Beyond Measure
Isaiah 40:13
Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD, or what man shows him his counsel?
To measure is a human art, isn’t it? We measure things to understand them, to grasp them, to effectively mark them as our own. For instance, time feels like an abstract concept until we mark it on a calendar as a birthday or a Christmas party or a wedding. And space, too, feels infinitely broad, until it’s the acre of dirt we call our ‘land’ or those familiar, local sites we call ‘home.’ So, when I read Isaiah’s rhetorical question here, “Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD?”, I love it for the way it reminds us that we’ll never have some Einsteinian, e=mc2-type formula that can bring God down to a science; yet that’s precisely what makes God’s incarnation so astonishing. Because, effectively, God condensed Himself into human measure, lived and died under our limitations, and compressed His transcendent character into words and deeds that we could understand and grasp and make our own.
So Christian, of all the precious, personal ways you measure your life today, make sure the Spirit’s character modelled for us by our Lord—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control—is the mark you hold most dear.