”In that day the Lord will take his terrible, swift sword and punish Leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent, the coiling, writhing serpent. He will kill the dragon of the sea. “In that day, sing about the fruitful vineyard. I, the Lord, will watch over it, watering it carefully. Day and night I will watch so no one can harm it. My anger will be gone. If I find briers and thorns growing, I will attack them; I will burn them up— unless they turn to me for help. Let them make peace with me; yes, let them make peace with me.” The time is coming when Jacob’s descendants will take root. Israel will bud and blossom and fill the whole earth with fruit! Has the Lord struck Israel as he struck her enemies? Has he punished her as he punished them? No, but he exiled Israel to call her to account. She was exiled from her land as though blown away in a storm from the east. The Lord did this to purge Israel’s wickedness, to take away all her sin. As a result, all the pagan altars will be crushed to dust. No Asherah pole or pagan shrine will be left standing. The fortified towns will be silent and empty, the houses abandoned, the streets overgrown with weeds. Calves will graze there, chewing on twigs and branches. The people are like the dead branches of a tree, broken off and used for kindling beneath the cooking pots. Israel is a foolish and stupid nation, for its people have turned away from God. Therefore, the one who made them will show them no pity or mercy. Yet the time will come when the Lord will gather them together like handpicked grain. One by one he will gather them—from the Euphrates River in the east to the Brook of Egypt in the west. In that day the great trumpet will sound. Many who were dying in exile in Assyria and Egypt will return to Jerusalem to worship the Lord on his holy mountain.“
Isaiah 27:1-13 NLT
As the scriptures say, “The Lord disciplines those he loves.” There will be a time to look forward to. It is a time in which our hope can be placed. In the eternal, it is a place that is near to us, though we all must wait for it. This eschatology is foundational to the ethic of Christianity. Our methods and praxis are built upon the idea that there will be a time of vindication and peace. It is what our Christian hope is based upon. One of the common disservices that every passing generation gives to the church is to forget that we do not live for the now, but for the then. Because of this building block being stripped out in favor of a finite minded worldview, Christianity has become a glorified self help program, the Bible its manual, and Jesus its guru. It has lost its transcendent fervor in favor of a Jesus who helps us attain small daily goals rather than the world altering ones prescribed in the great commission. The foundations paved by the blood of the first church always crumbles without the eschatology of the coming “glory of the Lord,” and his grapes of wrath and eternal kingdom. We ought to be eternal minded, beginning with the marker of an impending millennial rule that restores and punishes and cleanses. Only then can we step into that projected victory with the strength of the Lord’s great commission.
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