The God of Hope
Today’s a hot one. This whole week will be. Stay cool, and stay hydrated! If you need a place to cool down, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
This week in Burning Hearts, our 2026 bible reading plan, we’re reading selections from the book of Isaiah. It’s a wonderful book, and as I said in the weekly video, it is a vitally important book when it comes to understanding how Jesus and the New Testament writers understood him. Don’t miss out on reading with us! (Check out the Bible Project’s summary videos of it too!)
In today’s reading (Isaiah 6), we get a vision that the prophet has of God sitting on a heavenly throne, with his robe filling the temple. It’s a perfectly apocalyptic vision (apocalypse literally meaning ‘unveiling’ or ‘revealing’), as it reveals things from God’s point of view.
From God’s point of view, “the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:3) – but from earth’s point of view, things are a disaster.
On earth, God’s people have turned from their Lord repeatedly and so, judgment is coming for them. Now in the form of Assyria, but the real pain is going to be coming from Babylon. God has a message for his people, but he knows that their hearts have turned from him, their eyes are closed to him, their ears will not listen. If what you read in verses 9-10 sound familiar, it’s because Jesus all but directly quotes these many times to the leaders of God’s people of his own day (a few hundred years after Isaiah). They too had their hearts, eyes, and ears closed off to God’s Word, this time, in person in Jesus.
What’s to come?
Judgment.
“How long, O Lord?” will this last, Isaiah asks (6:11). Until everything is destroyed, God says. Cities in ruin, houses empty, land utterly desolate. Every oak felled, with only their stumps remaining to remind them of what was, and what could have been. The people had been disobedient to God, turned away from God for centuries, and after warning after warning from God through the prophets, they refused to turn. Now they were going to suffer the consequences of their own actions. It is a largely hopeless situation.
Hopeless judgment.
Almost.
The very last line of the very last verse invites in a ray of hope:
The holy seed is its stump.
What does that mean? The ‘holy seed’ is something of a thread that runs throughout the story of scripture. It’s not obvious to put together, but it seems to go something like this: since the beginning of humanity, we who have turned from God have been waiting for one human being to actually get it right and save us from ourselves. In fact, in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve blow it (no thanks to the serpent), God curses the serpent by saying that God will put enmity between the serpent and the ‘offspring’ of the woman. Guess what the Hebrew word for offspring is? The same one that in Isaiah is translated ‘seed’.
So right there, at the moment that we all mess up and turn from God and fail to be what God made us to be, God promises that a ‘seed’ will eventually come that will strike the head of the serpent.
God provides and promises a savior.
Fast forward to Isaiah: even in the moment of Israel’s national apocalyptic tragedy of total hopeless destruction,
there is hope.
Out of the fire, through the judgment, from the destruction, God has still provided a seed that means hope. There is still a seed that, one day, will sprout and be the human who we’ve all failed to be, and fulfill all the promises that we’ve all been longing for, and be the savior who everyone from Adam and Eve to you and I have waited for:
Jesus.
What does it mean? It means a lot. Too much for this blog post.
But one thing that it means is that baked into God, baked into the story of God in scripture, baked into how God is who God is, baked into the very person of Jesus – is hope. It’s no wonder he was raised from dead (the first fruit from the dead…another seed reference!).
Even in the fall, there is hope.
Even in destruction, there is hope.
Even in death, there is hope.
If only we could see the world like this, and our lives like this, and especially our disasters like this.
It’s hard to see. True. Isaiah could only see it because God gave him the vision. Otherwise, things on earth were a disaster. But that’s what the work of the Holy Spirit is, isn’t it? To give us eyes to see what we cannot see, and ears to hear what we cannot hear, and minds that can grasp what is ungraspable.
Hearts to hope for what is hopeless.
May God’s Holy Spirit bring that hope to you for your hopelessness today, knowing that this is the kind of God we have. Or, as Paul puts it in Romans 15:13,