Oh man, hello my friends, and welcome to another Robcast.

This is episode 281, and it's called Soards and Plows and the Great Unmasking.

That's what I'm calling it.

This moment that we are in.

I'm calling it the Great Unmasking.

We're on a roll here. Let's do another sermon, shall we?

And another sermon from the book of Isaiah, because they're these prophets,

who arose roughly 2,500 years ago, and did something in a sort of collective coherent way that was quite new.

And when you read these prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, they're doing wonders for me in grounding and centering me in this moment that we're in.

And this is new, but that's the beauty of an ancient text, is it shows you that what's new is often really old.

And especially something new and vital that feels like it's a turning of the ages, then you go back and you find out that we've been at somewhat similar moments before, where great numbers of people called out what was wrong and things tilted.

And the prophets, to me, they're fascinating because of how many of the things that they talked about are what we're talking about today.

So what I want to do is I want to show you a specific line from the prophet Isaiah that you've probably heard before.

But then what I really want to do is show you the lines around that line, the passages around that passage, because there's a pattern here.

There's a way that it works. And I want to lay it out for you as simple and elegantly and elementally as possible.

Like this is like a way, a movement. And when you see it, whoo, okay. So anyway, that's enough hype. Are you with me on that? That's enough setup. Let's just go right to it.

In Isaiah chapter 2, you have this line, the prophet is imagining a new day. And the prophet says the divine will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many people. They will beat their swords into plough shares and their spears into pruning hooks.

And the nation will not take up sword against nation nor will they train for war anymore. And you've heard that line, right? They will train for war. They will not train for war anymore.

But it's that line, they'll beat their swords into plough shares. That one, that's like greatest hits, right? That one made it across the ages. We've heard that. That one still is brought up again and again and again.

Yeah, it's because it's a great line. They will beat their swords into plough shares. So what the prophet essentially says is in this burst of wild imagination about where humanity could go.

The prophet says, they'll take all that energy that they've been using for dominance, conflict and brutality. They'll take all that energy that they've been using to amass weapons, to conquer and defeat their enemies.

All that energy is going to be taken not for conflict, war and destruction, but it's going to be used in a whole new way, not for the making of swords, but they'll beat those swords into plough shares.

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