10 Worldview
Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?
EXODUS 15:11
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins.
A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.
Go on up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good news;
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Behold your God!”
Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will tend his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms;
he will carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead those that are with young.
Who has measured the waters 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?
Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD,
or what man shows him his counsel?
Whom did he consult,
and who made him understand?
Who taught him the path of justice,
and taught him knowledge,
and showed him the way of understanding?
Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
and are accounted as the dust on the scales;
behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust.
Lebanon would not suffice for fuel,
nor are its beasts enough for a burnt offering.
All the nations are as nothing before him,
they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.
To whom then will you liken God,
or what likeness compare with him?
An idol! A craftsman casts it,
and a goldsmith overlays it with gold
and casts for it silver chains.
He who is too impoverished for an offering
chooses wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skillful craftsman
to set up an idol that will not move.
Do you not know? Do you not hear?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;
who brings princes to nothing,
and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness.
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows on them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
To whom then will you compare me,
that I should be like him? says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes on high and see:
who created these?
He who brings out their host by number,
calling them all by name,
by the greatness of his might,
and because he is strong in power
not one is missing.
Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the LORD,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
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.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they 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. (Isaiah 40)
I have never quoted a passage of this length in any book I have written, but I have a reason for doing it here. I would like you to do something right now. Go back and read this quotation of Isaiah 40 two or three times slowly. Let the words wash over you. Permit the poetic language to paint word pictures in your brain. Give your heart time to absorb the awesome glory depicted here. As you read, notice how the prophet is literally stretching the limits of human language to portray for you the glory of God. Pay attention to how hard he is working with descriptive words to leave you in heart-pounding, silence-inducing, worship-stimulating awe of God.
As an author, it is humbling to admit what I am about to admit, but the most important words in this book are words that I have not written. The most important, potentially transformative words in this book were written by the prophet Isaiah as he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. What we need to ask is, “Why were these words given?” and “What are we to do with them now?”
Say Good-bye to “Two-Drawer” Living
Sadly, many people who call themselves Christians live functionally compartmentalized lives. Whether they realize it or not, they have divided their lives neatly into two drawers: real life and spiritual life.
The real life drawer is the one they dig into most and are most comfortable with. It contains all the stuff of everyday life, like job, physical health, food, drink, friends, leisure, money, marriage, parenting, possessions, and daily experiences. This drawer dominates their thinking and their doing. It’s where most of their emotional and physical energy is expended and where most of their dreams will be realized or dashed. The big joys they feel and the big sorrows that crush them are usually felt because of what goes on here. This is where they envision the good life for themselves and their children. They often have little functional consciousness of anything other than the mundane stuff that real life throws their way. Yes, they believe in Jesus, his forgiveness, and the eternity to come, but these beliefs don’t have a radical impact on the way they think about themselves and life in general. I think I am describing hundreds of thousands of Christians.
They have a second drawer, to be sure. It’s the spiritual life drawer. All the God stuff goes here. It’s the drawer for Sunday services, small group, tithes and offerings, right theology, keeping the rules, short-term missions, and, if they’re really spiritual, family worship. Their Christianity is sectored off from the rest of life. Their faith is an aspect of their life, rather than something that shapes everything in their life. And if you pay attention to what’s going on with them, you can see clear signs of the negative impact of two-drawer living. We will consider those symptoms after we take a look at why Isaiah 40 was written and then preserved for us.
The “Here’s Your God” Worldview
Ask yourself, On any given day, what most influences the way that I think about myself and my life? Isaiah 40 was written to comfort hurting, suffering, and besieged people, but you need to understand the nature of that comfort. This passage should not be relegated to a list of helpful passages for a person needing comfort—along with maxims like “God is sovereign” and “This too will pass.” Isaiah 40 is not meant to be an abstract theological salve on the wounds of a hurting person. The reach of Isaiah 40 is meant to be much wider and broader than that. Isaiah 40 is meant to speak into the life of every child of God.
Here’s what you need to understand. Isaiah 40 is not comfort literature; it’s worldview literature. These words only provide comfort because of the radical, amazing, awe-inspiring worldview that they put forth. When you begin to understand, believe, and live in light of the awesome glory that Isaiah 40 reveals, you have reason to be comforted no matter what you happen to be facing at the moment.
There are two things that Isaiah 40 confronts. It first confronts any view of the world that doesn’t place a God of infinite grandeur in the middle of it. You simply cannot properly understand anything unless you look at it through the lens of the awesome glory that Isaiah sticks in your face. Not only does God exist and not only is he active and not only is he in control, but he is also so glorious that it is almost impossible to find words or illustrations that are huge enough to capture his majesty.
I am afraid that a whole lot of functional atheism exists in the church of Jesus Christ. I am afraid that we often live as if there is no God and it’s all on us. We tend to worry too much. We tend to control too much. We tend to demand too much. We tend to regret too much. We tend to run after too many God replacements. We do all these things because we so quickly forget God’s presence and glory. Isaiah won’t let you forget. He arouses your memory with grand and expansive word pictures. He works to reintroduce you to a God you may have forgotten. I can’t tell you how many times in counseling I have heard people—people who seem to have a rather well-developed theology—recount their stories but omit God from them entirely. I have thought many times, the fact that they assess their lives in such a God-absent way explains much of the distress, confusion, and despair they are experiencing. They are not discomforted simply because life has been uncomfortable. They are discomforted because they have brought a fundamentally unbiblical worldview to the uncomfortable things they are facing.
But Isaiah 40 addresses a second thing. It addresses the massive number of Christian people who remember God, but the God they remember is small, distant, disconnected, uncaring, and seemingly unwise. In a way, they are suffering not just because of the size of the things they are facing but also because of the smallness of the God they are trusting. Many people have talked to me about God in the middle of difficulties, and after listening to them, I have been struck that, if I believed in the “God” they described, I wouldn’t run to him for help either, and I’d be in a panic too.
This is where Isaiah 40 helps us. It addresses an age-old misconception that you can measure the size and nearness of God by assessing your circumstances. Your idea of God will never be either accurate or stable if you’ve arrived at it by trying to figure out what he is doing in the situations in your life. This is the mistake that Moses made at the burning bush—as well as the Israelites as they faced the nations on the other side of the Jordan River, and the army of Israel as they faced Goliath and the Philistines, and Gideon as he was called to defeat the Midianites, and the disciples as they hid in fear after Jesus’s death. Between the “already” and the “not yet,” if you look around, it will seem that the bad guys are winning and that God must lack the power or will to do anything about it.
If you think about it, you can remember times in your life when God confused you, when he seemed distant, or when you couldn’t see much evidence of him exercising his power for your welfare. This is precisely why the worldview of Isaiah 40 is so important. It confronts our practical atheism—that is, our conclusions that God is small. It reminds us that proper theology is rooted not in our interpretations of our circumstances but in God’s revelation to us of his unchangeable glory. In those moments when we can’t see that glory, we need the powerful word pictures of Isaiah 40 to re-form in us an accurate worldview that has an awesome God in the center of it.
Every hope you have as a believer is rooted in the glory of God that Isaiah reveals. Every act of obedience flows out of your belief that One of this awesome grandeur exists. Every courageous act of faith gets its courage from the understanding that this kind of God sits on the throne of the universe. Every bit of personal willingness to persevere through trial is ignited by the remembrance of what Isaiah stretches the words of human language to describe.
So because of this vision, you don’t live a two-drawer existence, filing all the real-life things in one drawer and all the spiritual-life things in another. You have only one drawer called life. Everything goes in that drawer. Where does Isaiah 40 fit? Well, it’s not another drawer. Isaiah 40 is a pair of glasses that you put on so that you can read and understand everything in your life drawer. Only when you wear the glasses of Isaiah 40 can you understand yourself, others, meaning and purpose, right and wrong, identity, morality, history, and the future properly. If awe of God is not at the center of your worldview, you will look at nothing properly.
Now retaining this worldview in a practical manner that actually affects your living presents a struggle. I was thinking this morning of all the duties, responsibilities, opportunities, difficulties, relationships, decisions, and concerns that flood into my mind like a dam that has been breached every morning as I wake up. It’s so easy to get distracted by it all. It’s so easy to forget things. It’s so easy to go through a day without God ever entering your thoughts. It’s so easy to load life onto your shoulders and be more motivated by low-grade anxiety than by divine awe. It’s so easy to have a formal worldview that is shaped by the theology of the Word of God but has little impact on the way that you act, react, make decisions, or plan.
Perhaps two-drawer living is more natural to us than we would like to think. Perhaps we separate pure lives into real life and spiritual life more than we know. Perhaps the awesome God-reality of Isaiah 40 doesn’t invade our consciousness as much as we need it to. Or perhaps what once produced awe in us doesn’t do so anymore. That’s why Isaiah 40 has been retained for us, because ten out of ten of us will again and again need our awe recharged. We will need to have the distortions in our worldview exposed and cleared out. We will need to remember that in the center of all that makes up our daily existence is a God of expansive, inestimable, awe-inspiring glory. We will need to reconnect with the fact that any worldview that doesn’t begin with recognizing this glory distorts reality and is a functional lie. We will need to remember that Isaiah 40 doesn’t merely speak to the spiritual dimension of our lives but offers the only lens through which we can see all of life properly. Any other view of life is like looking through carnival glass; the distortions in the glass will warp the appearance of anything you see through it.
The comfort of Isaiah 40 is that it gives us the only worldview that has eternal hope embedded in it. Isaiah 40 comforts us not because it helps us understand life or divine the future but because it reminds us of the glory of the God who rules in majesty over all the things that would otherwise rob us of comfort and hope. We need Isaiah to say to us again and again, “Here is your God!” And we need to let the awesome glory of his description of our God wash our hearts clean of cynicism, doubt, fear, discouragement, anxiety, worry, and control.
Signs of Two-Drawer Living
This has been a very convicting chapter for me to write. As I have been writing, I have been going through one of the most spiritually stressful and discouraging periods of my ministry life. I have tried to make good choices and have failed more than once. I have been under attack by people who loved me. I’ve had moments when I just wanted to quit. I have thought, “Forget ministry. Forget the church. I just want to go where no one knows me and live a quiet life! I’m tired of trying to help others only to get attacked myself. I’m tired of the burdens and the stress. I’m tired of uncomfortable conversations and tough decisions. I’m tired of private things being made public. I’m tired of praying and praying and nothing changing. In fact, things only seem to get worse. I’m tired of feeling alone and misunderstood.”
It is embarrassing to even write these thoughts and feelings down on paper, but they do capture where I’ve been recently. And it has hit me that, in the past six months, I haven’t been very good at preaching the gospel of Isaiah 40 to myself. While I was preaching it to others, I was looking at my ministry life in a way that was lacking the strengthening hope of Isaiah 40. This chapter has reminded me again that it is impossible for me to teach, preach, or write of truths that I don’t desperately need myself. If I ever stop being the first audience of my writing, I should stop writing. And as you read this book, please remember me and pray for me. Pray that God will help me to live, with courage and hope, the things that I write.
Now I would like to turn to consider some symptoms of two-drawer living.
1. Anxiety. I am reminded of Christ’s question to his followers in Matthew 6, where he essentially asks, “Why are you anxious?” Jesus goes on to propose that it makes sense for the Gentiles (unbelievers) to be anxious because they don’t have a heavenly Father. But then turning to his followers, he reminds them that they have a Father who knows what they need and is committed to delivering it to them. Jesus is saying that the anxiety of a believer is directly connected to his street-level view of God. If awe of God does not grip your heart, the anxieties of life will likely influence how you live.
2. Control. Why do we tend to be so controlling? Why do we try to work ourselves into positions of power? Why do we love authority more than we love submitting to authority? Why do we fear the loss of control? Why are we afraid of being controlled? Why do we tend to look at our lives as being out of control? Why do we have to be right, be affirmed, be validated, be respected, or be in power? Why do we not like to be told what to do? Why does control seem to be such a big issue for so many of us?
I am convinced that rest in this chaotic world, submission to authority, and a willingness to give and share power all arise from a certain knowledge that every single detail of our lives is under the careful administration of One of awesome glory. We will rest in the middle of unrest not because we have it figured out but because of who he is. When you are in awe of God’s glory, you just don’t have to be in control of everything and everyone in your life.
3. Addiction. Why are we so easily addicted to the substances, people, possessions, and experiences in our lives? Why do we tell ourselves that we can control things while the evidence suggests that they are already controlling us? Why is it so hard for us to say “no” to the pleasures of creation? Why do we go back again and again when these things not only fail to deliver what we seek but actually hurt us? Here’s the answer: whenever you ask creation to do what only the Creator can do, you are on your way to addiction. You don’t get the rest, peace, hope, or life that you’re seeking. What you get is a temporary retreat or pleasure or buzz, so you have to go back again and again. Each time, you need a little more, and before long, you are enslaved. When awe of God isn’t ruling your heart, you are rendered more susceptible to some kind of addiction.
4. Depression. I do not want to oversimplify this very complex human experience, and I don’t want to cheapen the difficulties of people who struggle with depression. But I will say that often one of the spiritual components of the paralyzing darkness of depression is a worldview that has no awesome God in it whatsoever. It’s like sitting in a pitch-black basement with no windows and convincing yourself that the sun has ceased to shine, that the world will grow unbearably cold, and that you will die. Your problem is not that the sun has quit shining. If you went upstairs, you would experience its brightness and warmth. Your problem is that, because you can’t see its brightness, you allow yourself to think that it has quit shining and that you have no hope. A God-absent view of life surely functions like fertile soil for personal hopelessness.
5. Debt. Why do we spend more than we have? Why do we constantly crave more? Why do we envy the affluent? Why are we all too skilled at spending more than we make? Why is it so hard for us to be satisfied with what we have? While I have addressed all these questions in the chapter on materialism, let me speak in summary again. To the degree that you forget the awesome and satisfying glories of the Creator, to that degree you will look for satisfaction in the creation. And because the creation has no ability to satisfy your heart, you will look again and again, acquiring more and more but never achieving contentment of heart.
6. Fear of man. Why do we ride the roller coaster of people’s responses to us? Why do we fixate on the appreciation of one particular person? Why are we willing to compromise our convictions to get someone to accept us? Why do we rehearse conversations in obsessive regret? Why are we afraid to be honest about our struggles? Why do we live in fear of being known? To the degree that you’re getting your identity from the people around you and not from the awesome God of Isaiah 40, to that degree you will be a sitting duck for fear of man.
7. Workaholism. Why do we work longer and harder than we should responsibly work? Why are we focused on achievement and obsessed with success? Why are we willing to sacrifice family and friendships to get ourselves a few rungs further up the ladder of achievement? Why do position and power tend to mean too much to us? Again, if you need a public track record of personal success to have inner rest and peace, rather than getting your peace from your connection to the glorious God of Isaiah 40, you will tend to work more than you should.
8. Dissatisfaction. Perhaps all the moans and groans of dashed dreams and discontented hearts that color our thoughts and conversations expose the degree to which the glory that we say we believe in (Isaiah 40) gets separated from the way that we think about and live our everyday lives. Maybe we’re dissatisfied not just because people are unpredictable and life is hard. Perhaps we’re experiencing two-drawer dissatisfaction. Perhaps the strengthening rest that is depicted at the end of Isaiah 40 has eluded us because the awesome God of Isaiah 40 is not in our thoughts and at the center of the way we make sense of our life (worldview).
So pray right now that God would grace you with the desire and strength to get yourself up out of that dark basement and into the comforting and encouraging light of his existence and glory, and believe that you can fly. Not because you understand, are appreciated, or are in control, but because God controls all things, because he is glorious, and because by grace he is all that he is for you.