The Promise (5)
“Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.” Isaiah 41:10 NASB
Help– The verb is an old friend, in fact, so old that it takes us back to the first “helper.” ʿāzar is the root of ʿēzer kenegdo, God’s description of the role of the woman. God is the ʿēzer of Israel, that is, the divine aid of the people—and so much more (as you may discover in my book, Guardian Angel). It is interesting that this particular word suggests God plays the role of the woman (before you prickle with Western resistance to this idea, just think about the text, not your paradigm). When Adam found himself alone in the Garden, he wasn’t in need of companionship. He had all the animals and God Himself. What he needed was a complement, one who would be exactly like him but not within him, one who would be his alter-ego, pressing him to respond to the call of the divine.
Thousands of years later, Isaiah’s words from YHVH reflect the same intention. Strength from the ʿēzer means help for us. In biblical terms, fear is overcome by the hand of the Lord. Ah, but not by His feet. In other words, you and I can grasp the hand that will pull us up and get us going (a push perhaps?) but we have to take the steps. Help isn’t the same as transport. Help is assistance. That requires joint effort, even if it is not equal effort. Yeshua modeled this exact condition when he encountered the man at the pool of Siloam. “Do you want to be well?” isn’t precisely what he asked. It is more like, “Do you want to be made whole?” And it took the response of the crippled man for the miracle to occur. Nothing happens while we sit and wait. Oh, that doesn’t mean we don’t wait expectantly, but when the moment arrives, help requires response. Help initiates a relationship, a reciprocal involvement. He does—we do.
God makes a promise. He tells us that we do not have to be afraid. After all, the sovereign master of the universe is willing to assist. He will provide the strength needed to bring about our restoration. But it won’t happen by laying on the bed roll. The hand is offered. Grasp it! The arm is ready to pull us up. Allow it! Then “Get up!” God’s promise is that when we respond, aid will arrive.
Topical Index: help, ʿāzar, reciprocal, Isaiah 41:10
God is an action, and we are made to reflect that action; therefore, I think it is impossible for Him to act in our lives without our willingness to act too, because His action in us IS our action. As sovereigns (stewards) of this earth, sin is where we hand over our power: help is where that power is returned to us. I think we were created to have our choices be able to handle anything and everything. This is why we are reminded to respond to evil by “overcoming evil with good”. God’s love in us fixes all our problems because it changes our RESPONSE to those problems.
Love is not a dump that fills our empty bucket, however; love is a match that lights our fire, but we have to build the altar with stones not of our own cutting (worship is not based on our rearranging reality on a false religious base, but on our becoming willing to worship God with what we are already surrounded with in that reality: i.e. “uncut stones”); gather the (dead) wood of our wasted self efforts by repenting of those attempts to live life without God; and then lay the sacrifice of ourselves on that altar: “a living sacrifice”. Then we pray for the touch of God to consume EVERYTHING, even the altar itself.
I think God’s idea of help is complete transformation. If our idea of response is anything less than our part of that total consummation, we are either avoiding the worship, building our altars out of our own ideas (belief systems) of how to worship, bringing the wrong kindling (in an attempt to avoid repenting), trying to light the fire with the sparks of our own pathetic substitutes for the Spirit, or refusing to actually lay down our lives through repenting for trying to do them without Him.
Why does it take such effort to get any help? Because God cannot help us when we are heading straight off a cliff. What do we want His will to match up with? Help with what? Push us off faster? The above scenario (my understanding, anyway) is what outlines the process of how we switch over to being able to line up our will with His, instead (highly recommended). This gives Him something to “help” with, for the only help He has to give us is Himself: is His will in our lives, and He refuses to work His will against our will. We don’t get the help without the Helper, after all. Are we really ready to be helped?
I guess this is what we would call stepping out in faith. Very scary but necessary.
In Hebrew thought, we do what God commands regardless of inner feelings, knowing that living outwardly changes our public relationships and subsequently affects our emotional state. In Hebrew thought, we do in order to feel. In Greek thought, we feel in order to do.—From Skip TW in March 2014
We have to do what God wants–His purpose for our lives to experience wholeness.