“In that day the Lord Almighty will be a glorious crown…”

Never had it happened this way before.  I was going to speak to a group of Christian college students who were being bold and starting off the school year with a Sunday worship service…in the dormitory!  You might be inclined to think, “Well, that’s no big deal.  I’ve heard of that happening before.”  But this was a private university with heavy Jewish influence in the leadership levels.  They had not exactly rolled out the red carpet to religious groups.  Indeed, one of the new foreign student advisors — they come and go so fast that the door to their office must be a turnstile! — nearly drop-kicked me out of her office just because I represented an off-campus, private religious organization that was somehow a threat to her students.  She never backed up that allegation.

But I digress.  Back to the student meeting.  They did praise and worship, prayed, and then one student leader stood up to introduce me.  “I met our speaker at another school.  When I first saw him I thought, ‘Who is this guy?  I don’t think I like him.  But maybe by God’s grace I can listen to him.’”  I thought he revealed more about himself rather than me.  He continued, “Then he started to speak.  I wasn’t sure what to make of what he was saying.  I thought he wasn’t a very good teacher.”  Now it was starting to get a little personal.  Then finally, “Then he really got going, and wow!  He got all fired up and things fell into place.  And I think you will see the passion come out of him like I did.”  OK, sounds more like me.

I admit to having my quirks.  In fact, I consider myself to be something of a “preposition-aholic.”  I love prepositional phrases ever since I discovered them as a youngster.  I don’t know what it is about them.  In high school one year I took a speed reading course, and one way to speed up our reading, they said, was to skip over prepositional phrases.  “Skip over them?!” I asked.  When I questioned this sentence-gutting approach, they threw me out!  Guess I should have started a preposition rights organization.

Why belabor this point?  Isaiah describes God as a glorious crown in 28:5.  The verse starts out with (you guessed it) a prepositional phrase: “in that day.”  Ahh, gotta love it!  But then we must ask, “What day?”  That’s the secret.  In Bible college, I noticed this phrase popped up over and over in the major and minor prophets.  “In that day.”  It spoke of the day of the Lord, a time of both God’s judgment and power, along with his coming Messianic kingdom at the end of time.  When you look at all the verses framed or prefaced by this phrase, it gets a little overwhelming.  But it is during that time, “in that day,” that “the Lord Almighty will be a glorious crown, a beautiful wreath for the remnant of his people.”

This was in contrast to “that wreath, the pride of Ephraim’s drunkards, to the fading flower, his glorious beauty, set on the head of a fertile valley — to that city, the pride of those laid low by wine!” (v. 1).  Ephraim was the same as Samaria, the northern kingdom that had turned away from God’s laws and ways after Solomon’s death.  Their walls on their central hill were their fortification, protection and defense, looking like a crown from the air.  They considered themselves impregnable.  So they lived in wickedness and rebellion and drunk themselves silly.  To them God said (v. 1), “Woe.”  Now it’s one thing if anyone else says “woe” to you.  But when God says it, watch out: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.  Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).  Be afraid indeed.  Assyria roared in and made Ephraim become “like a fig ripe before harvest — as soon as someone [saw] it and [took] it in his hand, he swallow[ed] it” (28:4).  Gulp and gone!

“In that day” of reckoning God will turn the tables of all evil doers, balance the books, “install [his] King on Zion” (Psalm 2:6) and rule the world with Jesus at the center of everything.  In that day the Lord will be a glorious crown, restoring and renewing the remnant of his people.  All the bad guys gone.  The bad language gone.  The corruption gone.  The vice and crime gone.  And what is there?  The victory.  The harmony.  The blessings — oh, how many of them!  And the glory!  How can you describe it?  Many people in this world seek after wealth, pictured in Scripture as gold.  1 Peter 1 calls gold a “perishable” thing (v. 18).  Moreover, he calls our faith “more precious than gold that perishes” (v. 7).  Indeed, they pave the streets of heaven with gold.  How many of you rush out of your homes and dig up your streets as if they were priceless?  So gold is no comparison to the glory of the crown that Jesus will be “in that day.”