By Ralph Douglas West | Senior Pastor, Church Without Walls, Houston, Texas.
The reality becomes obvious: All we have is God and His Word in the face of everything threatening to us. If you can trust God, He can deal with everything
that threatens you.
In this passage, God offers the arsenal we need in just one word: faith. That is, if we can put our trust in God, God can deliver us from every tyranny and threat that comes against us. It seems so simple, yet so many miss that very point because of their search for hope in different places. The only thing God wants to know—in the face of national, international, personal and individual threats—is whether we can posture ourselves to trust Him to be our ultimate preserver in all that seems unstable.
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Ahaz was the king of the small tribe/nation of Judah. Word had been circulating that Rezin from Syria and Pekah, son of Ramaliah from Israel, were preparing to join forces to contrive the perfect military storm to attack the people in Judah—a ratio of 10:2—huge military battalions gathering together against a small tribe.
When the word came to Ahaz, the king of Judah, he was stricken with an infectious fear that he passed on to the people:
"So the hearts of Ahaz and his people were shaken, as the trees of the forest by the wind" (
v. 2b). There they were in the face of their greatest fears: national, personal and individual disaster.
All of us know something of the possibility of disaster. America is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The past few years, Iran has been making its bid for a fight. Vladimir Putin is threatening the possibility of re-arming Russia. At one point, Venezuela perhaps was siding with North Korea. In all this, there is a sense
of disaster.
By one evaluation of what threatens us in America, we can empathize with Judah. Some fear a new Sept. 11, while others fear that every wreck is the work of a terrorist. Constant airport alerts have become normal. Security has been heightened to such a point that people now are required to remove shoes, coats and
hats. We are as nervous as cats in water.
These are the same fears Judah felt when the people's hearts trembled like trees being blown by violent winds. They were nervous because of the aggressive disasters coming upon them. A perfectly collated storm of military influence was coming, but they were fearful beyond that. Like Isaiah's generation, we also fear the inadequate defenses against approaching disasters. In our best attempts, we isolate and insulate ourselves from these approaching disasters, dreaming of a place where we can be protected.
At the end of the 20th century, the Berlin Wall came down. We built walls between Israel and Palestine. We built walls on the American front on the West Coast in an attempt to block out the immigrants.
Yet all these were inadequate defenses. We can install alarm systems and erect walls, but there is something about evil that inevitably circumvents everything
