Monumental Mountain Banquets

This week's study is on Isaiah 25:6-9:

The Lord of Heaven’s Armies will hold a banquet for all the nations on this mountain.
At this banquet there will be plenty of meat and aged wine—
tender meat and choicest wine.
On this mountain he will swallow up
the shroud that is over all the peoples,
the woven covering that is over all the nations;
he will swallow up death permanently.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from every face,
and remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth.
Indeed, the Lord has announced it!
At that time they will say,
“Look, here is our God!
We waited for him, and he delivered us.
Here is the Lord! We waited for him.
Let’s rejoice and celebrate his deliverance!”

This week's study is dedicated to my Uncle Curtis, who passed away late last week. He was a big fan of banquets, so when I saw the bit about the meat, I thought of him!

The mountain they are talking about here is Mount Zion, which is in Israel. Isaiah is hinting at what will happen when Jesus returns, and we are all resurrected. God holds a giant banquet for us, everyone, not just the Jews, on a mountain. Have you ever been on a mountain? Imagine the logistics of trying to arrange a luxurious feast before refrigeration for everyone in the midst of a barren mountaintop landscape. If you ever doubted that God can do the impossible, that should cure you of your misconceptions.

Isaiah uses the imagery of a cloth shroud that covers us all. A shroud is what they used to use instead of a coffin, because in the scrubby desert there aren't enough trees to make all the pine boxes you would need. It says God will swallow up death permanently. In the ancient Middle East, people thought of death like a wild animal that was insatiably hungry and would attack people at random. So the idea of this divine turnabout is beautiful, where God himself gets poetic revenge by swallowing this thing himself. Permanently.

It says he will wipe the tears from every face and take away our disgrace. Death is humiliating. Sin is humiliating. All of us are affected by those things and by the tears that result. But it's beautifully personal: God wipes away the tears. He doesn't just tell us to clean up, or hand us a cloth and walk off. He cares for us on an individual basis. 

He understands. He was crucified on the cross, experiencing both the humiliation of the deceased and the outrage of the father who had to stand by while it happened. And the shortest verse in the Bible is "Jesus wept," right?

These are the verses I wish I could show to people when they say stupid things like "If we all had enough faith, nobody would ever get sick or die." I want to say to them, "Really? So you have more faith than literally every single other human being ever to live in all of history? Wow. Such an honor to meet you." Would they also tell me that God's perfect diet for us is 100% sugar because that's what tastes the best to us and he wouldn't make bitter foods if he loved us? Unbelievable.

Death happens. Sickness happens. Sometimes God intervenes, and we get a miracle, like what happened when a friend of mine was a baby and died, and his mother laid on him and prayed for him, because she had no money for a doctor. He came back to life. But that doesn't mean that all of the other mothers whose children die young are less loved by God, or less faithful.

Death and sorrow are part of life. How else would we appreciate the ending so much, when we rejoice and see God in the end and say: 

“Look, here is our God!
We waited for him, and he delivered us.
Here is the Lord! We waited for him.
Let’s rejoice and celebrate his deliverance!”

Can you imagine? Especially to someone from Isaiah's epoch, where occasional famine and frequent tragic death would have been the norm. Suddenly, you're in a safe place. Your material needs are more than met. Your emotional needs are satisfied. And the God of the universe, himself, is personally interested in you, specifically, as a person.

So maybe we're at the end of our disgraceful years, or the beginning, or something in between. The important thing is that we're invited to a banquet at the end that will make it all somehow seem worth it. Use your time here to get ready for that day, and know that your sorrows will all be wiped away.