ROOTED - Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Isaiah 25:8, 9 

8   He will swallow up death forever;

and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,

    and the reproach of his people he will take away
from all the earth,

    for the Lord has spoken.

9 It will be said on that day,

    “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him,
that he might save us.

    This is the Lord; we have waited for him;

    let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”

 Reflection: Apocalyptic
Literature

Written By: Pastor Jesse Caro

Isaiah 25:2 paints a grim picture:

For you have made the city a heap,

    the fortified city a ruin;

the foreigners' palace is a city no more;

    it will never be rebuilt.

And this is the interesting reality of apocalyptic literature
(literature that writes about the end times, and the apocalypse): on one hand
it is disturbingly dark. On the other hand, there is an element of hope often
sprinkled in. It is, in this way, a little bit like our Gospel message. Our
Gospel has a necessary component that is dim: we are sinners and are pointed
headlong into an eternity of ruin apart from God. This blunt truth is hard to
accept, and hard to proclaim. But it is a necessary truth if we are to ever accept,
with joy, the following news (a flip side of the same Gospel coin): God in his
mercy has paid the debt we could not pay such that He has made a way for us to
have eternal life. It is a necessary “good news.” It is good news precisely
because there is corresponding bad news. That is, there could not be good news
without bad news (obvious fact).

Isaiah, as apocalyptic writing, has (in the same chapter) given us
a version of the ying yang nature of this type of writing and, by extension, a
taste of the Gospel. The city will be laid waste, a heap. It will never be
rebuilt. This declaration of the righteous judgment of God on his people will
be followed up by the good news that one day there will be no more death, and
God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. The prophet has made plain the basic
God-truth that good news follows, often, bad news. I for one am glad that this
is true. As our pastor has said often: there is no resurrection without a
cross. And the cross, then, makes us all the more grateful for the
resurrection. So, yes… there is a dark day coming when God will destroy all
evil-doers and clean up the house. It is sad that this must be the case, but
God has deemed it so. The good news, however, gives us the comfort of knowing
that afterwards there will be a day when God wipes every tear from our eyes and
death is only a distant memory.

Prayer

Lord,
we look forward to the day when you make all things new, and usher in your
Kingdom in all its fullness, wiping every tear from our eyes!