Today’s reading: Isaiah 40; Revelation 6
I don’t spend enough time sitting in wonder at the utter transcendence of God, let alone the unbelievable fact of His love for us despite being so far beyond us in every way.
The picture of Yahweh that Isaiah paints in Isaiah 40 is jarring because it is just so impossible. Isaiah anthropomorphizes God to try to capture just the edge of His greatness, power, and complete otherness from us, and even that picture is unbelievable. He starts off with God measuring the waters of the earth in the hollow of His hand, which, if you’ve ever tried to hold water in the hollow of your hand, you know how little you can hold. So immediately we are struck with a picture of a being, not like the gods of the nations, who were powerful, but still largely operating on a human-ish scale, but a being on an absolutely cosmic scale. For God to be able to hold the waters in the hollow of His hand, to mark off the heavens with a ruler, to weigh the mountains of the earth on a scale, etc., the entire earth would be no larger than something like a baseball before God.
Isaiah’s point is obviously not to tell us how physically large God is, but to draw our attention to just how completely different, powerful, and high above us God is. He sits above the circle of the earth, and all its inhabitants are like grasshoppers before Him, and yet how much does He still love us? How far was He still willing to go to redeem and adopt us into His family??
We are truly insignificant before God. Or at least we should be. We are infinitely closer in power, size, and physical significance to a single ant than we are to God, and yet God has called us significant.
The transcendent God considers us so significant, in fact, that He was willing to put on flesh, dwell among us, and ultimately be tortured and murdered by us, all so that He could bring us back into His family.
It really just helps drive home the absolute privilege the gospel is, that such a God was willing to suffer and die so that we could be adopted into His family by faith alone. We should be so insignificant as to be counted as nothing before Him, and yet God, by His choice to love us, has granted us a significance and importance beyond understanding.
Thank you , Lord.
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