flood

Isaiah 11:9: "They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."

There is a cure for what ails this world. There's a cure for the hate of neo-Nazis and Antifa, there's a cure for the savagery of ISIS and the belligerence of North Korea, there's a cure for the intrasagence of Democrats and Republicans. There's something that will fix my broken heart and the brokenness of my relationships. There's something that will fill that place inside me that's never satisfied, that restless part of me that always thinks there must be something more. 

What is it? It's the knowledge of the Lord. Isaiah tells me that on the day that knowlegde of God floods this world like Noah's 40 days of rain, there will be peace. The wolf will lie down with the lamb, and the cow and bear will feed together. No one will harm anyone or destroy anything; we will finally be at peace.

I think I write about this passage every year,  but it speaks such hope for my weary soul. And this year, I notice the concrete thing I can do to help this promise come to be: I can learn and spread the knowledge of the Lord. I can add my drops and ounces and gallons that Jesus will mulitply into floods, until that knowledge washes away all the anger and aggression and loneliness and lovelessness in the whole world.

It may not happen in my lifetime, but that won't be because I didn't do the thing I could do. So know this: God is good, and God loves you, and God has promised eternity to you if you just put your faith in Jesus. Read that truth in scripture, live it until you feel it's truth, and then go tell someone who needs to hear it. It can be our own pyramid scheme: if we all just tell a few people who tell a few people, maybe we can flood this old world with the knowledge of God sooner rather than later.