Mount Up With Wings As Eagles
Israel stood at the edge of the promised land, and the report of the spies came back heavy. Cities were walled up to heaven, sons of Anak walked the land, and the people saw themselves as grasshoppers beside the giants. They wept through the night and spoke of returning to Egypt, while wilderness swallow a generation before their eyes.
Isaiah spoke to a people who knew that wilderness well. He spoke to the weary, to the faint, to the young men who stumbled and fell.
The prophet had already declared the word of the Lord over the faint.
“Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28-31 KJV)
The Lord brought Israel out of Egypt with a high hand and an outstretched arm. He parted the sea, and the people walked through on dry ground. He led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and He fed them with manna from heaven and water from the rock. The Lord carried them as a man carries his son, and they arrived at Kadesh-barnea to take the land He had promised.
Spies returned. Ten of them spoke of giants and walled cities and certain death, and the people turned back. The generation that had seen the sea split and the manna fall; spent forty years in the wilderness and died there. They fainted at the report.
Joshua and Caleb waited.
They had brought back a good report and stood against the crowd, and they waited through the wilderness years while the rest of their generation passed away. When the time came, they crossed Jordan and took the land.
Caleb came to Joshua at eighty-five years old and asked for the mountain. “As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in.”
Caleb took Hebron and drove out sons of Anak, the very giants that had frightened his generation.
Eagle rises above the storm up to the mountains. Eagle spreads its wings, catches the current, climbs above the clouds until the storm lies beneath it. The strength of an eagle comes from what the sky has for it, and the sky is made by the Lord God.
The word of the Lord through Isaiah places the source of strength in one place only. A place of waiting, a secret place of the Most High. The faint receive power. The weak receive might.
Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
LET US PRAY
Lord, renew strength today.
In Jesus’ name, Amen!
