Tuesday July 9, 2024
Isaiah 40:7 (also 1 Peter 1:24)
The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD
blows on it; surely the people are grass.
It is the Spirit’s work to wither. I rejoice in our translation, ‘because the Spirit of the Lord blows upon it’. It is true the passage may be translated, ‘The wind of the Lord blows upon it’. One word, as you know, is used in the Hebrew both for ‘wind’ and ‘Spirit’, and the same is true of the Greek; but let us retain the old translation here, for I conceive it to be the real meaning of the text. The Spirit of God it is that withers the flesh. It is not the devil that killed my self-righteousness. I might be afraid if it were: nor was it myself that humbled myself by a voluntary and needless self-degradation, but it was the Spirit of God. Better to be broken in pieces by the Spirit of God than to be made whole by the flesh! What does the Lord say? ‘I kill’. But what next? ‘I make alive’. He never makes any alive except those he kills. Blessed be the Holy Spirit when he kills me, when he drives the sword through the very bowels of my own merits and my self-confidence, for then he will make me alive. ‘I wound, and I heal’. He never heals those whom he has not wounded. Then blessed be the hand that wounds; let it go on wounding; let it cut and tear; let it lay bare to me myself at my very worst, that I may be driven to self-despair and may fall back upon the free mercy of God and receive it as a poor, guilty, lost, helpless, undone sinner, who casts himself into the arms of sovereign grace, knowing that God must give all, that Christ must be all, that the Spirit must work all and that man must be as clay in the potter’s hands, that the Lord may do with him as seems good. Rejoice, dear brother, however low you are brought, for if the Spirit humbles you, he means no evil, but he intends infinite good to your soul.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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