It Starts Small

Have you been rebelling lately?
Do you feel far from God?
DO you feel demoralized?
Do you feel exhausted?
Do you feel hopeless?
Do you feel like God has abandoned you?

Are you on the edge of despair? Maybe you feel one or many or all these things, then chapter 40 of Isaiah is God’s love letter for you!

Isaiah 40 was written to God’s people in exile. It was meant to be read by God’s people while they were far from home in Babylon. The intended audience were a people who had rebelled, had experienced the destruction of Jerusalem, and who felt demoralized, exhausted, hopeless, on the edge of despair. They would have felt like God had abandoned them, and that they had no future left.

“Comfort, comfort my people,”
says your God. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and announce to her
that her time of hard service is over,
her iniquity has been pardoned,
and she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.”

Isaiah 40:1-2

Isaiah 40:1-2 is God telling us, comfort, comfort. Another way of saying it is, be comforted. When we put ourselves in the shoes of Israel, we can easily answer the question in verse 27:

Jacob, why do you say,
and Israel, why do you assert,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my claim is ignored by my God”?

Isaiah 40:27

When we put ourselves in Israel’s shoes we can look around and imagine they would have felt abandoned by God. How could God allow them to be dragged so far from home? What had happened to God’s promises? What happens when you look around and it looks like God has abandoned you?

Our circumstances can fool us into believing that God has abandoned us. This is doubt we are feeling. This sort of doubt does not honor God. It is ok to question God, but we must always be careful with accusing Him. 

Our God is loving! He loves us so much we can come to Him with our honest struggles, even about Him. Over the last two years, I can not tell you how many times I have come to Him and just honestly asked about the situation I was in. John the Baptist asks Jesus the same thing. He doesn’t accuse Jesus, but asks, are you really the messiah? He was in prison, and just needed to hear a Word from Jesus. 

Psalms often gives us words to our struggles. They model for us how we can come to God with our honest questions and doubts. Because we trust Him, we can always come to Him in honesty. He is not turned away by our honest seeking. What we see in this passage is God’s people doing what we often do: wrestling with very honest feelings that God has abandoned them. Verse 27 points out, they kept saying over and over again. This was not a one-time doing, but a pattern.

God reassures them in verse 27. DO you see what He calls them? Jacob and Israel. He is reminding them that they were not the first to wrestle with God. Jacob was the first to wrestle with God, but it was Isaac, Jacob’s father who had received God’s covenant and promise that He would never leave them. 

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the whole earth.
He never becomes faint or weary;
there is no limit to his understanding.

Isaiah 40:28

There is nothing that a discouraged person needs more than this. Isaiah was telling them they needed to relearn what they already knew. They did not need a new Word from God, they needed to remember God’s promises. We tend to forget in the middle of our own issues that God is with us. We are quick to forget what we already know is true. 

They needed to remember:

• God is eternal — God is working his purpose out in his own way, at his own pace, without our hurried, nervous desperation.
• God is Creator — He made everything and He is not short on power. If he has made everything, we never need to worry that any of it is beyond is control.
• God is untiring — We need rest all the time. We get exhausted, but God never does.

But it is not enough to honestly go to God with our doubts, and remember that He is the Great I Am….

He gives strength to the faint
and strengthens the powerless.
³⁰ Youths may become faint and weary,
and young men stumble and fall,
³¹ but those who trust in the Lord
will renew their strength;
they will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not become weary,
they will walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:29-31

Look at verse 30. The message is blunt: the strongest among us doesn’t have what it takes. Humans even at the peak of their strength don’t have what it takes. We are no match for the demands of life. But we’re not doomed to our own potential. There is a power beyond ourselves, and we can experience it!

How do we get this power? By waiting for the LORD.
What does waiting mean? It means that we confidently trust God to keep his promises.

When we place our confidence in God, we have no more reasons to doubt. When we do, we rise up on wings like eagles: the greatest of birds with strength to spare. We won’t faint even when things get tough because we will be relying on God’s strength and not simply our own. We’ll run and not be weary, walk and not faint.