” Quoting Matthew 8:26.
A worship Verse indeed, Isaiah 25:4 … “For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.”
We would be so praising God as well, had we not forgotten how He has so gloriously delivered us too!
The noun “refuge” means “shelter!”
As in Psalm 46:1 … “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
— Dr. Mike Bagwell
Out little Verse today truly is a “How to do it Manual” concerning Praise and Worship and Thankfulness for Deliverance from the fiercest of enemies!
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