Word of Salvation – Vol. 48 No.17 – May 2003

 

Our Awesome Minder

 

Sermon by Rev W Wiersma

on Isaiah 40:27-31

Scripture Readings:  1 John 3:11-24; Isaiah 40:12-26

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Word of God on which I want to speak to you is found in Isaiah 40 verses 27 to 31. These words from Isaiah seem to be addressed particularly to the Israelites who lived about hundred or more years after the life of Isaiah, when they were in exile in Babylon.

“Why do you say O Jacob and complain O Israel? My way is hidden from the Lord. My cause is disregarded by my God. Do you not know? 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. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary and young men stumble and fall 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 faint.”

The title of my sermon is: OUR AWESOME MINDER.

Let me explain that title a little before I get into my sermon proper. To “mind” is to take care of. To “mind” is to watch over and to look after, and that is what the Lord God does for us – especially for those whom He has brought into fellowship with Himself through His Word of grace and truth, through the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. God is our great and good minder.

But we don’t always think of God as such, do we? We do not always see God as the one who really cares about us and who actually, day by day, looks after us and takes care of our case. In fact, we sometimes think that God takes no notice of us at all. Instead of a buoyant confidence in God there is the feeling that God doesn’t care. Or even that God is powerless to do anything about our plight. It’s true isn’t it? God’s people sometimes get tired and discouraged. Everything seems to be against them – God doesn’t care.

Don’t you think that’s the way the Israelites would have felt at times when they had to make bricks under the threat of the whip in Egypt? And don’t you think they would have felt that way when, hundreds of years later, they were carried to that foreign land of Babylonia? Don’t we read of their complaint in Psalm 137, “by the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept. They said to us, ‘Sing us the songs of Zion.’ But how can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?” Away from our home in the land that God gave us.

It is hard to sing God’s praises when you are going through difficult times. And I believe that every believer has them from time to time. Every believer has his or her moments of doubt, questions that we have to wrestle with. Life is not always a breeze for God’s people.

Imagine living in a country where you are not allowed to come together for worship as Christians, as believers, as children of God. You are not allowed to talk about the Lord Jesus or you might find yourself in jail or shot. Imagine living among people so hostile to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that they think nothing of burning down your home, or raping your wife or of murdering your children.

But we can stay closer to home than that. For we all have our troubles and our sorrows. We all have things that we have carried with us for years on end, sometimes very close to our consciousness. There may be problems with children or tensions with parents. You know your pain. You know what troubles you.

And all the praying that you do – it does not seem to change anything. Things can get so bleak and so dark, so difficult, that all our certainties, all the things we held on to, and drew joy and comfort from, seem to be gone! Even a man like the apostle Paul writes this in the second letter to the Corinthians: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, we want you to know, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia (that’s in Turkey). We were under pressure far beyond our ability to endure so that we despaired even of life, indeed in our hearts we felt the sentence of death.”

That’s how the apostle Paul felt. He felt done for. He despaired of his life. He thought he had no future. Everything was against him and God was, as it were, leaving him there in that hole.

But it is interesting to read what he adds to that. He says that this happens so that we might not rely upon ourselves but on God who raises the dead – who can act beyond what seems to be the end, the finish, beyond where anything else can happen or begin. God even raises men from the dead. He does the impossible. Our hope is to be in Him.

And here the apostle Paul does what Isaiah does in this chapter before us. He turns our attention away from our immediate experience and from our circumstances and encourages us to think about God and His awesome power and care. God is not unaware of what you are going through – whatever that may be, and however long that is taking. God is not unaware. And God is not powerless to help us in His way and in His time.

Isaiah reminds the people of Israel – and all God’s people ever since – to think about things they already actually know. He said, “Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?”

You see, we know things but we fail to apply them to our situation. We fail to think things through. And what is it that we “ought to know” and that we “have heard”? That the Lord is the eternal God, the creator of the ends of the earth.

Some of us have heard that for fifty years and more and still need to be reminded. That God is the creator of the ends of the earth. There is no place in this world that God doesn’t know and where He can’t see you. And He will not grow tired or weary. His understanding, His mind, His knowledge no one can fathom. Our God is absolutely awesome!

We read about that in verses 12 to 26. I suggest you take the time today and read through those verses again. We come across the same sort of thing in Isaiah 40 and onward a number of times where God, as it were, challenges us. Who measured the earth? The seas? The mountains? God has them all sized up – and you too. And your circumstances as well.

Let me just highlight two things that are said about God in this chapter that really spoke to me. First of all, there is the mention that God’s knowledge, or God’s understanding, or God’s mind, is beyond us. It is plainly incomprehensible. We cannot comprehend it. And the second thing is that God’s power and energy are inexhaustible. They’re endless.

First then about God’s knowledge. Let me just quote the verses 12-14 again. “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand or with the breadth of His hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance? Who has understood the mind of the Lord or instructed him as his counsellor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, or who taught him the right way?”

We sometimes think that if we were God we would do something quite different. But God challenges us and says, “Whom did I consult to enlighten me and who taught me the right way?” Who taught God knowledge or showed Him the path of understanding?

As I read that I was reminded of the claim, and I have no grounds to disbelieve that claim, but the claim is made by those who can know, that the total knowledge that we as mankind have, doubles every two years. Every two years we learn as much as we knew up to that time. Now I remember when I was still at school they said that that was so in every ten years. But it seems that with modern technology and the speeding up of computers, they can find out things much faster. For instance they’ve worked out the genomes of whatever, and so it goes on – mind boggling actually.

We human beings continue to discover new things about things that have existed ever since God created them, and we continue to learn as much in two years as we have learned over the thousands of years – so they tell us. Our total knowledge about God’s creation just keeps on growing.

That just floors me, quite frankly, because it means that we ought to be very humble. In two years time mankind will know twice as much as we know today – we know very little then, don’t we? And in ten years time mankind will know 32 times as much as we know today, all told, in factual knowledge. Whether they are wiser is another thing of course. I’m just talking about the factual knowledge that we have of God’s creation. And that goes on and on and it never seems to stop! And God knows ALL of that already.

Do you see the point? Man will never discover anything that God doesn’t know already. And man has 100 or 1000, maybe 2000 or maybe 6,000 or 100,000 years yet left to find out all that God has made and designed. If that is how much God knows, then that’s endless isn’t it? It’s just mind-boggling! That God has created SUCH a universe that it takes man so long just to discover so little. Because as I said, if it is true then we only know one thirty-second of all there is to know if God were to stop the whole thing in ten years time and said, “well, you’ve found out everything”, we only know a teeny weeny little bit of what God has designed and made and already knows.

And that ought to make us very, very humble, oughtn’t it? I mean, sometimes we modern people, we think we know it all. And we tend to think that people two hundred years ago or a thousand years ago were absolutely stupid. Because, you know, we believe in evolution! (I am speaking as a man of the world).

Now in the light of that kind of thinking, we are going to be absolutely stupid in the sight of anyone who is going to live twenty years from now. We ought to be very humble, even in terms of what we know now. Secondly, we ought to be very humble in the sense that GOD, our creator, is so great that we are only just discovering all these things about Him, and all that He has made.

I’ll pass on to the next point. God has created everything and He holds it all in existence. He keeps everything going. He is, you might say, the force behind all that exists. He is the life-giving power of all that exists. He not only created it – He keeps it in being.

Isaiah writes that God brings the starry hosts out one by one. He has made all the stars. Now maybe some of you young people will be able to tell me how many stars there actually are in the universe. Has anybody counted them yet? I’m told that there are billions of stars. Have you ever considered the unimaginable energy and power in all those stars.

I did a little reading about the sun. Our sun is also a star – it’s an average sized star, if maybe a little on the small side. I mean there are smaller stars but there are also stars that are a thousand times bigger than our sun. But listen to what it says in one of my encyclopaedias about our sun as one of the stars. The sun is something like 1.4 million kilometres across in diameter. It contains 99.86 % of all the weight in the solar system – 99.86, so there’s only .14% of the system in the planets. The sun is something like 330,000 times the size of the earth. It’s estimated that the temperature at the core of the sun is something like 16 thousand degrees. And now listen to this – the energy that comes out of the sun with all that activity is reckoned to be equivalent to the explosive power of a hundred billion hydrogen bombs of a megaton each – per second!

Now, I can’t even begin to imagine those figures. A hundred billion, that’s a hundred times a thousand times a million, I understand. (Although, some people reckon that a billion is a million times a million). Anyway that’s immaterial almost. You have the equivalent of a megaton bomb, I don’t know what size it was that was dropped on Hiroshima, whether it was a megaton or less than that, but let’s say it was a megaton – it destroyed a whole city – just voom. A hundred billion of those every second, that’s the kind of energy that is radiated out of the sun. Which, by the way, is what keeps life on this earth going, because without that sun, without that energy emanating, radiating from the sun, life would be impossible upon this earth.

One of the amazing things is that the life on this planet is very finely tuned. A couple of degrees out – that is what they’re talking about with global warming all the time – a couple of degrees out and we could be burned up, or we could be frozen to death.

I was talking about one average little star producing this kind of energy. And that little star is the creation of God but is also kept in being by God. And that’s only one of the billion of billions of stars. Is it any wonder that the prophet says that “God never grows tired”? Because He is the creator who keeps all those things going. If He would grow tired and give up, the universe would collapse into oblivion.

And He gives strength to the discouraged, to the weary. And He gives power to the weak. Don’t say “Oh, if I was only young again. If only I was young I would have endless energy.” “No,” says the prophet, “even youths grow tired and weary and young men stumble and fall. 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 faint.”

The Lord, the God who has created all things, tells us, “I know you. Just as I know the stars, all the billions of stars by name, I know you by name, too.” The knowledge of God is unfathomable. Nothing escapes Him. Not you either. He promises, He has told us, that He loves us. How did He tell us that? In the gospel of Jesus. I, God, love the world, I loved you so much that I sent my Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. The love of God is up front. What we do with it is another question. But God’s love is there.

I’ve been reading the first letter of John a couple of times during my holidays because I’ve been thinking about the question of love and of KNOWING Jesus, KNOWING God. And John, among other things, writes, “God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son.” He who has the Son has life. He who does not have the Son does not have life.

There you have it in a nutshell. He who has the Son of God has eternal life. It is through faith in the Son, through acceptance of Jesus Christ that we receive strength, power, hope and courage. And instead of being weary and demoralised, we are lifted up by the knowledge that Jesus the Son is LORD, raised from the dead. God is working out His purposes. And those purposes may include painful episodes in our life for whatever reason, but looking to Jesus we will not despair. We will not stay in the foreign land of Babylon forever. Our home is in the new Jerusalem and we long for the day that we will finally be taken there. Our Almighty God will do it.

Amen.

PRAYER

Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of what we call science. Of those instruments whereby we are able to measure all kinds of things and even the majesty and greatness and awesomeness of your creation. And if the creation is so big, so great, so awesome, Lord, how much more are you who made it all and keep it all in being. And Lord, we thank you, that you, the Almighty God, care about us. And that you have great plans for us, and Lord, that we may put our trust in you, even though in this world we may have to go through painful periods, painful times, because this world is under the influence of sin and decay, destruction and conflict.

Lord, we thank you that we may look forward to the day that your creation will be put back into sync again, will be put back into harmony. And Lord we thank you that we may look at your creation and see your wisdom and faithfulness there. Lord, we pray that as we look up to the sky at night we may be reminded – our God is an awesome God and our God loves us, in Jesus.

Amen.