Isaiah 51:1-8
Eternal Perspective

"Listen to me, you who follow after righteousness, you who seek Yahweh: look to the rock you were cut from, and to the hold of the pit you were dug from. Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you; for when he was but one I called him, and I blessed him, and made him many. For Yahweh has comforted Zion; he has comforted all her waste places, and has made her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of Yahweh; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.

"Attend to me, my people; and give ear to me, my nation: for a law shall go forth from me, and I will establish my justice for a light of the peoples. My righteousness is near, my salvation is gone forth, and my arms shall judge the peoples; the islands shall wait for me, and on my arm shall they trust. Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look on the earth beneath; for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment; and those who dwell therein shall die in the same way: but my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.

"Listen to me, you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law; don't fear the reproach of men, neither be dismayed at their insults. For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool; but my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation to all generations."

World English Bible

So often in the Old Testament, we read how the Hebrew people interpreted God based on their immediate situations. If the crops were failing, they must have been disobedient. When the rains were falling, God must be pleased with them. When they bent God's Law for their convenience and profit, they gleefully assumed God's tacit approval of their twisted interpretations so long as enemy armies weren't threatening their region.

Faithful teachers and prophets warned against such temporal and selfish measures applied to God. The Creator should not be expected to pass tests given by the created! God was still God, no matter what the circumstances the Hebrew people found themselves. God was the only God, too, so the victories of opposing tribes was not an indication of God's weakness but an event out of which God's Will could come about. God's timing was not designed for the convenience of human leadership, and God frequently warned that the sins of a current generation would weigh heavy on the succeeding generations.

Still today, the urge to base our interpretation of God on our immediate circumstances is very strong and very much a part of the temporal nature of humanity. Of course we hurt when we experience a loss, and of course we celebrate when we experience a blessing—we are emotional creatures. We should express to God our emotions—and we should listen for God's loving response, firm in our faith that God hears our prayers and answers our prayers. That response is wholly different from the attempted manipulation of God recorded at places in the Old Testament that sought to control or appease God's "emotions".

One root of this sin in the unfaithful Hebrew leadership was their assumptions that God must want what they wanted, and if not, there had to be a way to persuade God to support their desires. Surely God wanted the crops to prosper and the people to eat well. Surely God wanted the nation to expand by taking over land from other tribes, just as Joshua had been commanded to do. Surely God understood the political necessity of establishing temples to false gods to further military alliances. If God only knew and understood the situation as well as the leadership understood it, then God would agree!

We still face these same temptations today. What we want seems so innocent and obvious that we are certain that God would want that for us, and we can be surprised and saddened when something different happens. Why would God not protect us from that problem? Why would God not make certain we get that new job? The answer is that God wants something different and eternal for us. Every difficulty has opportunities for us to exercise our faith and to demonstrate God's grace to others. For the problems that we want to resolve by a new job, God may have much more profound solutions.

In this passage, Isaiah pleaded with his people as they are about to face defeat and exile to remember that God is eternal. They had the stories of faith that demonstrated God's faithfulness in the past, and they could be assured that God's faithfulness would continue, even through a complete human defeat. We are more familiar today with concepts of the eternal than were Isaiah's listeners, but we still need these reminders. We need to consider that in every situation in life, we have the opportunity to respond according to our understanding, or respond as God is leading us to do. We can act temporally, or we can act eternally.

This thought came to me from a personal experience this week. My daughter was commuting to work when her car started having trouble. I drove up to where she was parked on the side of the expressway and switched cars with her. My feeble automotive knowledge confirmed that the car would not move at all and surmised that the transmission had failed. Dreading a very expensive repair bill, I called for a tow truck to take the car to the trusted repair shop at the dealer where I bought the car. The repair shop confirmed my diagnosis, but they also confirmed that the transmission was still under warranty and the cost of the repair and even the towing were completely covered. I lost a few hours of work, and I will be without a car for a week, but these are tiny inconveniences by comparison!

God kept pushing me throughout this experience to remember Whose I was. I failed to do so when I impatiently and aggressively passed a slower car on the expressway, and God let me know that I should have more important priorities than quickly reaching my daughter. God gave me a calm to handle the fear of an expensive repair so that I could be a good listener for the tow truck driver and be gracious with the frazzled workers at the repair shop. I don't believe that my "reward" was finding that the warranty covered the costs—I believe instead that this good news was another choice for me to stay engaged as God's representative in this situation, or to close myself off as I celebrated my personal gain.

I know that God blessed me in this situation by my daughter's safety and by a no-cost major repair, and I am very grateful for these. But I also know that God's eternal plan had more important objectives for me in this situation than my own desires and goals. I know that I will never be smart enough to understand that eternal perspective, nor can I develop and share a checklist of how we are to respond in every situation. I know that I will face more devastating situations than a stranded daughter and a broken automobile, and I have no comprehension of how God wants to use me when those tragedies come. On the other hand, I have faith that God will tell me the steps to take if I will listen, and my life can echo the words in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Kingdom come."