Hope past hope’s conceiving - Day 4
Isaiah 40:21-25, 28-31
21 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in;
23 who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
24 Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
25 To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One….
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
30 Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
31 but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
The end of the passage (vs. 28-32) is often quoted as a promise of hope and strength and well it should be. However, we should not miss the parallel between vs. 21 and vs. 28 – “Have you not known? Have you not heard?”
The God who will give strength to the tired and the powerless, who will lift up those who wait on God with the wings of eagles, who will help his people walk and not faint. This is also the God who brings powerful people and the elites to nothing, who blows away all the things human beings seek to create or establish. This is the God who is so great that human beings are but grasshoppers in comparison.
Such a vision of God, who breaks into human processes and brings the plans of human beings to nothing, is a disruptive God. A God who does this is unnerving for human beings, for we face the question: will God disrupt our plans? God disrupts the plans of those who in arrogance think that God is not needed. God disrupts the plans of those who think they know what God should do and start to help God out with what God should do. God disrupts those who think they know better than God what should happen.
God’s plan is a good plan, but we cannot know it fully (“his understanding is unsearchable”, vs. 28). God’s plan includes those who think they no longer have a place in what God is doing because they are too tired, too worn out, too weak, too unimportant. The humble and the overlooked, they are the ones to whom God gives hope. They are the ones who with energy and perseverance live now in the promise that Christ will come again. In that hope they live their lives.
PRAYER:
Lord God, disrupt our lives when we seek to tell you how to act and be, disrupt our lives when we claim to know better than you do what should happen next. Teach us the humble path of waiting for your timing to lift us up. In Jesus’ name. Amen.