THE BEAUTY OF TRANSFORMATION

Isaiah 55, one of the Bible’s most beautiful offers of grace, confronts us right at this point:

    For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven       and do not return there but water the earth,     making it bring forth and sprout,       giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,     so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;       it shall not return to me empty,     but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,       and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.     For you shall go out in joy       and be led forth in peace;     the mountains and the hills before you       shall break forth into singing,       and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.     Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;       instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;     and it shall make a name for the LORD,       an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. (vv. 10–13)

I have heard many sermons preached out of the first stanza of this great promise. It is very encouraging that God’s Word will not return empty. It is very motivating to know that God’s words always accomplish God’s purpose. It is wonderful to understand that I do not have to worry about results and outcomes. It is good to know that the God of the Word has a purpose for his Word and that he stands behind his Word, securing its productivity. All of this is amazing and stimulating, but I am always left as a bit of a crazy man when I hear a preacher expound this declaration without unpacking the critical question that it leaves. Declaring that God’s Word will always accomplish its purpose leaves you with this inescapable question: what, then, is its purpose? You simply cannot understand the genius and hope of this passage without answering this question. You see, it is quite possible and, sadly, quite regular for us to use the Bible unbiblically. Even given its God-driven purposefulness, you can approach, handle, and make use of the Word of God in ways that are outside of its intended purpose.

The second stanza of this passage answers the question that the first asks. In beautiful, nature-oriented word pictures, it calls us to recognize that the ultimate purpose for the Word is worship. This has to be so, because the deep drama of this broken world and the image bearers that inhabit it is a drama of worship. The gospel narrative is all about the larceny and restoration of true worship, the thing for which we were given breath, the worship of God. The story that the Word of God contains guarantees a time when all of creation will bow in worship of God. All sin is idolatrous, and grace’s work is to reclaim the deepest desires, passions, thoughts, and motives of our heart for God. This confronts us with the fact that the content and theology of the Word of God is not an end in itself but must be viewed as a means to an end. The intended end of this content is God-honoring, life-shaping worship.

But there is more.re left wondering, “How is this heart-deep worship produced?” This is where the passage goes next. It employs one of the stranger word pictures in the Bible. Remember, the overarching metaphor is the falling of rain and snow. Strangely, this passage says that when this rain falls down, the thornbush will become a cypress and the brier will become a myrtle. Now think with me. If you have a little thornbush in your backyard and it’s nourished by the snow and rain, what do you expect to get? The obvious answer is a bigger thornbush. If the rain and snow water that brier in your yard, you know the result will be a bigger brier. But not so with the Word of God; when this rain falls on the thornbush it actually becomes something organically different! The picture here is of fundamental, specific, and personal transformation.

Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).