Angry Hope (Isaiah 13-17)

I had been on the phone starting with polling places that were not open at 6:00 a.m. ending in reports of marshals preventing those in line at 7:00 p.m. from getting to vote. I began to recognize the fatigue in my muscles brought on by thirteen hours of tense conversations with angry voters and election officials.  The “boiler room” lived up to its name, steamy from perspiration of a legion of lawyers serving the cause.  Computers shifted from the Secretary of State and County Recorder websites to news sites.  Unexpected East Coast states were being called for Trump.  Our hearts sank as the working class voters who we knew would be the victims of electing an oligarch we trending his way.  

A wave of intellectual confusion, of physical exhaustion, of deep, deep sadness crashed over me.  My God what had my countrymen done?  From this bare computer room, complete with few windows and concrete floors, we looked out on the certain destruction awaiting our country as a result of its choice.

Isaiah preached this to the people of Judah.  God would not standby and watch their wickedness.  God would use the nations of Assyria and Babylon to punish God’s people for their reckless and foolish decisions, for their abandoning the widow and the orphan, for their arrogance.

But, but! The forces of evil would not reign forever.  Indeed for Babylon, Isaiah proclaimed a day of reckoning.  “Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; it will come like destruction from the Almighty. . . See, the day of the Lord is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it. . . . Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the Lord Almighty, in the day of his burning anger.”