I love the poetic and visual way Isaiah portrays God in today’s Old Testament reading. God is revealed as the sovereign, mighty and powerful King over all the earth, maintaining order and control, irrespective of whatever happens in earthly empires.
Isaiah says that God is enthroned. We are given a picture of God seated on the royal throne in heaven, crowned and ruling in glory. Because God sits above the earth, his might, power and authority is like no other: God is not vulnerable to politics or war. God is immovable. His reign is permanent. God discloses himself as ‘the Holy One.’ The Holy One—there is only one Holy One with perfection, purity, glory, power and authority unlike anyone or anything else.
Through Isaiah, God asks the rhetorical question: “To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal?” (v 25). God directs his audience to look upwards to the starry host:
I’ve shared this with you before, but I felt it fitting to do so again: you might remember hearing last year in our Lord’s Prayer series Kingdom, Power, Glory that scientists estimate that there are as many as 200 billion galaxies in the known universe, with somewhere between100—200 billion stars in each. And these stars are not ‘twinkle, twinkle, little stars’ but some are hypergiant stars, like Eta Carinae which is 100 times the mass of the Sun: around 13,914,000km in diameter! At 40,000 degrees Celsius it’s so hot that it is blue.
God sits enthroned above all this. That is how big God is! What is just as amazing is that God doesn’t use physical force or some kind of giant scaffolding to hold these stars in place. He simply calls and orders. That’s how powerful God’s word is!
Who of us could keep a star like that in place? By contrast we are weak and small, merely a speck in God’s creation. Isaiah puts it this way: the people of the earth are like grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are among the smallest of God’s creatures, which rest in one place for a fleeting moment before they are gone. That’s a fitting image for human beings, and one that brings the necessary correction to thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought: big, mighty, in control, and indispensable. All of the rulers who trust in their own strength and wield mighty power, Isaiah says, are no match for the Holy One.
Often we say how lucky we are, or “it will be OK, touch wood”. I can’t imagine a life left to random chance–that would be chaos. Yet it’s easy to understand why most people look to evolution or some other kind of theory or worldview to give an explanation to life and our beginning and ending. Actually, it is natural to think like that. It comes naturally; it is the way of the flesh; the way of trusting and esteeming human reason as the highest authority; the way of walking by sight, that what is seen is to be believed. That’s the way of the bondage of the will to the sinful nature. When we see trouble, strife, disasters all around, and our bodies in bondage to decay, it seems as though there isn’t a good god, or even any god at all.
But children of God, we have been set free! God has first come to you and ministered to you by the power of his Holy Spirit so that you walk not by sight, but by faith, trusting in the word of the Holy One, who is unseen. Through his word he has revealed himself to you as a gracious and merciful God, whose love for the world in Jesus cannot be stopped. And nothing in all creation can ever separate you from this same love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
That grace of God is so reassuring, just as this text was intended to reassure the original audience whom Isaiah spoke it to, of God’s grace for them—the Israelites in exile. They had rebelled, time and time again, against the Holy One, their King, repeatedly rejecting his commands and turning to the mute and powerless idols of their pagan neighbours. God had brought his right and just judgment on them, deporting them from their own land he had given them where he was personally present to them to hear their prayers and bless them at the Temple. Now they were subject to a foreign superpower, the Babylonians, similar to China or Russia today.
Who would save them now—these fatigued, despairing captives without any resources—in the face of such military might? God had shown them how futile their blocks of wood were; how helpless what they trusted in was.
To humans walking by sight, it looked as though all hope was gone. Would his anger smoulder against them for their unfaithfulness forever? Was he still their God? Were they still his people? So today’s text is part of the section of Isaiah focusing on God promise to return his people from their Babylonian captivity. Although there will be no peace for the wicked, God promised he would not remain angry with his repentant people (Isaiah 57:15-16). He sought to assure them that he is the one in charge, not mere mortals, so he can declare what is going to happen before it comes to pass. God promised that he would yet prevail for his people by using another empire to overthrow their captors. The strength and wisdom of their adversaries and everything humans trust in would vanish:
“He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff” (Isaiah 40:23-24).
Does it feel as though God has prevailed for you? Do you long to see God’s sovereign power in a broken and heart-breaking world? Do you wonder, like God’s exiled people of old, if God really is for you, and with you, with his power and might? Do you know in your head Isaiah’s message of God as Sovereign, enthroned King to be true, yet feel that life experience is one of weakness, defeat and powerlessness—physically, spiritually, emotionally? Does it seem as if God has gone on a hiatus, pressing the ‘on hold’ button while today’s worldwide pandemic of anger, hatred, division and conflict rages on?
As we watch on in shock at how people behave so antisocially with reckless abandon and care for no one apart from themselves, as world leaders bully, threaten and intimidate, and we watch on in horror as families are ripped apart by surface to air missiles, reducing cities to resemble piles of Lego, does it seem like God is far away, as he seemed to the Israelites of old?
God is not far away; not only enthroned above the circle of the earth. He revealed his power in the greatest way when he came down to earth, stepping into our world, clothing himself with our flesh in the most vulnerable existence: a human embryo. He was born to parents failed by the rental market—no room at the inn, and no hospital at which to ramp the donkey. His cot was in a stinking stable representing the mess and filth and dung of human sin, taking it all upon himself to redeem the world, exchanging it with his own righteousness for undeserving sinners.
Jesus has been given all authority over our greatest adversaries: our sinful nature, sickness and death, and Satan and hell. Today’s Gospel reading shows this boundless scope of Jesus’ authority and power as he simply took the hand of Simon’s ill mother-in-law to heal her and help her up. Jesus healed many who waited at the door, with various diseases, and he drove out many demons. This was just the beginning of his victory over evil for the world which would ultimately be fulfilled when he was lifted up, enthroned on the Cross. There the Holy One shed his precious blood for all people, and for you.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, God has not abandoned the world. He has not left us. The Holy One is with us by the power of his Spirit and the ever-present Christ. His mighty word penetrates through the hardest of human hearts, and at his breath the worst tyrant withers like grass. He reigns, and no one will be able to remove him from his throne.
Wherever Jesus’ word and sacraments are, the unseen Christ rules with grace. Just as Jesus ministered with his disciples to those in the Gospels, he and his divine power goes before you, his disciples today, to all whom you meet, so that whoever receives you receives him (Luke 10:16). As you help, he helps, as you console he consoles, as you pray he prays with you: “Our Father in heaven, your Kingdom come.” God’s kingdom does come. It still comes in power and rules with grace over every enemy to God and his will, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
In Christ, God reigns for you. Your Father in heaven has sent his Son to do for you what no one or nothing else can; no medical professional, no Premier or Prime Minister, no army or weapon, no technological or medical discovery, no vaccine or amount of money. People and things such as these will not help us against our greatest foes.
But Jesus does. He still preaches today, and his powerful word that set the stars in the heavens and holds their course will accomplish what he desires for you, through water and the word, through bread and wine: he is the Holy One to make you holy in his holiness, he is the strong one whose strength is made perfect in your weakness, he comes as the Chief Pastor of his church to forgive all your sin, freeing you from the power of darkness, emptying the accusations of the Law, Satan and the guilty conscience of all their power by the power of his absolution. He has brought life out of death, and made it a reality for you in your baptism, where he joined you to himself and his resurrection power.
So do not fear any foe, not even Satan himself. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).
For those who wait for the Lord, turning to him, the promise is that they will be strengthened and sustained to the end. He proclaims to you now: “That is why I have come.” And on the last day when we see what we have hoped for, and Jesus comes to judge the world and set it right—and every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that he is Lord to the glory of God the Father—you will rise with wings like eagles, to rest in the room that has been prepared for you in his Father’s mansion, forever and ever. Amen.
