Summary of passage: The Lord pronounces a curse on the Earth–He will devastate it and all of its inhabitants without exception. The Earth dries up along with its people because the people have broken the ever-lasting covenant, disobeyed the laws and violated the statutes, and defiled the Earth.
Questions:
3a) The Lord will lay waste and devastate the Earth. It will be totally plundered, its inhabitants scattered. The Earth will dry up and wither.
b) Everyone
c) God says it will happen so it will happen. I think God will destroy so He can renew; God will cleanse so we can be pure of heart and soul. We can be prepared for that day by living our life in God’s ways.
4) The Earth is defiled by its people who have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant.
Conclusions: Curious as to what exactly was in this “everlasting covenant” that the people had broken that caused all of this destruction (you have to know if you want to avoid it!), I googled it. Knowing God made a covenant with Noah that He’d never destroy the Earth again and sent us a rainbow as a sign of this promise, how can He destroy the Earth?
A covenant is a written agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties especially for the performance of some action. In this case between God and His believers. God made many covenants with man over the course of history. The Old Covenant would be between Noah and God, Abraham and God, etc all with the purpose and intent of having a relationship between God and man.
The New Covenant is a set of new agreements between God and man, outlined in Hebrews 8. Here God promises to put his words into our minds and hearts (God will dwell in us not outside of us), forgive our sins, and offer us eternal life.
This New Covenant will be fulfilled when God/Christ returns to Earth to establish His kingdom. This New Covenant provides a way for humans to have an intimate relationship with God.
Where does Jesus fit in? Well, through the blood of Jesus, we were cleansed of our sins. There is no other way to be cleansed and to dwell with God.
So what is Isaiah here talking about? I’m not for sure because we haven’t studied all this in depth. We must remember Isaiah lived BEFORE Jesus and although He prophesized the coming of Jesus, he probably didn’t understand what Jesus would mean for all believers after him and probably could not predict all the repercussions stemming from Jesus’s death on a cross.
So, based on the premise Isaiah did not predict the meaning of Jesus’s death, He is saying here in this passage: for God to dwell with us here on Earth, man must be perfect because God cannot abide with sin. So, to be perfect, we must be cleansed from sin so God can dwell with us. Thus, I am extrapolating that these verses in Isaiah is the process Isaiah believed we must go through to be cleansed so God can live with us. But this covenant Isaiah is referring to is the Old Covenant, and not the New Covenant just enumerated above. So I am theorizing here that this prophecy will not happen literally; it will be figuratively.
Will the Earth be destroyed when Jesus comes back to bring His Kingdom to Earth? My answer: doubtful. I think a lot of people will be destroyed (the non-believers and such) but why would God destroy the place where He wants to set up His Kingdom? There could be mass destruction of people and places when Jesus first arrives but I just don’t see the Earth vanishing in a puff of smoke and eradicated from the universe. I believe God loves His creations too much to do such a thing.
Once again, I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure all of this out in relation to Jesus.
The description of the New Covenant I summarized is taken from here: http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-is-the-new-covenant-god-offers-to-man.html
This was a great, easy to understand explanation if you want more info.