Meeting God in a Season of Anguish
In moments of anguish it’s easy to forget that some of our most cherished and comforting traditions emerged in seasons just like these. We need comfort in the midst of our trauma. We need hope for restoration. We need relationship with God. Isaiah 40:1-11 offers us all three.
We’ve mostly forgotten that Isaiah 40:1-11, is a passage born out of anguish. We read these words or hear them sung every December as the opening lines of Handel’s Messiah. They evoke positive feelings of security, warm cider, close relationships, and holiday cheer. We forget the anguish into which these words were written, and the condition into which they speak.
The context of Isaiah 40 is crucial. These words are written to a community in spiritual crisis. The chapters promise judgment coming on the people of Judah. This judgment will take the form of Jerusalem and its temple being destroyed, the royal family becoming castrated servants of the king of Babylon, and the people being scattered through a foreign empire.
Everything upon which the covenant worldview of the people of God was built would be tested by this judgment. Monotheism, the belief in One God, would be upended by the defeat of God’s people by foreign deities. The doctrine of election, one people of God, would be strained to the breaking point by scattering the people through a foreign empire. How will this people survive? Their hope for the future, one place for God’s people, would be challenged by their dispossession of the land, and their scattering into the empire.
Isaiah 40, in 3 distinct voices, point us to God in the midst of anguish. In these words, we encounter comfort, restoration, and the relationship that makes these possible.
The first voice speaks of comfort.
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.
The voice of comfort assures the people that their suffering and judgment is not the end. Conquered people are tempted to believe that God has abandoned them. As a conquered people, Israel might be tempted to turn from God and instead worship the power of the empire in its economic dominance, military prowess, and ability to exercise political will. Isaiah says, “No.” God has not abandoned you. The hardship that you’re enduring now is under the Lord’s hand. God is at work, even in judgment, even in exile.
Some of us balk at any talk of God and judgment. This is because, at least according to Boston University professor Dr. Peter Kreeft, we live in a cultural moment where we have collapsed, the virtues of love, compassion, and goodness all into kindness. And since, we rightly believe God is loving, compassionate, and good we assume therefore that God’s deepest nature is to be kind. (Judgment doesn’t fit with our image of kindness.)
But, according to Peter Kreeft, this is a distortion of God’s character. Kindness has to do with being friendly, generous, and considerate. It has to do with treating others as ‘kin’. It is a virtue. The New Testament even commands us to show kindness to one another. However, while it is not incompatible with the nature of God to include the conviviality associated with kindness, Kreeft argues that God’s truest nature corresponds more deeply to the virtue of mercy. Mercy is compassion or forgiveness shown to someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm. In a fallen, corrupted, and corruptible world God isn’t, ‘nice’. It’s so much better than that…God’s deepest nature is to be merciful.
That’s why the bible demonstrates God’s love as combative and confrontational as well as compassionate and gentle. That’s why in scripture God’s goodness makes moral demands and provides rescue from sin. That’s why God’s is revealed as both compassionate and critical.
In the desolation and anguish brought on by our own sin, the sin of others, or the vulnerability of a world experiencing multiple crises, (COVID-19, racial injustice, economic crisis, political polarization) God’s first word to his people is comfort.
God sees you. God’s mercy is open to you, whatever situation of captivity, judgment, or exile you’re living in.
The fist voice is the voice of comfort. God is at work. The Lord will restore justice.
The second voice is the voice of restoration.
A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
The image here is of work being done in preparation for a royal visitation. Imagine a city preparing to host the Olympic games. I drive through Lake Placid several times a year, and even though the Olympics haven’t been there since 1976, you can still see the buildings and infrastructures that were built to accommodate the Olympics.
Isaiah’s vision is one summoning people to work, to prepare for the Lord’s return to Zion. All that was broken will be restored. This is not a message for philosophical contemplation, it’s a call for shovels. There is work to be done. Our common prayer, ministry, outreach, and acts of mercy are all ways in which God bestows upon simple human beings what one writer calls, “the dignity of causality.”
What would need to happen in your home for God’s glory to be revealed more fully there? What would need to happen in your school, office, department, or studio for God’s glory to be revealed more fully there? What would need to happen in our online and cultural discourse for us to see God’s glory more fully revealed? What needs to be ‘filled in’, what needs to be ‘raised up’?
In the midst of anguish God speaks a word of comfort and a word of calling. We are called fill in and raise up in a way that anticipates the day when God’s glory will be revealed and everyone sees it together.
The third voice shows us how to have relationship with God.
It’s insufficient to believe in the comfort and mercy of God and to be actively involved in the work of God, we are summoned to relationship with God.
A voice says, “Cry out!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand for ever.
I love Isaiah’s utter realism about human beings. There is unflinching confrontation with the reality of human frailty, weakness, and limitation. Sometimes we get this idea that to be godly, or spiritually robust is to be without weakness, fault, or inconsistency. But here the voice is crying out “all people are grass”. God is not unaware of our weaknesses, sin, and inconstancy. God knows all about that and invites us into relationship with him anyway. We don’t need to be smart, powerful, rich, good looking, or talented. We don’t need to be nuanced, culturally sophisticated, highly educated, or socially powerful. In fact, most of those things get in the way of us having relationship with God.
Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
See, the Lord God comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
This final section contrasts what people are like with what God is like. God is powerful, just, and mighty. God is also the shepherd king who is tender and merciful. God carries the vulnerable in his arms and gently leads the mother sheep. God has no rivals in the scope and totality of his power. God has no equal in the depths of his tenderness and compassion.
Do you know God like that? Are you at the same time overwhelmed by the majesty, beauty, and power of God, AND dumbstruck by God’s tenderness and compassion to you? If not, then come and discover life with God. Leave a comment. Reach out and let’s discover together. If you do know God in this way then be a voice like Isaiah’s, a voice calling others to the mercy, restoration, and life with God.