High and Humble
Isaiah 57:15, Hebrew 4:12-16[1]
I’ve told you recently about some of my
favorite Bible verses. Another one is Isaiah 57:15: “Our holy God lives forever
in the highest heavens, and this is what he says: Though
I live high above in the holy place, I am here to help those who are humble and
depend only on me” (Isa 57:15, CEV). I love the way that verse
combines two important aspects of who God is: God is both far beyond our
ability to comprehend, and also as close to us as the very air we’re breathing
right this minute. I like this verse because I’m not so sure we do a very good
job holding those two essential concepts together. We’re comfortable with a God
who “lives away up there,” but I’m not so sure we’re comfortable with a God who
“walks beside me day by day.” At least I would suggest the way we live our
lives indicates we’re happy to keep God at arm’s length, or perhaps more!
Think about it: we want a God who’s bigger
than our problems. And we want a God who’s bigger than our problems to help when
we ask. But we really prefer to live our own lives, thank you very much, when
it comes to all the other aspects of life we think we can “handle.” I’m not
sure we really want a God who gets involved with every aspect of our
lives. If he does, it means we have to surrender every aspect of our lives to
God. As much as we may say we want to do that, I have a sneaking suspicion that
most of us prefer to stay in control. For some of us, I would say we might prefer
that God would simply mind his own business and stay out of ours!
But that’s not the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God who brought the children of Isael out of slavery in Egypt and then again brought them home from exile in Babylon. It’s not the God who came to live among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and who fed the hungry, embraced the outcasts, and got down and played with little children. Yes, God is the one who “lives forever in the highest heavens.” Yes, God is the one whose love for us and whose work on our behalf is infinitely beyond anything we can even dare to imagine (Eph 3:20). That also means that God is the one who is living and working in all our lives all the time. We may not even be able to dare to imagine what God is doing in and through us right now, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Bible insists God is indeed working in us, giving us “the desire and the power to do what pleases him” (Phil 2:13, NLT).[2]
That brings us to our Scripture lesson from
Hebrews for today. We see a reflection of this belief that God is always at
work in our lives in the statement that “the word of God is alive and
powerful.” We may not always be aware of God’s living and powerful work in our
lives because we’ve come up with so many ways to pay attention to anything but
that. Again, I would say part of the reason why we prefer to distract ourselves
from what God is be doing in our lives is because we’re really not all that
comfortable having God that closely involved in our lives. If God’s word truly
“exposes our innermost thoughts and desires” as our lesson says, we may want
God to keep his distance. We may prefer a God who “lives away up there” because
we really don’t want to get that close to the God who is more powerful than we
can imagine and who works in our lives to accomplish his will, not ours!
But our scripture reading from Hebrews
emphasizes that God’s powerful work in and through us right here and right now
is not something we should fear. And that’s another lesson we learn from Jesus.
Just as we believe that Jesus came in person to show us what God is truly like,
so also we can trust in the image of God that Jesus shows us. Last week we saw
that image reflected by playing with children. This week our lesson from
Hebrews reminds us that, because he was willing to become like us and suffer
for us, Jesus shows us the depth of God’s compassion and mercy. As our lesson
puts it, Jesus “understands our weaknesses” because he “faced
all of the same temptations as we do” (Heb 4:15, NLT).
While that statement is truly comforting, it’s
also one that can be confusing. We have a hard time understanding how God can
be both bigger than we can imagine and also intimately involved in every aspect
of our lives. Our Scripture lesson today holds those two seemingly
irreconcilable affirmations together by referring to God in terms of
approaching “the throne of grace.” On the one hand, clearly God is depicted as
one who exercises authority and power from a “throne.” The Bible consistently
portrays God as the one who reigns over the entire created order. Not just what
we can see, but all the galaxies that exist throughout the universe. God is the
one who reigns over all the nations, and over each of our lives. God sits on a “throne”
with authority and power.
And yet on the other hand, the Scripture
lesson speaks of God’s throne as a “throne of grace.” The Bible reveals to us a
God who empathizes with our struggles and sympathizes with our plight, a God
who shares our pain and our suffering. The image of God revealed by Jesus
Christ, the crucified savior, is one of compassion, and mercy. One aspect of
our understanding that God became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth is that his
experience of our full humanity reveals to us that God really and truly
understands what we’re going through. It’s easy to think that God is so far “up
there” that he really can’t identify with or understand what we have to go
through in this life. But the lesson reminds us that Jesus “faced all of the
same temptations as we do.” That means God cares deeply about us and empathizes
with us so that God is intimately involved in every facet of our lives. For
this reason, our Scripture lesson today invites us to turn in our time of need
to the “throne of grace,” confident that when we do so we will find compassion
and mercy.
That brings me back to the verse from Isaiah
57:15. In the version we heard earlier, the translation implies the fact that
God is both exalted and compassionate are in tension with one another: “Though
I live high above in the holy place, I am here to help those who are humble and
depend only on me” (Isa 57:15, CEV). But I find it interesting that in
the New Living Translation, those two aspects of God’s character aren’t
in tension at all: “The high and lofty one who lives in eternity, the Holy One,
says this: ‘I live in the high and holy place with those whose spirits are
contrite and humble. I restore the crushed spirit of the humble and revive the
courage of those with repentant heart’” (Isa 57:15, NLT). The “high and
holy place” where God lives is precisely with “those whose spirits are contrite
and humble,” precisely with us. God’s exalted power is displayed precisely in
his willingness to humble himself in order to get involved in our lives, in
every aspect of our lives.[3] And, of course, the ultimate purpose of God’s willingness to get involved in
our lives to that extent is to transform us into the joyful and free people he
created us to be, so that we might share his love with others and finally enjoy
that love in his presence forever.
[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/13/2024 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf. Philippians 2:12-13 in The Message: “Be energetic in your life of
salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy,
an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give
him the most pleasure.”
[3] Cf. William C. Placher, Narratives of a
Vulnerable God, 19: “God’s power is
the power of love. … in freely loving, God is most of all who God is, most
exemplifying the kind of power God has.” Cf. similarly Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics, 4.1:159: “In His high majesty He is humble. It is in this high
humility that He speaks and acts as the God who reconciles the world to
himself.
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