17. His Ways Are Not Our Ways

Most of us build our picture of God out of the people we have known. A parent who was hard to please. A boss who kept score. A friend who forgave once but never forgot. Without meaning to, we take human patience, human limits and human grudges, and then scale them up. Ortlund argues that we naturally imagine God as a bigger version of ourselves. Isaiah 55 is a loving correction of that habit.

Start with the invitation in verse 6: "Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near." Before anything else is said, God is described as findable and near. He is not hiding behind a wall of requirements.

Then verse 7 says, "let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." It is easy to read this as a to-do list: clean up first, then come. But look at how the sentence is built. Forsaking his way and returning to the LORD are one motion, two ways of describing a single turn. You do not leave your old road and wait somewhere in between until you are presentable. Turning away from your way is turning toward him. And the compassion is waiting for the person who is turning, not for the person who has finished improving. The ones invited are called wicked and unrighteous, and the promise is that he will abundantly pardon. The word abundantly matters. This is pardon by the armful.

Now the next line begins with "For," which tells you it is the reason behind the invitation: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Here is what makes this so surprising. The height of God is not mainly about being harder to impress. In this context it explains why pardon can be so large. You might think a holy God must be stingier than you are. Isaiah says the opposite. His thoughts about sinners reach higher than your guesses about him.

Ortlund points to other places with the same note. Psalm 103:11 compares God's steadfast love toward those who fear him to the height of the heavens above the earth. Isaiah 57:15 says the high and holy God also dwells with the contrite and lowly in spirit. The highest one is drawn to low people. We assume height means distance. In Scripture, height means a mercy bigger than our worst estimate of it.

So today the task is to notice what you have borrowed. Where has a human face been pasted onto God?