a powerful, compassionate God

Friday, I wrote about the glorious promise of strength in Isaiah 40. As I noted then, the concluding promise of strength to walk, run, and rise up gets even better when put into the bigger context of the chapter. I backed up just a few verses to consider the contrast of the youth who faints with the strength that comes from God. But the picture Isaiah paints grows richer and fuller when we take the chapter as a whole.

It begins with the famous “Comfort my people” and continues with “speak tenderly to Jerusalem.” That sounds good. But then, as we move further, we find God’s greatness described in wonderful pictures and contrasted with the smallness, the weakness of man. We are told that “all flesh is grass” and that it dies under the breath of the Lord. And just so we don’t miss the point, Isaiah reiterates, “Surely the people are grass.”

A little later, we get a series of images that reinforce the magnitude of God and His power:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance?

We sing with our children “He’s got the whole world in His hands” as a tool to teach them that they are secure in His care. That wasn’t my initial response when I read this verse. Isaiah gives us image after image of God’s ability to measure what is, to us, immense. I love the way he uses and over and over: “Who can do this and this and this and that?”

A few verses later we are told that “all the nations are like a drop from a bucket”–no,

All the nations are as nothing before him,
they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

Okay. I’m feeling small, and not particularly comforted. How about you? But Isaiah continues with more pictures:

• compared to God, earth’s “inhabitants are like grasshoppers”
• He “stretches out the heavens like a curtain”
• He “makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness”; “he blows on them, and they wither”
• He knows the stars by name and keeps them in their place

Having built this portrait of the incomparable power of God, Isaiah then asks another question:

Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?

He continues,

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.

I confess that when I first read this section, I thought we were headed for a rebuke. Sometimes, when God’s people are presented as saying “My way is hidden from the Lord,” the idea is that they think they can get away with sin. But not so here. This time, the question is, “Why doesn’t God see my struggle and do something? Why am I feeling disregarded by God?” And Isaiah’s answer is masterful: this God who does not faint or grow weary gives His strength to the weary so that they can be like Him.

Isaiah tells us, “Take comfort in your trouble!” and he invites us to consider:

• this God who is so big that He can hold the oceans in His hand,
• this God who is so strong that He can keep the stars in place,
• this God who sees the nations as nothing,
• this God who can breathe and wither the grass:

this God who is so big and strong and amazing–He cares for you. He who has limitless strength will give His strength to you.

Tagged as: God, Isaiah, power, promise, strength