Between the First and the Last

"Who has known the mind of the LORD

or been able to give him advice?

Whom did he ask for help?

Who taught him the right way?

Who taught him knowledge

and showed him the way to understanding?

Isaiah 40:3-4

READ Isaiah 40:1-41:9

SITUATION God promised to remain faithful to his people. The Jews felt that God had ignored them, but God would rescue them from captivity.

OBSERVATION Because he is perfect, all-powerful, and knows everything God transcends nature. Mysteriously, though, he still concerns himself with our lives.

INSPIRATION God is always first and God will surely be last.

To say that is not to draw God downward into the streams of time and involved Him in the flux and flow of the world. He stands above His own creation and outside of time; but for the convenience of His creatures, who are children of time. He makes free use of time-words when referring to Himself. So He says that He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, the first and the last.

Man in the plans of God has been granted considerable say: but never is he permitted to utter the first word nor the last. That is the prerogative of the Deity, and one which He will never surrender to His creatures.

Man has no say about time or place of his birth; God determines that without consulting the man himself in consciousness and accepts the fact that he is. There his volitional life begins. Before that he had nothing to say about anything. After that he struts and boasts and utters his defiant proclamations of individual freedom, and encouraged by the sound of his own voice he may declare his independence of God and call himself an "atheist" or an "agnostic." Have your fun, little man you are only chattering in the interim between the first and the last; you have no voice at the first and you will have none at the last. God reserves the right to take up at the last where He began at the first, and you are in the hands of God whether you will or not.

This knowledge should humble us and encourage us, too. It should humble us when we remember how frail we are, how utterly dependent on God, and it should encourage us to know that when everything else has passed we may still have God no less surely than before. (From The Root of Righteousness by A.W. Tozer)

APPLICATION Is anything in your life guaranteed? Is you career unshakable, your family immortal, your money eternal? Do not base your comfort and enjoyment on what could be gone tomorrow. Only God and his Word will last for ever--let these be the basis of everything in your life.

EXPLORATION Waiting--Isaiah 52:10; 2 Corinthians 4:1; Hebrews 12:1-3.

The Devotional Bible - Experiencing the Heart of Jesus, Max Lucado General Editor, New Century Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers