Feathery Friends

A musing of birds and barn swallows

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they?” Matthew 6:25-26

Every time I return from a run across the countryside, I stretch out underneath a pavilion in the nearby sport’s park.  About a month ago I noticed a couple of barn swallows taking nest in the rafters above.  Like a young couple in love they chirped and chased each other, occasionally taking a break to chatter with me or at me (I hope the former but fear the latter). One or the other would then roost in the nest for a while as the other hunted in the soccer fields nearby for scrumptious gnats and other insects.  “Were there eggs?”  I wondered to myself.  I would have to wait and see and let time reveal their secret. 

Barn swallows always brought back pleasant memories for me.  We had several generations roost in the corner of the porch where I grew up.  Sometimes, though, they were unpleasant guests.  They made the bottom corner a bathroom, chattered warnings to us when we sat on the porch swing and dive bombed our cat Blackjack several times (they really didn’t like him!).  Yet as a child curious about life, I daily watched the daily transformation from when the hatchlings first stuck out their little heads with enormous beaks to when they sprouted feathers and learned to fly.   

They also aided me while I mowed grass.  Countless armies of hidden insects erupted from the freshly mowed grass as I made my passes and rows.  They swarmed around me and would surely have overpowered me and carried me off if it wasn’t for my feathery friends.  Like a fleet of jet fighters in a dogfight, the barn swallows mustered their forces and swept through the masses of disturbed bugs.  The swarms fled and I continued to mow.

So with childlike curiosity, I kept watch after my runs to see if any enormous beaks would stick out when mama bird flew nearby.  And sure enough, one day after a hot, sweaty run, the sight of a beak refreshed me. They have grown now and their parents will soon teach them how to fly.

Four feathery friends

But all along, if I will listen, they teach me another lesson.  On a mountainside long ago, Jesus addressed a crowd of people through his followers.  Most of these people were poor farmers or fishermen who paid taxes and tried to provide for all their family members.  They worried about food.  They worried about clothes.  They worried a lot.  And as Jesus spoke, he pointed to the birds and said, “Consider the birds of the air; they do not sow nor reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” 

Think about the birds for a moment.  When was the last time you or I saw Mr. Barn Swallow buy a tractor, then plow and disc the garden, plant it and water it?  When was the last time you saw him buy hammer, nails and timber to build a barn to store his food in it?  No. From eagles to hummingbirds, our feathery friends do not worry about where their food comes from. 

Jesus reminds us that ‘your heavenly Father feeds them.’  God takes note of the smallest of his creatures and cares even for them.  He whispers to the frogs where the best flies in the bog live, he uncovers plump raspberries and blackberries for the birds and delivers treasure maps to the squirrels and chipmunks where acorns and walnuts can be found.  God provides for the smallest of his creatures.  Not a bird falls from the sky without his knowledge of it.

Mama bird feeding her grown hatchlings

And if God so cares for the smallest of his creatures, how much more ‘valuable’ are you and I, the crowns of his creation.  We are valuable to him.  He made us in his own likeness and in his own image.  We are valuable to him.  He searches us and knows the deepest corners of our hearts, the hidden thoughts of our mind and the tender muscle fibers after a workout.  We are valuable to him.  Though we all go our own way instead of his way, he ‘so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16).  We are valuable to him.  Like the father in the prodigal son parable (found in Luke 15), he stands and waits for us to come home.  We are valuable to him.  Those who believe in his Son, Jesus, have the unique privilege to be called ‘children of God’ (1 John 3:1).  I emphasize this point because we either tend to forget God’s goodness in trouble or believe what others say about us.

This is the lesson that our feathery friends teach us often.  So the next time you are anxious or worried about your life—listen to the birds sing in the morning or watch them fly and dart about.  Then remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:26:  “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow nor reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable then they?” 

God's Everlasting Covenant of Love

Meditation on Isaiah 55:3b

I will make an everlasting covenant with you, 

My faithful love promised to David.

            A covenant is a solemn promise that binds God and his people together and is usually initiated by God.[1] Often in the Old Testament, it involved cutting an animal in half and one or both parties walking between the pieces.  This bloody ritual bound the two parties together in a legal agreement that displayed the horrific reality if they failed to keep the agreement: namely, they would end up like the animals.  This is what took place with Abraham in Genesis 15.  Only there, God treaded the path between the carcasses and endangered only himself.  We watch him initiate covenants with his people as early as Noah.  God set the rainbow in the sky for Noah, his family and all generations to see so that they would know God would never again flood the earth.  “Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth” (Genesis 9:16).  God made a covenant and bound himself with Abraham (Genesis 15) and renewed it with Isaac and Jacob.  When the Lord gave Moses the Law, he established it as a covenant between him and his people.

            God initiates the covenant and thus binds himself to his people.

  

            The Lord made a covenant with David during his reign.  The shepherd boy turned king desired to build God a house, a temple.  This is a noble thought and through the prophet Nathan, God established a covenant with David and his family line: “The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you…I will raise up your offspring to succeed you…and I will establish his kingdom…my love will never be taken away from him” (2 Samuel 7:11, 15).  This is God’s covenant to David, his solemn promise.

 

            This verse in Isaiah follows on the heels of God’s invitation to come to him.  Why?  Why should we come to him?  Yes, God desires to satisfy us fully.  But there is more.  He also desires to make ‘an everlasting covenant’ with us, the solemn promise of his love to David.  Let’s unpack this a little bit more.

 

We read in 2 Samuel 7:15 that God’s love will never be taken away from David’s descendants, those who sit on his throne.  Although David died several hundred years earlier then the writing of this prophecy, God bestows his love upon David’s descendants.  When Gabriel appears to Mary several hundred years after the writing of this prophecy, he announces Jesus’ role.  “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.  The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (Luke 132-33).  Perhaps this love is alluded to when God twice declares it to His Son while he is on earth, namely at his baptism and the Mount of Transfiguration.

So if Jesus is the descendant of David and God bestows his love on him, what does this have to do with us?  Everything and much more!

 

When we believe Jesus, his death for our sins and his resurrection, we are united to him: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).   Paul uses the marriage imagery to magnify this point. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’  This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32).  This is bonding indeed!

   

The covenant stipulation, the ‘legal requirements’ if you will, is solely based on God’s ‘faithful love promised to David.’  In other words, when we believe in Jesus, we enter in, share in and partake of the same covenant love promised to David and his descendants, climaxing in Jesus and given to those who follow him.  This covenant is ours through the Son of David, Jesus the Messiah, and is sealed by his gruesome death.  As he said hours before he was crucified, “Drink from it, all of you.  This is my blood of the covenant poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:27-28).

       

            Whether Paul alluded to this covenant love in Romans 8 or not, it certainly is God’s promised love towards us.

Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?  It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns?  No one.  Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

            In the everlasting covenant, sealed by Jesus’ blood and ratified by the empty tomb, we are secure in God’s love.  God will not turn his back on us because of his covenant towards us in his Son.  He loves us deeply and is committed wholly to us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).

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[1] I do not wish to delve into the topic of covenants here and have merely simplified what a covenant is.  Wayne Grudem defines a covenant as “an unchangeable, divinely imposed legal agreement between God and man that stipulates the conditions of their relationship.”  Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1994. 515.  

The Invitation

A meditation on Isaiah 55:1-3a 

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!  Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.  Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.  Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.

From Genesis to Revelation, God constantly invites his people to something greater then themselves.  He invites Abraham to leave his father’s household and journey to an unknown land.  He calls an aged Moses from a burning bush and instructs him to lead his people to freedom from an oppressive nation.  He calls Samuel when he was a boy and made him a prophet to his generation.  He took David from tending a flock of sheep and appointed him as king over his people.

The invitation is different in Isaiah 55.  It is not a summons to journey to a foreign country or call to a rescue mission.  Neither is it a call to kingship or prophet-hood.  Rather it beckons us with a simple plea: “Come.” 

            

The recipients of this summons are the thirsty.  They are invited to “come to the waters.”  Imagine for a moment that you are in a desert wasteland.  The sun glowers over you with burning hatred, your clothes are ragged and torn, your lips are chapped and your mouth, dry.  For you, water is scarce, precious, life sustaining and giving.  As soon as you sight an oasis from afar, you run and gulp it down in great draughts.  Your body is refreshed from the weariness of travel and the sun’s unrelenting oppression.  Your mind relaxes from the strenuous worries and anxieties of death by dehydration.  Your heart renews from its dry and barren state and thoughts of hope return.  All this happens because you quenched your thirst at the waters.      

            

“Come…you who have no money, come, buy and eat!”  These other recipients are classified as the poor.  They are familiar with empty bellies.  Their meager meals of stale bread and gravy do not satisfy their gnawing hunger pains.  Perhaps they even scavenge for food in a nearby garbage can.  Any invitation for food is welcomed, especially when it goes beyond their stale diet of bland, staple foods.  Here God summons them to buy ‘wine and milk,’ symbolic of delight and nourishment.  Here their bellies will be filled with the ‘richest of fare,’ a feast like none other.

           

Remember, they have no money.  This feast is on God’s account, not theirs.  He flips the proverbial bill for the ‘wine and milk.’  All he requires of you and I is found in the word, ‘Come.’  Come, just as we are, thirsty and poor, to drink and delight in Him.     

Yet there is a question He asks to our hearts in this passage: “Why spend money on what is not bread and your labor on what does not satisfy?”  This is better illustrated.  Imagine you are poor.  Every night you and your family crave a solid meal, something beyond your thin diet.  Then one evening, someone slips a hundred dollars under your door.  You take the money to the store but instead of buying bread and meat, a meal that will satisfy you and your family, you spend it on a new outfit or a video game.  A new outfit is good but it will not satisfy your hunger.  A video game can relieve stress but it will not stave off starvation. 

Perhaps the problem in 21^st century America is not that we are in a desert wasteland searching for water or on the streets of an inner city scavenging for food.  No, we are far more vulnerable to drink from the shallow, muddy and barren wells to quench our thirst, then to visit the spring of living water.  We would rather spend our money on potato chips and candy, things that only temporarily relieve our spiritual hunger pains, rather then a feast that satisfies.  Such is our greatest problem.

Looking beyond water and food, it is very clear that the question asks, “Why do you go somewhere else to satisfy your deepest needs, other then God?”  Facebook, friends, fashion, video games, entertainment with music, movies and movie stars all promise satisfaction but fail to fulfill.     

            

Yet God is different.  His promises are never shallow or empty.

His invitation summons us to ‘listen’ to him and ‘come’ to him.  “Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good…listen that you may live” (2-3).  God’s spoken word produces fruit in us. “Blessed is the one…whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night.  He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season” (Psalm 1).  His word strengthens us, even in our sorrows: “My soul is weary with sorrow; strengthen me according to your word” (Psalm 119:28).  His word refreshes us: “The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul” (Psalm 19:7).  His word sanctifies us. “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).   

Listening to his word equals life: “They are not just idle words to you—they are your life” (Deuteronomy 32:47).  His word imparts life.  Jesus said, “The Spirit gives life…the words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life” (John 6:63).  Peter assures us that God’s word brings rebirth, new life: “For you have been born again…through the living and enduring word of God.”  Refusing his word only means death.  A quick perusal of the Bible illustrates this: Pharaoh rejecting God’s command through Moses, the Israelites disobeying him again and again until they were finally exiled and the world in Revelation that refuses to repent of their ways.   

            

God’s invitation is a summons to ‘listen’ and to ‘come.’  “Give ear and come to me.”  He is the feast that fully satisfies.  He is the water that quenches our terrible thirst.  He alone satisfies.  He refreshes and nourishes.  He fulfills and fills us.  God and nobody or no one else can or ever will.  The Son of God emphasizes this when he says, “I am the Bread of life” (John 6:48) and “Let everyone who is thirsty come to me and drink” (7:37).  Don’t go over there.  Come to me.  Don’t feast over there.  Come to me.  Don’t drink in a broken well.  Come to me. 

“Come.”  It happens to be the final invitation at the end of the Bible: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’  And let the one who hears say, ‘Come!’  Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17).