Reflections on Isaiah 58:8-9
I really look forward to Thursday evenings. On the first and third Thursday of each month, a group of us meets at our community clubhouse to study the Bible, pray, and enjoy fellowship. And this Thursday evening, we savored Mary’s famous brownies. For the last few months, we’ve been walking through Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly. This week, our discussion centered on chapter 17, where Ortlund focuses on Isaiah 55:8–9.
As we talked, I found myself thinking about this passage in a fresh way. I’ve always leaned on Isaiah 55:8–9 when life gets confusing. I’d tell myself, “His thoughts are not my thoughts; His ways are not my ways.” And that would be enough—at least on the surface—to bring a little rest to my heart.
But in our group discussion, it struck me that these verses are saying so much more than I realized. God isn’t just pointing out that He’s sovereign or beyond our understanding. He’s showing us His mercy. His compassion. His heart. His ways are higher than ours because His love and forgiveness are bigger than anything we could imagine. That’s what makes the gap between His ways and ours so comforting, not frightening.
Thinking about that made me face something personal. One of the reasons I’ve sometimes held back from fully embracing a God who is this loving and forgiving is because of the picture I carried from my youth. For so long, I imagined a God who was stingy with His love—a God just waiting for me to mess up. A God who was disappointed if I didn’t pray enough, or irritated when I failed to obey. I didn’t realize how deeply that old picture had shaped how I thought about Him and even how I related to Him.
But as we reflected together tonight, something softened in me. Isaiah 55 reminded me that God Himself says His mercy is higher than my thoughts—higher than my broken assumptions, higher than the small, limited version of Him I had clung to for years.
So as the day winds down and the evening arrives, I find myself asking God to give me a supernatural understanding of His love and mercy toward me. I’m asking Him, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to remove those small and incorrect views I’ve carried for so long. I want to see Him as He truly is—not as I imagined Him, but as the gentle, lowly, compassionate God He really is.
And the more I let that truth sink in, the more I find rest—not just when life doesn’t make sense, but also in the ordinary moments of everyday life.