There are five verses in the book of the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 55 which completely satisfy all the deepest needs of the human soul and spirit. For all they are so immediate, they are as far-reaching as infinity and as eternal as the Creator God Himself. In them, He expresses all of Himself that human beings can comprehend, and explains our standing before Him in a way which cannot be challenged. The words are as old the creation of the universe, yet so contemporary, they may predict man’s discovery of the quantum nature of that which has been created.
Verse 6 instructs us to… “Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near:” Our human lives are so short and our awareness of God so limited, that He acknowledges our frailty and appoints a time and place in each life to remind us that He has given us all a choice. John 1:9 declares Christ to be the One “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” At some point during the time in which we are enlightened, we have enough free will and enough understanding of Him as the Source of light to make a choice between good and evil. Because of our fallen nature, we eventually choose evil. This verse in Isaiah chapter 55, indicates that there are times after our choice of evil during which He is a near, and can be found. From this, we can see that the Creator God loves his creation and offers repentance to each willful sinner.
The truth of our free will, that is to say our ability to choose to continue in sin or to repent is further expressed in verse 7, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” God in His great love offers is not only the chance to repent, but also His mercy and pardon. That the God Who created the universe should look upon sinful individuals with abundant mercy and saving grace will take me the rest of my life on Earth just to begin to comprehend. One day, when my terrestrial body is translated into a celestial one, I may come to a more complete understanding of His great love, but at this present time, I can only praise Him and wonder and awe, knowing how incomplete my praises are.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,” says verse 8, “neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” It is amazing how brazenly human beings approach the Word of God. The Bible is intended to be our guide in the continuing process of understanding God. But so-called theologians continually placed their opinions above His stated revelation. Is this not the same thing Eve did in the garden? When the serpent received her, she used her faulty powers of reason to justify her disobedience, thereby plunging the human race into sin. We cannot blame her above all others. That’s not what I’m saying. Any one of us in that situation would have been overcome by our own curiosity and done the same thing. The point is, when it comes to send we are all the authors of our own fate. When we use that same faulty human reasoning to try to comprehend the incomprehensible God we must do so with great humility, recognizing the immeasurable vastness of his thoughts and the comparative smallness of our understandings.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Here, in verse 9, God informs us that his thoughts are infinitely greater than ours. Heaven, or outer space is infinitely distant. The use of this language indicates to me the multi-dimensionality of God. Human beings are limited to these three dimensions, but God inhabits one or more other dimensions, each of which is higher in quality than the one before. If there were only one dimension there would be nothing. If our lives were restricted to two dimensions, there would still be nothing, but, that “nothing” would at least extend in two directions, 90 degrees from each other. It is not until we enter into a third dimensional universe when we have anything at all. In a three-dimensional universe we have many things, and each of those three dimensions is at 90 degrees to the other two. When you move from the second dimension to the third dimension, you have infinitely more space. A fourth or a fifth dimension would be incomprehensible to our minds.
Listen to the language of I Corinthians 2:9, “… Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” By this verse, I find it easy to understand the inability of man to understand; the highness of God’s thoughts above our thoughts. We can no more imagine what another, higher dimension is like, then we can imagine what it would be like to exist in only two dimensions, in other words without any depth, in a single flat surface which extends into infinity as a geometric plane. And I take great comfort in the incredible greatness of God. What would it be like to have the God Who was as comprehensible as any mortal man?
Finally, in verse 11, God lets us in on a great mystery. We are told, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” The Word of God, which we can read with our own eyes is a supernatural book. Those sequences of vibrations by which God spoke the universe into existence have a power beyond the ability of our three-dimensional minds to comprehend. The written Word of God contains the same kind of power, though probably not at the same strength, and not enabled by our whims and natural desires. But it is powerful to accomplish that which God pleases and it will prosper in the thing to which God sends it. Thus, the writer of Hebrews describes it in chapter 4, verse 12, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”