The Speck of Dust on the Scales Text: Isaiah 40:12-17
Introduction: A Corrective Lens for a Myopic Age
We live in an age of profound spiritual nearsightedness. Our vision of God has been tragically shrunk down to a manageable size. For many, He is a celestial therapist, a divine butler, or a vague, benevolent force. For others, He is an angry old man, a cosmic tyrant to be overthrown. For the secularist, He is an embarrassing superstition, a relic of a pre-scientific age. But whatever the particular distortion, the result is the same: a small god, a tame god, a god made in our own image.
This is not a new problem. The Israelites to whom Isaiah was writing were in exile, surrounded by the monumental paganism of Babylon. They saw the towering ziggurats, the massive armies, and the opulent wealth of an empire that did not know Yahweh. And in their despair, their vision of God began to shrink. They began to wonder if perhaps Yahweh was just a local deity, a tribal god who had been defeated by the superior gods of Babylon. Their circumstances were screaming at them, telling them that the world was very big and their God was very small.
Into this crisis of vision, Isaiah speaks these words. This passage is a divine corrective lens. It is designed to cure our spiritual myopia and to restore our vision of the sheer, breathtaking magnitude of God. This is not poetry for the sake of poetry. This is a series of devastating, worldview-shattering rhetorical questions designed to recalibrate our entire understanding of reality. It is a polemic against every form of human pride, every idol, and every small thought we have ever had about the God who is.
We must understand that if our doctrine of God is wrong, everything else will be wrong. If the foundation is crooked, the entire building will lean. A low view of God will always lead to a high view of man, a high view of our problems, and a high view of our enemies. Isaiah is here to demolish that faulty foundation and to rebuild our faith on the bedrock of the absolute sovereignty, the infinite wisdom, and the incomparable majesty of the living God.
The Text
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, And encompassed the heavens by the span, And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, And weighed the mountains in a balance And the hills in a pair of scales? Who has encompassed the Spirit of Yahweh, Or as His counselor has informed Him? With whom did He take counsel and who gave Him understanding? And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge And made Him know the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, And are counted as a speck of dust on the scales; Behold, He lifts up the coastlands like fine dust. Even Lebanon is not enough to burn, Nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before Him; They are counted by Him as non-existent and utterly formless.
(Isaiah 40:12-17 LSB)
The Unmeasured Creator (v. 12)
The interrogation begins with the created order. God, through the prophet, asks a series of questions to which the only possible answer is "no one but God."
"Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, And encompassed the heavens by the span, And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, And weighed the mountains in a balance And the hills in a pair of scales?" (Isaiah 40:12)
Consider what is being said here. God measures the oceans of the world, all of them, in the palm of His hand. This is not a metaphor for a very large hand; it is a statement about the smallness of the oceans. He measures the universe, from one end to the other, with the span of His hand, the distance between His thumb and little finger. He scoops up all the dust of the earth, every grain of sand on every beach and in every desert, in a small measuring cup. He puts the mountain ranges, the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies, on a set of scales to weigh them.
This imagery is designed to do two things. First, it establishes God's intimate and effortless sovereignty over creation. He is not overwhelmed by the vastness of the cosmos; He cups it in His hand. This is the bedrock of the Creator/creature distinction. He is not a part of the system; He is the one who designed, built, and sustains the system. He is transcendent.
Second, it reveals the absurdity of our anxieties. We are terrified by rising sea levels; God holds the seas in His palm. We are awed by the size of a mountain; God weighs it like a bag of flour. We feel lost in the vastness of space; God spans it with His hand. The things that overwhelm us are His casual handiwork. This is the God who tells us not to be anxious. Why? Because the scale of our problems does not even register on His scales.
The Uncounseled Mind (v. 13-14)
From God's infinite power, Isaiah moves to His infinite wisdom. If no one can match His physical power, perhaps someone can match His intellect?
"Who has encompassed the Spirit of Yahweh, Or as His counselor has informed Him? With whom did He take counsel and who gave Him understanding? And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge And made Him know the way of understanding?" (Isaiah 40:13-14 LSB)
The questions are relentless. Who has measured the mind of God? Who has ever served on His advisory committee? When God was laying the foundations of the world, with whom did He consult? When He was establishing the laws of physics, the principles of logic, and the standards of justice, from which university did He get His degree? Who taught God?
The answer, again, is a deafening silence. This is a direct assault on the central idol of our age, which is the autonomous human mind. We believe we have the right to stand in judgment over God. We put His Word in the dock and cross-examine it. We decide which parts of the Bible are acceptable to our modern sensibilities and which parts must be discarded. We presume to counsel the Almighty. We think we can teach God a thing or two about justice, fairness, and compassion.
Isaiah says this is insane. It is the creature attempting to instruct the Creator. It is a clay pot telling the potter how to shape it. All our knowledge, all our logic, all our sense of justice is derivative. We only know what justice is because we are made in the image of a just God. To use that borrowed sense of justice to critique the source of all justice is the height of folly. As Paul says, echoing this very passage, "For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?" (Romans 11:34). God has no counselors. He has no teachers. He is the fountainhead of all wisdom, knowledge, and understanding.
The Weightless Nations (v. 15-17)
Having established God's supremacy over the natural world and the world of ideas, Isaiah now turns to the pinnacle of human organization and power: the nations.
"Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, And are counted as a speck of dust on the scales; Behold, He lifts up the coastlands like fine dust." (Isaiah 40:15 LSB)
The Israelites were terrified of Babylon. We are fixated on the political dramas of our day, the rise and fall of superpowers, the machinations of governments. We look at the might of nations, their economies, their armies, their cultural influence, and we are impressed. God is not. Before Him, all the nations of the world, past, present, and future, are like a single drop of water falling from a bucket. They are like a speck of dust on a scale, so light that it does not even affect the measurement. He "lifts up the coastlands like fine dust," meaning He can move continents as easily as we might blow away a bit of dust.
This puts all of our political obsessions and fears into their proper, humbling perspective. The powers that seem so monolithic and permanent to us are, to God, utterly ephemeral and insignificant. This is not to say that politics do not matter, but they matter only as they relate to the purposes of this God. The story of history is not ultimately about the clash of empires; it is about the establishment of the kingdom of God, to which all other kingdoms are but a footnote.
Isaiah presses the point further, moving from the nations' power to their worship.
"Even Lebanon is not enough to burn, Nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before Him; They are counted by Him as non-existent and utterly formless." (Isaiah 40:16-17 LSB)
Even if you took all the glorious cedars of Lebanon, a symbol of immense value and majesty, they would not be enough fuel for a worthy sacrifice. And if you took all the animals in those forests, they would not be a sufficient burnt offering. Our very best, our most extravagant acts of worship, cannot begin to match His worth. The gulf between the Creator and the creature is infinite.
He concludes with the most devastating assessment of all. "All the nations are as nothing before Him." But it is even stronger than that. They are "counted by Him as non-existent and utterly formless." The Hebrew for "utterly formless" is tohu. This is the same word used in Genesis 1:2 to describe the world before God spoke His ordering Word into it: "formless and void." Without God, all the plans of men, all the empires, all the political structures, are just chaos. They are a return to the pre-creation state of nothingness. They have no substance, no meaning, no reality apart from Him.
The God Who Became a Speck of Dust
Now, if the sermon ended there, we would be left crushed and terrified. We would be left with an unbridgeable chasm between this immense, holy God and our own non-existent, tohu-like selves. And that is precisely why we must turn to the gospel. Because the central claim of Christianity is the most staggering thing imaginable. It is that this very God, the one who holds the oceans in His hand, willingly became a drop in the bucket.
The God who encompasses the heavens with a span was encompassed in the womb of a virgin. The one who weighs the mountains in a scale was weighed in the arms of His mother. The un-counseled mind, the source of all wisdom, "grew in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52). The one before whom all nations are nothing, placed Himself under the authority of a pagan Roman governor.
Why? He did it to bridge the infinite gap. Our best sacrifices, the forests of Lebanon, are insufficient. So He became the sacrifice. The Word who spoke creation into existence became flesh and dwelt among us. The God who is pure being, before whom we are "non-existent," took on our nothingness and died on a cross, so that we, in Him, might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The comfort of Isaiah 40 is not simply that God is big and our problems are small. The comfort is that this immeasurably great God is our Father through faith in Jesus Christ. He has not remained distant and aloof in His grandeur. He has drawn near. The hand that measures the cosmos was pierced for our transgressions.
Therefore, our response to this vision of God should be twofold. First, profound humility. We must abandon all our pride, all our self-reliance, all our attempts to counsel God or justify ourselves before Him. We are the speck of dust. He is the one who holds the scales. Second, unshakable confidence. If this God is for us, who can be against us? What nation, what political turmoil, what personal crisis, what fear can stand against the one who weighs the mountains in a balance? We are to cast all our anxieties on Him, because the one who cares for us is the one who holds the universe in the hollow of His hand.