The Way God Thinks--March 28, 2025

The Way God Thinks--March 28, 2025

"See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.  Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.  For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts that your thoughts."  (Isaiah 55:6-9)

It's never about God just pulling rank.  It's always about God's supreme mercy.

I don't think I ever realized that this is the underlying point of this passage from Isaiah 55, until reflecting on it this week after hearing it in worship this past Sunday.  The final verses to this section include more familiar words about how God's thoughts are "higher" than ours, and how God's ways are beyond our ways. And I've heard those lines plenty of times in my life.  Usually I hear them trotted out to mean that God is smarter than we are, or that things that seem terrible and awful in life must really be good, because they must be part of God's plan and how God's ways are just beyond our own.  Often I hear these verse interpreted to mean something like, "If the world seems unfair or unjust or you don't understand why terrible and cruel things happen in it, well, it's only because you don't see how it's all really necessary and God's ways are just inscrutable, so suck it up, because God is just smart and we are just dumb humans."  And okay, sure, God must certainly be "smarter" than we are.  Sure, God's way of knowing must be infinitely beyond the crude and limited way we walking meat-sacks barely have a grasp on reality.  Sure, we are all playing checkers and God is playing three-dimensional chess from Star Trek.  But is that all that's going on here in Isaiah?

When we read these verses about God's ways and thoughts being above our own in their actual context, it's not at all about forcing us to accept the apparently cruelty or injustice of life as "just part of God's plan" that we can't understand.  It's not at all about telling us we should unquestioningly accept the violence, rottenness, or trauma of the world without a protest, because God supposedly "must have willed it to be so." The voice in Isaiah 55 doesn't have the need to cudgel us into grinning acceptance of terrible things in the name of God being "higher" than we are.  And it is most definitely NOT a matter of God just pulling rank to say, "I'm above you, so don't question anything."

Instead, when we take the time to hear these verses about God's ways being beyond our own in their original setting, we see that they come as the conclusion of a passage about God's unexpected mercy and welcome of outsiders, mess-ups, and crooked hearts.  It starts, as we read, with the announcement that outsiders (the "Gentile" nations, outside the borders of Israel or Judah, and beyond the boundaries of good Torah-trained worshippers of Israel's God) will be drawn to the people of Israel and Judah.  They will come, wanting to live the covenant way of life that is grounded in justice and mercy.  They will want to learn to share their bread the way God's Word had commanded the people of Israel to do.  They will come, seeking refuge, belonging, and a place within the covenant people of Israel.  And when all these immigrants come, the prophet says, it will be because God has drawn them: "because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel."  

That notion would have been mind-blowing for the first hearers of these words, who had certainly grown up hearing that God was their unique possession, and that they alone were the people God cared about.  They had heard voices insisting them (in the name of God, no less) that God wanted them to be separate from every other people group, and that every other people group on earth was beneath them... and here comes the prophet saying, "Nope--God is going to draw those other people in, and God wants you to make space for as many of them as come to your doors."  That wasn't what anybody expected.

But the prophet of Isaiah 55 is just getting started.  He adds that God is inviting "the wicked" and the "unrighteous" to come to God and to leave behind their old crooked ways and find forgiveness.  Instead of God saying, "I've had enough of you sinners, so here comes a lightning bolt of wrath to wipe you off the face of the earth!" God says, "Hey, all crooks and rotten stinkers!  Calling all wicked no-goodniks!  You can leave all your crookedness behind and come to me instead!  I'm offering mercy, a new beginning, and forgiveness.  Just quit those old dead-end ways you've been pursuing--they'll never fulfill you or satisfy you.  I'll give you what you need."  God's invitation is specifically to sinners, mess-ups, evildoers, and villains--all of them can find grace and a new beginning, and all free of charge, God says. And again, that all would have been shocking to the ears of the Respectable Religious People in the audience when Isaiah 55 was first spoken.  To people who pictured God as merely personified karma, doling out punishments for "bad guys" and giving out gold stars for "good guys," this would have been scandalous... reckless... absurd!

In other words, it would have been beyond the typical human way of thinking.  As in, "just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts, and my ways higher than your ways."  See it now?

It's only after God has scandalously declared a new policy of welcome to foreigners and mercy to criminals that God breaks into that bit about "my ways are higher than your ways."  God isn't just bragging about being God while belittling us mere humans just in order to stroke the divine ego.  God is saying, "The reason you all find my mercy so preposterous is that you are all still stuck thinking in your narrow and self-centered little patterns.  I operate by a different vision: grace."  That's what this passage has been about all along.

Hopefully, this close reading of these verses will remind us of the importance of reading the Bible in context, rather than clipping out a couple of verses that sound good.  That's probably a good practice for our reading of Scripture no matter what.  But beyond that, the particular message of this whole passage is worth taking to heart.  When Isaiah 55 says that God's ways are beyond our ways, it's not trying to say that God is so enigmatic or obscure that we can never figure anything out about how God operates or what matters to God.  No, really, it's the opposite: it's a clear declaration of how God's ways are beyond ours, namely, through mercy.  

And to hear Isaiah 55 tell it, if there ever comes a time that we think mercy for mess-ups sounds foolish or welcome to foreigners sounds reckless, it's a sign we've stopped thinking in God's kind of thought patterns and have settled into our old, shriveled, and selfish habits again. And God calls us out of those mindsets, to step into the expansiveness of grace that makes room for all of us, outcasts and sinners, losers and fools, alike.

An old definition goes, "Theology is learning to think God's thoughts after him." Isaiah 55 might tell us that every time we train our minds to think, see, and act through mercy and grace, we are learning to think like God. That's at least worth a try today, isn't it?

Lord God, teach us to see the world and use our minds in ways that reflect your graciousness to outsiders and your forgiveness for sinners... like us.