Passage Read: Isaiah 35-38
Meditation Verses: 38:10-12
Thought
What is the point of life, if not to serve the Lord and lay up glory and honor in His presence forever? Hezekiah speaks of no longer seeing the Lord in the land of the living, yes, but what about seeing Him in the land of the dead? While the Lord may not visit Hades, he will meet all his ancestors who worshiped and served the Lord, and they will be able to speak to one another about the great things God did in their day. And after a time, the Lord would in fact visit them and bring them out of captivity!
Application
He didn't know all these things, but thought this life was all that mattered. It matters only in so far as we use it to lay up treasure in heaven! It is less important how many days we live and more important how many days we devote to his service. The only grievous thing about departing early in life (relative to those around us) is that we lose all those years to serve the Lord and invest further in eternity. The great gamble is that we'll live to have time to give more of our day to the Lord's work after we "retire." But what if we don't make it to retirement? That's when an early death is tragic, because we wasted our only years on things that didn't matter, in hope that we would have later years to invest in the things that last forever. But it is also a waste of youth to invest it in things that pertain only to this life, because later years are weaker and less energetic years. To delay serving the Lord wholeheartedly is to lose opportunity and productivity. Even that is a love of earthly things over heavenly things. Hezekiah received 15 more years from the Lord in response to his prayer, but he doesn't seem to have used them to serve the Lord better, but perhaps worse. That is a waste. Better to end in victory rather than live on and ruin your legacy. Better to serve the Lord wholeheartedly every day of however many years I have, than to put off serving the Lord or fade out in latter years. Better a short life lived in faithfulness and devotion to the Lord than one lived long and only doing a little for His kingdom.