It’s January 6, Epiphany, the visit of the Wise Men to the child Jesus. I wrote about it last year, reprising an earlier blog. Feel free to meditate on that visit.

In the meantime, let’s continue our foray into Isaiah – Isaiah 2 in our reading plan.

Without getting technical and trying to figure out all the details, it’s instructive when we read the prophets to find out the kinds of things that displease God. For example:

For you have rejected your people, the house of Jacob, because

• they are full of things from the east and of fortune-tellers like the Philistines, and
• they strike hands with the children of foreigners.
• Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures;
• their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots.
• Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made. (Isaiah 2.6 – 8, ESV, bulleted for clarity)

Do you see any parallels to modern-day America?

• Eastern religion and psychics?
• Worshiping wealth?
• No end to our cars!
• Idols? We love and bow down to our technology, and AI is fast becoming an idol, as I have observed before.

And for that kind of behavior and lifestyle – a lifestyle of pride and rejection of God, there will be judgment:

And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low, and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass away. (Isaiah 2.17, 18, ESV)

The end of St John’s first epistle (not his gospel) is terse:

Little children, keep yourselves from idols. (1 John 5.21, ESV)