Bring Everyone Along: When God Makes the Unusual Promise
by Lisa Allgood, Executive Presbyter
“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities.”
I love reading the whole Bible, year after year. There always seems to be something that jumps out at me differently – even if it’s a passage of Scripture I know well, something that makes me stop and stare out the window for a while pondering ‘Huh…’
This passage is one of those. There are parts of Isaiah 54 that have personal meaning for me, for other reasons, and yet the reason this particular piece of that chapter caught me off guard is for the same essential reason: God is promising big, big, unexpected, unusual things to His people – who are in exile. In Babylon. Subject to a different culture and way of life in a foreign land – where they’ve been for nearly 70 years. The last thing they expect is that they will be rescued; they are in the final days of their exile in Babylon (although they don’t know it yet). That means many of the original exiles have passed on and many now in exile were born into it and know of nothing else.
And yet here comes God, telling them to get ready to build. To become something so much greater than they could ever imagine. That they are to expand their footprint and their influence (tent size being correlated with power and influence). That they are being made ready, once again, to become the people He intends for them to be. Later on in the chapter not only does God indicate He has forgiven His people, but in His everlasting kindness and compassion He is taking them back as His family and will provide protection unlike anything they could understand (verse 17, the famous “no weapon forged against you will prevail”).
Inconceivable. How can this be? God has returned to His people and will not only lift us out of exile but asks us to get ready for things, for support, for love, for favor beyond anything we can imagine? How?
Because we serve an amazing God.
My friends, many of our churches feel they are in a bit of exile right now – not growing, not thriving, the world around them changing fast and seemingly hostile to the ministry that used to sustain so many.
Those same promises of God are for us as well. We, too, are called to continue our spiritual journey – especially when have been tempted to settle for what we already have, however feeble that feels. We are not here in human form to simply live average lives. We are the children of God, here to be His creative Power moving forward, growing, using that Power to create the kingdom of heaven where we are, today. Isaiah reminds us we have nothing to fear. Challenges will have no power – if we let God lead the way. Our spiritual purpose cannot be denied.
Because we are never apart from the infinite Love that is God. And the promise of God is to transform that human experience into a radiant expression of its underlying divinity. “I am about to set your stones in antimony, and lay your foundations with sapphires. I will make your pinnacles of rubies, your gates of jewels, and all your wall of precious stones” (Isaiah 54:11-12). We are not here to pray to be lifted from this world, or to give up building what He is asking us to do for Him. We are here to be the agents through which this world is transformed into the kingdom of heaven.
So friends, enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left. God is with us.
