January 18, 2019: Day 48 – Isaiah 44

I wonder if you ever thought that the actual physical Bible, the book itself, could be seen as an idol?  How do you feel if someone throws a Bible away?  Isn’t there a sense that goes well beyond waste, a sense that there is something morally wrong in that?  Isaiah warns us in this chapter about making idols.  He goes into deep detail about the wood that is used by the craftsman to heat himself, to bake bread, to cook meat over its coals, and then the rest of it he fashions it into an idol which he worships.  He calls that in vs.20 a fraud.  How can anything inanimate provide security and safety?  It simply cannot.

I love the beginning of this chapter where we read in vs.2: “…the Lord who made you, who formed you in the womb and will help you.”  What a great image of God who creates us literally in the womb will never forget nor forsake us.  In this chapter the prophet categorically declares the glory of the Lord forever over any idol or human made object.  There is no other god like the God of Israel, he is the only rock.  Once again in vs.24 we find repeated that it was the Lord, the redeemer, who formed us in the womb.  I don’t know about you but I get great consolation in knowing that the God that I worship created me and formed me just  like Genesis 2 tells us He did.