“Indeed, my plans are not like your plans, and my deeds are not like your deeds, for just as the sky is higher than the earth, so my deeds are superior to your deeds and my plans superior to your plans.” Isaiah 55:8,9
I like to think of myself as okay. Not great, but at least okay. I am probably not the only one who does that. It is comforting, I guess, to look around and believe that there are a lot of people worse than we are. But today I was looking at these verses in Isaiah and I realized that the word “your” in these verses was talking about me. Not the other guy- me. My deeds are not like God’s deeds. My ways are not God’s ways. In all ways, His ways are superior to my ways.
Well, I guess that can be fairly depressing if we ponder it. But God does not stop there and leave us with no hope. Almost every part of the Bible is about hope; about how we can triumph in spite of our misguided ways. The Bible gives us hope in a world of hopelessness.
Today I was thinking back to a few summers ago to the inferior rafts that I bought for our family camping trip. I recently upgraded to one that actually floats. I thought it would be a good investment, especially for whoever is in the middle of the river in it. Our ways are like those old rafts. They are inferior and regardless of how fast or slow the leak- our ways always leak. And like the rafts, we cannot patch them on our own. We can try to fix things up on our own, but it will never work. I had to get a new raft, just like we have to become new creatures. We can’t patch up the old, we must become new. That can only be done through Christ.
I like to think some of my ways are good. But no matter how good I think they are, if they are mine, they are not the ways of God. What I need to do is to know God well enough to know His ways. When I start becoming more like Him, my ways will start to come in line with His ways.
Many people want to try to do their own thing and try to align God with them. That cannot be done. Going back to the rafts, that would be like coming back to camp and instead of pulling ourselves to shore, we try to pull the shore to us. The shore, like God, is fixed. We must be the ones that move. If God’s ways are superior to ours, why should He come to us. It is logical that we go to Him. Unfortunately, the common practice is for us to do our own thing and then try to say that is God’s way as well.
I think back to that past summer and what it was like when my raft was sinking in the middle of the river. I was thinking that I will probably go down with both ends of the raft above my head closing in on me like a giant clam. I thought how much better it would be to have a raft that holds air. Now I have a good raft because I purchased one. If we want to get rid of our inferior ways, guess what, we don’t have to purchase it. It has been paid for and all we need to do is receive it.