Isaiah 35:8

Isaiah was a prophet in Jerusalem around 700 BC, and chapter 35 is one of the most luminous chapters in the entire Old Testament. After many chapters warning of judgment and devastation, Isaiah pivots to describe what God's ultimate future looks like: deserts bursting into bloom, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the lame leaping. In the center of this vision, a highway appears — called "the Way of Holiness." In the ancient world, kings built roads to display power and move armies. This road is different: it is built by God, and it leads home for scattered, suffering, exiled people. The road belongs to those who walk in God's way — and the verse's point is not that certain people are barred from it, but that you cannot travel toward God while walking resolutely in the opposite direction.

God, some days the terrain feels like nothing but burning sand, and I can't see where I'm going. Thank you for the promise of a road. Help me trust that holiness isn't a wall keeping me out — it's a way that leads me home. I want to walk it, even when it's hard. Amen.

There is something deeply human about wanting a road. Wanting to know the way. Isaiah writes this vision to people who had every reason to feel utterly lost — a nation under threat, facing exile, quietly afraid that God had forgotten his promises. And he doesn't give them a pep talk. He gives them a highway. Not a vague feeling or a spiritual metaphor — a road. Built. Visible. Passable even by people who are stumbling. "Wicked fools will not go about on it" isn't about gatekeeping the deserving from the undeserving. It's about the nature of the road itself: you can't walk toward God's restoration while resolutely heading the other direction. The road sets its own terms. Here's what quietly undoes me about this passage: the road runs through the desert. Isaiah describes it in the middle of burning sand and dry ground — places of desolation that will, one day, become springs. The Way of Holiness doesn't skip the hard terrain or reroute around the wasteland. It goes straight through it. Which means you don't have to have arrived somewhere safe and comfortable before you can start walking it. You don't have to have your whole life sorted out. The road is already there. The only question is whether you're willing to turn toward it — and keep going, even when everything around you still looks like desert.