Rough Roads made Smooth and the World Out of the Way
3 A voice cries:“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;make straight in the desert a highway for our God.4 Every valley shall be lifted up,and every mountain and hill be made low;the uneven ground shall become level,and the rough places a plain.5 And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,and all flesh shall see it together,for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
Isaiah 40:3–5 ESV
French Lick Indiana is a pretty place. If you drive in on a snowy day, you almost feel like you are in some little alpine town or something surrounded by the big hills. They have a greenway there that winds through the bit of the valley so you can ride a bike or take a walk for a little ways without needing to tackle any hills. But you won’t make it far. Even parking overflows to a hilly and strange multi-tier parking lot with stairs to take you from your car to the buildings.
Kansas is flat. Kansas is super wide-open, I-didn’t-know-the-sky-was-that-big flat (though technically Illinois and North Dakota are even flatter!) If you drive down I–70 to Colorado you are amazed sometimes at how far away the horizon is. You can see a storm coming for over an hour, and the Sun takes forever to set.
This is not at all what Isaiah, and then John the Baptist, are talking about here. But it does help you to know what they are talking about. What is in the way of seeing the Lord? The World. The World and all of it’s worries, judgments, cares, pain, and fear stands in the way of us seeing God like so many hills in French Lick and mountains in Austria. They are established, mighty, unmovable and block our sight of the late sunset and anything beyond their borders.
When Jesus came, He broke down every one of the world’s barriers to help us to see the salvation of God. Only God could move the whole world out of the way and show us Himself with the clarity and vastness of the Southern Illinois landscape (though God is not so boring!).
Pray today that God would show off and that whatever worldly hill or rough road is hiding Him would be made level. Pray that you and all of the travelers with you would get a new view of the horizon, which God fills with the presence of Jesus with us.
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