The God of Redemptive Reversals
But in that coming day
no weapon turned against you will succeed.
You will silence every voice raised up to accuse you.
These benefits are enjoyed by the servants of the LORD;
their vindication will come from me.
I, the LORD, have spoken!
(Isaiah 54:17)
The dream that changed my life forever came to me in the summer of 2012. In my dream, I saw a blonde man with a beard standing on stage behind a wooden podium. He was preaching passionately, and I sensed that this was the man I was meant to marry. I had started dating a seminary student with blonde hair and a beard shortly before this dream, so when I awoke the next morning I excitedly shared it with my Mom because I just knew it was confirmation that I would marry the man I was dating. And I did.
Two years later, I found myself sitting in a church pew watching this man preach about the Samaritan woman who encounters Jesus at the well in John Chapter 4. I was in an emotionally and verbally abusive marriage, but nobody knew that at the time. Tears welled in my eyes and my throat tightened in anger as I watched my husband preach about the love of Jesus for this disadvantaged woman; while at home, the love of Jesus was nowhere to be found. I watched people congratulate him after the service, and I wondered how it was that my dream come true had so swiftly turned into a nightmare.
The night our marriage finally ended, I was driving east across the Lake Washington 520 bridge, crying my eyes out and singing “Desert Song” by Hillsong at the top of my lungs. The song is based on Isaiah 54, and I was desperate to claim the chorus of that song as a promise to me:
I will bring praise
I will bring praise
No weapon forged against me shall remain;
I will rejoice
I will declare
God is my victory and he is near.
Although the helpless rage of betrayal and the ache of grief were thundering within me, I sensed a small cloud of hope rising as I drove into the night. God’s benediction of release from the darkest season of my life settled upon me as I sang. During my divorce, Isaiah 54 became a lifeline for me as I rehearsed God’s promises to redeem his ruined bride—Israel—like wedding vows over my own life:
“For your Creator will be your husband; the LORD of Heaven’s Armies is his name!
He is your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the God of all the earth.
For the LORD has called you back from your grief—as though you were a young wife
abandoned by her husband,” says your God.
(Isaiah 54:5,6)
Your Creator will be your husband. The reality that the pain of a young wife being abandoned by her husband was as ancient as the Israelites in exile was a lifeline that kept me tied to the people and story of God. I read pain—my pain—in the pages of God’s storied redemption and hoped that if God could redeem Israel’s heartache, then maybe he could redeem mine, too. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes the redemptive reversals of God as “Heaven working backwards”:
That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
When Heaven works backwards, abandoned wives become cherished treasures, heartache becomes hope, and we find that the tears we shed in pain have been watering the soil of our soul so that abundant blossoms of new life can emerge.
*
Two weeks ago, I shared the story of how God brought me and Drew together with a couple of sweet friends we met at a pastors’ retreat in Colorado. When we tell our story, Drew starts with the time I accosted him at a busy Seattle crosswalk, asking if he wouldn’t mind sharing how he survived his own divorce. But I always begin our story with the dream I had in the summer of 2012. The couple laughed as I mentioned “the blonde man with the beard, preaching” as this happens to be the perfect description of Drew. For the first time in my life, I found myself sharing the painful dissonance of watching my former husband boldly preach about the love of Jesus for the Samaritan woman in John 4 while experiencing an entirely different reality at home.
During a pause, one of them thoughtfully asked, “And has Drew ever preached on John 4?”
“Yep! I did last week,” Drew chimed in.
I couldn’t believe I had missed it. I suppose I was so caught up in the passion and conviction of Drew’s sermon that I didn’t realize my life had come full circle, crowned with lovely irony. God had redeemed the bitterness of hypocrisy and hidden pain of the first John 4 sermon with the sweetness of another John 4 sermon, one preached by a man who is just as loving and kind at home as he is in public.
As I basked in the realization of newly wrought redemption I said, “I love how God re-forms the very elements of our deepest pain into new creations of blessing.” And our friends smiled and nodded because they, too, have experienced the reversal of utter heartache into radiant redemption.
*
“I am the potter and you are like clay in my hand,” God says in Jeremiah 18. Our God loves to re-shape the clay of our lives, spinning darkness into light with every turn of his pottery wheel. God’s redemption flows from the immensity and purity of God’s love. Redemption is who God is. As humans, don’t we love to turn our beloved ones’ frowns into smiles? Isn’t it wonderful to perform small acts of kindness that infuse life and color into the stark black and white memories of pain we carry deep within us? I can think of nothing better than making a crying baby laugh through their tears, soothed by a game of peekaboo. Maybe peekaboo is a game God loves to play with us, too. What a privilege it is to help an elderly widow blossom with her own belovedness again, just by listening to her stories. If we are capable of finding joy in redemptive reversals this much, don’t you think God is, too—yet infinitely more so? I know I do, because I have experienced it firsthand in my own life too many times to count.
There is another promise of redemptive reversal in Isaiah which has long captivated my imagination:
He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.(Isaiah 2:4a)
One day, the same weapons we have used to kill will be reshaped into farming and gardening tools—tools that cultivate life. Does the beauty of that strike you, too? Maybe this, then, is what God means when he promises that no weapon formed against us will remain:
No weapon formed against us will remain a weapon for long.
In our lives we will experience the attack of countless fiery arrows from the world, our own flesh, and the devil—who delights to weaponize our faith, failure, and fear. But when we surrender the dirt and clay of our lives into the capable hands of the Potter, He turns our faith into sight, our failure into victory, our fear into love. The dawn is coming, although we may walk through the deep night of suffering many times on this earth. Because of the surety of this eternal dawn, we can take heart as we wait for the promised redemption of all things.
Swords into farm plows,
Spears into garden tools;
Death into life,
War into peace:
These are the reversals that sing of your name.
We praise you, O God,
For no weapon formed against us
Shall remain.
Amen.
Going Deeper: Listen to “Desert Song” by Hillsong. Sing it like you mean it, even if it doesn’t feel true.
Drew’s recent sermon on John 4 is excellent, and you can find it here. He even has blonde hair and a beard, go figure.
An Invitation: Do you have a story of God’s redemptive reversal in your life?
If so, I would love to hear it and celebrate with you. Use the contact button on my home page to reach out!