Judah’s Sins Denounced

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 3:1-26, Isaiah 4:1-6, Isaiah 5:1-30, Matthew 18:6-9

Throughout our Lent 2025: He Will Save Us reading plan, we have compiled selections from both our She Reads Truth and He Reads Truth writers. The same devotionals can be found on the She Reads Truth and He Reads Truth apps and websites for the remainder of this reading plan.

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Perhaps one of the things that will most astonish us in heaven is the many woes we’ve been spared. 

In Isaiah’s day, the Lord looked at the lives of His children of promise and felt hot anger rise within Him (Isaiah 5:25). Though God had clearly revealed both His glorious nature and His everlasting love, Israel chronically chose the wormy fruit of sin instead. A perfectly holy, always just God could only have one response: 

Woe to them, 

For they have brought disaster on themselves. 
—Isaiah 3:9 

Through His prophet, the Lord went on to declare a waterfall of woes for the children He loved. 

Woe to the vain and self-absorbed (Isaiah 3:16–24).
Woe to the liars (Isaiah 5:18). 
Woe to the arrogant (v.21). 
Woe to the drunkards (v.22). 
Woe to the crooked (v.23). 

And especially heartbreaking, 
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil (v.20). 

It’s tempting to race through such passages with cultural detachment, simply imagining both apathy toward sin from God’s people and His angry response as a thing of the past. But God does not change (Malachi 3:6), and neither has our sin nature. We’re all prone to run from God’s will and ways and celebrate our own sinful selfishness. 

Woe to us should we put our hope in God softening toward sin. The position this puts us in is beyond precarious. Like the people of Israel, indifference toward God’s intolerance of our rebellion will heap disaster on our heads. We are rightfully jarred by such realities.

And yet, tucked into chapters that outline God’s righteous and powerful judgment, we see a hope more powerful than the punishment we deserve. 

On that day the Branch of the LORD will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of Israel’s survivors….when the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodguilt from the heart of Jerusalem….For there will be a canopy over all the glory, and there will be a shelter for shade from heat by day, and a refuge and shelter from storm and rain.
—Isaiah 4:2, 4–6

The Father’s anger toward sin hasn’t softened. He’s simply poured the judgment we deserve on the Son so that you and I can be cleansed from our sin and filth. We now know that the Branch of the LORD is Jesus (Isaiah 11:1, Zechariah 3:8, John 15:5–11). How beautiful and glorious is He! 

Oh, let us live sober toward our own sinful tendencies. Let us tremble at the woes our sin has earned. But let us resist wallowing and move to worship, for our Savior, Jesus, is the shelter and refuge we need from the judgment we deserve. 

Written by Erin Davis