This is a sensuous season, a season of smells, sights, sounds…

...chestnuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack Frost nipping at your nose;
yuletide carols being sung by a choir
and folks dressed up like Eskimos...

Jingling bells and sleigh bells and silver bells, a mother's deep prayer and a baby's low cry. It's a season for the senses. Isaiah the prophet turns poet when he tries to picture the promise of God's salvation, the hope of God's redemption, the joy of God's good news, and new life in our midst.

But first, Isaiah describes God's judgment of evil.

The poet prophet exhausts his wildest imagination to picture the desolation with smoldering ruins, haunted by wild beasts, the stifling stench of decay and the heavy silence of death. It's something right out of Dungeons and Dragons or T…