Highway

March 9, 2019

The reading of the prophet Isaiah at a funeral today caught my attention. The text was Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of him who cries in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

I grew up with the old King James that inserts a comma between “wilderness” and “prepare,” giving the nuance of someone in the wilderness calling out to people to clear the way for God. Most modern translations recognize the poetic form of Hebrew poetry that preserves the parallelism of the words “wilderness” and “desert,” by putting the comma after the word “cries.” The result is, “The voice of one who cries, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

The old version makes clear the connection between Isaiah and the Gospels’ record of John’s preaching in the actual desert regions of ancient Judah, but the newer translations may in fact be closer to the original intent. The difference is simply whether the messenger is in the wilderness, or whether the wilderness is where the way for God is to be prepared. Both are valid interpretations, but having my soul steeped in the old KJV, the emphasis on the highway being built in the wilderness is intriguing.

I live in a rural area where roads still follow old Indian trails, the originals sometimes wending through swamps, up and down and around hills. Nearby is a small community called Kabob, which got its name from the sound of wagon wheels going ‘ka-BOB, ka-BOB’ as they bounced over the corduroy roads of the early nineteenth century. Before the days of mechanized highway equipment, building roads through the wilderness was a strenuous, difficult task. The task of preparing ourselves for the coming of the Lord is no less arduous. My heart is often a wilderness, filled with obstacles and challenges in this business of giving God a wide, straight road into my soul. He is ready to come in, but it’s my job to clear the road. I always have a choice: I can do nothing; I can blaze a footpath that allows only limited access; or I can bulldoze a wide highway that gives him all the room he needs to come in all his dazzling glory. 

My Lenten discipline this year is abstaining from Facebook except for posting my nightly musings. Already I’ve discovered that the time I’ve spent on it has overgrown my highway, reducing it to a mere footpath. Refraining from FB is my way of clearing out the overgrowth and widening the path by devoting time to the construction (or reconstruction) of God’s highway. It’s harder than I thought it would be, but I am looking forward to seeing the result: a four or six lane highway able to handle all the Holy Spirit traffic God wants to send my way. If I am right about this, I’ll have plenty for which to give thanks come Easter. If I am wrong, I’ll still have the benefit of having given myself to a cause worthy of the Christ I serve.