Cancer Blog #70
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #70–The Mighty Stubble
February 6, 2023
[Isa 40:22-25] 22 It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. 23 He [it is] who reduces rulers to nothing, Who makes the judges of the earth meaningless. 24 Scarcely have they been planted, Scarcely have they been sown, Scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth, But He merely blows on them, and they wither, And the storm carries them away like stubble. 25 “To whom then will you liken Me That I would be [his] equal?” says the Holy One.
An amazing passage that always fills me with wonder and awe since I first became a Christian. Here Isaiah describes the transcendence of God: His might and sovereignty over all the earth. We saw in the last entry that all people are small and insignificant beside Him. And, now Isaiah makes that point again but from another angle. We who are a part of the “hoi polloi” (the common people) were compared by Isaiah earlier to grass that withers and flowers that fade. Here our stature is pictured as a grasshopper, an insect that is small and frail next to the boot of a man. In fact, in Numbers 13: 33, it is how the Israelites saw themselves in comparison to the inhabitants of the land of Canaan after Joshua and Caleb had spied out the land in preparation to invading it:
[Numbers 13:33] “There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”
And yet that is how Isaiah sees us when we are next to God, small and insignificant. Further Isaiah says that the immensity of the sky when God is next to it is like a curtain we have in our homes, a sky whose enormity overwhelms us when we stare up at it. But, Isaiah also wants us to look at the force of God compared to that of our most powerful human leaders. Like us “the hoi polloi” who live under their rule, they have only brief lives that are under God’s complete control just as much as ours are. God merely has to blow on these mighty rulers and they, like us, will wither as the grass does and then will be carried away by God’s breath. It reminds me of using the leaf blower after I have trimmed the grass and then stems off some bushes. When I turn on the leaf blower even at a low setting, the blades of grass and small leaves from the trimmed bushes scatter and tumble away; they are light, they have no weight. That is how God sees our greatest and most powerful leaders, insignificant debris easily scattered by His breath. No wonder God then asks: who is indeed equal to such a great God, the God who has the life and death of all our mighty ones grasped securely in His hands?!
Next: Why Be Afraid?