Trust

Isaiah 49:13-18
13 Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones. 14 But Zion said, "The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me." 15 Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. 16 See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me. 17 Your builders outdo your destroyers, and those who laid you waste go away from you. 18 Lift up your eyes all around and see; they all gather, they come to you. As I live, says the Lord, you shall put all of them on like an ornament, and like a bride you shall bind them on.

Just behind his house, in an old, three-stall barn, John keeps an ancient mail delivery jeep he bought for his son as a project (which only cost him about a hundred dollars and the tank of gas it took to cross the Florida line to pick it up). He had envisioned that perhaps his son and one or two of his friends would take the old jeep, get it running, and maybe use it to tend horses or use it out in the woods during hunting season. Now as you can imagine, John’s son was pretty excited about that old jeep, and as soon as it slid off the trailer and was pushed on its four flat tires onto the concrete floor of that barn he already had rapturous visions for that rusty rattletrap. He saw himself behind the wheel, splashing through the mud on the way out to a good camping spot, or cruising over the grassy terraces of the fields where he kept his horses.
For the first month or so John’s son spent nearly every night in that barn trying to get the engine of the jeep to roar to life, and then keep it running without having a friend ride on the fender, pouring gas one drop at a time out of an old Coke bottle into the carburetor. When that endeavor failed, it was on to attempting to free the clutch from years of stagnant, outdoor rusting; that too seemed to be a dead end. Before long, John’s son had lost all interest in the project; he had grown frustrated with what seemed to be inanimate attempts at rebellion as time after time his efforts to revive the jalopy failed. And so, there, just behind his house, in an old, three-stall barn, John keeps an ancient mail delivery jeep he bought for his son as a project several years ago.
You know, when you hear stories like that, it’s quite fascinating to think about how quickly we grow tired, bored, or frustrated with something when it doesn’t go the way we want it. We’ll throw our hands up in the air and simply walk away, hoping that someone else will have better luck than us or that the whole thing will just go away. I mean, can you imagine anyone foolish enough to keep working at something for years, investing his or her life into something that doesn’t seem as if it’s ever going to get any better? Can you imagine the enormous ignorance it must take for an individual to continually attempt to fix something that just seems to want to remain broken? That’s what the physicist Albert Einstein called insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
It really is quite fascinating how quickly we give up on things, and not just those things we try to fix, but also those things in which we put our trust. You take a new job, hoping that the terrible experiences you had the first week were just a result of your adjusting to the new place, but when things don’t seem to change you’re ready to walk out the first chance you get. A farmer sows his fields with a new kind of seed, has a bad year, so he plows it under and vows never to take the risk again. A church calls a new pastor; attendance dwindles and giving declines; so, despite the spiritual development of the congregation and the improvement of the community, a committee is formed to ask the pastor to leave (it’s awful that this ever happens, but it does). Even when it comes to those things in which we invest our trust, we are quick to give up on them at the slightest hint of failure.
So it was with the people of Judah and their relationship with God. One would think it’d be difficult to forget the way in which God had brought an entire nation out of bondage and into a land “flowing with milk and honey,” yet Judah seemed to have a chronic case of amnesia. Despite God’s providence for the people of Judah, at the slightest hint of difficulty the people would turn their backs to God and seek help from the collection of various idols and religions that littered the ground of the Ancient Near East. They would sacrifice to the Baals, worship at the high places of Asherah, and bow down before the images of the Canaanite, Phoenician, and Babylonian gods. Why, you might ask, especially after such a history with a God of deliverance? Well, I suppose the answer to that question may be simpler than you think; after all, it is terribly fascinating how quickly people give up on the things they trust at the slightest hint of failure.
You see, Judah wasn’t too different from us in that when hardship loomed on the horizon, trust in God became too easily forgotten. However, God is not one to be played the fool, so in due time God had had enough of Judah’s rebellion and took action against such a rebellious people. Now, right there, if I was in charge, I’d wipe them all out, give them away, or just leave them like a forgotten hobby to rot or collect dust in the desert, but thankfully God doesn’t think like I do. In the early part of the sixth century B.C., prophets like the first Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah, sprang up, telling the people to repent for God was sending the Babylonians to conquer them on account of their wickedness. And around the year 587-586 B.C., the Babylonians not only carried away the best of Judah’s people, they looted the Temple and left it to burn and rot. Judah was in exile.
It was while Judah was in exile in Babylon, that prophets like the one we refer to as “Second Isaiah” and Ezekiel sprang up, prophesying to the people that God had indeed not forgotten them, but was making a way for them to return to Judah, to Zion, and once again live as a free people. God was planning to pull off another exodus (though without all the bells and whistles of the first one). It’s in that atmosphere that we hear the first words of our text this morning: “Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.”
Doesn’t it sound like God is trying to fix something that just wants to stay broken? The prophet tells the very heavens and earth to rejoice at what God is about to do—he’s comforting his people, taking compassion on them, but listen to the response from the people in verse 14: “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me." They think God has abandoned them. It’s not as if they’ve been ignorant of their situation; they are in a foreign land; all of what used to be Judah is no more. Surely God has forgotten them! It only makes sense after all: God tried to be the God of Judah, but the people kept rejecting him, so he was through with them; he had them conquered and carted off, forever to be forgotten. But that isn’t how it is with God.
Listen to the tender way God speaks to the people in verses 15 and 16: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.” God has not forgotten his people, despite their rebellion and their subsequent exile in Babylon. How can he forget them?! God tells the doubting people, those who so easily gave up on him, that a mother is more likely to forget her new born child! God’s people are engraved into his hands like a tattooed scar; God has not, nor will he ever forget his people. Einstein would have labeled the God of Judah as insane!
Despite their rebellion, despite their unfaithfulness, despite their idolatry, despite everything that Judah has done to reject God, he still remembers them. He has not forgotten his love for his people, and in his love for them, he is bringing them back home, back to Judah, where (verse 17-18) “Your builders outdo your destroyers, and those who laid you waste go away from you. Lift up your eyes all around and see; they all gather, they come to you. As I live, says the Lord, you shall put all of them on like an ornament, and like a bride you shall bind them on.” We know from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that Persia would overtake Babylon and the newly named “Jews” would return to Jerusalem in order to rebuild what they once had. God hadn’t given up on them. You could say he has a divine sense of trust in his people despite their lack of trust in him.
History, however, shows us how God’s people, despite his love and seemingly limitless “second chances,” still refuse to be fixed. They would return to Zion, but they would still turn away from God. God even went so far as to dwell among them, yet even then, all of his people (both Jew and Gentile) turned their backs on him to the point of his execution on a cross. They would reject him despite the sacrifice and the resurrection, despite the testimony of his followers and the miracles of their faith. Yes, despite all of God’s trust in us, his people, we still turn our backs to him when we feel as if he’s let us down, as if he’s failed us. We find it hard to trust a God we can’t see, a God who allows AIDS and cancer to exist, a God who lets his followers suffer and die on account of his word, a God who asks us to have faith even when the sky is dark and the horizon is indistinguishable. We find it hard to trust in a God who asks us to give him everything, when we think he hasn’t given us anything.
Of course, that’s where we’re wrong; that’s where Judah was wrong. God had brought them out of Egypt, provided for them in the desert for forty years, gave them the land promised to their ancestors, and the protection and prosperity to live in the land so long as they lived by his law. God has brought us out of bondage, provided for us despite our arrogance to think we can provide for ourselves, given us the promise of eternity in his presence, and the hope that no matter how dark the days may seem he has been there and will be there with us. All he asks is to trust in him, to trust in the saving grace that comes through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We may quickly lose interest in the things in our lives that frustrate us, that seem impossible to correct, but thanks be to God that he hasn’t lost interest in you. God never forgets you, though you may cast him aside, claim you never want anything to do with him; he’s always there to call you back, to call you back to trust. Won’t you trust him today? Won’t you put your trust in the God who loves you so much that he never forgets you, who loves you so much that he gave his very life that you may live forever in eternity with him? Won’t you trust him today?
Let us pray…