"And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.
It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.
But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness."
Isaiah 34:9-11
This is part of a prophecy of the Second Coming. A few verses before this it says "all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll" (verse 4). In this selection, the streams into pitch, dust into brimstone, and the "stones of emptiness" are all pretty scary as well, but also kind of cool imagery, and as part of these verses, we know that all hope is not lost, although this all sounds like scary, dramatic, despair-inducing stuff. The hope here are the birds, who aren't dead or gone, but who have a new place to live, theoretically to be unbothered by people for a very long time. It kind of reminds me of pictures from people who have gone into the restricted Chernobyl area and recorded images of nature reasserting itself.
What it seems like to me is that there are going to be huge things that are going to scare people a lot, but that the earth and the animals are going to be okay... and honestly, so will we, if we keep our eyes and our hearts focused on Christ, who has saved us and will continue to save us as we repent, turn to him, and learn how to be the good people that can be part of a better world. Today, let's hold on to hope in Christ and turn to God in all that we do. The future can be uncertain and scary, but there is also a happy ending there waiting for us, after all of that, if we keep turning the pages and sticking with the plot. God is the author, and the scary parts of our lives are never the ending. Only new beginnings.
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