Though you were once despised and hated,
    with no one traveling through you,
I will make you beautiful forever,
    a joy to all generations.
Powerful kings and mighty nations
    will satisfy your every need,
as though you were a child
    nursing at the breast of a queen.
You will know at last that I, [Yahweh],
    am your Savior and your [Goelekh],
    the Mighty One of Israel.^[a]

Isaiah 60:15-16

Yahweh Goelekh: The LORD Our Redeemer

I don’t know if there’s a more beautiful idea in all the world than this one – redemption. The idea that something that was fit for nothing but the trash could be fixed, could be whole, could be “good as new.”

If I am an expert on anything, it is how easily things break. I prefer the term “undercoordinated” to clumsy, please and thanks. 🙂 I am reminded by my own hands every day how flimsy this world is, how easily broken, how passing. Very little of what I break is worth redeeming, worth fixing; in this modern world, it is quicker and cheaper and easier to just toss it in the trash and start over.

I wonder sometimes if it would be easier for God to just scrap us all and start over. Toss this fatally flawed batch of lemons in the trash and make the whole world over again. It’s no less than we deserve, and God is fully capable. So why doesn’t He?

The answer is always, always about Him. He doesn’t because that’s not who He is. He’s not the trasher, the scrapper, the thrower-awayer. He is the Redeemer. It is His very name. Our hope for our brokenness to be fixed has nothing to do with who we are or what we can do, and entirely to do with who He is and what He does.

He is Yahweh Goelekh. He is the Lord our Redeemer. And so we are not trashed. And so we are redeemed.