Isaiah 35

The Highway To God

An highway shall be there. Isaiah 35:8 (AV).

I am the way. John 14:6.

Did you ever think what a wonderful thing a road is? The story of a road is as fascinating as a fairy-tale. The earliest roads were not roads at all. They were not even paths, they were just tracks. Some of them were tracks beaten down by wild beasts, and afterwards trodden by the foot of man. Today in Central and East Africa such tracks are still to be seen. They are so like goat or antelope tracks that you can barely tell the one from the other. Travelers say that in Bechuanaland the main roads consist, not of one broad track, but of many single tracks running side by side and occasionally crossing or overlapping each other. Such tracks are so crooked and wandering that a distance which should be only two miles becomes three.

Just think of roads like that, and then think of one of our great roads, broad and evenly paved. Or think of one of our city streets with its pavements, its gutters, its subways and railroads, its electric power grid, and its elaborate system of underground pipes and conduits.

It was from the Romans that we first learned how to make roads. The Romans were the great road- makers of history. They saw that the secret of making their great Empire one was to have communication, and you can't have communication between one place and another without a road or way. So they planned these long magnificent roads of theirs, each of which counted its mileage from Rome. That is why we hare the proverb, “Every road leads to Rome.”

So well were these roads made that a thousand years after some of them were in as good condition as when they were laid. We have the remains of some of them in Great Britain to this day. Watling Street, from Kent to Cardigan Bay, Ikenild Street, from St. David's to Tynemouth, Fosse Way, from Cornwall to Lincoln, Ermin Street, from St. David's to Southampton were old Roman roads.

The most famous of all Roman roads was the Appian Way, the Great South Road which ran from the Porta Capena at Rome to Capua. It was known as “the Queen of Roads.” It was a triumph of Roman labor and engineering skill. It crossed marshes, bridged ravines, and cut into the solid rock of the cliffs. It was along this white ribbon of a pavement that St. Paul travelled a prisoner to Rome.

I said that the Romans made roads because they stood for communication and interaction. That is just what a road stands for today. It is a way to somebody or something. The highway of our text is that. The prophet Isaiah is talking of a way to God. Some people say that he was speaking to the Jews in exile and telling them how God would make a way of return for them across the desert to Jerusalem and its Temple. To the Jews the Temple was the place where God was. And going home to Jerusalem meant going home to God.

Years after Isaiah gave this message to the Jews there came to Jerusalem One who said of Himself, “I am the way.” The way to what or whom? The way to God. Christ came to the world to show men the one true way to God. The prophets whom God had sent into the world before this to lead men to Him were like the feeble wandering footpaths of Bechuanaland. But Christ, God's own Son, was the great direct Way to the Father.

Have you ever heard of the walled-up door, the Porta Santa, of St. Peter's at Rome? It is walled up except during Holy Year, which comes once in twenty- five years. Every quarter of a century, at a touch from the reigning Pope the door is opened, and the people enter by a new way into the great church. Only one year out of twenty-five! Only once in the lifetime of most people, twice in the lifetime of some, and thrice in the lifetime of the very few is that way to the Holy Place open.

But Christ's way to God is never closed. By that Living Way we can reach God at any time and in a moment. God sent us that way, for use. Let us see then, dear children, that we follow the way of Christ to God.