Making The Impossible Possible

Now, here we are at the beginning of the year 2023. Even though we have no idea what this year holds for us, I know that God wants us to grow deeper in our relationship with Him and take steps of faith to trust Him for even greater things, to watch Him take seemingly impossible situations and make them possible.

Please turn with me to Isaiah 54:1-3

1“Shout for joy, O barren one, she who has not given birth; Break forth into joyful shouting and rejoice, she who has not gone into labor [with child]! For the [spiritual] sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman,” says the LORD. 2 “Enlarge the site of your tent [to make room for more children]; Stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, do not spare them; Lengthen your tent ropes and make your pegs (stakes) firm [in the ground]. 3 “For you will spread out to the right and to the left; And your descendants will take possession of nations and will inhabit deserted cities.

We can see three things in this passage…

The Cause of our Joy

The Challenge to our Faith

God’s Commitment to His Promise

Let’s look at:

1. The Cause of our Joy

Verse 1 says,

“Shout for joy, O barren one, she who has not given birth; Break forth into joyful shouting and rejoice, she who has not gone into labor [with child]! For the [spiritual] sons of the desolate one will be more numerous than the sons of the married woman,” says the LORD.

In the book of Isaiah, Israel is described as a nation who separated themselves from God because of their continued disobedience and rebellion. They were seeking after and serving other gods, and in a sense divorced from the Lord their God. Exiled from their homeland and powerless to deliver themselves out of slavery to the Babylonians, they had become lifeless and spiritually barren for quite some time.” In this case, their barrenness, or the inability to have children, was seen as shameful because they would have been fruitful if they hadn’t divorced themselves from the living God.

How did a once blessed nation go into such despair? Even though God was right in their midst, they didn’t see their need for Him, & they stopped walking with Him and hearing from Him. They stopped living for Him and instead lived for themselves and their own pleasures. They should have been a shining light as a nation, going out into the world with the knowledge of God but they became inward focused and that light had turned into darkness. They were now spiritually barren.

This was their situation and their condition. God knew this yet in verse 1 of Isaiah 54 God tells a barren woman to be joyful, to sing it aloud! How can a barren woman who has never had any children rejoice? How is it possible for one who has had no ability to produce any children to have more children than a married woman? What do you mean to widen the tent to make room for more children when I don’t have any at all? Is God mocking this nation? Asking them to do the impossible? This is when their wearisome existence became the scene where none other than the very Spirit of God was poured out to impart the fullness of true life.

And this teaching of barrenness, emptiness, and the powerlessness of human strength vs. the power of the Spirit of the Lord to accomplish the impossible is a favorite theme throughout the Scriptures. God made a covenant or promise to Abraham that only He could fulfill - that his wife who was barren would have children and that their descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the sea. God called Moses to do the impossible - deliver 2 million children of Israel from the most powerful nation on the face of the earth and take care of all their needs everyday for 40 years as they wandered around the wilderness. God called David, a shepherd boy, the youngest and least in his family to be the king of the nation of Israel, when no one believed in him. Jesus asked the disciples to do the impossible - feed 5,000 people (not including women and children) with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. In every one of these cases, it was only the Lord God who had the power to make the impossible possible.

So what would cause someone who is spiritually dead and barren to rejoice? Especially in things he or she knows is humanly impossible? The answer is found in the chapter before. The people were able to rejoice because of the announcement of God’s salvation in Isaiah 53 - because of the coming of the suffering servant, His Son, the Savior of the nation and of the world. He did the impossible - took the human race’s incurable sickness, sorrow, rebellion, shame of sin that carried a penalty that no one could ever repay. He removed the stain of sin that no one could cleanse.