Isaiah 49:14-16
But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.
This is one of the most poignant verses in Scripture, especially in light of the terribly irony we have made of it in modern times. In Isaiah’s day, the thought that a mother could forget her child or have no compassion on the child of her womb was simply beyond the beyond. It was such an absurd idea that Isaiah could use it as an example of how wildly absurd it was to imagine that God would ever forget his beloved people. Today, when 1.6 million children are massacred in the womb every year our culture has given a whole new dimension to the verse. For it now shows, not the paltriness of Isaiah’s imagination, but the immensity of God’s love for us that he would take the magnitude of such horrendous evil upon himself in the Crucifixion of Christ and go on loving and interceding, even for a people like us capable of doing such things. He was in deadly earnest when he said we were graven on the palms of his hands. Today, find a way to join him in helping the weakest members of our culture, even if it means going outside the walls of the city with him and sharing in something of his rejection and his cross.
