If you take a closer look at Israel’s past, you may notice that each time in history when the Jews were not occupying the land they were given by God, it was desolate, a desert. The only time Israel is lush and green, blooming, and teeming with life is when it is occupied by the people God chose to live there.
Why? Because God set it up that way. No other land in history (to this non-historian’s knowledge), can claim this unique quality. I understand that if no one is planting, nothing grows, but in Israel, everything blooms and grows lush, when her people are home, even places where men do not plant.
It is also so with us. When we do not allow the Holy Spirit of God to live in us, we too, become a desert. Nothing grows that is life. Only those things that cause death. Hate, resentment, jealousy, bitterness, PRIDE.
God set it up that way. He is the One who breathed life into us. If we don’t live out of the life HE breathed into us, we cannot live. We are left to scratch out an existence in a desolate desert.
Isaiah’s personification of nature was prophetic in that we are Israel. And God is the person who gives us life just because he ‘occupies our land’ or lives in our heart.
The choice is simple. Thrive or wither? Lush or barren? Life or death?
And don’t be fooled. You will choose. You choose everyday.
I choose life.
“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the Lord will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set pines in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.” Isaiah 41:17-20
