You Are Mine
Isaiah 43:1-7[1]
Among the fears we can deal with in our lives, the fear of
rejection can be one of the most devastating. For some of us, that fear is only
a “what-if” possibility. But for many of us, it comes from our life experience.
We have actually experienced rejection by those who we thought would give us
love: parents, spouses, children, family, or friends. It is one of the most
painful things I’ve ever had to endure in this life. Many of you have had your
share of rejection, and I think you might very well agree. When you go through
rejection once, or twice, or perhaps more than that, it ingrains in your soul
the fear of being rejected again. And fear is something that keeps us from
fully living our lives.
I think part of the reason why the fear of rejection is so
powerful is that it affects us so deeply. At the core of our being, we long to
feel safe and secure in the knowledge that there is someone in this world who
will always love us, through thick and thin, come what may. When we think we
have that kind of love, and we find ourselves rejected by the ones we thought
we could depend on, it makes it hard to trust that we will ever be safe or
loved again. No matter how kind, no matter how affirming, no matter how loving
someone may be, the thought is always lurking around that they could change
their mind and walk away.
Our Scripture lesson from the prophet Isaiah for today is one that
was addressed to a people who very likely felt rejected by God! They were
people who had lost everything: homes, lives, land, and even in some cases
family. They had been forced to leave it all behind. When the prophet spoke his
message, they were living in exile in Babylon, far from anything familiar. I
would imagine it was hard for them not to feel rejected by God. Though their
faith may have been shallow, they had believed that with God on their side,
they were safe from having to suffer the kinds of things they had gone through.
But the Babylonians brought them to a rude awakening.
One of the Psalms sheds light on how the exiles must have felt.
Psalm 137 is one of the most bitter laments in the Bible. In it, the Psalmist
recounts how their captors asked them to sing the songs of their land and their
faith. But the response was “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign
land?” (Ps. 137:4). In the devastation they felt, they had “hung up their
harps” on the willow trees and instead of singing they sat and wept by the
rivers of Babylon (Ps. 137:1-2). In fact, the end of the Psalm is one of the
most disturbing expressions of the desire for revenge in the Bible. While they
asked the LORD to remember and avenge them, I would think that a significant
cause of their bitterness was the feeling that they had been rejected by God.
Into the darkness of their despair, in the name of the LORD the
prophet assured them that, regardless of what they had been through and in
spite of what they might be feeling, God had not rejected them. The prophet
called on them not to fear, and promised in the name of the LORD that “When you
pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall
not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the
flame shall not consume you” (Isa. 43:2). That probably sounded hard to
believe. They had been through the waters and had felt overwhelmed. They had
been through the fire and had very likely been burned.
In the face of all that they had been through, the basis for this
promise was who God was and what God had done. The prophet called on the people
not to fear the flood or the fire because of who God is: “the LORD … who
created you” and “the LORD your God, …, your Savior” (Isa. 43:1, 3). The God
who had created them in the first place was the same God who had proven that he
was their Savior many times. But perhaps more importantly, he was also the God
who loved them. In the midst of their heartbreak, he was the God who declared:
“you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you” (Isa. 43:4).
Because of that love, he was also the God who had “called them by name” and had
declared definitively: “you are mine” (Isa. 43:1).
From a real-life perspective, you can’t go through a flood without
getting soaked through. And you can’t go through a fire without at least
smelling like smoke, and maybe even getting singed. The hard truth about life
is that bad things happen to good people. And at times it can be so tragic as
to leave us wondering whether there is anyone out there who knows us and cares
about us, including God! The many holocausts that we have witnessed through
history are prime evidence of that hard truth. But the promise is not that we
will never suffer, but rather that these hardships will not consume us. And the
reason for that is that God promises, come what may, that “you are mine.”
The fear of rejection can make life just as bitter for us as it
was for the Jewish exiles in Babylon. And there are some experiences that are
so tragic we can also wonder whether God has rejected us. But the promise of
Scripture is that no matter what we may go through in this life, God has
declared to us, “you are mine.” Nothing can change the fact that God has
claimed us as his own out of his unfailing love for us. In case we have any
lingering doubts, God himself came among us in Jesus to make clear once and for
all that he is our Savior. In Jesus, God demonstrated once and for all, out of
his unfailing love for us, that he has claimed us as his own. The God who
created us and the God who saves us is the one who has declared forever: “you
are mine.”
[1]
©Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 1/13/2019 at Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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