Isaiah 1:9 “Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.”
When a “nation” (Isaiah 1:4), that God has so wonderfully blessed with the comforts and blessings of His presence with them, turns from Him to pursue the pleasures of their carnal lust, great ruin and destruction looms on their horizon. When warnings are given, the wicked scoff at them, mock them, reject them, plug their ears, persecute the messengers, and try to quell the warnings. While God is merciful, gracious, and longsuffering; those who continue in rebellion and refuse to repent will come face to face with the wrath of God. The wicked in Noah’s day (Genesis 7) found out that God is not to be toyed with. At the end of the Period of the Kings (II Kings 25; II Chronicles 36), Israel learned that God means what He says. Again, in the New Testament, those who rejected the Messiah found themselves again to be the object of God’s Righteous Wrath (Mark 13:2). Yet, the will of God will not be overthrown; in Noah’s day He saved eight souls (I Peter 3:20), a remnant to repopulate the earth; in Old Testament Israel’s day He saved a remnant that He would return from captivity to repopulate Jerusalem (Ezra, Nehemiah); in the Apostles’ day He preserved a Christian “remnant” to propagate His Church-Kingdom (Acts 11:19). Paul quotes from Isaiah 1:9, but uses the word “seed” instead of “remnant” to emphasize that those saved out of the great impending destruction would produce abundant fruit and propagate the Lord’s Church-Kingdom throughout the world (Matthew 24:14). People destroy themselves, but God always preserves “a very small remnant”, “a seed” to propagate His “church” “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). In every case, out of almost total devastation, God raises up a people faithful to Him.