The Precious Cornerstone

Isaiah 28–29 (with 1 Peter 2:4–8; Matthew 7:24–27)

Before this 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).

Therefore, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: “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.”

Isaiah 28:16

Drunk on the Wrong Wine

With chapter 28 we enter a new stretch of the book: six chapters strung together by a single grim cry. The Hebrew hoy, woe, is a mourner’s cry over the dead, and the NET catches its force with doomed and as good as dead. Ephraim’s drunkards are doomed; Ariel is as good as dead; the rebellious children are as good as dead; those who go down to Egypt are as good as dead. These chapters are sometimes called the Book of Woes, and they are addressed not to the foreign nations now but to God’s own people, and especially to their leaders. The first woe falls on a kingdom in its cups. The splendid crown of Ephraim’s drunkards is doomed (28:1). The northern kingdom is pictured as a garland of flowers on the head of a man too drunk to notice that it is already wilting: the withering flower, the crown of those overcome with wine.

But before Judah can feel smug about her drunken northern cousins, Isaiah swings the same charge south, and it lands on the holiest men in the land. Even these men stagger because of wine … priests and prophets stagger because of beer … they stagger while seeing prophetic visions, they totter while making legal decisions (28:7). The very men charged with seeing God’s vision and pronouncing His judgment are staggering, their tables covered with what their stomachs could not keep down (28:8). The picture is deliberately disgusting, because the thing it describes is disgusting: the spiritual leaders of God’s people too sodden to do their work.

And their drunkenness was not only the kind that comes out of a bottle. When Isaiah brought them God’s plain word, they mocked it as baby-talk: Who is the LORD trying to teach? … To those just weaned from milk! (28:9). They sneered that the prophet was treating grown, sophisticated men like toddlers, droning at them in what sounded to them like meaningless gibberish, senseless babbling, a syllable here, a syllable there (28:10). In the Hebrew it is a sing-song jingle, tsav latsav, qav laqav, very nearly nonsense syllables, the way a clever man might mockingly imitate a child still learning his letters. They were too worldly-wise to sit still for God’s simple, repetitive word. And that is the deeper drunkenness: the intoxication of people drunk on their own sophistication, who find the word of God too plain, too repetitive, too childish for minds as advanced as theirs.

There is, in fact, a mercy in the very repetition they mocked. A syllable here, a syllable there is exactly how a patient parent teaches a child to read, and exactly how God teaches sinners who are slow of heart: a little at a time, over and over, with much patient repeating, because we do not learn the things of God quickly, nor hold them firmly once we have. The gospel is plain enough for a child to grasp, and that plainness is not a defect to be outgrown but the kindness of a God who wants even the simplest of us to understand and be saved. The scoffers heard the repetition as an insult to their intelligence. It was actually the patience of God, stooping to teach them the way you teach someone you love and are determined not to lose.

So God tells them how He will speak to them next, since they will not hear Him plainly. For with mocking lips and a foreign tongue he will speak to these people (28:11). If they will not hear God in the plain Hebrew of His prophet, they will hear Him in the strange, foreign speech of the Assyrian soldier in their streets. The simple word they mocked will give way to a word they cannot understand at all, and it will be a word of judgment. There is a sober warning here for every age that finds the plain preaching of God’s word too simple to bother with: the word despised does not quietly go away. It comes back, and harder.

A Treaty with Death

The drunken, scornful rulers of Jerusalem had a plan to keep themselves safe, and Isaiah lets us hear them boast of it in words that ought to chill us. For you say, “We have made a treaty with death, with Sheol we have made an agreement. When the overwhelming judgment sweeps by it will not reach us. For we have made a lie our refuge, we have hidden ourselves in a deceitful word” (28:15). Listen to the confidence in it. They believe they have struck a bargain with death itself, an understanding reached with the grave, so that when the flood of judgment finally comes through, it will simply pass them by. They have, they are sure, found themselves a hiding place.

There is something almost absurd in the boast, and Isaiah means us to feel it. You cannot make a treaty with death; death signs no treaties and keeps no bargains. It is the one party that has never yet failed to collect, the one creditor that takes every debtor in the end, whatever arrangements he imagined he had made. To say we have made a treaty with death is rather like a man standing on the railroad tracks announcing that he has come to an understanding with the oncoming train. The rulers’ confidence was not merely misplaced; it was a kind of madness, the madness of people so desperate to feel safe that they will believe a lie about the one thing in all of life that is utterly certain. And it is a madness we are every one of us prone to, each time we arrange our lives so cleverly that we never quite have to think about death at all.

But hear what their hiding place is built out of. We have made a lie our refuge, we have hidden ourselves in a deceitful word. Their whole security is a structure of lies. Perhaps it was the secret alliance with Egypt that the next chapters will drag into the light; perhaps it was the fatalist’s shrug we already heard in chapter 22, Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die! But underneath whatever the particular scheme was lay the oldest lie of all: that we can somehow manage death and judgment on our own terms, cut a deal, find an angle, hide ourselves in some place where God’s reckoning will never think to look. It is a lie, and Isaiah names it as one; and yet it is the very lie that nearly every human being is, in some quiet corner of the heart, counting on.

And the tragedy of it is that there is a true refuge to be had, but it is the exact opposite of the one they were building. They hid in a deceitful word, and they hid from the Lord; the safety they actually needed was to be found by fleeing to Him. The judgment is real, and there is in fact a hiding place from it. But it is not a deal struck with death, nor a wall of lies, nor any shelter we throw up to keep God out. It is God Himself, the very One they were hiding from, who is the only refuge the overwhelming judgment cannot reach. Every false refuge has this in common: it is an attempt to be safe from God instead of safe in Him. And it is always built, however carefully, on the wrong side of the only door that actually opens onto safety.

We build our own refuges of lies, and they are not always crude ones. Some are obvious enough: the money we are certain will insulate us, the influence we imagine will protect us, the careful denial that simply refuses to think about death at all. But some of our refuges are dressed in Sunday clothes. A man can make a refuge of lies out of his own religion (out of his churchgoing, his giving, his decency, his theological correctness), hiding from the judgment of God behind a wall of his own good behavior, as though God could be managed by a respectable life. That refuge is no sturdier than the drunkards’ treaty with death. Hail will sweep away the unreliable refuge, the floodwaters will overwhelm the hiding place (28:17). Every shelter we build to hide from God, instead of fleeing to Him, will in the end be swept clean off its foundations. The only question is what we will be standing on when it goes.

The Precious Cornerstone

And right there, in the very breath after exposing the refuge of lies, God lays down something to stand on. It is the heart of this session, and one of the great gospel sentences in the whole book. Therefore, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: “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). Against the false foundation the rulers had built for themselves, God sets a true one that He builds Himself. Notice the first words out of His mouth: I am laying. The foundation is not something we quarry and set in place; it is laid by God, in Zion, as His own gift. Where the rulers manufactured a refuge out of their lies, God provides a foundation out of His grace.

And there is enormous relief in those little words I am laying, for they mean the foundation does not depend on us to quarry it, to shape it, or to set it true. We are forever trying to construct something solid enough to stand our lives upon. We lay down achievements, reputations, relationships, savings, and hope against hope that they will hold, and we are never quite sure any of it will bear the weight when the weight at last comes. Isaiah says we may lay down the exhausting work of laying our own foundation, because God has already laid one, in Zion, that will hold. The single most important stone in the whole building of your life is not one you are required to provide. It has been set in place for you, by God Himself, and all that remains is to build on it.

Look at the four things Isaiah says of this stone. It is a stone: solid, real, not a scheme or a slogan but something you can actually stand on. It is an approved stone: the Hebrew pictures a stone that has been tested and has passed the test; it will not crack under the weight, because it has already borne the weight. It is a precious cornerstone: the stone set at the foundation’s angle from which every wall takes its line and its strength, the single most important stone in the whole building, and costly beyond price. And it is set in place … for the foundation, firmly founded, utterly reliable, the opposite at every point of the refuge of lies. A real stone, a tested stone, a precious stone, a sure stone: this is what God lays down in Zion for sinners to build their lives upon.

And the apostles leave us in no doubt at all about who this stone is. Peter takes up the verse and applies it straight: Look, I lay in Zion a stone, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and whoever believes in him will never be put to shame (1 Peter 2:6). He is speaking of the Lord Jesus, the living stone whom men rejected but God chose. Paul quotes the same verse twice (Romans 9:33; 10:11), and the New Testament names Christ Himself the cornerstone on whom the whole church is built (Ephesians 2:20). He is the approved stone, tested in every way as we are, tried in the furnace of suffering and in the grave itself, and not found wanting; the stone that bore the full crushing weight of the world’s sin and did not crack. He is the precious stone, costly beyond all reckoning. He is the sure foundation, the one place in all the universe where a sinner may set down the whole weight of his life and his death, and not be moved.

Linger over that word approved, for it carries more comfort than it first appears to. A tested stone is one that has already been put under the full load and has not failed. The Lord Jesus is the tested foundation because He has already been tested with everything that could ever test us, and more besides: tempted in the wilderness, pressed to the ground in Gethsemane, crushed under the weight of the whole world’s sin at Calvary, and lowered into the testing of the grave itself. And He held. He did not crack, did not crumble, did not give way at any point. So when we set the weight of our lives and our deaths upon Him, we are not gambling on an untested stone; we are resting on the one foundation in all the universe that has already borne the very worst that could ever come, and stood. He was tried, so that we who build on Him need never face an untested God.

And see how this foundation is laid hold of. The Hebrew says simply the one who believes, and that is how Peter and Paul quote it. Not the one who is clever; not the one who is respectable; not the one who has cut the shrewdest deal, but the one who believes, the one who simply entrusts himself to the stone. The cornerstone is received by faith, and by faith alone; the drunkards’ sophistication could lay no hold on it, but a child’s bare trust can. And the promise made to that faith is sweet: he will not panic, which the apostles, following the Greek Old Testament, render will never be put to shame. The one who builds on this stone will never have to scramble in a panic when the hail comes, never be left exposed and ashamed when every other refuge has been swept away. The believer is not in a hurry, not frantic, not afraid, because the thing he is standing on cannot be moved.

We should be clear about what this faith actually is, since the word gets so badly muddled. The faith that lays hold of the cornerstone is not a feeling worked up in the chest, nor a leap into the dark, nor a vague religious optimism. It is the plainest thing in the world: resting your weight on something because it is trustworthy. There is a difference between believing that a chair will hold you and actually sitting down in it, and only the second is faith. A man can affirm every true statement about the cornerstone and still be standing, white-knuckled, on his own sand. To believe, in Isaiah’s sense, is to take your weight off your own foundations and set it down on the stone God laid: to sit down, at long last, in the chair. And even that trust is not our own achievement but the Spirit’s gift, worked in us through the very word that points us to the stone. The drunkards trusted their cleverness; the believer trusts the stone. That is the whole of the difference, and it is everything.

It comes down, in the end, to two foundations, and the Lord Jesus once drew the picture as plainly as it can be drawn: a wise man builds his house on rock, and a foolish man builds his on sand, and the two houses look exactly alike until the storm comes; then one stands and the other collapsed; it was utterly destroyed! (Matthew 7:24–27). The treaty with death is sand. The precious cornerstone is rock. And there is a solemn flip side that Isaiah and the apostles both name: the very same stone that is a sure foundation to those who believe becomes a stone that makes a person trip, and a rock that makes one stumble to those who will not (8:14; 1 Peter 2:8). You cannot stay neutral about this stone. Either you build your life upon it and stand, or you trip over it and fall. There is no third option, for the stone has already been laid. It is the Lord Jesus, and He is either your foundation or your stumbling-block.

His Strange Work

We have seen that the hail will sweep away the unreliable refuge (28:17), and the treaty with death will be dissolved (28:18). God will indeed rise up and judge. But Isaiah says something about that judgment which is easy to read past, and precious once it is seen. When the Lord rises up to do His work of judgment, the prophet calls it his peculiar work … his strange task (28:21). Strange: foreign, alien, not the thing that comes most naturally to Him. Judgment, Isaiah is quietly telling us, is not God’s native element.

That single word tells us something deep about the heart of God. We are prone to imagine a God who is quick to anger and slow to mercy, who judges with relish and forgives only with reluctance, but Isaiah says the very reverse. Judgment is the strange work, the one God reaches for last and lays down first; mercy is what comes naturally to Him. Elsewhere the Scriptures say it outright: he is not predisposed to afflict or to grieve people (Lamentations 3:33); He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). When God must judge, He does it, but it is not where His heart is. His heart is in the rescue. And a sinner who has truly grasped that one thing about God will run toward Him in his guilt rather than away, knowing that the God he is running toward would far rather save him than condemn him.

Luther seized upon that word and built a great comfort on it, and the Lutheran Confessions take up the same verse (Ap XII; FC SD V). Luther spoke of God’s strange work and His proper work, His alien work and His own work. The strange work is the law, the wrath, the judgment, the tearing-down; the proper work, the work nearest to God’s heart and the one He most delights to do, is the gospel, the mercy, the saving, the building-up. And here is the comfort: God does the strange work only ever in the service of the proper work. He wounds in order to heal; He kills in order to make alive; He brings down to the dust only that He may raise up again. The judgment that falls on the refuge of lies is real, and it is severe, but it is not God’s last word, nor His deepest desire. He tears away our false shelters not because He delights to leave us standing exposed, but because He means to get us off the sand and onto the Rock. Even the strange work is in the service of His love.

And Isaiah closes the chapter with a homely little parable that makes exactly this point. A farmer, he says, does not just keep on plowing at planting time; he plows in order to plant, and then he levels the ground and scatters his seed (28:24–25). And when the harvest comes, he does not thresh every grain by the same brutal method: the delicate caraway is beaten out with a stick and the cumin with a flail, while only the grain goes under the wheel of the wagon, and even that one certainly does not thresh it forever (28:27–28). How does the farmer know to work with such care and such measure? His God instructs him; he teaches him the principles of agriculture (28:26); this also comes from the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, who gives supernatural guidance and imparts great wisdom (28:29). The point is gentle and sure: God deals with His people the way a wise farmer deals with his crops. His plowing is never pointless and never endless; it is always aimed at a harvest. His threshing is measured to exactly what each grain can bear, and He does not crush forever. The very judgments that frighten us are the work of a Farmer whose guidance is wonderful and whose wisdom is great, and who never once rolls the wheel over the grain except to bring in the harvest.

Lips Near, Hearts Far

Chapter 29 opens with another woe, this one laid on Ariel, a cryptic name for Jerusalem, the city of the altar hearth. She will be besieged, brought so low that she speaks from the dust (29:4); and then, at the last possible moment, her enemies will vanish like a dream, like a hungry man who dreams that he is eating and wakes to find his stomach empty (29:7–8). It is a foreshadowing of the night the Assyrian army would melt away from Jerusalem’s walls, which we will reach in a few chapters. But the deeper trouble in Jerusalem is not the army camped outside; it is the sleep within. For the LORD has poured out on you a strong urge to sleep deeply. He has shut your eyes (29:10). God’s word has become to them like words in a sealed scroll that no one can read, not the one who can read, not the one who cannot (29:11–12). They have stopped their own ears against the plain word for so long that they can no longer hear it at all.

A deep sleep sent as judgment is frightening precisely because the sleeper does not know that he is asleep. The man under judgment in chapter 24 at least knew the earth was reeling; these people feel nothing at all amiss. The services go on, the words are recited, the book sits open on the lectern, and not a syllable of it lands, because a numbness has settled over the whole congregation that no one inside it is able to feel. It is the most dangerous spiritual condition there is: not open rebellion, which at least knows that it is fighting God, but a comfortable drowsiness that has lost the very capacity to be troubled by His word. The first mercy such a people can receive is to be made uncomfortable again, to have the sleep disturbed, even roughly, before it deepens past waking into death.

And then comes the verse that lies at the bottom of all their trouble, one of the most searching sentences in the Old Testament. The Lord says, “These people say they are loyal to me; they say wonderful things about me, but they are not really loyal to me. Their worship consists of nothing but man-made ritual” (29:13). The Hebrew puts it in a vivid picture: this people draws near with its mouth and honors God with its lips, while its heart is far from Him. Here is the diagnosis laid bare: a religion of the lips, with the heart removed far away. They said the right words; they kept the right forms; their worship looked, from the outside, entirely correct. But the heart had gone elsewhere, and what worship they still offered was secondhand, a thing learned by rote from the traditions of men, and not a living trust in the living God. The lips were near. The heart was far.

It is worth being careful here, for this is rarely the crude hypocrisy of a cynic who believes nothing and fakes it all. More often the drift is quiet and gradual, and it happens to sincere people. The forms that once carried a living faith keep running on by sheer habit long after the heart behind them has wandered off somewhere else; the words of the hymn come out of the mouth while the mind is on the afternoon’s errands; the prayer is said correctly and felt hardly at all. No one ever sits down and decides to honor God with the lips while sending the heart far away. It simply happens, the way a marriage can quietly go cold while both parties keep up every courtesy. Which is exactly why the verse is a mercy and not only a rebuke: it is God, who will not be content with our lips, calling our wandering hearts back home before the distance hardens into a habit we can no longer even feel.

The Lord Jesus took up this very verse and laid it on the most religious men of His day. When the Pharisees criticized His disciples over a matter of ceremonial hand-washing, He answered them, Hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied correctly about you when he said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:7–8). And we should be honest enough to let the verse search us as well, for it is aimed not at the irreligious but at the devout: at people who go to church, who know the words, who would sit down to read a study such as this one. It is frighteningly possible to draw near to God with the mouth, to honor Him with the lips, to keep every form correctly, while the heart itself sits somewhere far off. The cornerstone is not laid hold of by the lips. It is laid hold of by the heart, in faith; and a religion that has the words without the heart is just one more refuge of lies, however orthodox its vocabulary.

But chapter 29 does not end in the deep sleep. The God who shut their eyes in judgment promises to open them again in mercy. At that time the deaf will be able to hear words read from a scroll, and the eyes of the blind will be able to see through deep darkness (29:18). The very faculties that sin had sealed shut, ears that could not hear the word and eyes that could not see it, God Himself promises to open. And when the Lord Jesus came, He did exactly this, in flesh and blood: He opened literally deaf ears and literally blind eyes; and when John the Baptist sent from prison to ask whether He was the One, He sent back word in the very language of this chapter: The blind see … the deaf hear (Matthew 11:5). He opens the sealed scroll; He gives the heart that the lip-servers lacked; those who stray morally will gain understanding (29:24). The same Lord who is the cornerstone is the One who opens deaf ears to hear the word they had mocked, and blind eyes to see the stone they had stumbled over.

And this is where the chapter turns from a mirror into a gospel. For if the trouble is a heart gone far off and ears sealed shut, then the cure cannot simply be that we try harder to feel near and to listen better. A deaf man cannot decide to hear, and a heart that has wandered cannot lever itself back home by sheer effort of will. Someone must open the ear; someone must give the heart. And that is precisely what the Lord does. The same Lord who is the cornerstone is the One who pours hearing into deaf ears and sight into blind eyes, who through His word and His Spirit gives the very heart that the lip-servers lacked. So the right response to the warning of verse 13 is not a frantic resolve to do better, but a prayer the deaf and the blind are perfectly able to pray: open my ears, that I may hear; open my eyes, that I may see; give me the heart I cannot give myself. He delights to answer it.

Gathering the Threads

Two chapters, and beneath all their woes a single steady question: what are you standing on? Isaiah shows us a people drunk on their own cleverness, too sophisticated for God’s plain word, who had built themselves a refuge of lies and called it a treaty with death. He tells them plainly that the hail is coming, and that the refuge will not stand. And then, into that exposed and frightened place, God lays a stone: tested, precious, sure, a foundation set in Zion for anyone at all who will simply believe. That stone is the Lord Jesus. The judgment that sweeps the lies away is God’s strange work, and even that strange work serves His proper work of mercy, for He is the wise farmer who plows only to plant, and never threshes longer than the grain can bear.

And the warning of chapter 29 keeps the whole thing honest: it is entirely possible to have the words and miss the stone, to draw near with the lips while the heart stays far off, to be orthodox and sound asleep at the very same time. The cornerstone is not laid hold of by correct vocabulary; it is laid hold of by a heart that trusts it. So the question Isaiah leaves us with is not whether we know the right words about Christ, but whether we are actually standing on Him: whether, when the hail comes and every other refuge is swept away, the thing beneath our feet is the tested and precious and sure foundation that God Himself laid in Zion. Whoever believes in him will never be put to shame (1 Peter 2:6). Build there, and you will never be put to shame.

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. The leaders mocked Isaiah’s plain word as baby-talk, a syllable here, a syllable there (28:9–10), too simple for sophisticated men. How can sophistication, success, or even theological knowledge become a kind of drunkenness that keeps us from hearing God’s plain word? Why does God so often speak in ways that offend the wise?

2. The rulers boasted of a treaty with death and said, we have made a lie our refuge (28:15). What “refuges of lies” do people hide in to feel safe from judgment, and how can even our religion, or our good behavior, become such a refuge? What does it take for the hail to sweep a false refuge away (28:17)?

3. God lays in Zion an approved stone … a precious cornerstone for the foundation, and the apostles tell us it is the Lord Jesus (28:16; 1 Peter 2:6). Why does it matter that the stone is tested and proven? What does it mean that the one who believes will not panic, that he will never be put to shame?

4. The Lord Jesus said the wise build on rock and fools on sand, and the two houses look alike until the storm (Matthew 7:24–27). The same stone is a sure foundation to faith and a stone that makes a person trip to unbelief (8:14; 1 Peter 2:8). Why is there no neutral ground with this stone? Why must He be either foundation or stumbling-block?

5. Isaiah calls God’s judgment His strange task (28:21), and Luther saw that God does this strange work only in the service of His proper work of mercy: wounding to heal, plowing to plant (28:23–29). How does this change the way we read God’s hard providences? How is the wise farmer a comfort when we feel we are being threshed?

6. God indicts a people who honor Him with their lips while their heart is far from Him (29:13), and the Lord Jesus aimed the verse at the most religious men of His day (Matthew 15:8). Why is this a special danger for devout, churchgoing people? What is the difference between holding the right words about Christ and actually resting the heart upon Him?

Looking Ahead

The treaty with death was one false refuge; the next chapters expose another, and this one has a name: Egypt. In the next session we take up chapters 30 through 33, where Isaiah confronts God’s people for running down to Egypt for help, trusting in Pharaoh’s horses and chariots rather than in the Holy One of Israel (30:1–2; 31:1). It is the perennial temptation: to secure ourselves by political power, by alliances, by anything we can see and count and lay our hands on, rather than by the God we cannot. But set against all that frantic running is one of the tenderest invitations in all of Scripture: If you repented and patiently waited for me, you would be delivered; if you calmly trusted in me, you would find strength (30:15). And the section gives us a glimpse of the King whose reign brings the very shelter we keep running off to Egypt to find: a shelter from the wind … like the shade of a large cliff in a parched land (32:2). We will weigh the horses of Egypt against the shade of the Rock.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 30 through 33, with special attention to chapters 30 and 32–33. Watch God’s people run to Egypt for the help that God alone can give, and find the great invitation they refused: if you repented and patiently waited for me, you would be delivered (30:15). And look for the King whose reign is like the shade of a large cliff in a parched land (32:1–2).

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, You see how readily we build our refuges out of lies (out of our cleverness, our money, our good behavior, our very religion) and then call ourselves safe. Forgive us the treaties we strike with death, and tear down, by Your strange and merciful work, every false shelter in which we hide from You instead of fleeing to You.

We bless You that You have laid in Zion a sure foundation, Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the tested and precious cornerstone, and that whoever believes in Him shall never be put to shame. Grant us not merely to honor Him with our lips while our hearts go wandering far away, but to rest the whole weight of our lives and our deaths upon Him. Open our deaf ears to hear the word we have so often mocked, and our blind eyes to see the stone we have stumbled over, that we may build upon Him and stand when the hail comes; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.