8. “Comfort My People”, Sabbath(2.13)
Read for This Week’s Study
Memory Text
 “Get up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, you who bring good tidings, lift up your voice with strength, lift it up, be not afraid; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Behold your God!’ (Isaiah 40:9, NKJV).

 World War II ended in 1945 while a Japanese soldier named Shoichi Yokoi was hiding out in the jungle on the island of Guam. Leaflets dropped from U.S. planes proclaimed peace, but Yokoi thought it a trick. A loyal, patriotic soldier of the emperor, he had vowed never to surrender. Because he had no contact with civilization, he lived on what he could find in the jungle, a sparse, hard existence indeed.


 In 1972, 27 years after the end of World War II, hunters came across Yokoi while he was fishing, and he only then learned that the message of peace had been true. While the rest of his people had been enjoying peace for decades, Yokoi had been enduring decades of privation and stress.—Roy Gane, Altar Call (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Diadem, 1999), p. 304, adapted.

 Many centuries earlier, through the prophet Isaiah, God announced that the time of His people’s stress and suffering was really over: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa. 40:1, 2, NRSV).

 Let’s take a look at what this means.

 Study this week’s lesson to prepare for Sabbath, February 20.