I have been following a chronological yearly Bible plan for my leisure reading and I have recently hit the book of Isaiah. It is a book packed with prophecies concerning the people of Israel, Zion, and Jerusalem. It is also a book where we get to see how the Lord speaks of His tender love to His wayward people. It is a book that is filled with the Lord’s care, assurance, power, and goodness concerning those who trust in Him and those He has set His eyes upon. However, what caught my attention in the chapters I have read so far is the way God speaks of himself. It blew my mind away because throughout the Bible, there are a few books where we hear God speak about himself directly, for example the book of Genesis, or the book of Job. In other books, the Lord is mentioned by others and not by God directly. Moreover, what the Lord was saying about Himself sort of surprised me and made me realize that the very things He is extolling about Himself, I should be extolling these virtues and characters as well. In fact, I should be paying attention to His character if I am not familiar with it or if I am prone to take things for granted. So today, I would like us to go over some of the sayings of the Lord when it comes to who He is so that we would be careful to walk before Him in humility.
The first way God speaks about Himself in the book of Isaiah is by stating the reality that He has no equal. In Isaiah 40, the Lord declares “To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal? Says the Holy One” (Isaiah 40:25). This declaration holds volume considering that before this statement, God had been telling His people the mighty works He does, works that our minds cannot comprehend or we do not often pay attention to. For example, the Lord asks “who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?” (Isaiah 40:12). So it appears, the mountains and hills as we know them have actually been weighed by the Lord? What about the waters, and this includes all waters in the seas and ocean, so also these waters have been measured? It is astounding! The Lord knows the depth of His creation. Indeed He is the creator. Our brains cannot even fathom this, and even if we tried, we would not be able to comprehend. How could we? So indeed, when God asks, “to whom will you compare me” is simply to show us that there is no one to compare Him to. Furthermore, as is with our human tendency, we love to compare God with ourselves or with our idols. If there is a sin that the Lord hates more it is the sin of idolatry. In partaking in this sin, we diminish the power of God, we equate Him with idols our hands have made, idols that are worthless, amount to nothing, idols that do not speak, yet have eyes; idols that are not powerful yet we call those our gods. As God speaks of Himself, He asks His people “who has taught him the path of justice, taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?” (Isaiah 40:14). These are all rhetorical questions where the answer is always “no one”, they are self-contained. But in these questions, I would like us to not miss who God is and what He is telling us today. First of all, God is not like us, and cannot be equated to us. He made the world we live in and knows it from the inside out. There is nothing about what He has made that He is still trying to “figure out”. Secondly, His wisdom, understanding, justice, majesty, love, compassion, truth all comes from Him. He was all these things and will always be all these things. He did not become just, nor did He become merciful, nor did He learn righteousness, nor did He acquire wisdom, no, all these attributes were His from the very beginning. Hence the name, “the I AM”. We need to stop putting God in a human category.
The second way God speaks about Himself in the book of Isaiah is by declaring His all-knowing prowess. For example, in chapters 41-44, a similar statement from God says “Who declared it from the beginning, that we might know, and beforehand, that we might say ‘He is right’? There was none who declared it, none who proclaimed, none who heard your words” (Isaiah 41:26). Essentially, the Lord is saying one of the characteristics that make Him an all-powerful God, is His ability to see everything and to know everything. He is the beginning and the end for a reason. No one can boast of this power, to be able to say the things that are yet to happen and say them as clearly and potently as God has said them. One example that I find amazing is in the prediction of Cyrus king of Babylon. God told Isaiah several times and maybe other prophets that He would raise Cyrus, give him honours, bestow riches upon him for the sake of Israel, to accomplish His purpose for the people of Israel which was to deliver them from the Babylonian oppression and rebuild His temple (Isaiah 44:26; Isaiah 45:1-6). These are things you cannot just make up. And everything happened exactly as God had declared to His servants the prophets. Cyrus came and made a proclamation to let the Israelites go and rebuild the temple of God. Cyrus did not know this great God, yet God raised Him for this very purpose. I only wish Cyrus had decided to know the One who gave Him all the wealth and power He had. We see that the omniscient character of God is essential to Him being God. As a matter of fact, this is a question the Lord would often ask us, we who foolishly attempt to put Him on a trial which tells me, being omniscient gives you a God-like power, it is almost as though it puts you in that category of deity. Only at this level, can you truly have an audience with God. The reality is, the gap between God and us is too big to be even mentioned or attempted to be measured, it is just not something to be discussed. He is God and we are not.
The third way God speaks of Himself in the book of Isaiah is by highlighting His faithfulness and His covenant keeping power. In Isaiah 46, God says to Israel: “Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (Isaiah 46:3-4). In this passage, the Lord is telling His people that He is faithful, that when He does a thing, He brings it to completion. Unlike men who start and do not finish, the Lord takes care of what He starts, He is able to carry and save. In other words, what the Lord makes, He is strong enough to protect. Therefore, we can rest assured that when we are putting our trust in the One who is above everything, we are safe as the psalmist tells us “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the almighty” (Psalm 91:1). There is full security for those who put their trust in the One true God.
In closing, God does not have to parade His might in this way, He does not have to appear in a court of law or defend Himself by telling us who He is and what that means for us. He is self-sufficient after all, yet He does. And He does this in the hope that we will run to Him, in the hope that we will trust in Him, in the hope that we will honour Him as He should be honoured, in the hope that we will choose life and live. Indeed, as a compassionate and merciful God, He does not want to see people perish, that is why He sent Jesus Christ, His one and only son to die on the cross on your behalf and on mine so that in believing in Jesus, we would have eternal life, we would now be called sons of God (John 3:16; 1 John 3:1). What a gift He has for us! Not only that, He wants us to come to Him so that we would have an abundant life in this earth and in the one to come. I pray you repent of the ways you have taken for granted this great God and that you begin to realign your mind with His character and submit to Him. If you do not know this great God, I invite you to get to know Him and there is not a better time than today to do that, so read the Bible, call upon His name, repent of your sins and you will not be disappointed. May the Lord help us all. Amen!
A Word Aptly Spoken 