Death Swallowed Up

Isaiah 24–27 (with 1 Corinthians 15:51–57; Revelation 21:1–4)

Before this session, read Isaiah 24 through 27. It is a sweep, so read first for the movement of it, and then linger on chapters 25 and 26. Watch the whole earth come under judgment, and then find the banquet on the mountain (25:6–8). Do not miss the two great promises the New Testament will seize upon: he will swallow up death permanently (25:8), and your dead will come back to life (26:19).

He will swallow up death permanently. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from every face, and remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. Indeed, the LORD has announced it!

Isaiah 25:8

The Earth Reels

For eleven chapters Isaiah has pronounced the Lord’s word over the nations one at a time: Babylon, Moab, Egypt, Tyre, each in its turn. Now, in chapters 24 through 27, the camera pulls all the way back, and the prophet shows us not this nation or that, but the whole earth at once, under the hand of God. These four chapters are sometimes called Isaiah’s “little apocalypse,” for they lift the curtain on the very End: the last judgment, the resurrection of the dead, the final feast, and the new creation. And they open with a scene that ought to sober anyone: the whole world coming apart at the seams. Look, the LORD is ready to devastate the earth and leave it in ruins; he will mar its surface and scatter its inhabitants (24:1).

And the judgment falls on everyone alike, with a great and democratic leveling that spares no station. Everyone will suffer: the priest as well as the people, the master as well as the servant … the seller as well as the buyer (24:2). The distinctions we spend our lives building up (rank, wealth, office, the careful sortings of high and low) count for nothing on that day. Priest and layman, master and servant, rich and poor stand on exactly the same ground before the judgment of God. Death is the great leveler, men like to say; but death is only borrowing the Lord’s own habit. When He comes to reckon with the earth, every human pecking order collapses into one undifferentiated crowd of sinners before one Judge.

And why does the earth reel so? Isaiah tells us, and the answer reaches all the way back to the beginning. The earth is defiled by its inhabitants, for they have violated laws, disregarded the regulation, and broken the permanent treaty. So a treaty curse devours the earth (24:5–6). The earth groans not by accident but under a curse: the curse that falls on covenant-breakers, and behind it the curse first pronounced in Eden, when the man broke faith with God and the Lord said, the ground is cursed because of you (Genesis 3:17). The whole long story of human covenant-breaking, of laws violated and God’s good order overturned, comes due here all at once. A treaty curse devours the earth: the curse the whole creation has been groaning under ever since the garden, come now to its full and terrible term.

And we must not imagine this is somebody else’s problem, the wickedness of Babylon, of the obviously godless. The covenant Isaiah says has been broken is a permanent one, the same Hebrew phrase Genesis uses for the perpetual covenant God made with Noah and every living creature (Genesis 9:16). It is older than Israel, older than Sinai; it is the covenant bound up with the creation itself and written onto every human conscience, the basic faith every creature owes its Maker. To live as though the world were ours to use as we please, as though there were no Giver to whom we owe our thanks and our obedience, is to break that covenant, and there is no one who has kept it whole. The reeling earth of chapter 24 is not the judgment of a few notorious sinners off in the distance; it is the judgment of the whole race, and we are standing in it. Only when we have felt the real weight of that can the feast in the very next chapter strike us as the wonder it actually is.

And yet (for this is always the way of Isaiah) the darkest chapter in the book does not end in the dark. After the earth has staggered around like a drunk and fallen (24:20), after the Lord has punished the heavenly forces in the heavens and the earthly kings on the earth (24:21), the chapter closes with a sudden blaze of glory: the LORD of Heaven’s Armies will rule on Mount Zion in Jerusalem in the presence of his assembly, in majestic splendor (24:23). The judgment of the world is not the end of the story; it is the clearing of the ground for the reign of God. When everything that can be shaken has been shaken, what remains standing is the King upon His mountain. And it is to that mountain, to Zion, to the reign of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, that the next chapter carries us. And what we find waiting there is not a courtroom at all. It is a feast.

A Feast on the Mountain

Out of the wreckage of the judged earth, the prophet lifts our eyes to a mountain, and on the mountain a table is spread. The LORD of Heaven’s Armies will hold a banquet for all the nations on this mountain. At this banquet there will be plenty of meat and aged wine—tender meat and choicest wine (25:6). It is a king’s banquet, a coronation feast: the richest food, the finest aged wine, nothing held back, nothing rationed. After the famine of judgment, abundance; after the reeling earth, a table that does not move. The God who came as Judge in chapter 24 comes as Host in chapter 25, and He sets out a feast.

And notice for whom the table is laid: for all the nations. Not for Israel alone, not for the deserving few, but for all peoples, the very nations we watched come under the burden in the chapters just before. This is the note we have heard building all through the book: the nations streaming up to the mountain in chapter 2, the highway from Egypt to Assyria in chapter 19, the banner raised for the Gentiles in chapter 11. Here they all arrive at last, and sit down to eat. The mountain of judgment becomes the mountain of the great homecoming dinner, with places set for people out of every nation under heaven, which is to say, with places set for us.

And it is worth dwelling on the sheer extravagance of the table, because we are so prone to imagine the life to come as something thin and bloodless: endless church, a pale and disembodied hovering somewhere among the clouds. Isaiah will have none of it. He describes the richest feast his language could conjure: tender meat and aged wine, plenty and the choicest of everything, the spread a great king lays on for a coronation. The God who invented the wedding banquet and the harvest festival, who made the tongue to taste and the heart to gladden, is not planning a meager and joyless eternity for His people. The end of the story is not less life but more: joy heaped up and running over, at a table where the wine never gives out and no guest is ever once sent away hungry.

And we do not have to wait for the end of the world to taste this feast. Every time the church gathers at the rail and receives the body and blood of the Lord Jesus, she is given a foretaste of the banquet on the mountain, a morsel now of the feast that is to come. This is why the church’s liturgy speaks of the Supper exactly so, as a foretaste of the feast to come: the table at the front of the sanctuary is a small outpost of the great table on Zion, and the bread and the cup handed to us there are the Lord’s own pledge that He fully means to seat us, body and soul, at the marriage supper of the Lamb. When we kneel to commune, we are rehearsing the End. The feast has already begun.

He Will Swallow Up Death

And now Isaiah comes to the very heart of the matter: to the reason there can be a feast at all on a mountain, in a world that had been reeling toward the grave. On this mountain he will swallow up the shroud that is over all the peoples, the woven covering that is over all the nations (25:7). There is a covering, a woven cloth, a shroud, thrown over the whole human race, and it is the shroud of death. Every people on earth lives beneath it; it is the one truly universal fact, the dark cloth laid over every face at the last. And Isaiah says the Lord will swallow it up, take it clean away. The shroud that covers all the nations will be lifted, and Isaiah is about to use that same verb, swallow, of death itself.

And then the words that name this session, words almost too good to be believed. He will swallow up death permanently. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from every face (25:8). Read it slowly. Death, the devourer, the eater of all living things, the monster that has swallowed every generation that ever drew breath: death itself is swallowed up. The eater is eaten. The grave that has never once given back what it took is itself consumed. We have spent our whole lives watching death swallow everyone we love, and knowing that one day it will swallow us; and Isaiah tells us there is coming a day when death is the one that gets swallowed, gulped down and gone, permanently.

We do not often let ourselves feel how total death’s reign has been. It is the one appointment none of us will miss, the shadow that falls across every joy if we look at it too long, the silent assumption underneath all our striving: that whatever we build, death will eventually come and take it. Every other enemy can in principle be escaped, or outlasted, or made peace with; death cannot. It is, as Paul says, the last enemy to be eliminated (1 Corinthians 15:26), the one that comes for us after all the others have done their worst. And it is precisely that enemy (not a small one, not a manageable one, but the undefeated devourer of the whole human race) that Isaiah says the Lord will swallow up. He does not promise merely to help us cope with death, or to soften it, or to teach us to make a kind of peace with it. He promises to destroy it outright.

But how can death possibly be swallowed? Death is not a thing you can fight from the outside; it takes everyone who comes against it. There was only one way to swallow death, and it was to go down into its very belly and destroy it from within. This is exactly what the Lord Jesus did. The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, so that by God’s grace he would experience death on behalf of everyone (Hebrews 2:9), and so that through death he could destroy the one who holds the power of death (that is, the devil) (Hebrews 2:14). He let death swallow Him whole; and death, in swallowing the Author of life, swallowed something it could not keep down. On the third day He came out the other side, and death has had a hole torn in it ever since. The grave swallowed Him, and choked, and gave Him back; and in giving Him back, it lost its grip on everyone who is His.

And we dare not miss that He did it willingly, and did it for us. Death had no claim on Him whatsoever; He was the sinless one, the very Author of life, and the grave had no right to Him at all. He walked into its jaws on purpose, of His own free will, the way a man might throw himself across a grenade to save the people standing behind him. He did not owe death anything; we did. And so when He went down into it in our place, He was not paying off His own debt but ours, swallowing, in His own body, the death that was coming for us. This is the love that lies at the bottom of the whole vision: the feast, the wiped-away tears, the emptied grave all rest upon a Substitute who let the devourer take Him, precisely so that it could never take us.

The apostle Paul knew exactly where this promise comes to rest. At the climax of his great chapter on the resurrection of the body, describing the day when the dead are raised imperishable, he reaches back across the centuries and seizes Isaiah’s very words: Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:54–55). Isaiah’s Hebrew says permanently, for good and all; the Greek wording Paul quotes says in victory, and both are true, for a death swallowed forever is a death swallowed in triumph. The swallowing of death that Isaiah foresaw is the resurrection: the day the Lord Jesus returns and the dead in Him rise bodily, imperishable, death undone not as a comforting idea but as a hard fact, in raised and glorified flesh. Thanks be to God, Paul adds, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! (1 Corinthians 15:57). The victory in which death is swallowed up is His victory, and He hands it to us.

And there is a tenderness folded into the triumph. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from every face. The same God who swallows up the shroud over the nations bends down to wipe the individual tears off individual faces; the wiping is gentle, and personal, the gesture of a father with his child. John would see it at the very end: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more (Revelation 21:4). And the only fitting response is the cry Isaiah puts into the mouths of the redeemed: Look, here is our God! We waited for him, and he delivered us. Here is the LORD! We waited for him. Let’s rejoice and celebrate his deliverance! (25:9). The long waiting of the ages, the patient, often tearful waiting of the people of God, is answered at last with a face. Here is our God! He came. He swallowed death. He wiped the tears away. We were right to wait.

Perfect Peace

Chapter 26 is the song the redeemed sing on the far side of all this: the song of a city that cannot fall. We have a strong city! The LORD’s deliverance, like walls and a rampart, makes it secure (26:1). It is a striking picture: the walls of this city are not stone but the Lord’s deliverance itself. The thing that keeps the city safe is not its fortifications but its God. We have watched, all through the burdens, every walled city in the world come down: Babylon, Tyre, even Jerusalem trusting in her water supply. Here at last is a city with walls that cannot be breached, for the simple reason that the walls are the saving work of God Himself.

And inside the strong city, Isaiah names the peace of the people who dwell there. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you (Isaiah 26:3, ESV). The Hebrew actually doubles the word for peace, shalom, shalom, peace upon peace, the deepest possible wholeness; and it is given to a particular person: the one whose mind is stayed upon God, leaning its whole weight on Him, trusting. This is the peace we have been tracking through the entire book: the peace Ahaz threw away when he would not believe, the peace of the one who in chapter 12 said I will trust in him and not fear, the peace the Prince of Peace came to bring. It is not the absence of trouble (the strong city still has enemies prowling outside its walls of deliverance) but the absence of panic in a heart that has leaned itself wholly upon God.

And notice that this peace is not produced by trying harder to feel peaceful. We cannot manufacture shalom by gritting our teeth and willing ourselves to be calm; the harder we stare at our own anxiety, the larger it looms. The peace comes from where the mind is stayed: from what it is fixed upon and leaning its weight against. A mind turned in upon its own fears will find no rest there; a mind turned outward and upward, fastened on God and on His promises, is steadied by the One it holds. This is why the Lord has given us His word and His sacraments: not as religious decoration, but as the very places where a frightened heart fixes the mind when the world is shaking, the handholds by which it takes hold of the unshakable God. Peace comes in through the eyes and ears fixed on Christ; it is not a feeling worked up from within.

And Isaiah tells us why such a mind can be kept at peace: Trust in the LORD from this time forward, even in Yah, the LORD, an enduring protector! (26:4). Behind an enduring protector the Hebrew says, literally, a rock of ages, and from there the phrase passed into the great hymn. The reason the trusting mind is kept in perfect peace is that the One it leans on does not move, does not weaken, and does not pass away: He is the everlasting Rock, the strength of all the ages. A mind stayed on its own resources, or on the shifting circumstances of a reeling world, will reel right along with them. A mind stayed on the Rock of Ages is as steady as the Rock. The peace, you see, is not in the strength of our trusting; it is in the trustworthiness of the One we lean on.

And that strong city is not only a hope for the future; by faith we already live inside its walls. The believer dwells, even now, in a city whose walls are deliverance and whose builder and maker is God: secure, not because the world has stopped being dangerous, but because the One who keeps the city neither slumbers nor sleeps. The walls we can see, the ones we are forever tempted to trust, will all come down in their turn; nations and fortunes and even our own strength are walls of sand. But the city the Lord keeps stands through every siege, and the heart that has moved inside it, and stayed its mind on God, has found the one address in all the world that the angry judgment cannot reach.

Your Dead Will Come Back to Life

Deeper into the song of the strong city, Isaiah says something the Old Testament rarely says quite so plainly, and he says it with a shout. Your dead will come back to life; your corpses will rise up. Wake up and shout joyfully, you who live in the ground! For you will grow like plants drenched with the morning dew, and the earth will bring forth its dead spirits (26:19). The dead will come back to life. Those who lie in the ground will wake up and shout joyfully. The earth, which has swallowed the bodies of every generation that ever was, will bring forth its dead: give them back, open its clenched hand at last. This is the resurrection of the body, declared centuries before the empty tomb, and it is the necessary other half of the promise that death would be swallowed up. For if death is truly swallowed, then the dead must live; the grave cannot keep what death can no longer hold.

There is a blunt word in the middle of the verse, your corpses will rise up, and the New Testament tells us why corpses can rise. The dead do not rise alone, or at random; they rise because a body rose first. Paul names Him: Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first sheaf of the great harvest, raised ahead of all the rest as the pledge and the pattern of their rising. Because one grave in Judea is already standing empty, every grave of every believer is under notice. The resurrection of the dead is not a vague hope that things will somehow work out in the end; it is a settled certainty, anchored to a date in history and an empty tomb. He rose; therefore we too shall rise. Because His body came up out of the grave, ours shall come up after it.

Notice the gentleness of the image Isaiah reaches for: you will grow like plants drenched with the morning dew. The resurrection settles upon the dust the way the morning dew settles on a dry field: quietly, freshly, life returning overnight to what looked dead and brown. And notice that it is altogether bodily. Isaiah does not say that the souls of the dead drift off to a better place; he says your corpses will rise up, the bodies that went down into the ground come back up out of it. The Christian hope has never been the escape of the soul from the body, but the raising of the body itself: I believe in the resurrection of the body, as we confess every time we say the Creed. The same God who knit us together in the womb will not lose track of the bodies He made; He will call them up out of the dust like dew, and the ones who dwelt in silence will wake up, and shout for joy.

And then, set right beside the resurrection, comes one of the tenderest verses in all the prophet: the Lord’s word to His people about how to live through the judgment that is coming upon the world. Go, my people! Enter your inner rooms! Close your doors behind you! Hide for a little while, until his angry judgment is over. (26:20). It is the language of the Passover, when Israel sheltered behind blood-marked doors while the destroyer passed through Egypt; it is the language of Noah’s ark, shut up safe and tight while the flood did its terrible work. God does not promise His people that the angry judgment will not come; He promises to hide them safely through it. And the Christian knows exactly where that hiding-place is. Your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). We are sheltered through the wrath of the last day not behind a door of our own, but inside Christ Himself, the One upon whom the whole wrath has already fallen and spent itself out. Hidden in Him, we may watch the angry judgment pass over, and not be afraid.

The Dragon Slain and the Vineyard Restored

Chapter 27 opens with the Lord finishing His oldest fight of all. At that time the LORD will punish with his destructive, great, and powerful sword Leviathan the fast-moving serpent, Leviathan the squirming serpent; he will kill the sea monster (27:1). Leviathan, the sea-monster, the twisting serpent, the dragon of the deep, was, in the imagery of the ancient world, the embodiment of chaos and evil, everything that rears up against the order of God. And Scripture, by its end, lets us see plainly who the dragon really is: the ancient serpent, the one called the devil and Satan (Revelation 12:9), the serpent of Eden, the very one whose head was promised long ago to be crushed by the offspring of the woman (Genesis 3:15). Here Isaiah sees the promise kept: the Lord draws His great sword and kills the monster at last. The serpent that struck at the heel of the woman’s Son one Friday afternoon was, in that very act of striking, having its own head crushed; and what Isaiah foresaw as a future day, we look back upon as a finished victory, and forward to as its final, public undoing.

This is a quiet courage for everyone who has ever felt afraid of the powers of darkness, that sense that evil is vast and ancient and far stronger than we are. It is. We are no match for the dragon; we never were. But we do not have to be, because the fight is not ours to win. It has already been won. The Christian does not march into battle against the devil hoping to come out on top; he goes in behind a Champion who has already run the dragon through, fighting not for a victory but from one. The serpent still hisses and still strikes (a defeated enemy can do real damage on his way down) but he is a beaten thing now, under sentence, with a sword already through him. We resist him not in our own strength, which would be hopeless, but in the strength of the One whose great sword has already done the deed.

And with the dragon dead, the prophet turns to a vineyard, and the longtime reader of Isaiah will sit up at once, for we have seen this vineyard before. When that time comes, sing about a delightful vineyard! “I, the LORD, protect it; I water it regularly. I guard it night and day, so no one can harm it” (27:2–3). Back in chapter 5, the Lord had a vineyard that brought forth only wild grapes, and in His grief He tore down its wall and let it go to ruin. Here is that very vineyard again, but everything about it has changed. Now the Lord protects it; He waters it faithfully; He guards it night and day so that no one can harm it. The ruined vineyard is restored, and this time it bears: The time is coming when Jacob will take root; Israel will blossom and grow branches. The produce will fill the surface of the world (27:6). The fruit the old vineyard never managed to bring forth, the new vineyard pours out until it fills the whole world.

Do not pass over the wonder that it is the same vineyard. God does not bulldoze the failed vineyard of chapter 5 and plant a brand-new one somewhere else with better stock; He restores the very vines that had brought forth wild grapes. This is how God deals with His people all through the Scriptures: not by discarding the failures and going to find better material, but by redeeming, watering, and keeping the very ones who had disappointed Him. It is good news for a church that knows its own long history of wild grapes, and for a believer who knows his own. The vineyard that bears fruit to fill the world in chapter 27 is not somebody else’s, freshly planted and pristine; it is the old ruined one, kept now night and day by a grace that simply refused to give up on it.

And we know how this came to pass, for the true Vine told us so Himself. I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener, said the Lord Jesus (John 15:1): the Vine that finally bore the fruit Israel’s vineyard never could, the Vine into which we are grafted as branches, that we might bear fruit at last by remaining in Him. The vineyard the Lord keeps night and day is His church, watered faithfully by His word and His sacraments, guarded so that nothing can finally pluck her out of His hand. There is real comfort here for every anxious believer and every small, struggling congregation: you are not keeping the vineyard alive by the strength of your own watering. The Lord keeps it, night and day. The fruit will come, because the Vinedresser never sleeps.

And the whole apocalypse ends exactly where it has been heading all along: the gathering home. At that time a large trumpet will be blown, and the ones lost in the land of Assyria will come, as well as the refugees in the land of Egypt. They will worship the LORD on the holy mountain in Jerusalem (27:13). A great trumpet sounds, and from every place of exile, from Assyria and Egypt and every far edge of perishing, the people of God come streaming home to worship on the mountain. The New Testament knows that trumpet well: the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:52); the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God (1 Thessalonians 4:16). The same trumpet that raises the dead gathers the living, and the lost and scattered are brought safe at last to the feast on the mountain where it all began. The apocalypse that opened with the whole earth reeling closes with the whole family of God gathered home, and singing.

Gathering the Threads

Stand back and see the shape of these four chapters, for it is the very shape of the End itself. The whole earth comes under the judgment of God: the curse brought to its full term, every human rank leveled before one Judge. And then, on the mountain, a feast: spread for all the nations, the great homecoming dinner of the peoples. At that feast the shroud of death is swallowed up from every face, and death itself is swallowed up forever; the dead are raised like dew out of the ground; every tear is wiped away by the hand of God. The ancient dragon is slain; the ruined vineyard is restored and at last bears fruit enough to fill the world; and a great trumpet gathers the lost safely home. Judgment, feast, resurrection, victory, homecoming: that is where the whole Bible is going, and Isaiah saw it seven centuries out.

And every line of it turns upon one Person. Death could only be swallowed by One who would go down into its throat and destroy it from the inside; the dragon’s head could only be crushed by the woman’s Son who let His own heel be struck; the vineyard could only bear fruit once the true Vine was planted in our soil. The feast on the mountain, the death swallowed, the tears wiped, the dead raised, the dragon slain: all of it is the work of the Lord Jesus, the One the redeemed will point to at the last and say, Look, here is our God! We waited for him. And we wait for Him still, but not as those who have no hope; for the death that frightens us is already a defeated enemy, the grave that will take us is one that has already had a hole torn clean through it, and the feast is already spread. We taste it now, a crumb at a time, every time we kneel at the rail. One day we will sit down to the whole of it, in bodies raised up from the dust, and the long waiting will be over.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. Chapter 24 widens the judgment from single nations to the whole earth, leveling every rank: the priest as well as the people (24:2). Why does it matter that the final judgment spares no station, and reaches the very ground under a curse that goes all the way back to Eden (24:5–6; Genesis 3)?

2. The Lord spreads a banquet on His mountain for all the nations (25:6), and the church tastes it now in the Lord’s Supper. How does it change the way we come to the Supper to know that it is a foretaste of that feast? Who is welcome at the table on the mountain?

3. Isaiah says the Lord will swallow up death permanently (25:8), and Paul applies it to the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:54). How did the Lord Jesus “swallow” death, and why was going down into death the only way to destroy it (Hebrews 2:9, 14)? What does it mean that the eater has itself been eaten?

4. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you (26:3, ESV). Where does this peace actually come from, and why is it not the same thing as the absence of trouble? How is a mind “stayed on” the Rock of Ages (26:4) different from a mind stayed on our own resources or our circumstances?

5. Isaiah promises a bodily resurrection, your corpses will rise up (26:19), and not the mere survival of the soul. Why does the Christian hope insist on the resurrection of the body? How is the image of dew a comfort in the face of the grave?

6. The Lord tells His people to hide for a little while, until his angry judgment is over (26:20), and the New Testament says our life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). What does it mean to be sheltered through the judgment inside Christ Himself? How does this connect to the Passover, when Israel sheltered behind the blood?

Looking Ahead

We have stood at the very End and seen death swallowed up; now Isaiah brings us back to the present, and to a question the whole glorious vision presses hard upon us: on what are you building? The next session takes up chapters 28 and 29, where the prophet turns to the leaders of his own people, drunk on their wine and drunker still on their own cleverness, boasting, We have made a treaty with death, with Sheol we have made an agreement (28:15), a deal with the grave that will keep them safe. Into that false security the Lord speaks one of the great gospel promises of the whole book: Look, I am laying a stone in Zion, an approved stone, set in place as a precious cornerstone for the foundation. The one who maintains his faith will not panic (28:16). The apostles will tell us plainly who that cornerstone is. We will set the refuge of lies against the sure foundation, and ask what it is to build a life (and a death) upon the precious cornerstone.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 28 and 29. Watch the doom fall upon leaders who are drunk, on wine and on their own wisdom, and who imagine they have struck a bargain with death itself (28:15). Find the precious cornerstone the Lord lays in Zion (28:16), and notice the warning about a people who honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from Him (29:13).

Closing Prayer

O Lord God, before whom the whole earth reels and the proud are brought low, we thank You that You did not leave us beneath the shroud that covers all the nations, but sent Your Son down into the very jaws of death to swallow it up forever. We bless You that the grave which waits for us has already been emptied of its power, that death has lost its sting, and that You Yourself will one day wipe every tear from our faces with Your own hand.

Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace, our minds stayed upon You, the Rock of Ages, while the world around us shakes; hide our lives with Christ in Yourself, that Your angry judgment may pass us over; and water us as Your own vineyard, night and day, that we may take root and bear fruit. And when the great trumpet sounds, raise our bodies from the dust like the dew, and bring us, with all Your lost and scattered people, safely home to the feast upon Your mountain; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has swallowed up death in victory, and who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.