“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isaiah 55:1)
If you feel spiritually parched and dry today, God holds out water to you. If you come to God thirsty, you will be satisfied. God bids you come and receive water to quench your thirst. He bids you come and drink.
But God also holds out wine and milk. He not only quenches our spiritual thirst, he gives us true and abundant joy. Milk represents satisfaction and abundance, and wine is a picture of joy.
God calls us to come and buy wine and milk without money. There is no cost. He gives them freely to all who come. He is the generous King who holds out not only water but free milk and wine to all who come to him.
Therefore, we do not need to toil for what cannot satisfy us! Why would we spend our lives trying to fill a cup with a few drops of salt water? But that is what we do when we try to find life and joy outside of God.
God holds out to us what we cannot supply for ourselves: true, vibrant spiritual life and joy. It can be yours today, anew and afresh. All you need to do is come to God. All you need to do is return to the Lord, and take the cup from his hand and drink.
But how can this be? How can God freely give abundant life, mercy, and joy to sinful people like us? In his commentary on Isaiah, John Oswalt reminds us that it all goes back to Isaiah 53: the work of the Suffering Servant, now fulfilled in Christ. Oswalt writes:
Because of what he has done, God’s face toward his people is not stormy but sunny. The “arm of the Lord” has been revealed against what has separated them from God: their unatoned-for sin. The only thing that they must do is to accept the sin offering that the Servant has made (in prospect) and receive the mercy of God that that offering entails.1
So come to the waters today, for the first time or the four thousandth time. And drink and be satisfied in Christ alone.
- John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40–66, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 434–435. ↩︎
