Focused on the Price

Isaiah 56:1-5

When good is spoken of as evil and evil as good, a follower of Christ needs to keep focused on the prize, a growing relationship with Jesus, not feelings, or  events, but keeping our eyes on the goal of walking in fellowship with God and man.  When we see verse one; “Thus says the LORD: “Keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.”  When the word salvation is used many of us would think of what Christ has done by deliverance from sin and its consequences by allowing His grace by faith in the finished work of the cross.  But that is not the correct use of the word in this case, it is God saving His people from the Babylonian bondage, the word salvation is being used as a source or means of being saved from harm. You find no call for repentance, or obedience, but you do see God’s promise of coming soon, and in His coming they will see His righteousness.

God singles out the Mosaic covenant of the Sabbath, it was key to man being in fellowship 

with God, but just keeping the Sabbath and not preserving justice and doing what was right 

would not produce a happy person.  In Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth commandment;  

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 

but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, 

you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your 

livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven 

and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the 

FLORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”  

It is not always easy to be part of a new school, being the outsider or the new person at work, and many find this also to be true in the church, but to be a foreigner, a non Jew who has converted to the Lord, not he nor anyone should say the LORD will exclude you.  If you look at Exodus 12:48-49, “A foreigner residing among you who wants to celebrate the Lord’s Passover must have all the males in his household circumcised; then he may take part like one born in the land. No uncircumcised male may eat it. The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you.”

We do not have any proclamation in the church on Eunuchs, but we do have men and woman who cannot have children, for different reasons from the Eunuch, but the same promise holds for them, God will provide a memorial for them.  If you look at Deuteronomy 23:1, it prohibits the Eunuchs from worship but my HCSB has this note about verse four: the law listed in Deuteronomy 23:1; “However this verse (Isaiah 56:4) describes an obedient eunuch and thus one who had become a eunuch accidentally or who had converted to worship of God after becoming a eunuch.  Such devout eunuchs were invited to join in the worship of God.”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice