(Isaiah 44:24-45:13; Romans 9:14-21)
Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the one who formed you in your mother’s womb: “I am the Lord, who made all things; I alone stretched out the heavens above you, and no one helped me spread out the earth beneath your feet. I am the one who reveals false prophets for the fools they are and brings their predictions to nothing, and who makes nonsense of the knowledge of those who consider themselves wise, while I confirm the words of my servants and cause their predictions to be fulfilled. I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I form the light and create darkness; I bring well-being and create disaster. I am the Lord who does all these things.”
This is the word of the Lord. In this passage, God gets down to details about how he’s going to set his people free from Babylon—he even names names: he’s going to raise up a conqueror named Cyrus, the king of a pagan nation, and use this pagan who doesn’t even know him to return the Jews to Jerusalem and begin the process of rebuilding the city and temple of God. Such a claim invites two different reactions from two different groups of people. One, what right does he have to claim to do this? And two, how dare God use a pagan conqueror to accomplish his purposes? Why doesn’t he raise up another Moses, another hero of Israel, to lead this second Exodus? The answer to both questions is this star-blasting affirmation of the absolute sovereignty, the absolute lordship and the absolute right of rule, of God. This is of course something that’s been stressed a few times already in the chapters leading up to this one, but it reaches a new level and a new pitch of intensity here. Just consider the levels on which God’s sovereignty is asserted in this passage.
One, the Lord is the one who formed you in the womb. He made, specifically, you. Your character, your body, your gifts, your strengths and weaknesses, the things you value and the things you dislike, aren’t simply the semi-random product of your genes and your environment; sure, God used your genes, and he used the environment in which you grew up and in which you live, but he is the one who created you and who made you who you are. He gave you the gifts you would need to do the work for which he created you, and he gave you the character and temperament he desired you to have to be the person he wants you to be. Granted, to be human and not God is to be sinful, and so you also have traits that aren’t what God wants for you—but even those have been allowed for, and even in those, he’s at work to teach you to trust him and depend on him, and to trust and depend on others. The point is, God knows you far better and far more deeply than you know yourself, because he is wholly responsible for making you who you are, and he is Lord over your life not just at the superficial level, but all the way down to the deepest wellsprings of your character and nature.
Two, the Lord rules all creation because he made all of it. He is the Author of the story, and it’s his word that brought all things into being; as the author, he has absolute authority over everything that is in the same way as I have, under him, absolute authority over this sentence. Indeed, his is far greater, not only because his authority is over me and working through me as I author this sermon, but also because at any given point I might trip over my tongue and say something other than what I intend, while God never does such things. His authority is not only complete, unrestricted by any limitation whatsoever, it’s also perfect, unflawed by any error of any kind, and perfectly sufficient, not shared with anyone or anything beside himself. It’s not just that no power can compete with God’s—it’s that, as he declared in chapter 40, beside him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand. Any resistance or opposition to him lasts only as long as he permits it, and only within the bounds that he sets.
Three, the Lord rules over all things because there is no one else who can compare to him. There is no one else who has the power to do what he has done, and can do; he is unequalled in might. There is no one else who has the wisdom and understanding even to see the future, let alone to bring it about; others may try, but he frustrates their attempts and exposes their futility with no difficulty whatsoever. Only God can declare the future and then bring it about, and he can do so in any way he chooses; only he can raise up Cyrus and then open the way to conquest before him, such that no one will be able to resist his armies until he has accomplished all that the Lord intends for him to accomplish. Only the Lord formed the earth and set the sun, the moon and the stars in motion above it, and only he keeps it all together and keeps it all moving; he is unmatched in power, in wisdom, and in glory, and he has no rival, nor anyone even close.
Four, the Lord is in control in everything that happens—everything. “I am the Lord, and there is no other,” he declares. “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and I create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things.” This is not to say that God desires bad things to happen, as if he enjoyed them; but it is to say that nothing happens apart from God’s power and his sustaining will. There is nothing good that does not come from his hand, and there is no trouble and no disaster that does not happen on his sufferance. God could, for instance, have prevented 9/11; he could have given Osama bin Laden a fatal accident years ago, or changed Bill Clinton’s mind to green-light bin Laden’s assassination, or had him knifed in the back by some Afghan tribesman. He didn’t choose to do that. He could have prevented our current economic crisis—fairly easily, in fact; he didn’t choose to do that either. I don’t know his reasons, for these or for any other disasters, and I won’t presume to declare the mind of God; but whether he decreed them for judgment or permitted them for other purposes, the testimony of Scripture is clear that they happened only by God’s will. Indeed, Scripture is clear that nothing happens, for good or ill, that is not in some way an expression of the sovereign will of Almighty God.
This is a hard word for us. That God sends good things—yes, of course; that only God deserves the credit for the good things that come to us—which is to say, that we can’t take credit for them ourselves—is usually not something we want to consider. Indeed, for many people, that’s a painfully hard idea to accept. But that God sends bad things—that’s something else again. Does that make God the author of evil?
There are those who have believed so, and who have responded either by rejecting God or by rejecting the biblical testimony to his power and lordship. But the truth is, it doesn’t. God did not create evil—he could not do any such thing, because it’s completely contrary to his nature—nor did he ever desire that evil things should happen. However, when our first ancestors fell into sin, he chose not to obliterate them, toss out the world he’d made, and start over, but rather to put a plan in motion to redeem their sin; as a consequence, while he may at times prevent us from sinning and forbid disasters from occurring, there are other times when, for his own purposes, he doesn’t. The important thing is that there is no evil he permits in which he is not in some way at work in order to redeem it—and there is no suffering he allows in which he does not share, in the body of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. God is not aloof from the pain of this world; in Christ, he has borne it all.
In dealing with all this, we are of course in very deep water, looking into mysteries which are beyond our ability to comprehend; which is at least part of the reason why God’s plans are so often mysterious to us, and even at times seem to make no sense at all to us. This is particularly true when we think we have a better idea for what God could and should be doing; if he would just do this thing, we think, everything would be so much better than it is—so why isn’t he doing it our way? That seems to have been the response of some, perhaps many, in Israel when God declared that he would return his people to their homeland through the work of a conquering pagan king, rather than through the heroic leadership of one of his own people; and to them, God directs one further statement of his lordship: “Who do you think you are to argue with me? Does the clay have the right to complain about what the potter makes from it? Does the pot have the ability to question the potter’s skill? Or does anyone have the right to go to a parent and question whether their child has the right to exist? Please, feel free to give me your orders—I’m only the creator of the universe, after all; I’m sure you have much to tell me that I don’t already know.”
This is, of course, a potent blend of irony and sarcasm designed to give a real kick to God’s point: we don’t know enough to question his plans and his decisions. God alone sees everything, and he alone is aware of everything that has to be considered, and it’s on that basis of his total awareness and infinite understanding that he has set his plans in motion; we only see a part of the picture, and a small part at that, where he sees the whole. If he chooses to advance his purposes not by giving us success, but by giving success to someone we don’t like, someone who doesn’t even know him or give him credit, that might not make sense to us—but God sees a lot more of the picture than we do. If he chooses to show mercy to some and not others, to bless some and not others, that’s not unjust, because the truth is that none of us can claim to deserve his mercy and his blessing; God is not capricious and he doesn’t act for no reason, but he has perfectly good reasons for everything he does. We just don’t see them. The mystery of God’s ways really isn’t in God at all, it’s in us—in our limited perceptions, and the limitations of our minds and our ability to understand what’s really going on.
I said last week that the first lesson God tries to teach his people—over and over and over again—is “Trust me. Trust me. Trust me”; and that’s ultimately the point of this passage. In the easy times, when you have plenty of money and everything’s going well, trust God that he’s providing for you, and giving you extra to give away to those in need, and to store up for the hard times when they come. In times of disaster, trust God that he’s still with you and still working for your good, that he’s allowed the disaster and that he’ll bring you through it—that even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need fear no evil, for he is with you, and the rod of his strength and the staff of his guidance comfort you. In times when the way before you is clear, trust God that he has opened the way, and in times when you can’t see where to go, trust him that he’s holding you by the hand and leading you on, one step at a time. As the poet and hymnwriter William Cowper wrote, “You fearful saints, fresh courage take; the clouds you so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.”
Those aren’t just words on Cowper’s part, either; the story behind that hymn is an interesting one. Cowper battled mental illness for years, and the story is told that finally one day he decided to drown himself in the Thames. He called a cab and told the driver to take him down to the river, but the driver got lost in a thick London fog and couldn’t find his way; after driving around London blind for quite a while, the cabbie finally stopped and let Cowper out. Much to Cowper’s surprise, when he dismounted from the cab, he turned and found himself standing on the doorstep of his own home. God had allowed the illness with which he wrestled, but when it drove him to kill himself, that, God prevented; he had sent the fog to save Cowper’s life. Even in our blackest moments, God watches over us.