An Uncertain Destination

Isaiah 51:6 Look up to the heavens! Look around you at the earth below! The skies will disappear like clouds of smoke. The earth will become like worthless old clothes. The people on earth will die, but my salvation will continue forever. My goodness will never end.

I think there’s only one thing worse than an uncomfortable journey – and that’s an uncomfortable journey with an uncertain destination and an unknown time of arrival.

I remember once in my time in the military, going on a survival exercise. We were wet, we were cold, we were hungry. Now you can cope with that, if you know that it’s all going to end next Thursday. But they didn’t tell us where we were going and when it was going to end. And that, added a whole new layer of pressure on top of the wet, cold and hungry thing.

You see, we don’t like uncertainty. We want to know what the future holds and how things are going to turn out. But that’s not always possible, so how we handle uncertainty has everything to do with how much we’re going to end up enjoying the journey.

So, when the uncertainty eats away at you, really, the best thing to do is to cast yourself completely on God. The God who spoke these words to Israel at a time of great fear and uncertainty:

Look up to the heavens! Look around you at the earth below! The skies will disappear like clouds of smoke. The earth will become like worthless old clothes. The people on earth will die, but my salvation will continue forever. My goodness will never end. (Isaiah 51:6)

In these fearful and uncertain times, God told them to lift up their eyes and look at the heavens to see what He’d created. To see the power with which He’d put it all together. And He also encouraged them to remember that even when it all falls apart, His salvation and His goodness would last forever.

Great, but how do you and I come to that realisation here and now?

Towards the end of WWII, the allies were sweeping across Germany, searching farms and houses, looking for snipers. At one abandoned house, almost a heap of rubble, searchers with flashlights found their way into the basement. There on the crumbling wall a victim of the Holocaust had scratched a Star of David. And beneath it, in rough lettering, the message:

I believe in the sun, even when it does not shine
I believe in love, even when it is not shown
I believe in God, even when He does not speak.

That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.

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