“Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath…- Isaiah 51:6”
Every landscape has its own features that if you look at them – see them – cause you to fall into wonder about time and distance, about how short and small are yours and how long and far is the earth. As a child of the Midwest being able to stare into the distance and see all the way to the horizon. Growing up on the Mississippi, and having known a kid swept away by the river, its power unknowable. The age of the Allegheny mountains worn down and centuries of mines that haven’t come close to exhausting the supply. And when moving out to Arizona, seeing actual mountains for the first time gave new meaning to the call for the mountains to fall on us. I remember the feeling driving through them up to Las Vegas for a baseball tournament. How the mountains, if they even noticed the cars traveling like ants through them, must be chuckling at all the hustle. They were there before anything and would outlast everything. And then you lift up your eyes to the heavens and consider the time span it took for the light of many of the stars to reach us, lengths so long that you have to make up words – light-years, parsecs – such that you can fool yourself that you comprehend what you are thinking about.
God tells his people to look at these things. Feel those feelings. And then He says, “for the heavens will vanish like smoke, and they earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die in a like manner (Isaiah 51:6).” As magnificent and eternal as the material world looks, to God is it temporal. Nothing more than smoke that blows away. A favorite garment that eventually becomes threadbare and hole-y. That is not only the way of all flesh, but of all matter. It is here for a time. But that time is nothing compared to its purpose.
The purpose of the material is so that we might understand the glory and righteousness of God. “My salvation will be forever, and my righteousness will never be dismayed (Isaiah 51: 6).” Our souls which are still able to be struck by the time and distance of the heavens above and the earth beneath are able to learn through them about the one who supports them all. We are able to know that God is just and his law has gone out from him, and that his law is a light to the peoples. (Isaiah 51:4). We are also able to know, because He took on our flesh, He entered our material, that His salvation has gone out. And that salvation reaches as far as the coastlands (Isaiah 51:5). The coastlands, which to the hill people of Judea were Tarshish, the unimaginable ends of the earth, hope in the LORD. The coastlands are part of the covenant.
It is the last Sunday of the Church year. The long green season is at its end. The colors go blue or purple next week. Another cycle of fast and feast begins. In the midst of the hustle of the next month, take a minute to lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look – see – the earth beneath. Let the natural wonder come. But then let that wonder attach to what it all gives witness to. The one who made it all. While thus they sing your Monarch, Those bright angelic bands, Rejoice, O vales and mountains, and oceans clap your hands.
