Above

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near.  Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. “

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. “(Isaiah 55:6-9)

Reading this passage this morning, the first question that comes to mind is whether or not I really believe that God has mercy or freely pardons. I know it’s what Scripture says, and I guess I am depending on it being true, but this morning I woke with a sore back and a bad case of brain fog. I feel like I’ve been stumbling around, and the two prayers that came most readily to my mind were “Please, Lord,” and “Have mercy.” The first issue is that I’m not sure those aren’t flippant prayers on my part. God has had mercy – otherwise I’d probably be dead. Am I praying them as a real request, or am I just whining? I’m leaning toward the latter explanation because it seems to me as if, on mornings like this, I’m turning the key to my mind and the engine grumbles but doesn’t start. The whining is part of an attempt to get my mind functioning and focused. 

The second thing that comes to mind is the parallelism. We have the wicked and their ways, and the unrighteous and their thoughts. We also have God whose thoughts and ways are higher than ours. There is a cycle involved here – our actions stem from our thoughts, and our thoughts stem from our actions. Our unrighteousness produces our wickedness, which produces more unrighteousness. On the other hand, God’s thoughts – which are higher or better than our unrighteous thoughts, produce higher or better actions, which produce higher or better thoughts. 

The difference between our unrighteous thoughts and God’s higher thoughts isn’t a matter of a few millimeters. How much higher are the heavens than the earth? It might be useful to understand this in terms of orders of magnitude rather than arithmetic. The smallest difference between your thoughts and God’s would be that His are ten times as high as yours. If yours are a 1, His aren’t 2, 3, or 4. His area 10, 100, or 1000. When we say we can’t or don’t understand, we’re right.