29 November – 5 December 2015. Isaiah 35 (click to read). Sometimes when my sons come home after a long day, they stumble through the front door, lie on the floor, and let out a big sigh of relief: they are finally home! Home is a place of peace and safety, a place to rest from […]

22–28 November 2015. Isaiah 28 (click to read). History teachers tell us that “one thing we learn from history is that people don’t learn anything from history!” In history’s stories we see so many mistakes and failures. But instead of learning from those mistakes, we just do them all over again. Maybe the prophet had […]

15–21 November 2015. Isaiah 21 (click to read). In the ancient world, many different empires took turns defeating and controlling the surrounding lands and peoples. Whether it was Egypt or Assyria or Babylon or other great empires, each new one seemed worse than the last, oppressing the people, robbing countries of their wealth, and leaving […]

8–14 November 2015. Isaiah 14 (click to read). In 1888 a French newspaper mistakenly reported that Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had died. The newspaper happily announced that “the merchant of death”, the person “who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before” was finally dead. Nobel was horrified […]

1–7 November 2015. Isaiah 7 (click to read). Chapter 7 starts a new and complicated section in the Book of Isaiah, one full of political details about different empires and kings and their battles against each other. During that time, the place we think of as “Israel” was actually divided into two kingdoms: Judah in […]