"God is... Self-Sufficient"

21-Aug-2011

“God Is…Self-Sufficient”

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor

Corinth Reformed Church
150 Sixteenth Avenue NW
Hickory, North Carolina 28601

828.328.6196 corinthtoday.org

It’s never a bad thing to need God.

Isaiah 40:12-17

August 21, 2011

I need, I need

Linda and I spent several days this past week on Bald Head Island. One of the many wonderful aspects of Bald Head Island is the sea turtle protection program. Loggerhead sea turtles come ashore to nest, and, if all goes well, 60 days later a bunch of little baby turtles make their way to the ocean.

On average, only one in 100 of the original eggs will make it to adulthood. Humans try to help the survival rate. The first priority for humans to help the survival rate of sea turtles is to protect them from humans. In some parts of the world, that means making the sale of turtle eggs and turtle meat illegal. In other places, it’s about protecting turtles from being caught inadvertently in fishing nets.

On Bald Head Island, the focus is on giving the nesting process the greatest chance of success. Summer interns comb the beaches at night, when mama turtle is most likely to nest. After she digs the hole, buries her eggs, and covers them over, the intern places a cage to protect the nest from predators and a warning sign to humans not to hassle or remove the turtles at risk of a $100,000 fine and five years in jail. The interns may also place plastic landscape edging to guide the baby turtles toward the sea.

But there’s only so much humans can do. In the thirty years of the BHI sea turtle conservation program, nest destruction by predators has been reduced by 50%, but there has also been a marked reduction in the number of nests found on the island – down from a high of 200 in 1985 to just over 100 in 2008. No one knows why.

When I ponder sea turtles, especially baby ones, I feel very big, very powerful, very knowledgeable, very self-sufficient. It is very deceiving.

I come back home to my own world of complex human needs – people getting older, families struggling, stocks tumbling, the Panthers looking like a bottom tier team in their second exhibition, locking myself out of my own office on a Saturday when no one is around. From the significant to the inconsequential that constitutes life, I feel helpless, out of control, and sometimes downright dumb. That’s a good thing.

I am not God. I don’t know much. I can’t fix things – or people. I need help. I need wisdom. I need perspective. I need encouragement. I need.

Unlike baby sea turtles, unlike me, God never says, “I need.” God is self-sufficient. What does that mean and why does it matter?

What God doesn’t need

We turn to the Scripture to wrestle with that question, to one of the most familiar chapters in the entire Bible. Even if you don’t know the Bible well, you will recognize some of the lines in this chapter –

Comfort, comfort my people (1).
A voice of one calling in the wilderness (3).
Every valley shall be exalted (4).
The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever (8).
He tends his flock like a shepherd and gathers his lambs in his arms (11).
Those who hope in the LORD will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and now grow weary, they will walk and not be faint (31).

What led to the writing of such lofty words, of such comforting language? The book of Isaiah is divided into two major parts (some say three). The first part is a warning to those who arrogantly go about their lives willfully ignorant of God. They act as if God does not exist, and as if they will never be accountable to him. Judgment looms over every chapter from 1 to 39.

Chapter 40 begins part 2. The mood dramatically shifts, because the balance of the book is written after the fall of Jerusalem. The protective wall is in ruins, as is the temple of God. Doom is now past tense. If the job of the preacher is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, chapters 1-39 are designed to afflict, while chapters 39-66 are designed to comfort. God’s people have hit their low point, and they need hope. They need to know it’s not all over. They need a foothold for the future.

We chose today to read and reflect on some of the lesser known parts of chapter 40, where Isaiah asks a series of rhetorical questions. As I review what he says, think about how this is going to help the suffering people of his time.

If you turn Isaiah’s questions into statements, he says God is self-sufficient.

God doesn’t need help. Verse 12: “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?”

From the toddler’s “I can do it myself” to the young adult’s “I can change the world” to the senior citizen’s “I can live alone,” we humans are hard-wired to declare our self-sufficiency. It’s part of our fallen nature, I suppose, our pride that declares we don’t need anything or anyone.

Usually for evidence we cite our accomplishments. “Look what I did before.” God cites his accomplishments as well. I made the ocean. I designed the universe. The earth’s dirt can fit in my measuring cup. I weighed rocks and soil to decide how much would be assigned to Baker’s Mountain or Mount Everest.

A. W. Tozer says,

Probably the hardest thought for our natural egotism to entertain is that God does not need our help. We commonly represent Him as a busy, eager, somewhat frustrated Father hurrying about seeking help to carry out His benevolent plan to bring peace and salvation to the world….The God who worketh all things surely needs no help and no helpers.

God can do anything he wants to do. He doesn’t need help.

God doesn’t need advice. Verse 13: “Who has understood the Spirit of the LORD or instructed him as his counselor?”

Wouldn’t you love to be God’s advisor? A lot of people would like to be President Obama’s advisor right now. They don’t want to run for his office – or they know they couldn’t be elected anyway – but they would love to get close enough to give him some counsel on what to do next. We treat God that way.

In fact, we often pray that way. We don’t really want the responsibility for running the world, but we’d sure like to get close enough to God to give him some helpful hints on what needs to be done. But God doesn’t need advice.

God doesn’t need instruction. Verse 14: “Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge or showed him the path of understanding?”

One of the humilities of getting older is realizing the limitations of your own knowledge. It happens on two fronts, I’ve decided. First, the older you get the more aware you are of how much there is to know. The stack of books I want to read is two feet high, but every time I read one it only widens a lens on yet another subject I know little about. There’s not enough lifetime left to learn it all.

Second, you forget what you already learned. My brain is less reliable, not more as I get older. It’s little things. Last night I was at the grocery store and saw a local pastor I know well. I was two aisles over before I could remember his name. I went looking for my phone at church the other day for a good 15 minutes when I was ready to go home – all over my car and office, calling it from the church phone and never hearing it ring. I had laid it on the chair beside the hallway bathroom. Why?

Not long ago I said to Jamie Treadaway, “If I’m getting Alzheimer’s, just tell me. Don’t spare my feelings.” He looked at me very seriously and said, “Bob, I just told you an hour ago.” The fact that my short term memory recalled the conversation is my only reason for hope!

But maybe the wisdom of getting older is directly related to knowing you can’t remember everything, you can’t know everything. The awareness if your own ignorance gives you only a greater awe of God. He needs no instruction.

God doesn’t need allies. In verses 15-17, Isaiah turns his attention to the nations. Remember, he’s writing during a great shift of international power and boundaries, at least from Israel’s point of view. Think of the American South after the Civil War, or Germany in 1945, or the present day uncertainty and turmoil in the Middle East. “Surely the nations are like a drop in the bucket,” he says in verse 15. Lebanon (known for its wood) is not sufficient for altar fires, he adds in verse 16. (That’s like saying Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are drying up. In verse 17 he says the nations are “less than nothing.” That’s the same Hebrew word in Genesis 1:1, “And the earth was without form and void (nothing).” At their most powerful, the nations of this world are less than the earth was when it was unshaped, devoid of vegetation, and uninhabited. For nations to rise or sustain their place, they need allies. God doesn’t.

Humbling, isn’t it? Tozer again: “The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.” He doesn’t need. Anything. Period.

But what’s the point of pondering God’s self-sufficiency? Look at the end of Isaiah 40. Isaiah knows what people are feeling. “Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the LORD and my cause is disregarded by my God’?” They thought God had forgotten them.

“Do you not know?” Isaiah asks. “Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary….Those who wait on the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not be weary, they will walk and not faint.” (vv. 27-31).

The purpose of our unmet need is to redirect our focus away from ourselves and toward God. It’s a hard lesson to learn over and over again. It’s never a bad thing to need God. He is the only self-sufficient One.

We could find a number of other places in the Bible that speak of God’s self-sufficiency. One of my favorites is Acts 17. The setting is very different from Isaiah 40. Isaiah is written for a hopeless nation in distress. In Acts 17, the Apostle Paul addresses erudite philosophers with well-developed arguments about gods and the meaning of life, thoroughly refined by marketplace arguments.

As he walks around, Paul finds in the city of Athens a monument “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.” Much of what we know today about Greek philosophy we owe to a third century AD Greek historian named Diogenes Laertius. Diogenes tells how this Athenian monument came to be.

A plague struck Athens in the sixth century BC. City rulers tried everything they knew to stop the plague, and were unsuccessful. So they brought in a consultant, a prophet named Epimenedes from the island of Crete. He told them to drive a herd of sheep from the Areopagus throughout the city. Whenever a sheep would lie down, it was to be sacrificed to one of the Greek gods. Obviously the plague meant some deity was angry, and they had to appease all of them.

To cover their bases, they built one altar “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.” It was a way of saying to the gods, “If we missed you, this is your altar.” Soon thereafter the plague stopped. As a result such altars were built throughout the region.

Paul, wanting to introduce to these philosophers and polytheists the worship of the one true God, and to the risen Jesus, uses this superstition as a starting point with the Athenians. “I’m now going to tell you about this God you call ‘unknown,’” Paul says. “The God you are missing made everything in the world. He, in fact, governs heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in man-made temples. He doesn’t need anything, because he made everything. He set the boundaries for the nations” (Acts 17:23-27, paraphrase). All of that should sound familiar after reading Isaiah 40.

Then Paul adds this: “God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

Fascinating. Here is Paul’s argument. God is self-sufficient – all-powerful, all-wise, all-knowing. He needs nothing; he doesn’t need us. He left us alone and scattered us across the world so that, spread out, we would lose our sense of self-sufficiency. Then we would look for him. And when we do, we will find he was there all along, as close as our breath.

I am not God

One of the most frustrating aspects of being human is what I can’t do. Think about it. Do you realize almost every one of your problems is at least in part due to being dependent on someone else to come through for you? It’s downright annoying. Apparently the self-sufficient God thinks that is a good plan – that we have something to learn from needing each other.

Now, we don’t like it. It rubs against the part of us that really would like to be more God-like. (That was Adam and Eve’s problem in the beginning.) But would it really be good for you to be self-sufficient, to need no one and nothing? From the beginning, even before sin entered the world, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.”

OK, then, but why can I not choose my areas of self-sufficiency? I don’t really want to be alone, or be God – I just want to bracket certain areas of my life where “I can do it myself.” I want to minimize the risk and go for the reward.

That makes me think of sea turtles again.

If I may humanize them for a moment, it must be terrifying to be a baby sea turtle. You wake up in a rather cramped space. You break out of the shell only to find yourself being walked on – and you trample your siblings. You struggle out of the nest and try to find the sea. Unless some Bald Head Island intern has placed guard rails and is watching over you, it’s a traumatic journey to the beach. And when you get close, waves keep pushing you back up the shore. There’s not much to eat once you get in the water – and you have to learn how to breathe under the ocean. Sea creatures far more agile than you start looking for you the moment you get to the water.

Your compassionate side wants to do something. You want to pick up all those babies and put them in a zoo somewhere. Or collect them in a net and place them in the ocean – maybe in a protected spot. But you know ultimately the struggle is good for them. They need it.

And while it’s true that some of them – most of them – will not survive, what does survive is so much bigger than they are. What survives is the circle of life God created. What survives is hope, courage, faith, strength to pass on to the next generation.

God in his wisdom has created us with need. He wants that very vulnerability to turn toward him – to teach us that what we need is not so much the elimination of our need. What we need is a sense of our utter dependence on the Self-sufficient One. Knowing we are needy is the right place to start. Amen.