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Winter Quarter 2023-2024: Faith That Pleases God
Unit 3: The Righteous Live by Faith
Sunday School Lesson for the week of February 4, 2024
By Jay Harris
Lesson Scripture: Isaiah 40:12-13, 25-31
Key Verse: “He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.” (Isaiah 40:29)
Lesson Aims
- To introduce the February Unit and the 40th chapter of Isaiah as well as its context
- To ponder the bigness and transcendent nature of God so that we understand that God is able
- To reflect on the surpassing love of God, who knows our name and understands our troubles
- To understand the enduring pattern of how God’s power bends down to the faint and powerless
- To learn what waiting on the Lord involves and how God renews our strength and lifts us
Introduction to the February Unit and Our Scripture
With this lesson we begin the February Unit (and last unit) of our Winter Study: “Faith that Pleases God.” The title of the unit is “The Righteous Live by Faith.” We are exploring faith as it is lived out in the life of the believer. We might ask whether we are talking about the everyday life of the believer or the extraordinary times that occasionally come in the believer’s life. We will see examples that perhaps lean one way or the other, but in all the examples we can apply the lessons both to daily life and the occasions that require an abundance of faith.
The 40
th chapter of Isaiah is huge in terms of its importance. It signals a new section in this book of sixty-six chapters. The first 39 chapters contains words of warning peppered with beautiful visions of hope. In the words of warning, God (through the fertile mind of the prophet) is seeking to wake God’s people up from their complacency. It is a call to repentance while there is still time. The timeline for these 39 chapters of warning is the Eighth Century B.C., which ended in the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. What remained of God’s people were those left in the southern kingdom of Judah.
The 40
th chapter jumps forward in time to the Babylonian exile in the Sixth Century B.C. (remember the numbers go down the later you get in the years before the Christian era). The focus is the people of Judah who were taken to Babylon by the Babylonian army and held captive there with their homeland destroyed. The city of Jerusalem, including the temple, had been reduced to rubble.
The 40
th chapter addresses this dire situation with these astounding words: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” (Isaiah 40:1) God speaks tenderly to Jerusalem that her term has been served, her debt has been paid, and her sins have been forgiven. God will provide through the desert a highway for her people to return home. This means that God’s people will be liberated from their captivity. In all this, “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 40:5)
In this chapter and those that follow, the prophet’s task given by God is, again, to wake up God’s people. In this instance, it is not to wake them from apathy, it is rather to wake them up from their despair and lead them to a renewal of their lives in hope. This message is meant to energize God’s people.
Keep in mind also that prophets give announcements of future events well before they come to pass. The purpose is to prepare God’s people for what comes ahead. It is a level of preparation that must go deep and wide in the life of a believer. God is creating faith in the believer, and we get to see how God, through the prophet, does this. The creation of faith and hope in the hearts of God’s people is as important as their future liberation. The purpose is to build a faith that pleases God and draws the believer into a relationship with God.
Building Up Faith in a God Who Is Able
How would the exiles get their minds around the astounding announcement of their liberation? Everything in their experience would tell them that freedom from their captivity was not possible. That’s how formidable their captor was. Their situation would have appeared completely hopeless. The prophet will get around to giving God’s people the details of how it will be done, but first they need to be reminded what kind of God they served.
12 Who has measured the waters of the sea in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance?
The prophet asked a rhetorical question. The answer to the question is “no one but God.” The prophet wants his audience to contemplate the bigness of God. The God who created the vast universe could hold the waters of the sea in the hollow of his hand and measure them. The Creator of it all is bigger than the universe itself, marking off the heavens with a span, then enclosing the dust of the earth in a measure, and so on. No one but God is big enough and powerful enough in the creating, renewing, and sustaining activity that brought the earth and the larger universe into being.
Have you ever felt your spirits lifted just by standing in the sand and gazing across the ocean, or standing on a mountain top and looking across mountains as far as the eye can see, or peering into the Grand Canyon? These experiences take on a spiritual quality because they make us think of the Creator. You can also get the same experience from looking at your newborn child or relative.
These experiences give us perspective. As big as our problems are in our own minds, God is bigger. To contemplate the bigness of God helps us put our problems in perspective.
13 Who has directed the spirit of the Lord
or as his counselor has instructed him?
The answer to this question is also “no one.” No one has directed the spirit of the Lord or counseled or instructed God. No one has and no one could. Every human who has ever directed anything, or counseled anyone, or instructed anyone must have also been directed, or counseled, or instructed by some source outside of himself or herself at some point. All direction and instruction can be traced back to the Ultimate Source, who is God. God is the only One who has no source outside of himself because God is himself the Source.
Philosophers call God the Unmoved Mover. Every movement is created by some force outside of itself, but at the beginning of it all, there is the One who is the Mover of all, who was himself not moved by any other. The Unmoved Mover is God.
God is the Source not only because God is the First, but also because God’s ways and understanding are higher than our ways and understanding. No one has directed the spirit of the Lord because no one is capable of that. No has counseled or instructed God because no one has the ability. No one’s understanding matches God’s understanding. No one even comes close.
God delights in giving us direction, in counseling us, and instructing us, but there will always exist that inability to understand all that God understands. This is why we look to God when there are problems that perplex us and situations that overwhelm us. The prophet continues to press this point in verse 14.
Then, in verses 15 through 17, the prophet says that the nations are “like a drop from a bucket and are accounted as dust on the scales.” In other words, no nation presents a barrier to what God wants to do. So, when God says he has a way of liberating God’s people from the clutches of the mighty Babylonian army, then God’s people must trust that God knows what he is talking about. God’s ways are higher than our ways, because God is big. “All the nations are as nothing before him” (Isaiah 40:17), and that includes the Babylonian empire. God influences events on the world’s stage and on a grand scale and in ways that are not even remotely accessible to our understanding until God reveals it.
This is the good news! This is great news! All this says God is able! God’s wisdom, counsel, and direction transcends our own understanding, so that the situations that perplex us do not perplex God. God is greater than our problems.
How has God reminded you of God’s bigness or transcendent nature? How did that reminder give you a different perspective, a needed perspective, on something you were experiencing? How would you help someone who is missing that in their faith?
A God Whose Love Is As Great As God’s Power
In verses 18 through 20, the prophet describes the absolute folly of idols. A workman fashions a tiny representation of a false deity out of corruptible materials, and people are gullible enough to compare the idol to God and worship it. The prophet rightly asks, “
To whom, then, will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him? (Isaiah 40:18)
In the years before the Exile, God’s people had sought to blend the worship of idols with the worship of the one true God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. It was like a Disney movie title gone horribly wrong: “Honey, I Shrunk the Lord.”
Through the work of the prophets during the exile, God was teaching them that God had not died when the Babylonian army destroyed the temple. God was with them in the Exile. The knowledge that God could be with them in a foreign land, and be present in their trials and hardships, had already begun to expand their concept of God. Now, God was bringing the message to a culmination.
25 To whom, then, will you compare me,
or who is my equal? says the Holy One.
Yet again, the prophet was reminding God’s people of the Lord’s transcendent quality. Because of God’s transcendent nature, as we have said, we understand that God is able. God is incomparable. God is “Other” in the most profound and wonderful ways.
How can a God who is so totally “Other” also be relatable? How would such a God not be remote in terms of our experience? Can such a God come down to our level and relate to us? We can even wonder if God even knows us and our problems.
26 Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
mighty in power,
not one is missing.
Here is a picture of God as One who created the “starry” host (see New International Version translation). God knows each and every star and has a name for each one! God, in his mighty power and omnipresence, keeps count of the stars so that not one could be said to ever be missing. His knowledge of his creation is infinite in its detail.
How does this translate in God’s concern for people? Isaiah has already spoken to this in verse 11, where God’s people are compared to sheep and God is the shepherd, who feeds his flock, and gathers his lambs in his arms, and carries them in his bosom, and gently leads the mother sheep. When God gathers the exiles, and leads them home, not one will be missing.
27 Why do you say, O Jacob,
and assert, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
We sometimes wonder if God knows what we are going through. Our way is not hidden from God. God’s intimate knowledge of us and God’s claim upon us tells us that God is nearer to us than we can perceive and grasp. Because God knows us better than we know ourselves, it can be said that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not as remote from our problems as we may suppose.
All this tells us that God is able to love as no One loves. God’s incomparable power and wisdom is matched by God’s incomparable love. Because of God’s incomparable love, because God knows us by name, and “because he is great in strength, mighty in power”—"not one is missing.”
When we forget God’s nature—that God is both the transcendent One and the One who is closer to us than we are to ourselves—we too can think our circumstances are hidden from the Lord, and we are thus disregarded by God. We are not disregarded by God.
In this reflection on God’s nature, we are combining what might seem to be two seemingly opposing theological concepts: 1) God’s transcendence—God’s
otherness, and 2) God’s immanence—God’s
nearness and immersion in our lives. In practice, these are not opposing concepts at all. God holds both qualities within God’s nature. This is who God is, who God has always been, and will always be.
This is nowhere expressed more clearly and beautifully than in the Incarnation—when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14) No wonder that John says that we have seen his glory, glory as of a Father’s only Son. What Jesus revealed so perfectly was always there in the dual nature of God. Truly, Jesus was and is our Emanuel—God with us.
Would you say you were more acquainted with the “otherness” of God or the “nearness” of God? What value do you see in holding these two qualities within God’s nature together in balance? How might you bring more balance in your own faith? On what would you need to focus?
Strengthened with God Power
The God we have just described is the One who is with us in our situations and circumstances. When such a God is with us, we should be prepared to be to open, be receptive, and even willing to be surprised. We should also be prepared to be empowered.
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
God is not only the Unmoved Mover, who provided the initial spark to the vast universe of God’s creation, God is also the Creator to the ends of the earth, who sustains the universe’s creative engine. God does not faint or grow weary. No wonder that God’s understanding is unsearchable. God’s strength is inexhaustible. It is boundless.
29 He gives power to the faint
and strengthens the powerless.
Notice how the strength and power of the Lord bends down to the level of the faint and the powerless. In the belief systems of much of the ancient Near East, it was often assumed that the conquering powers were favored by the gods. God’s people, however, possessed a unique counter-story in which the Creator of the universe, the One true God, looks out for the welfare of the weak, the faint, the powerless, and oppressed. The story that the captives in Babylon had in their spiritual memory was that God had delivered their ancestors from state sponsored slavery in Egypt. What God had done before, God could do again.
The prophet was announcing a liberation for the captives that would amount to a Second Exodus. Truly, it is the business of the Creator of the Universe to bring release to captives. When you think of God giving power to the faint and the powerless, think of God arranging the affairs of nations, including the most powerful nations, to favor the weak and those in bondage.
Isaiah will proclaim a few chapters later God’s decree and plan to use a ruler named Cyrus, the king of the Persian Empire, to be God’s instrument. God will enable him and the Persian army to subdue nations, including the Babylonian Empire. A cylinder survives today where the benevolent policy of Cyrus is inscribed. The official policy was to allow the captive peoples of the former Babylonian empire to return to their native lands and their religious institutions to be rebuilt.
The captives in Babylon could have never imagined how a juggernaut like the Babylonian army could have been made to release the captives. Only a big, transcendent God, like the God of Abraham and Jacob and David, could influence world affairs and cause a nation to rise up and defeat another empire. Only our God would choose to be a God for the powerless and lend his strength to create the means for their liberation.
Do you believe that more people believe that God helps those who help themselves or more believe that God helps those who cannot help themselves? Do you think the stories of God giving power to the powerless resonates like it should in society and in the Church? How does God favor for the powerless speak to all of us?
Waiting for the Lord
Notice how the prophet did not jump immediately to the part about using Cyrus and the Persian Empire to secure the freedom of God’s people. It was important to get them to think first of the character and nature of God. It is God’s business not only to liberate God’s people, but also to create faith in them. It would take some time for God to work out the means for their liberation, but God intended to strengthen their faith in the meantime.
Some might not live to see their liberation, but they would live to have their faith and hope reignited and fanned into flame. They would live to be strengthened in their daily living. They would be strengthened to be formed into a worshiping, serving, and witnessing community of faith right where they were planted. The would live into the story God had for them.
30 Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted,
31 but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
All of us, even the teenagers and young adults among us, can be dragged down by life. All can faint, grow weary, fall exhausted, experience breakdown, suffer from despair, or experience anxiety or dread. All of us can experience life events that bring us down.
You can pick up a small handful of gravel and toss it lightly into a crowd of people, and you will not avoid sprinkling some of it on more than one person whose strength and fortitude have been exhausted at some point in their lives. Among the members of that same group, however, will be found those who have waited for the Lord and found their strength renewed.
What does it mean to wait for the Lord? It means to avoid bailing out in terms of our faith when trouble comes. It means that when we ask “why” in the face of trials and want to accuse God, that we also ask “why” in the face of blessings and thank God. It means we persevere in waiting for the answers when we have questions. It means not abandoning our relationship with the Lord, but instead leaning into a deeper relationship with our Maker, Redeemer, and Sustainer in the tough times.
One key to resilience in life is to cultivate resilience in our faith. A book that I have gotten a lot from is a book entitled,
Tempered Resilience, by Tod Bolsinger. The illustration used throughout the book has to do with the process of forging metal.
The forging of metal happens by subjecting metal to various kinds of stresses. There is the anvil, the hammer, and high heat. You can see this process illustrated in a History Channel program called, “Forged in Fire.” Each show is a competition between a handful of participants. They are challenged to create one or more implements that test their ability. At the end, they must subject their implement to a real-world test.
We know about the various stresses that our lives undergo. It is how we meet these stresses that determines whether we are brought low or undone by them or whether we persevere in the end. According to Tod Bolsinger, we should be looking to strengthen and temper our faith, so that our faith is strong when the stresses of life come. “Temper” is a good word because we know that tempered steel is steel that is equal parts strong and equal parts flexible so that we bend instead of break in the face of crises and stress.
How is our faith tempered? It is tempered by subjecting our faith to controlled stresses that resemble the way the forger uses the anvil, the hammer, and heat in a controlled way to temper steel. What does this look like in terms of tempering our faith to make it more resilient? According to Bolsinger, it means subjecting our faith to a way of life that includes spiritual disciplines, devotional habits, and healthy church practices. These activities must be entered into deliberately and with discipline. The discipline we apply is part of the point. If all this sounds a bit demanding, remember that the goal in this activity is a deeper, more satisfying, more joyful relationship with the Lord.
They say that when tough times come, you do not rise to the occasion, you fall back on your training. Waiting for the Lord means we are not running ahead of the Lord, rushing from one crisis to another, nor are we sitting idly by with nothing to do. Waiting for the Lord means we stay in step with the Lord. In the spirit of Lamentations 3:22-23, we live eagerly expecting to experience daily the “faithfulness” and “steadfast love” of the Lord. We live with the belief that the “mercies” of the Lord “never come to an end” and “are new every morning.” Every morning is an opportunity to wait for the Lord to meet us and lead us through the day.
Those who wait for the Lord in this way shall renew their strength. Their spiritual preparation throughout life enables them to be uplifted and carried on the wind of God’s care, like an eagle’s wings allow the eagle to be carried on the wind. Those who stay in step with the Lord shall run the marathon of life and not be weary and walk through the hills, valleys, and rocky places of life and not faint.
How have you waited for the Lord or seen others wait for the Lord in a way that inspires you? How does the illustration of a faith forged through spiritual habits and disciplines speak to you? Why do you think people tend to live from one crisis to another, and how could they live more intentionally? What is one thing you can do to wait for the Lord that you are not presently doing? What would it look like in your life for your strength to be renewed and to mount up with wings like eagles?
Prayer
God, the Creator of the universe, and the One who knows us by name, You are the liberator of captives who utterly surprises us with how You can change the fortunes of the powerless, and You want us to know Your Strength. Call us to a life of waiting for You, show us the way, and strengthen us for life’s journey, that we might run and not be weary and remain faithful, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God forever, Amen.
Dr. Jay Harris serves as the Superintendent of Clergy and District Services for the South Georgia Conference. Email him at jharris@sgaumc.com. Find his plot-driven guide to reading the Bible, the “Layered Bible Journey,” at www.layeredbiblejourney.com.
