For They Shall Be Comforted!

Isaiah 40:1-2

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.

God's tenderness is vastly greater than we can understand or imagine.  The tears that Christ shed on the cross put out the fires of hell for us.  The suffering that we have to endure in Christ is not "vengeance" but a sharing in His own suffering.  And even when chastisement comes to us for our real sins, it is ordered, always and forever, toward our final bliss and blessing, not toward our destruction.  But before, behind, and above it all is that tenderness, a desire for our true comfort (not the TV-numbed counterfeit the world sells us) that is the deepest, sweetest comfort there is.  It is a comfort that made Paul actually rejoice in his sufferings.  It is a comfort so intensely beautiful that sane men have walked gladly straight to their deaths rather than lose it.  To taste it is to lose the desire of the cheap imitations the world routinely offers.  Today, if you are grieving, may you know the comfort God gives to the mourning and drink of it deeply.