Remembering the bigger picture

Scripture Verse that Caught My Attention: Isaiah 10:12 & 15 When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, he will punish the arrogant boasting of the king of Assyria and his haughty pride.
Is. 10:15 Shall the ax vaunt itself over the one who wields it,
or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it?
As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up,
or as if a staff should lift the one who is not wood!

Observation: The king of Assyria was understood by Isaiah to be an instrument of God’s wrath, but the king thought that he was powerful in and of himself.

Application: The other night my family and I were in a hotel late at night and the kids turned on the TV. There was teen-focused sitcom on one channel where there was a wizard who did some magic through a normal person and the normal person mistakenly thought that he suddenly possessed wizard-like powers. It took a number of near failures before the actual wizard was able to convince the wanna-be-wizard, that the powers he had displayed were not his own. It was a light-hearted sit-com, but, aside from the wrath in the Isaiah passage, there were some similarities to what the King of Assyria would eventually experience.

In many ways this is a lesson for many of us. It is so tempting, when confronted with a taste of relative ‘success’ to believe that we are the main reason for the accomplishment. It’s so easy to forget all of the other people and circumstances that have enabled us to be the in the position we are in or to paved the way for us to respond the way we do. It’s more than the standard line “and I’d like to thank all the little people that made this possible.” It’s realizing that we ourselves are ‘little people’ in the grand scheme of things. God can use any and all of us for divine purposes. And while we have every reason to employ every skill and resource at our disposal in the course of our every day, we also have every reason to not think too highly of ourselves along the way. As Isaiah makes clear in regard to the King of Assyria, just because we do the Lord’s work for a time does not necessarily mean that we are any better than all the rest.

Prayer: Lord, thanks for the continual reminders that everyone’s only hope is in you and that none of us is self-sufficient in our own right. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

(Readings today included: Isaiah 8-10 and Hebrews 8)