[1] You will say in that day:
“I will give thanks to you, O LORD,
for though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
that you might comfort me.[2] “Behold, God is my salvation;
I will trust, and will not be afraid;
for the LORD GOD is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation.”[3] With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. [4] And you will say in that day:
“Give thanks to the LORD,
call upon his name,
make known his deeds among the peoples,
proclaim that his name is exalted.[5] “Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously;
let this be made known in all the earth.
[6] Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion,
for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.”
If you just cut in to any section of Isaiah and you didn’t land in chapter 12, you might not believe that chapter 12 was really a part of the book of Isaiah. There are some pretty awful bits in there.
The fact is, at some point, all of the horrors of this life will be seen in the correct light or forgotten. Just like the horrors that Isaiah prophesied would someday be seen as a discipline/cleansing/salvation, our lives and our struggles will all be seen to bring glory to God.
At one level that is easy to reject. The Pie in the Sky By and By doesn’t always help me right now when I’m struggling! And I don’t even know struggling. (Hebrews 12:4 I’m looking at you: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”) The platitude of “Everything will turn out alright in the end.” is like salt in the wound to a suffering person while they are going through it.
Unless it’s true.
If it’s really, deeply, confidently true that it “will all be alright in the end” then that is something I can really hold on to. C. S. Lewis said that you only know how long a temptation will last if you don’t give into it. It might go away in 3 seconds, but if you give in to the temptation after 1.5 seconds, you’ll never know. If you hold on to the hope that it will be all right in the end, you are more likely to see that it really will.
The best part of all of this is that God’s promise to be faithful is greater than our own. This section starts with “you will say in that day” because God knows that they will. There is going to be a lot of rough and a lot of struggle, but God knows how it will end.
How we handle the knowledge of the end and what we do about it is what defines how we’ll do until we get there.
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