Christianity is Outrageous
Isaiah 40:25-31
Introduction
How would you describe the Christian faith? What are the first adjectives that come to mind? As I study the Scriptures, there is one particular word that seems to be particularly relevant. And that is: Outrageous. You may never have thought of that word before, but let us take some time to reflect on it. So what does outrageous mean? The first definition that comes up is “shockingly bad or excessive.” That doesn’t sound very good. Unfortunately, there are forms of Christianity that do fit into this category. As a teenager, I used to watch televangelists, specifically because they were outrageous in this way. You never knew what the next money-making stunt would be or what controversy they would find themselves in. Televangelists may not have the spotlight anymore but there are still these outrageous Christians. We have gotten better at keeping Christian leaders accountable and instead of covering up their antics, we investigate and report on them. But that is not the definition of outrageous that I want to talk about.
The second part of the definition is this: “very bold, unusual, and startling.” Now, that is a very apt description of what Christianity is. Those who think that Christianity is boring have not really grasped what we are actually claiming. Christianity may be either true or false, but it is not boring. Christianity makes some pretty audacious claims, outrageous claims.
Typically, there have been two common ways that people have talked about the divine. One is to see God as completely transcendent. What do we mean by that? God is seen as completely other, as something unknown and unknowable. The divine is a force, possibly permeating everything, but not something that you can truly interact with. There is an attraction to this because it lifts God up, so high in fact that God is really unaware of us. This God would think of us as much as we think of amoebas. This God is sometimes called the god of the philosophers.
The other way to look at the divine is to see God as very immanent. This type of divinity is right down in the trenches with us. The Greek gods were very much like that. Rather than being an unfathomable force, the Greek gods were like humans, just with special powers. These gods were not creators, they had fathers and mothers themselves. They had spouses and children. They had enemies and friends, they were sometimes abusers and sometimes victims. Praying to them had limited use. They did not have the power to do anything about what the other gods were doing. The best you could hope for was to stay on their good side so that they wouldn’t make your life any more difficult.
So basically, people thought of God or the gods as either way up there or way down here. God was either all powerful but didn’t really care or might have cared but didn’t have the power to help out much. The outrageous idea of Christianity, and of the Hebrew religion before it, is that these two ideas come together. That is, as the dictionary defines, “very bold, unusual, and startling.” Let’s take a closer look.
Lifted High
How great is our God? The prophet tells us to lift up our eyes and to look to the heavens. Perhaps it was at night and the stars were shining brightly. People have always been intrigued by the stars. While we might look up and wonder if there is life out there, the ancients often thought that perhaps those stars were gods or other divine beings and were tempted to worship them. There is a reason why even today, people still believe in astrology and speak of the stars aligning when things go well.
For myself, one of the things that make me aware of God is looking up on a clear night sky. I look at those stars and try to imagine how far away they are from us and from each other. We get used to a certain way of looking at distances but when look to outer space, our minds are really stretched.
Think of this. Voyager 1 left earth in September 1977 and finally left our solar system in 2012 to enter interstellar space. It is expected to next get relatively close to a star in approximately 40,000 years. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, which is 40,208,000,000,000 km or 4.25 light years away. Think about that. If the closest star to us exploded today, it would take over four years before we knew that it had happened. In fact, whenever we are looking up at the stars, we are looking back in time. We are seeing them now as they were long ago because it takes the light so long to reach us.
Our little planet here orbiting the star that we call the sun is just a little part of the Milky Way galaxy. It is estimated that the Milky Way contains 100–400 billion stars. And our galaxy, which is huge beyond our imagination, is one of only 100 billion galaxies that have so far been discovered. It is believed that the diameter of the universe is 93 billion light-years.
Of course Isaiah did not know any of this and God did not care to share all of this scientific data. But even the casual observer of the night sky knows that the heavens are awesome. Psalm 19:1 says “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
The ancients often saw their gods as being limited to very small geographical space. And even if a god was worshiped across cultures, they were thought to have a certain domain. But the God of the Bible is night this. God is the God of the universe. There is no place in all of the galaxies or planets that you can go to, where God would not be. God is just as aware of what is happening at the edges of the universe as he is with what is happening on planet earth.
We need to have the sense of the magnitude of God’s power. God is not a kindly old grandfather who is vaguely aware that there are some things happening here and there.
Isaiah tells us: “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.” (Isaiah 40:28)
There is a caricature of certain kinds of people who, when not happy, loudly exclaim, “Can I speak to your manager?” When it comes to God, there is no manager, there is no higher authority. God is the Creator and Sustainer of all creation.
Stooping Low
So our God is fully aware and is present everywhere in this incredibly huge universe, something that is really beyond our comprehension. That is truly awesome. But at the same time, it does not necessarily help us. On a smaller scale, think of an incredibly rich billionaire. They can live their life and we can live our life without ever encountering or affecting each other. They have their existence and we have ours. We could imagine how our experience would be similar to the kind of God we have been looking at. In fact there are many people who see God just like that. God created and sustains the universe but really has nothing to do with us.
But this is where biblical faith gets outrageous. We don’t just believe that God is powerful, we believe that God cares about us.
The reason Isaiah asks his readers to look up the sky and to imagine the majesty of God was not so they would feel small and insignificant. Rather it was because this is what they needed to hear to get through the difficult times they were living in.
Even the most stubborn of people will eventually realize that they are at the end of their strength and ability. We are reminded: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted.” (Isaiah 40:30) Those who seem to have everything going for them will eventually run out of strength. We might think that the God of the universe, if noticing us at all, would simply say: “Silly, weak humans” and move on. But here is where our faith gets outrageous. “But those 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 40:31) What the prophet is saying is that this incredibly powerful God shares his strength with the weak. This is truly outrageous. God cares not just about the galaxy on the other side of the universe but about you and that trouble the you are experiencing right now. God will share his strength. This does not mean that all of your circumstances will change but God will enter into your circumstances.
Christianity takes this to the next level in what we believe God has done. God has come to us by taking on human flesh and becoming one of us. One of my favourite passages is this description of what Jesus did: “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:6-8) God did that to help us in our need. We were spiritually beyond what we could do ourselves and God stooped down to us in Christ and supplied our need. That is outrageous!
Conclusion
People want to put God into a box. One box is that of all powerful but aloof from the concerns of his creation. The other is that of a God who cares but is pretty limited in what he can do. God continually breaks out of both boxes. God is both the creator and sustainer of the universe and the God who enters into your struggles and provides what you need. This was what God was doing in the time of Isaiah but what he has done even more so through Jesus Christ. I want you to think about what we have reflected on. If all of this is true, what does it mean for us? I think one good response is hope. The time I most often read this passage is to people who are dying. Even in hat looks like the most hopeless of situations, we have an incredible God walking with us. Consider how this truth can shape what you are going through.
