Isaiah 52:15b

Isaiah 52:15b

For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.

The ‘they’ in this verse are the kings we thought about yesterday – those people who will stand silent as they face the final judgement, realising that the Servant who they rejected as worthless is in fact the exalted ruler and judge.

At that moment, everything that wasn’t obvious about the Servant during his lifetime will become clear. He may have looked unimpressive but he is in fact the Lord of all creation. He may have seemed powerless in the face of an unjust trial, but he is in fact the righteous judge of all people.

This final day judgement is not just about the punishing of wrongdoing. It’s about the putting right of everything that is wrong or broken, everywhere in the universe. Everything will be made as it should be. And so truth will be clear, hidden things will be revealed, foolishness will be replaced by understanding.

This is a complete contrast to the world we find ourselves in right now. We still live in a fallen world, where we can’t even trust our own thinking because it has been warped by sin. Left to our own devices, we don’t just prefer darkness, we actually think it is light. We not only think and act foolishly, but we pride ourselves on how clever we are.  The people of Isaiah’s time were just the same. When God commissions Isaiah to be a prophet, back in Chapter 6, he warns him that the people will “be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” They have proved so determined to ignore what God has said to them that God himself will harden their hearts so that they cannot see or hear or understand. “How long will this last?” Isaiah asks. And God explains that it will continue until the promised judgement is complete. But there’s a glimmer of hope that when the Servant comes, things might change. Here, we see that glimmer become clearer.

Here we are promised that there will be a day when people WILL see and hear and understand what is really true – about God, and themselves, and the salvation which Jesus offers.

In God’s kindness, we don’t need to wait until the final judgement for those things to become clear. All of us who have put our faith in Jesus have only done so because he has already opened our blind eyes and softened our hard hearts so that we could hear and understand and believe the good news of the gospel.

Let’s thank him for that today, and let’s pray that his Spirit would continue to be at work in the lives of those who don’t yet know him, so that they too might see, understand, repent, believe and be saved, before it is too late.