What are you depending on for help this year?
No matter what nation or race or society or gender the people of this world are of, we all are looking for someone who is wise enough and resourceful enough and caring enough and powerful enough to recognize and correct the problems that we have in our societies. However, there has never been an emperor with an empire, or a king with a kingdom, or a leader with a nation, even though some have lasted thousands of years and had the power to rule most of the world, which has been able to eradicate poverty or disease or famine or disabilities or any of the other problems that plague mankind,
As a matter of fact there has never been a single person that has been able to eliminate all of these problems for his family or even for himself even if he is isolated from the rest of the world. So the Bible says in at least ten different places that the help of man is “VAIN”; empty; without meaning or purpose; without effect. One of the religious leaders of Israel in Jesus time recognized this fact when he said, “if this work be of men it will come to naught”.
If this sounds fatalistic and hopeless for a Happy New Year’s post, IT IS! There is a song that we sing often at or church that has a phrase in it that we need to remember, it goes like this, “All is vain unless the Spirit of the Holy One comes down,” King Solomon of Israel at the greatest extent of the empire found out and wrote in Ecclesiastes that under the sun, “Vanity of Vanities, All is vanity.”
Thank God that Isaiah chapter 40 which corresponds to the beginning of the New Testament ends with these verses; “Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. Isaiah 40:28-31