Times are troubling. Things just don't seem to be like they used to be. Whatever happened to life just "playing out" like it did for previous generations? Talk of God isn't heard in the public place like it used to be. National leaders seem to be cut from a different cloth than the founding fathers. A new world order seems to be emerging with powers rising in the Orient. These emerging forces challenge and threaten what has been the status quo.
The economy is getting worse, not better, and money doesn't seem to go as far as it used to go. What is a person supposed to do? And to top it off, some are saying it's going to get worse before it gets better! Yeah, call them for what they are—"doom and gloomers." Does this sound like your world? Yes, it probably does.
But it's also the world of the prophet Isaiah around 700 B.C., as God was allowing the "curtain to come down" on the covenant peoples of Israel and Judah, who had increasingly pushed the Ten Commandments out of the marketplace of ideas and values. They wanted to be like everyone else. God granted them their wish. Like every other kingdom, they would be swallowed up by a new world order arising from the city-states of the Mesopotamian plains.
Isaiah seemingly "nails the coffin shut" when he pens in Isaiah 8:22, "Then they will look to the earth, and see trouble and darkness, gloom of anguish; and they will be driven into darkness." Ouch! Certainly no pardon for severity of punishment or clemency for good behavior is given here. Pretty bleak! You might say, "Where's the love?"
Well, that "love" starts to unfold in chapter 9, which in the scroll of Isaiah's time, would have made for one complete line of thought.
