“For this is what the high and exalted One says— he who lives forever, whose name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.”
Isaiah 57:15 (NIV)
Isaiah 57:8 stands out in my mind as one of the clearest denunciations in all of Scripture of people who view pornography - a companion passage is Habakkuk 2:15 & 16.
Isaiah 57 provides a terrible picture of the people of God who have turned to wickedness, who have rejected the high and exalted One whose name is holy, who busy themselves with going as low as they possibly could and just when you think they might become tired of wickedness, they somehow find strength for more. Very discouraging- for as I read these Words I think of loved ones raised to fear God and to love Jesus, who fit this description in Isaiah 57 and who have the promise of verse 21 hanging over their heads and their futures.
“There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”
Yet this chapter started with a wonderful promise that the righteous find rest in death for they enter into peace. Who exactly are those righteous ones? They are the ones in whom the high and exalted One, whose name is holy has taken up residence. It is absolutely amazing to me, and humbling and sobering to read in this passage of the truth that our Lord brought to culmination – the truth that God Himself, not some lessor being, but God Himself dwells within each believer’s body. It is the presence of the One which makes us righteous and keeps us walking uprightly.
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