A Word in Season: Divine Consolations (Isaiah 61:3)

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Have you heard one of those particularly gifted musicians who can sit down at a piano for example and take a piece in a minor key and just transpose it into a major key as they play so that it changes the whole mood and tone of the piece?

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Sometimes it's barely recognizable. You can tell that it's the same piece, but it just sounds entirely different.

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Something like that happens when the Lord God takes hold of those who mourn.

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In Isaiah 61, when the Spirit of the Lord is upon the servant of the Lord to preach good tidings, the outcome of that is quite magnificent, turning the troubled into the triumphant.

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God works to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the

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Lord, that he may be glorified. It is a complete transposing.

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It is a upturning and overturning of all the current circumstance and expectation of the people of God.

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They are mourning, they are distressed, and they need consolations from heaven.

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And the Lord God deals with them where they are and gives them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

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Ashes would have represented the downcast soul and deep distress of spirit.

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It would have been a way of representing outwardly the inward grief, and yet here the

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Lord gives beauty in the place of ashes. The oil of joy instead of mourning, the oil that would have brightened and freshened the face and communicated something of a delight and readiness, and then the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

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We might say almost rather than the the funeral outfit. These are the wedding garments.

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Why? That those who are mourning, those who are troubled in Zion, may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the

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Lord that he may be glorified. This then is God's consolation to his troubled people.

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It's a great encouragement to individual believers who are grieved and mourning, either over their own sin or over the needs of the churches to which they belong, or because of the state of God's kingdom more widely.

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It's a great consolation to congregations which are struggling and striving, battered and bruised, seeming to make very little progress, living perpetually, it might feel, in a minor key.

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And here is the Lord in his power and in his mercy preaching the gospel, and you will note that it is both

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God who does this and by his word that he works. And so he consoles and comforts, he lifts up the downhearted, he is healing the broken soul, he is proclaiming freedom and liberty and jubilee to those who know him.

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And the end result is that God himself will then be glorified as the people of the

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Lord are seen to be the planting of the Lord, well established, well rooted, well grounded in him and in his truth.

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And so as we may be facing days of distress, as we may be mourning and grieving over our own particular sins, as we may be troubled by the state of the church, it is to God that you and I must turn.

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It is to God that the church must look. It is to our Messiah, the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and by his mighty spirit that we can anticipate that God will transpose our experience, that he will turn the minor key of mourning, ashes, heaviness into the major key of beauty, joy and praise.

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Let us not doubt the capacity of God or the willingness of God to work by his gospel in order to reverse our expectations, to turn over our miseries, to raise up those who are cast down, to bless those who are in deep need.

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God is most gracious, Christ most loving, the spirit most mighty in order to accomplish these things.

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So turn to him, trust in him, call upon him and expect that the