The Real Meaning of Life

This is one of my favorite chapters in Isaiah, and a top runner for the entire Bible. If you’ve read the Bible before, you know that this chapter is prophetic about the coming of Jesus. If this is your first time, I can assure you that Isaiah’s words are accurate.

Let me give you the Cliff’s Notes version. God created the perfect world; literally perfect. All was designed to work perfectly without fail and in perfect harmony with each other. But then sin was introduced, and everything changed. Man became imperfect. So God had to instruct man on how to live his life.

We often think the “rules” came when God issued the Ten Commandments, but those rules for life were there long before Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a sin for Cain to murder his brother, and yes, he knew it was a sin because when God asked him about Abel, he tried to pretend he didn’t know. And we know the earth was destroy by a flood because the people of the earth had became so wicked it couldn’t be fixed. I know, scripture says God sent the flood, but I don’t believe it. God doesn’t harm or kill anyone, the flood was the result of sin, the natural consequences of sin.

And man refused to follow the rules, the moral compass that is built into each of us, the laws given by God, most likely verbally to Adam and Eve or laws that God placed in man’s heart, laws man ignored. So God wrote the law on tablets of stone with his own finger, and the tablets were placed in a sacred ark for safekeeping. God had hoped if the rules were written on stone and that the ark was ritualistic considered Holy, that man would not forget. But man did forget, or perhaps just ignored them. The temptation from Satan is great, and as we all know, this is all a big struggle of Satan trying to draw everyone away from God to his side.

God sent prophets to the earth to warn people of the consequences of sin. And they didn’t listen. In fact, the prophets got things wrong. I’ve talked about how frustrated Moses was with the children of Israel who refused to be good, so very frustrated that he lost his temper several times. And while scripture doesn’t indicate, there is no reason to believe the prophets weren’t affected in the same way.

Imagine being Nathan, a prophet to the great King David. David had the greatest faith of all at that time. He was obedient to God, he was selfless. He was loyal to the point that even though King Saul was trying to kill him, David refused to defend himself. David was likely as close to perfect as one could be. Then, he fell. He lusted. He murdered. Imagine being Nathan, prophet and advisor to this nearly perfect man, then faced with the task of telling David that he had sinned. David was apparently oblivious to the sin he committed. If I were Nathan, I would roll my eyes and think, “What the heck?” (only it wouldn’t have been “heck”).

All of the prophets had to be frustrated to the point of pulling their own hair out. And their emotions got the best of them, and they perceived God to be an angry God, full of wrath, just waiting to punish the wicked for their sins. And that is the perception the Pharisees got from reading the writings that would eventually become “The Old Testament”. And the sad thing is, church leaders are still preaching the “wrath of God” today.

So God had no choice but to send Jesus to earth, to teach the people the meaning of the Ten Commandments, to show them God’s true loving and merciful character, and to show people how to live peaceful lives.

But the Pharisees didn’t believe Jesus was the Son of God. God was strict, his rules were precise. The punishment for sin was death, not a natural consequence of sin, but a punishment inflicted by God for breaking the rules. Jesus didn’t have these characteristics, and we now know that because Jesus is God, we know the true character of God.

Instead of learning from Jesus, the majority rejected Him. He didn’t fit the narrative of God, but more and more people began to follow Jesus. So they had to kill Him. That was the greatest lesson Jesus could show us; that God loved us so much that He was willing to die for us. We’ve read stories about earthly fathers who had died protecting or saving their children, and God is no different.

In this chapter of Isaiah, he is prophesying about the birth of Jesus and what is to come.

If after reading the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you reread the Old Testament, it will make much better sense. Even David, in some of the psalms he wrote, prophesies about Jesus and His death.

Isn’t religion a shame? We teach that the Old Testament is obsolete, that it doesn’t matter anymore because we are under the New Testament, the New Covenant, yet we continue to preach the same God that the pharisees believed in, either to scare people into being good or worse, to scare people into going to church.

We are we not teaching the “love” of God? That is all that matters, is knowing that God loves us enough to die for us, in fact He did die for us, and all He wants in return is for us to love Him in return.

When you read the Old Testament, just realize there is a logical explanation for how the authors perceived God. I don’t suggest they lied, I just believe their perception of God was off. See past the language of a “wrathful” Being, and see the love God gives all throughout the Bible.