God Is Everything

Isaiah 40:21-27 “God Is Everything”

It’s been 4 weeks since we’ve looked at Isaiah 40 together. Our passage this evening is found in chapter 40, verses 21-27. Next Sunday evening, Lord willing, we will finish up this chapter and move unto our next study. Since it’s been 4 weeks, let’s start reading at the beginning of the chapter.

Read Isaiah 40:1-27

In verses 1-11, we find 3 voices, crying out the good news about God.

-Prepare the way: God comes with salvation

-People are grass, but God’s Word stands forever

-Behold your God, the mighty Lord and gentle shepherd

In verses 12-26, God takes up a disputation or an argument with His people. They believe the wrong things about God. God sets his people straight: I am great, I am powerful, and I care about you! Verse 27 contains Israel’s wrong views about God. In verses 28-31, God tells his people that he really does care.

In our passage, God wraps up his argument. He repeats quite a few themes from verses 12-20.

1. We need to remember revelation (21)

Sometimes, the most important thing you can do in life is to remember. Like remembering to brush your teeth…remembering your mom’s birthday…remembering that you set a bag a groceries on the roof of your car. As some of you heard on Wednesday night of my painful experience: remembering to turn on your crock pot before you go to church. In the Christian life, many of our problems can be traced back to not remembering the truth we already know. The Apostle Peter says this to Christians in 2 Peter 1:12-13:

“Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. 13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder…”

This is the problem that Israel had. This is the problem that we have. We don’t remember who God is. And really, if Isaiah 40 is anything, it is reminding God’s people about God. Look at verse 21. God had revealed specific truth to his people at the beginning. The truth has been available to them to hear and to understand.

Isaiah 40 talks about God as Creator. From creations we can discern God’s eternal power and divine nature (Romans 1). But that’s not what God says here. He has given his people more than the witness of creation. He has revealed himself in WORDS. God says: don’t you remember?!

John Calvin explains why God repeats himself in Isaiah 40:

“It is because we are so prone to distrust, that the very smallest occasion makes us waver; and therefore the Prophet is constrained to repeat the same thing in many ways, that he may keep our weak and inconstant hearts in the exercise of confidence in God.” –Calvin

We are weak and frail. We are grass. God needs to remind us over and over again. When we come to church, when we open our Bibles, our first goal should not be to learn something new. It should be to encounter God. Often when we see God in His Word, we see something that we already know, that we must be reminded of. Much of the Christian life is trusting what we already know and acting on it.

I’ve heard people says- I didn’t learn anything in S.S. or from the message. Yes, we need to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ. We need to move from taking in milk to chewing on meat. But that kind of attitude that says—I didn’t learn anything new—often points to something different. It shows pride. They do not know the depth of their own sinfulness and frailty as a human. They think they are above being reminded about the truth. That is a bad place to be. I’ve been there before, and you don’t want to go there. We should always be glad to hear again the basic truth about God and the gospel. Because we need it.

What does God remind his people of?

2. God routes the rulers (22-24)

When I say route the rulers, I do not means that God gives the rulers directions to the nearest gas station. I mean that he gets rid of them. God sits above the circle of the earth. Think of the sky as a dome, or gazing at the horizon- it’s a circle as you look around. God sits above all that and sees the mighty rulers as little grass hoppers. *Crunch* The heavens…the stars in the sky are to God like pulling closed a curtain. They are like setting up a tent. Maybe setting up a tent sounds scary and complex to you, but the idea is that to God, the universe is like a common household object. Verse 24, he blows on the rulers like stubble or chaff. They are blown away easily. The rulers are setting up their kingdoms, and in a moment later God takes it all away with a breath.

We need to be reminded of God’s power over rulers in this election season. We need to be reminded who really is in charge as we face the moral upheavals in our country. There are many politicians saying a lot of big things these days. Come next November, the nation will be on the edge of their recliners, waiting to hear the results. Billions of dollars will be dumped into the campaigns. Untold hours will be spent promoting candidates. Sometimes we are tempted to wrap our hopes up with a certain candidate, expecting that they will make things better in our nation. Isaiah 40 reminds us to step back and see things from God’s view. The nations and their rulers are less than nothing compared to our mighty God. Our hope and expectation should be bound up with God, not with rulers that can disappear in a single breath.

As one pastor put it: “But we ought to observe what I have already said, that we are so wicked and ungrateful judges of the divine power, that we often imagine God to be inferior to some feeble man. We are more terrified frequently by the empty mask of a single man than we are strengthened by all the promises of God.” –Calvin

We need to be reminded that God sets up and disposes of rulers at his will. He is in charge. What else to we need to remember?

3. We don’t rate THE Ruler (25-26)

When I was getting ready to go to seminary, part of my entry requirement was to take the Miller Analogies Test. I drove from Carlisle to Chambersburg, PA, and sat in a very white room to take this test. The test was simply 120 analogy questions, arranged in order of increasing difficulty. For example: Bach : Composing :: Monet : ? (Painting) Then they got weird:

1. AUTHOR : LITERATE
2. CYNIC : GULLIBLE
3. HOTHEAD : PRUDENT
4. SAINT : NOTORIOUS
5. JUDGE : IMPARTIAL
6. DOCTOR : FALLIBLE

We like to rate and compare things in life. You can’t go anywhere these days, without finding a survey stuck in your face. On a scale of 1-10… Do not do that with God. See verse 18. We go by what God says about himself, not what our restless imaginations dream up. God is incomparable. You can’t rate God!

Right after this, God starts talking about the stars. Why would he do that? In Babylon, where Isaiah readers were, they worshipped the stars. God says: you worship these?! Ha- I created them and order them however I want! At the very least, God is using the stars of an illustration of His great power. It is one thing to say that God created the stars. It is another to say that he arranges them like a general arranges his army. And that he calls them EACH by name! Every single one of the trillions of stars. This is not focused on the raw power of God, but more on the exercise of his sovereign rule over all things. Versus earthly rulers who can only look up and wonder at the stars. Whether it be the ruler of a nation or the stars in the sky, God has planned their course and knows their end.

For his children, God does not just have the power to help you. Like having potential energy. That tank of gas could get you to Niagara Falls and back.  It is far more than that. He IS exercising his power in your life according to a comprehensive plan that will not fail. He is organizing the universe for his glory and for the good of his children.

What do we need to remember? God routes the rulers, he is not to be compared, and last:

4. God regards our rights (27)

This verse is Israel’s view of God. This is WHY they need to remember revelation: because their view of God was wrong.

The first way their view was wrong is this: my way is hidden from the Lord. They thought that God could not see them…that he had forgotten them. They had an error in their view of God. The second way their view was wrong is this: my judgment (or right) is disregarded by my God. They thought that God had forgotten to give them justice. They thought that he did not care about the injustices they faced. They had a wrong view of their experience.

It is easy for us as Christians to acknowledge God’s greatness and God’s power. But when it comes to MY life, we sometimes think that he has forgotten me. He doesn’t see my suffering. He does care about my pain. He ignores the injustice done to me. You are not alone if you think this way. God’s people thought this way thousands of years ago. Christians throughout the centuries have struggle with this question: God is powerful. He can help me. But does he care about me?

God will answer that question in the rest of the chapter. But I would like to close this way. One commentator put it this way:

“The wrong inference from God’s transcendence [God’s greatness that we’ve seen in Isaiah 40] is that he is too great to care; the right one is that he is too great to fail.” –Kidner

When we think of God’s greatness, and his justice, we sometimes wonder if he is too great to care. “God’s off managing the stars, and now my life is a wreck, and our nation has gone to pot!” Does he notice? Does he care?

The biggest display of God’s power and justice come at the cross. God poured out his pent up justice at our sin. But he poured it out on Christ. At the cross, where we see the greatness and justice of God, we also see his love for us. Christ died FOR US. The Father crushed his Son because of his great mercy.

The God who rules over all nature…the God who squashes kings at his pleasure…the God who sits above the world and sees the mightiest rulers as grasshoppers…this is OUR God in Christ. In Christ, God’s greatness is harnessed for our good. As Isaiah 40:11 shows us, he is the mighty shepherd who carries us along.

Your way is not hidden from the Lord. No, he plans your way and guides you in it. He knows your beginning and your end. Your justice is not disregarded by your God. He will keep you to the end, and he will give you justice for all the suffering you have faced from the hands of evil people. In Christ, you are his beloved child. He does care.

Remember the simple truths. God is great. God is powerful. God knows all things, orders all things, plans all things. We are nothing – He is everything. Nations will rise and fall. Kings and rulers will grab power and pass away with a breath. But God never fails. His Word will stand forever. His salvation will come. He will keep his kids to the end. He is everything

“The wrong inference from God’s transcendence is that he is too great to care; the right one is that he is too great to fail.”