God’s Grandeur

Readings:    Isaiah 40:21-31

Where: St Stephens, Wai-iti Road, 28 Feb 2018

Minister: Rory Grant

• Macetown story
  • Leave me hanging on the cliff
  • Couldn’t go up, couldn’t go down
  • I felt helpless, small, frightened and alone
  • My world shrunk around me until all I could feel was the dirt scrabbling under my toes and the tears in my eyes
• People of Israel left in a similar situation when they were taken into exile
  • Lost, abandoned and alone
  • Two over-riding questions:
    • Has our God been defeated?
    • Has our God forgotten us?
  • Prophet Isaiah answers both of these questions with a resounding NO!
• God is not dead
  • People of Israel believed that their land had been given to them by God as an eternal inheritance.
  • Morevoer, the City of David, Jerusalem, was the site of God’s holy temple, the holy of holies, the place where God’s presence was made manifest among God’s people
  • Both of these things had been destroyed by foreign armies serving foreign gods.
  • How could they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, when the land was their connection to the Lord?
  • They were facing an unprecedented situation that shook their understanding of God and salvation to the core.
  • Isaiah’s response is a resounding hymn of God’s grandeur and glory “Have you not seen? Have you not heard?”
  • God is not onlyh alive, but he is all-powerful, Lord not just of Israel, but of all heaven and earth.
  • Isaiah’s words are awesome.   Enormous.
  • These words are so beautiful, so huge and overwhelming that we can get lost in them. We are so small and insignificant.  Crushed like grasshoppers.  Blown like chaff.
  • Until the miracle of that last stanza:
    • He gives strength to the weary
      and increases the power of the weak.
      ³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary,
      and young men stumble and fall;
      ³¹ but those who hope in the Lord
      will renew their strength.
      They will soar on wings like eagles;
      they will run and not grow weary,
      they will walk and not be faint.
  • God has not forgotten us
    • All of a sudden, we realise that the grasshoppers are those who use their power to dominate, that chaff are the rulers who oppress God’s people
    • God has not forgotten us
    • All of a sudden those words of awe are transformed from words of fear to words of hope. From words of despair to words of encouragement
    • God has not forgotten us
  • As my world closed in around me, as I was trapped on that cliff, I heard my father’s voice calling out to me. Encouraging me.  Coaxing me out of my current situation into the glory of God’s grandeur.  Encouraging me to sing.  “O Lord you lead me, by the still waters, quietly restoring my soul.  You speak words of wisdom, the promise of glory, the power of the presence of God.  Have faith in God.  Let your hope rest on the faith he has placed in your heart.”
    • All of a sudden, instead of being consumed by fear, I was set free.
    • In place of the fear, I was struck by the beauty of my surroundings. By the sun on my back.  The clear, blue, sky, the flinty dryness of the central Otago schist.
    • I wasn’t just set free, I was transformed
  • Salvation is more than just breaking even.
    • So often we think that being saved by God is just about having our slate wiped clean. A fresh start.  A chance to be the person we should have been all along.
    • There is that, but there is so much more.
    • There si a newness of life. There is a new life that we never could have known, save for the presenece of God in our lives.
    • For Israel, they were not simply restored to the way things had been, tied to the land, reliant on worship in the temple. Instead a whole new way of being was opened to them, where all the world was God’s and worship and salvation and freedom were to be found
    • From the foundations of the earth, all the world is God’s
  • God’s grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

• Salvation is breathing in the grandeur of God
  • Cook camp
  • Huckity huck
• Joy is tasting God’s goodness
  • Have you not seen? Have you not heard?
    The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
    He will not grow tired or weary,
    and his understanding no one can fathom.
  • Amen