View from Heaven

Isaiah 55:1–12

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to Me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a ruler and commander of the peoples. Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations you do not know will come running to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for He has endowed you with splendor.” Seek the LORD while He may be found; call on Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the LORD, and He will have mercy on them, and to our God, for He will freely pardon. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is My word that goes out from My mouth: It will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

Today we have another set of verses rich in insight about God’s character. He is transcendent, His thoughts and ways are always higher than ours (vv. 8–9), He has an eternal or more precisely timeless perspective and He is omniscient. I take comfort in that the context in which He declares this truth about Himself is when He speaks of seeking Him in forgiveness and repentance of the otherwise wicked or evil (vv. 6–7). This makes Him worthy as He is of being the sole Judge of the Earth and the Author of Life. He knows through and through what is in the hearts of people beyond all that appears to us and our limited view, who are we to judge then? But, “the LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart (I Sam 16:7).” In a similar way God has a privileged view over everything that happens, has happened, and will happen and thus His understanding is higher. St. Cleopas asked the LORD somewhat incredulously, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days (Luke 24:18)?” Ironically He is the only one who knows and understands what happened there, and He did proceed to relate His thoughts to them, “Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter His glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself (Luke 24:26-27).” How wonderful it is when God reveals His ways and thoughts unto us and He does just that through His Word and His Spirit upon us, we only need ask. He tells us the danger of not seeking His wisdom through the prophet Hosea, He tells Israel, “so you will stumble by day, And the prophet also will stumble with you by night; And I will destroy your mother. My people are destroyed for lack of wisdom. Because you have rejected wisdom, I also will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. The more they multiplied, the more they sinned against Me; I will change their glory into shame (Hosea 4:5–7).” The Apostle James exhorts us, God does not leave us in the dark about Himself, ourselves, and the world we live in: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you (Jam 1:5).” Ask of God in prayer, search His truth in His Word, seek guidance from His Spirit, indeed He has invited us to come reason together with Him (Isa 1:18), just as much as He invites the thirsty to drink, and the hungry to eat (vv. 1–2) “for the LORD gives wisdom; From His mouth come knowledge and understanding (Prov 2:6).” As a sidenote, it is interesting to find that the analogy God uses here for His Word is of the wayer cycle, which means, the prophet and the people at that time already seem to understand the way rain and snow works, that it goes down from heaven and returns to it, though not without blessing the earth first with nourishment (v. 10), we tend to always disparage people in history and dismiss their thinking as primitive and even superstitious, but this is clearly not the case. Physicist Dr Aron Wall maintains that “it was perfectly obvious to any pagan philosopher or early Christian that Nature proceeds according to orderly laws, and natural processes. Modern Science can take credit for unifying the description of many phenomena into common mathematical frameworks, but to act as though the existence of order in Nature is a modern discovery is simply absurd.” More to the point though is that God’s Word refreshes our lives like rain, and it purifies hearts, convicts us of sinfulness and reinforces our need for Christ, it will not return to God in His Heavens empty just as much as all His revelations do like in nature (Rom 1:20), in dreams and visions, in His loudspeakers in troubled times (Lewis), in His still small voice (I Kings 19:11–12), He desires for us to be restored in our relationship with Him (v. 11) and He will accomplish it.S