A Word in Season: Sorrow and Sighing Swallowed Up (Isaiah 35:10)

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This is a veil of tears through which we walk, and sometimes it feels like sorrow and sighing swallow us up.

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Perhaps even today you woke with a great burden upon your soul. Perhaps a husband or a wife or a brother or a sister hears you with those deep and heavy sighs that come from your soul because there is some difficulty, some sorrow, some grief, some shame, some pain, some battle, some burden, and you are weary and you are distressed.

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Isaiah talks about the prospect of that glorious Zion to come.

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He paints in chapter 35 a picture of a transformed world, and at the end of it he uses language that he also employs in chapter 51 and verse 11.

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He says in Isaiah 32 and verse 10, my point being that this language is echoed more than once, the ransomed of the

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Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads.

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They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

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Now we are in a season of sorrow and sighing. Yes, there are joys and there are gladnesses, and we should not for one moment deny those, but they are often more precious in the promise than they are currently enjoyed in the reality.

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We still fight against sin within, we still contend with the world and the flesh and the devil around us and against us.

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There are afflictions that we suffer as creatures in a fallen world, there are troubles that we have, sometimes on account even of the sins that have been forgiven to us.

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There are also the issues that we have because of the sins of others, the assaults of the adversary, all these things are swirling around us.

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The church is not what she ought to be, we are not what we ought to be within the church of Jesus Christ.

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There are those tensions and divisions that grieve us and distress us. And yet Isaiah reminds us that the wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for God's generation and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

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There's this beautiful poem in which Isaiah holds up and contrasts present experience and future prospects.

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He talks about what is going to come, and he talks about the assurance, the certainty that God will keep his people for that reality.

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There's a highway, a road called the Highway of Holiness. It belongs to the people of God and those who walk on it shall not go astray.

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There's no violence there, no lion or any ravenous beast. It is for the redeemed and the ransomed people of God, those who are blood -bought into his kingdom, they shall return and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads.

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They shall obtain joy and gladness. And on those days when our life and our labours seem characterised by the sorrows and the sighs that belong to a sinful world, it is good for us to remember that we are on the

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Highway of Holiness, that we are on the path to glory, that we are pilgrims on the road toward heaven, that it is a road that we must stick on and that God will keep us on and will use to bring us to glory itself.

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And when we come there, we will come with singing and with everlasting joy on our heads.

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And then the joy and the gladness that we have tasted and do taste while on this pilgrim road, we shall, if you like, finally catch up with it.

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That's when sorrows and sighs shall be swallowed up by joy and gladness and there will be no more scope, no hint, no possibility of sorrow and sighing there.

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So yes, now there will be those days of grief and sighs.

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Now there are those burdens and those battles that we face. Now the joy and the gladness, though real, is not yet final and complete.

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But there will come a day when your sorrows and your sighs shall flee away, swallowed up in everlasting joy and gladness.