My heart cries out for Moab; her fugitives flee to Zoar,
to Eglath-shelishiyah.
– Isaiah 15:5
This verse is a powerful picture of the heart of God, even as he is walking through these oracles and pronouncements of judgment on different nations and places.
Isaiah 15:5 challenges us to look upon the realities experienced by refugees around the world.
Here in Isaiah 15:5, you see God’s heart crying out for Moab as fugitives flee. It’s basically a picture of refugees leaving their homeland with nothing. As I read this verse, I just think about the world we live in today and the number of refugees in the world fleeing their homeland with nothing. One of the most sobering moments I can remember is walking through a refugee camp in the middle of the Syrian refugee crisis and seeing all these families and little kids in tents in the mud and freezing cold, looking for a place where they can find safety.
Having left everything in their homeland with nothing but a bag in their hands with a few things they were able to bring, having tracked miles and miles and miles by foot, and not knowing where they were going. In this particular setting, they were stuck. And I think about that multiplied over in the lives of millions of people from places like Syria or Afghanistan or think about wars today, Ukrainian refugees. Think about hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza right now as they’re fleeing their homeland.
Isaiah 15:5 challenges us to look upon suffering beyond political stances.
This is not intended to be a commentary on all the political ramifications of war, but it is a picture of suffering men, women, and children. To see Isaiah 15:5 showing us God’s heart for them, his heart crying out for them. And so if that’s what God’s heart does, shouldn’t that be what our hearts do? Again, regardless of how we view the politics of a situation, help us, oh God, to see the people in situations like this around the world and to cry out for them and to the extent possible to work for their good.
This is part of the picture we see all throughout the Old Testament and New Testament. God’s people are called to welcome sojourners and refugees and to be an expression of God’s compassion and love for them, and justice for them. So we pray, God give us your heart for refugees all around us and all around the world. I say all around us. I think about someone I met just a couple of days ago who came here just a few weeks ago from Afghanistan.
God as refugees, leave their homeland and need provision, need help, need support. God, we pray that you would help us as your people to be a picture of your love for them, to support them, to care for them, to provide a home and supplies and resources for them and friendships for them. Lord, we pray that you would help us to be welcoming of sojourners and refugees. And to work God… To the extent with which we are able… To work on behalf of fleeing refugees from different places around the world.
Prayer for Refugees
And God, we pray for your grace and your mercy and your help over them. God, we pray for your church in different parts of the world… Where refugees are fleeing from and fleeing to God. We pray for your grace, your strength, your provision, your mercy, and your help for refugees. And God, knowing that many of these places are places where the gospel has not gone. Where most of the people in those places like Syria or Afghanistan… Or in much of the Gaza strip, God, many of them have no knowledge of your love in Jesus.
God, we pray that the gospel would spread to them. God, we pray that they would hear the good news and believe… And receive the good news that you love them,… That you have made a way for them to have eternal life with you… To have a home and an inheritance in you that nothing in this world can ever take away. Oh God, we pray all of this in light of your heart for refugees. And Isaiah 15:5, in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
