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Isaiah 43:1-7

This passage from Isaiah is a difficult one to preach because it’s very hard to say any better or explain any better what God himself is saying here.  So, I thought I would do something different today and read it over and over again and just let it sink in.  As I read it just listen and maybe a word or thought will grasp you.  If so, ponder it.  After I read, we’ll sit silently for a minute and then we’ll sing the chorus of The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

This passage is absolutely beautiful.  God says, “I created you.  I formed you.  Do not fear.  You are mine.  I am the LORD, your God, your Saviour.  I have redeemed you, yes you, at the expense of other people and peoples, indeed at the expense of dying myself.  You are precious and honoured in my eyes.  I love you.  Do not fear for I am with you.  You belong to me.  You are called by my name and I have created you to bear my Presence.”  Take this as a word from God, to you and to us as a congregation. “Do not fear. You are mine.  You are precious.  I love you. I am with you.”  Take this word.  It is yours.  It pertains to you.  It pertains to us.  Listen again.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

            I have a particular connection to this passage.  Sometime not long after my first wife and I split up, I was talking with my friend Dwight who taught me to play the banjo.  While we were talking, he got his Bible out and opened it to this passage (really all of chapter 43) and said that many years back the Episcopal priest there in town who was a close friend of his felt led to share it with him to comfort him.  Dwight then said “I give it to you now.  It can be your word.”  He read it.  Later in the chapter it says "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland” (43:18, 19).  There in the midst of having lost everything (emotional and otherwise), Dwight gave me this word, these verses.  It hit me deep.  Instead of lost, devastated, and ashamed I truly began to feel that I belonged to God and that God does love me and was working in me and my life on my behalf bringing about something new.  He was taking all that loss, shame, and hurt and making something new from it, forming me anew.  For had created me, formed me, as he has you, to bear his presence before others.  For probably the first time in my life I found myself able to let the past go and not dwell on it or try to get it back.  Listen again.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

The depth of ambiguity and anxiety that follows things like death and divorce can really become disillusioning.  You don’t know who you are anymore or what to do.  The occasional solitude that used to bring rest becomes relentless. You’re alone all the time and it can be very hard to be alone.  I think in life that it is too easy to forget that we belong to God and how much he loves us.  We forget who God is.  We think everything’s on our shoulders and God is only interested in evaluating our performance.  These verses say the complete opposite.  I give you this word.  Let it be your own.  You belong to God.  You are precious.  God loves you.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

We belong to God, who is the loving communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he does not leave us to ourselves and he is not silent.  He is with us.  He speaks.  We have no reason to fear.  We are called by his name and he created us to bear his Presence.  That’s your, my, our constantly new reality.  As that is the case, God is working in and with us as a congregation and as individuals to bear his glory.  The Hebrew word for glory is kabod and its basic meaning is weightiness, felt weightiness, his felt Presence.  God has created and formed us to be those who bear the weightiness of his Presence and to bear it in such a way that the weight of God’s love comes to bear on us and on others.  That means God in his wisdom has chosen to make us the visible, tangible proof of his reality and ways.  Take this word to heart.  Whenever you doubt who you are and what God is doing in your life and even if you lose sight of God and his love for you.  Turn to Isaiah 43 and read it over and over again.  It is your new reality.

 “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  Amen.

 

Preferential Treatment

Isaiah 43:1-7

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.