Isaiah 50:10-11, “Let him who walks in darkness and has no light trust in the name of YHWH and rely on his God. Behold, all you who kindle a fire, who equip yourselves with burning torches! Walk by the light of your fire, and by the torches you have kindled!”
Are we in darkness? Are we uncertain? Are we plunged in confusion and inability to see what is ahead? (Which is to say, are we humans?) If so, the answer is NOT to try to SEE; it is NOT to try to master and control and rule over our fate; it is NOT to try to kindle a light of our own by which we will be granted a degree of autonomy….rather the answer is to depend wholly and only on the God whom we have known with saving clarity in the gospel of the glory of Jesus Christ who is the image of the unseen God.
The answer is to believe that this one whom we meet on Calvary IS the identity of God and that He is unshakably and invariably this one toward us at all times and in all situations….and to act in accordance with that assurance. If I knew that God Almighty were precisely the one that I meet as I stand at the foot of the resurrection-illumined cross where Jesus Christ dies bearing the sin and under the punishment of His enemies so that those enemies might become children satisfied in their Father…if I believed that love was the defining reality of God’s identity and so the beauty for which all things exist, how would I act, how would I prioritize, how would I choose and seek and love and value? That—it seems to me—is what it means to trust in the name of YHWH and rely on our God, and so to faithfully and fruitfully navigate the dark labyrinth of this life…and this trust is placed over and against a grasping, commanding, ordering, attempt to see by our own light and so control a situation.
Oh, blessed blindness that drives us to our Lord, holy darkness that demands dependence on the unseen seer of all….to cling in blindness with the hands of our whole lives to the hand of YHWH as He is known in Jesus Christ is an incalculably better thing than to see the next step by the light of our own flickering torch and so to navigate this labyrinth in the folly of autonomy.
