How do I hope for God to judge all the world's evil, wickedness, and sin-twisted corruption when I, myself, am implicated in that very judgement?

As we prepare for Advent, we turn to the prophet Isaiah, who announces the counterintuitive truth that God's promises of peace arrive through and in the midst of His judgment. The city that once sheltered justice, Jerusalem, has abandoned the widow and the fatherless, it has given itself over to other, lesser things. Yet, Isaiah proclaims God's promises to remove its corruption and restore its faithfulness. Hope begins with recognition: Not ours, but God's as He confronts that which we have become, and what we have given ourselves over to.

Isaiah reminds us that hope is subversive: weapons become tools for cultivation; God walks among us; power become a helpless infant, light reaches into darkness; a small, fragile shoot sprouts from a tree stump long thought dead and gone.

Judgment, though, perhaps, frightens us? But maybe rightly so. Evil cannot endure if creation is to become and remain good, and we cannot place ourselves outside that reckoning. Yet in Jesus, the Messiah foretold in Isaiah, we can come to expect more than mere destruction: through what feels like struggle, violence, pain, and even death, God restores peace and brings us back into relationship with Him. The end of judgement is, ultimately, reconciliation.

Questions for reflection:
• Do we expect God to judge sin, including our own? What makes that frightening?
• Where do we confuse the end of evil with the end of hope?
• How might hope in restoration through judgment reshape our prayers and relationships this week?
• What would change in our prayers and relationships if we desired that restoration for the people we find hardest to love, as well as for ourselves?

Scripture References: Isaiah 1:21–31; 2:1–5; 7:10–14; 9:2–7; 11:1–10.

From our pre-Advent series, Building Expectation · November 1, 2026

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