Waiting for God to Renew Our Strength—Lectionary Reflection for Epiphany 5B (Isaiah 40)

Isaiah 40:21-31New Revised Standard Version UpdatedEdition

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.
²⁶ Lift up your eyes on high and see:
    Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
    calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
    mighty in power,
    not one is missing.

²⁷ Why do you say, O Jacob,
    and assert, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
    and my right is disregarded by my God”?
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.

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                To what degree is God omnipotent, all-powerful, and mighty? These are questions many Christians are asking. Traditionally God has been understood to have sufficient power to do what God needs to do. Often, we speak of this divine power in philosophical terms as God being omnipotent.  Biblically, the word most commonly used in English translation is God Almighty. Lately, there have been debates as to whether this is truly the biblical understanding of God’s power. Some, including Tom Oord, have spoken of the “death of omnipotence.” He offers instead “amipotence,” a word he coined to speak of the power of love. Often the debate over divine power is rooted in theodicy. That is, the philosophical attempts to defend God’s goodness in the face of evil. The premise of some is that if God is truly loving and has the power to rid the world of evil, then God should do so. If God is loving and doesn’t rid the earth of evil, then perhaps God lacks the power to do so. That’s a huge conversation. I’ve participated in some of these conversations. I’ve reviewed Tom Oord’s book The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, and I’ve raised questions about his interpretation and that of others. Ultimately, when it comes to theodicy, I’ve decided that none of them truly resolves the problem. Thus, I maintain that God is love, that God has enough power to do what God needs to do, and evil exists. Somewhere in all of this discussion, we have to place human freedom. In other words, is evil the price we pay for human freedom?

                I’m reading at this moment Sergius Bulgakov’s book The Bride of the Lamb, which deals with theological anthropology, including human freedom and the problem of evil. Being that he’s an Eastern Orthodox theologian and not beholden to Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin, he offers a different perspective. I’m only at the middle part of the book, so there is more to come. Unlike the four previously mentioned figures, Bulgakov endorses omnipotence but makes more room for human freedom. At the same time, he embraces a form of synergism that people like Tom Oord might resonate with. Regarding evil, I will offer this definition from Bulgakov and leave things there for the reader to pursue further.

Evil is not a substance but a state of creaturely being. “The prince of this world” is not a god but only a rebellious creature. As it is most commonly defined, evil is an absence of good, sterēsis, privatio, an accident, a parasite of being. In the positive sense, only Good, only God and His power in creation, exists. Ontologically, evil does not exist, but is a phantom of nonbeing. [Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 147 - Kindle).

Of course, evil is present in the world. We can’t ignore it because it makes itself present daily in the violence and vulgarity we see around us and perhaps participate in. Turning again to Bulgakov, I will leave this addition to what I posted above:

Evil arises in time, just as it has its end in time. One can say that, in a certain sense, evil is created by creatures (both angelic and human), but, of course, not “out of nothing” (which is the character of God’s creation). Rather, it is created out of the creatures themselves, who are created by God. In this sense, evil is a parasite of being; it arises in being as its sickness; it gets its strength from being. Actualized nothing becomes a reality. [Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 153 - Kindle).

Evil is a parasite, a sickness that arises out of creatures God created. Is God to blame for evil? Perhaps. At least, that God created humanity with a certain degree of freedom seems to have given rise to evil. Now natural disasters, that’s a very different question and not one we can deal with here.

                As we move toward the conclusion of the season of Epiphany (Transfiguration Sunday follows), a season of revelation and enlightenment, we hear this word from Isaiah 40, which invites us to lift up our eyes toward the heavens where God sits enthroned. As this reading from Second Isaiah suggests, God is high and lifted up, sitting above us, looking down on creation. It’s a vision of reality common to the ancient world but very different from our own. As the first Russian cosmonaut observed, heaven doesn’t seem to sit above the earth. He is correct, the universe is vaster than anything an ancient Jew like Isaiah could imagine. Our ability to hear this word from Isaiah is hindered if we wish to read it literally. I’m not sure even Isaiah meant us to read it completely as “fact” rather than as a theological declaration. That is how I read it. It is a theological word, not a scientific one. The message then is one of transcendence. In whatever form God exists, God transcends our reality. When I say that I’m comfortable with the idea of panentheism (the world in God and God in the world) but not pantheism (God and the world are identical).

The passage begins with a question. Don’t you know, haven’t you heard what has been known from the beginning, since the foundations of the earth were laid, that God sits above the circle of the earth and looks down upon us, such that to God we look like grasshoppers. When God sits on God’s throne and looks down, we’re but tiny little entities. At least at this point, Isaiah doesn’t call ants. But the point is we’re rather small. It’s a lesson that Isaiah couldn’t learn but we have since we entered the space age. When you head out into the solar system and look back at the Earth, our planet is rather small.

Now that we have heard and now know how small we really are we can attend to what follows. The first word goes to the people who really think highly of themselves, that is the princes and the rulers of this world, who are nothing in comparison to God. This was a message that the Jewish recipients would have taken to heart because Second Isaiah writes to exiles. God is bigger, Isaiah tells them, than the Babylonian emperor. It also serves to remind us that the God Isaiah represents is not a localized deity. The Holy One is the God of the Universe, whose love for creation leads to a concern for those whom God has created. So, when God blows on them, like newly planted foliage, they whither. The tempest, the windstorm, blows them away like rubble or maybe even tumbling tumbleweeds. The call that goes forth here is to put our trust in the God who transcends all things. Yes, to whom will we compare this God whom Isaiah reveals to us? Who is God’s equal? After all, God is the creator of all things. As such God has great strength and power. Should we use the word omnipotent? I leave that one to you, though it does sound as if, in Isaiah’s mind, God has a lot of power.

                As I noted, this message goes to exiles living in Babylon. They no longer have a kingdom or a temple. They’ve lost their ability to determine their future. It may seem as if God has forgotten them. As Isaiah reveals, they had been complaining to God, suggesting that their way was hidden from Yahweh and that God was disregarding them. In other words, living in exile they felt like God had abandoned them. Perhaps you have felt that way at times. At this moment in time, for many people of faith, it seems as if things are stacked against us. Churches are struggling to survive. Seminaries are pulling back, even the big ones. Many of our congregations are aging and wondering if there is a future for them. I’ve watched as the congregation where I was married has closed, the church where I was ordained has closed. The first congregation I served as pastor has essentially closed, though a ministry has emerged from it. Nevertheless, they have left the building. My denomination is much smaller today than when I was ordained nearly forty years ago. These are common experiences. At times, we feel as if we are living in exile. We wonder, is God paying attention?    

             As we experience this season of apparent exile, we hear the prophet point our attention to God, and call on us to “lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?” Yes, who is the creator of all things? In asking this, Isaiah asks us whether we can put our trust in the Creator. It is here that Isaiah offers us a word of hope. While we may grow weary as we live through this season of exile, God doesn’t grow weary. Not only that, but God “gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” While we may pine for the glories of the past, that isn’t necessarily what is ahead of us. Our churches might not once again be filled to capacity like they were back in the 1950s. It also doesn’t mean that the world will suddenly be more just and merciful. Remember that when the exile ended and the people returned, they may have built a new temple, but the kingdom wasn’t restored to what had existed before the exile. The temple they created apparently wasn’t as grand as the previous one (until Herod got involved in building a monument to himself). Still, there is hope to be found in the presence of the Creator if lean on the power of God rather than our own power.

The concluding message is an invitation to lean on God’s empowering presence. Isaiah reminds us that while even youths will faint and grow weary, “those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not grow faint” (Isa. 40:31). While we may look like grasshoppers when God looks down from the throne, at the same time Isaiah suggests that God calls us by name (Isa. 40:26). So, maybe we’re not as small as it seems, at least in the eyes of the God who knows our names. While God is powerful, God does not act alone. Remember God is the one who empowers us. As Ron Allen and Clark Williamson note: “Isaiah does not promise that God will do everything for the people; God will empower them to cooperate with God as God’s covenant people in bringing life and well-being to light. God is not a tool that we may use to meet whatever needs we have. God is the One whom we are to love with all our selves and on whom we may rely to do for us everything that it is appropriate for God to do” [Preaching the Old Testament, pp. 135-136].

 Image Attribution, Koenig, Peter. Grasshopper, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58487 [retrieved January 25, 2024]. Original source: Peter Winfried (Canisius) Koenig, https://www.pwkoenig.co.uk/.