M-W-F Bible study: Isaiah 26:12-19

12 LORD, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished you have done for us.

13 O LORD, our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone do we honor.

14 They are now dead, they live no more; those departed spirits do not rise. You punished them and brought them to ruin; you wiped out all memory of them.

15 You have enlarged the nation, O LORD; you have enlarged the nation. You have gained glory for yourself; you have extended all the borders of the land.

16 LORD, they came to you in their distress; when you disciplined them, they could barely whisper a prayer.

17 As a woman with child and about to give birth writhes and cries out in her pain, so were we in your presence, O LORD.

18 We were with child, we writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind. We have not brought salvation to the earth; we have not given birth to people of the world.

19 But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.

(the following is from Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary -- www.christnotes.org)

"Commentary on Isaiah 26:12-19

Every creature, every business, any way serviceable to our comfort, God makes to be so; he makes that work for us which seemed to make against us. They had been slaves of sin and Satan; but by the Divine grace they were taught to look to be set free from all former masters. The cause opposed to God and his kingdom will sink at last. See our need of afflictions. Before, prayer came drop by drop; now they pour it out, it comes now like water from a fountain. Afflictions bring us to secret prayer. Consider Christ as the Speaker addressing his church. His resurrection from the dead was an earnest of all the deliverance foretold. The power of his grace, like the dew or rain, which causes the herbs that seem dead to revive, would raise his church from the lowest state. But we may refer to the resurrection of the dead, especially of those united to Christ."