Isaiah 55 Study: When God’s Plan Feels Unreachable
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. - Isaiah 55:9
Have you ever read verses like that and walked away wondering if God was just trying to rub in our faces how much better He was than us?
But notice where it’s placed. It follows directly after verse 7c-8a:
“For He will abundantly pardon. For My thoughts are not your thoughts.”
This isn’t coming out of nowhere. It reminds us of how far exceeding His goodness and grace is to us in respect to how we’ve sinned against Him.
We’re now in verse 9 in our Isaiah study, continuing the thought from last week’s comparison on our thoughts and ways to God’s.
God pardons our sin far beyond what we could possibly comprehend. Yet, even when we say we believe this, we often live as though we still need to earn His forgiveness. Or as if we’re somehow owed it based on something we did.
But in reality, it’s not what we do to deserve His grace. When He forgives our insurmountable debt, it’s because of who He is and the purity of His character.
Psalm 103:11 draws another similar parallel:
“For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His lovingkindness toward those who fear Him.”
This verse isn’t meant to intimidate us into obedience because of the grandeur of Heaven or God’s majesty - though it certainly could. It’s meant to remind us of a love so vast we can only begin to imagine it. And that kind of love demands a response: we can lean into the love or ignore it all together.
We see glimpses of God’s love everyday. Through the beauty of the mountains and seas. Through the waves of lilies across a field. Through the breath in our lungs All of it reflects His life-giving presence. This passage invites us to draw near - to receive more.
What God offers is more than we could ever give. And He's offering it for free.
What hesitates us from accepting this? Usually, it’s us.
We either think we don’t need Him because:
We’re self-sufficient. We do well enough on our own. We follow the rules, so we feel we’re entitled to good gifts God offers. But we don’t need all of Him, just enough of Him to make us feel spiritually sufficient. We do things to get things from Him - our relationship is contractional rather than relational.
We’re beyond His grace. We believe we’ve done enough in life to where we won’t ever reach that impossible moral standard we see modeled in our first group. It’s too high and we know that. God must not realize how bad we are, His grace is insufficient. We’ll live this out by succumbing to our morally low standard for ourselves and eventually find ourselves looking for another source of comfort and identity which makes us feel better.
Either way, we’re believing lies about God’s character - deciding He’s not good enough. Shame consumes us and covers the truth about who God is. But verses like Isaiah 55:9 remind us that it’s got nothing to do with us. It’s all in the character of God which allows us to come freely into His loving grace and choose Him.
He knew exactly what He was getting into when He made us. He knew we’d resist Him, pretend He wasn’t there, reject Him, and mock Him. And yet, He’s too good to be affected by anything we could possibly attempt to mess up.
His ways far outreach ours. Even if we tangle the threads, He weaves all eternity into His pure goodness.
Think for a moment: what if we stopped spinning our wheels trying to be “good enough”? What if He’s been good enough all along?
The more we explore His goodness, the more we’ll see His strength within us and the less we’ll be overwhelmed by our own shortcomings.
