A few weeks ago I went on a fieldtrip with my son’s
class. Being a parent helper, William’s teacher assigned me five kids to
keep. William was one of them. I find it difficult to have one of my own
kids in a group like that. It’s like I have
to act like William is not my own. We
had a craft to do. I couldn’t just help
William and exclude the others. I
couldn’t just make sure his craft was done with excellence and leave the other
kids to figure it out for themselves and produce something ugly. I had to forgo my urge to show William
preferential treatment and regard him as just one of the kids. I think this is the way we like to think of
God, that he doesn’t show preferential treatment to anybody or any groups of
people, that he loves everybody each the same.
But, looking at this passage in Isaiah, God is telling us different,
that he does give preferential treatment to those who are his. Bear with me here as I flesh this out.
In this passage from Isaiah God broadly points out
that he has given preferential treatment to his people and he gives his reason,
“Because” he says “you are precious in my eyes, and honoured, and I love
you.” Wow. I think we need to take those words to heart.
Precious in God’s eye. Honoured by God. Loved by God.
When was the last time you took scripture words like that personal, took
them to heart for yourself, rather than just read over them as Bible words
spoken to a people a long time ago in a land far, far away. Well, you are each precious in God’s eyes and
honoured, and he does love you.
Let me tell you about that word love…literally. Here comes your Hebrew lesson. Sorry. There
are a couple of words in Hebrew for love.
One is “chesed” which means “loving-kindness” or “steadfast love”. When we think of God showing non-preferential
love to everybody because it is his nature and disposition, “chesed” is what we
are working with. But “chesed” is not
the word here. God is not saying I love
you with the idea of universal loving-kindness.
The Hebrew word for love God uses here is “ahav”, which
is a very affectionate, tender, preferential, non-abstract kind of love. It’s the kind of love that couples have, the kind
of love that parents show to their own children and not so much to somebody
else’s. It’s the love we reserve for our
best friends. “Ahav” involves the bonds
of family, close friends, and romance. It
is a very preferential treatment kind of love.
So, God is saying here that he has a very preferential kind of affectionate
love for his people, for those he calls his own, for us, for each of us, for
you. Each of you is his beloved child
and he loves you.
Well, let’s have a look at what this preferential
treatment is. God starts by describing
what he did for ancient Israel, the people of God into whom we are grafted in
Christ. In verse one God says, “I
created you, Jacob. I brought you into
existence.” Jacob was the father of the
twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob has his
life due to God. Then God says, “I
formed you, Israel.” Or better, yet “I
forged you, Israel”. The name changes
here. We have to remember that Jacob got
the name Israel after wrestling with God at Bethel, with the Angel of the Lord
as the story goes. Jacob was the name of
the man who was the father of twelve sons, but his name became Israel after the
fiery test of wrestling with God.
Moving into verse two we have a reference a reference
to creating. God brought everything into
creation from out of the waters (Gen. 1:1-2) and he brought Israel into being
at the Exodus when they crossed the Red Sea.
This is like when the “chaotic waters” of our lives churn up for no
apparent reason and though it seems like we might get overwhelmed and swept
away by the flood we do not because the LORD God of all Creation is with us.
One bit of preferential treatment we get from God is
he is with us. God the Holy Spirit is
with us. He will neither leave us nor
forsake. So also, since God is with us,
he will not let us get overwhelmed in those times when life is topsy-turvy. The floods will come. The rivers will rise, but God won’t let us
get swept away. God’s presence is the
firm rock we stand on. God makes us to
really know he is with us and that all things are in his hands. That’s some preferential treatment.
The second part of verse two is a reference to
forming or, better yet, to forging. Fire
is the fire of refining or forging metal, the tumultuous fiery ordeals of life
in which God burns the dross off his people and forms or forges us to be more
and more like him. The people of Israel
after they made it into the Promised Land and settled were constantly turning
away from God to the idols of the people of the Land and they would become
disgraceful. So, to remedy this and
bring them back God would let their enemies burn their cities down and carry
them away into captivity so that they would learn to trust, to “ahav”, and
serve him only. This was a refining
process, a forging process in which God, like forging metal, formed Israel to
be his people in the world, people that gave image to his loving-kind nature.
Needless to say, we also get carried away with
“idols” – consumerism, materialism, that list could go on – and so God refines
us as well and forges us to look more authentically like him. At times God lets the consequences of our
actions to love ourselves rather than God and neighbour run their course and we
know we are in a living Hell of our own demise, but we don’t get burned
up. We come out of the flame closer to God
and more faith-filled than we were before, more Christ-like than we were
before. That’s so preferential
treatment.
So, this preferential treatment thus far looks like
God makes us to know that he is with us and by the work of the Holy Spirit is
forming us to be more authentically like Jesus, more Christ-like. We are called by his name and he calls us by
name. He deals personally with us. We have his “ahav”. But, there’s one more thing. God says he has redeemed us. Old Testamentally speaking redeeming is
deep. It is to pay a price that restores
rights, worth, and dignity to a person whose life is otherwise wasted or extremely
vulnerable. If you’re familiar with the Ruth
story, she needed a redeemer to give her rights, worth, and dignity so Boaz
married her. Without Boaz she would have
likely become a prostitute. Speaking of
Israel, God delivered them out of slavery in Egypt and the price of redemption,
the ransom, was the lives of the firstborn of Egypt. That’s a hard one for us to grasp, but still
today Jews remember at Passover that the firstborn of Egypt had to die for them
to become who they are.
After saying “Because you are precious in my eyes,
honoured, and I love you,” God says, “I give people for you, nations in
exchange for your life.” Here’s a hard
fact of preferential treatment that has bedevilled Bible scholars and
theologians for centuries. It’s called
“election”. Why is that God has chosen
some and not others. Why is it God has
revealed himself to such as I and not to some other? Why does God apparently show his love to some,
to me, and seem to withhold it from others?
How is that a wife or a husband can say, “ I know God loves me and is
working in my life,” while someone as close as their spouse cannot say the same
for themselves. Or, one of my children
knows the Lord. The other doesn’t. That’s painful business. That’s election.
God says, “I give people for you.” The concept of give can include the act of
betrayal. We see this in the most quoted
verse of the New Testament, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son.” He gave over his only Son, he
betrayed his only Son to death for us.”
God so loved the world (that’s the “chesed” kind of universal
loving-kindness) that he betrayed Jesus, his beloved Son, to death to be the
life price for humanity. Just like the
price for Israel’s freedom was the lives of the first-born of Egypt, so Jesus’
giving of his life is the price that delivers us from death. God’s preferential treatment for us comes
with a cost and should not be taken lightly.
The preferential treatment God chooses to show us each is
his glory and therefore we must in turn uphold his honour. The fact that we know that God “ahav’s” us
personally and is working in us to form us into the image of Christ is, for now,
the proof of God’s universal loving-kindness for everyone that we can hope
everyone one will one day come to know. Therefore,
we must strive to let everyone know this love of God by regarding everyone accordingly
and we must do so at the cost of not being who and what we want to be, but
rather being what God wants his beloved children to be. God has called us by name, saved us,
redeemed us, created us, formed us in his image for his glory, his honour. Let us live as his beloved children and be
well pleasing to him. Amen.
