Come to Zion with singing

Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah,

Pilgrim through this barren land. William Williams

 

Read Isaiah 35:5—10

Before Israel went into the Promised Land they drooled over pictures of it. It was a land flowing with milk and honey. There they would grow fat.[1] In this passage I am again taken out of the land. I am in exile. Dreaming. It is beyond what I have experienced, the satisfaction of every longing. It seems like the land of one day, a holiday country. On the actual return to the land the exiles found broken down buildings, enemies sly as foxes, internal strife and rocky soil. Yet God has allowed this picture to shine out in the scripture like the cover of a book. Written across it: ‘The Blessing.’[2]

 

Dear Father, how I long to see, to walk in, to settle into this landscape you hold out to me as a promise. I see it already where Jesus is, healing the blind and the deaf and the speechless. I see the picture filled out from that beginning, painted in breathing colour, until it becomes a land I can live in. It’s a picture, surely, of your kingdom to come that I pray for. I pray that in large and small ways I’ll see the signs of this coming kingdom, and go through my life claiming it, singing of it in peace, and that it will form my very character.

 

 

 

 

[1] Deuteronomy 31:20

[2] Matthew 11:4—6