The Grasshopper Kings and the Star-Naming God Text: Isaiah 40:21-26
Introduction: The Great Downgrade
We live in an age of calculated amnesia. Our generation is not simply forgetful; it is actively engaged in the project of forgetting. We are told, from our kindergartens to our halls of government, to forget where we came from, to forget what a man is, to forget what a woman is, and above all, to forget God. The prophet Isaiah confronts this same spiritual Alzheimer's in the people of Israel. Four times in our opening verse, he asks a variation of the same question: "Do you not know? Have you not heard?" This is not a quiz to check their theological IQ. It is a rebuke. It is the cry of a man shaking someone who has fallen into a deep and dangerous slumber.
The central malady of our time, and of every time, is what we might call the Great Downgrade. It is the persistent, rebellious human tendency to downgrade God and to upgrade man. We want to shrink God down to a manageable size, to make Him a cosmic butler, a therapeutic friend, or a vague spiritual force. And at the same time, we want to inflate ourselves, to puff up our own importance, to declare our own sovereignty, and to sit as judges over reality itself. We want to be the potter, and for God to be the clay.
This passage in Isaiah is God's glorious corrective to this fatal conceit. It is a blast of cosmic reality. It takes our petty, man-centered worldview and shatters it against the infinite majesty of the Creator. Isaiah's argument is simple and devastating. He invites us to look in two directions: down at the rulers of the earth, and then up at the stars of the heavens. When we look down, we see the utter frailty and transience of human power. When we look up, we see the infinite might and meticulous care of the sovereign God. The contrast is designed to cure us of our delusions of grandeur and to fill us with a holy and comforting awe.
To forget the God described in these verses is to lose your grip on reality. It is to live in a fantasy world where grasshoppers think they are giants and where temporary political appointees believe they are ultimate. This is the definition of insanity. And so, this text is a call to sanity. It is a call to remember who God is, and consequently, who we are.
The Text
Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is He who inhabits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; It is He who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to inhabit. It is He who reduces rulers to nothing, Who makes the judges of the earth utterly formless. Scarcely have they been planted; Scarcely have they been sown; Scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, But He merely blows on them, and they wither, And the storm carries them away like stubble. “To whom then will you liken Me That I would be his equal?” says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high And see who has created these stars, The One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; Because of the greatness of His vigor and the strength of His power, Not one of them is missing.
(Isaiah 40:21-26 LSB)
The Forgotten Foundation (v. 21)
We begin with the prophet's sharp, repeated questioning:
"Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?" (Isaiah 40:21)
This is a foundational appeal. Isaiah is not introducing some new, esoteric doctrine. He is calling them back to the first page of the book, to the grammar of reality established in Genesis 1. The knowledge of God as the transcendent Creator is not a matter for specialists. It is basic, elementary, and has been declared "from the beginning." It is understood "from the foundations of the earth." This is what Paul argues in Romans 1. The knowledge of God's eternal power and divine nature is clearly perceived in the things that have been made. To be ignorant of this is to be willfully ignorant. It is a culpable stupidity.
The modern secularist prides himself on his supposed intellectual honesty, but he is the chief offender here. He builds his entire worldview on a determined refusal to hear what has been declared from the beginning. He looks at a world screaming with design, order, and complexity, and insists that nobody made it. He is like a man standing in the middle of a library, surrounded by millions of books, who concludes that it must all be the result of a print shop explosion. This is not reason; it is rebellion. It is a spiritual deafness that refuses to hear the constant, thunderous testimony of creation.
The View from the Throne (v. 22)
Having established that this knowledge is basic, Isaiah then gives us the content of that knowledge. What is it that we should have understood? It is the absolute transcendence of God over His creation.
"It is He who inhabits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; It is He who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to inhabit." (Isaiah 40:22 LSB)
God's perspective is the ultimate high ground. He "inhabits above the circle of the earth." This is not a primitive scientific statement about a flat earth with a dome over it, as skeptics love to caricature. The word for circle here can mean sphere or vault. The point is theological, not cosmological in a technical sense. God is enthroned over the whole of His creation. He is not a part of the system; He is the author of it. This is the crucial Creator/creature distinction. God is not in the box with us; He made the box.
From this vantage point, how do the inhabitants of the earth appear? "Like grasshoppers." This is not meant to be a statement of our worthlessness, but of our scale. Think of the most powerful man on earth, the president, the dictator, the CEO. In the councils of their own minds, they are titans, movers and shakers of history. From the divine throne room, they are insects. Their grand geopolitical strategies are the scurrying of ants on a hill. This is a necessary dose of humility. When we forget this, we begin to take ourselves far too seriously. We begin to think that the decrees of Washington or Brussels are ultimate. But they are the chirping of grasshoppers, and God is not impressed.
The second half of the verse reinforces this. He "stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent." The vastness of space, which makes us feel so small, is to God a simple piece of fabric, a tent He pitches with ease. He is not overwhelmed by the size of His own creation; He is its master. This is a God of effortless, infinite power.
The Disposable Elite (v. 23-24)
Isaiah now applies this transcendent reality to the realm of human politics. If all inhabitants are like grasshoppers, this must include the most important-looking grasshoppers.
"It is He who reduces rulers to nothing, Who makes the judges of the earth utterly formless. Scarcely have they been planted; Scarcely have they been sown; Scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, But He merely blows on them, and they wither, And the storm carries them away like stubble." (Isaiah 40:23-24 LSB)
Human authority is derivative, temporary, and fragile. God is the one who "reduces rulers to nothing." He makes the judges of the earth "utterly formless," which is the Hebrew tohu, the same word used in Genesis 1:2 for the unformed creation. God can take the most established political dynasty, the most powerful judicial authority, and with a word, return it to a state of primordial chaos. He un-creates them.
Verse 24 gives us a devastating agricultural metaphor for this. These rulers and judges see themselves as mighty oaks, deeply rooted and established for generations. God sees them as barely-sprouted seedlings. "Scarcely have they been planted...scarcely has their stem taken root." Before they can even get established, God acts. And what great effort does it require? "He merely blows on them." It is a divine exhalation, a puff of air, and they wither. The hot wind of His judgment comes, and the storm of His providence carries them away like worthless chaff.
This should be a profound comfort to the people of God when they are living under oppressive regimes. And it should be a terrifying warning to those who wield power unjustly. Your reign is provisional. Your authority is borrowed. You are a tenant on God's earth, and your lease can be revoked at any moment, with a simple breath from the Owner.
The Incomparable One (v. 25)
After this display of His absolute sovereignty over creation and human history, God Himself issues a challenge through the prophet.
"“To whom then will you liken Me That I would be his equal?” says the Holy One." (Isaiah 40:25 LSB)
This is the central question of all true religion. The essence of idolatry is the attempt to liken God to something in creation. It is to take a created thing, whether it is a block of wood, a political ideology, a sexual desire, or a personal ambition, and to give it the honor and authority that belongs to God alone. God here declares the absolute bankruptcy of all such attempts. You cannot compare the infinite to the finite. You cannot make an equal for the Creator out of the things He has created.
Notice who is speaking: "the Holy One." Holiness means to be set apart, to be in a class by oneself. God's holiness is His absolute uniqueness. He is utterly other. This is why the second commandment is so fundamental. To make an image of God is to lie about Him. It is to drag Him down from His transcendent throne and to make Him a grasshopper, one of us. But God will not be graded on a curve. He will not be part of a pantheon. He is not the best in a category of "gods." He is the only one in the category of "God."
The Star-Shepherd (v. 26)
To clinch the argument, God directs our gaze upward one last time.
"Lift up your eyes on high And see who has created these stars, The One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; Because of the greatness of His vigor and the strength of His power, Not one of them is missing." (Isaiah 40:26 LSB)
This is not just a call to appreciate astronomy. It is a call to worship the Creator. We are to look at the night sky and ask the ultimate question: "Who created these?" The answer is the God of Israel. But He is not a distant, deistic creator who wound up the clock and walked away. His involvement is personal, meticulous, and constant.
He "leads forth their host by number." The stars are a vast army, and He is their general, marshalling them in perfect order. Modern science has given us a glimpse of the sheer number involved, hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies. Yet God has them all numbered. He is not overwhelmed by the data.
And then comes the most intimate detail: "He calls them all by name." Naming in Scripture is an act of sovereignty and intimate knowledge. We give names to a handful of stars and constellations, but God has a personal name for every single one. This is a staggering thought. The same God who reduces kings to stubble has an intimate, personal knowledge of every object in His vast creation. Because of His infinite "vigor" and "power," not one of these billions upon billions of stars is ever lost, ever out of place, ever unaccounted for.
Conclusion: From the Stars to the Soul
Now, what is the point of all this? Is it to make us feel insignificant and crushed, like the grasshoppers we are? Not at all. The argument of Isaiah 40 moves in precisely the opposite direction. The very next verses say, "Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, 'My way is hidden from the LORD, and the justice due me escapes the notice of my God'?"
The logic is glorious. If this transcendent God, who treats potentates like dust bunnies, also takes the time to name every star and ensure that not one is missing, how can you possibly conclude that He has forgotten you? If He maintains such meticulous, sovereign care over inanimate balls of gas trillions of miles away, will He not care for His own covenant children, whom He has redeemed with the blood of His Son?
The God who stretches out the heavens like a tent is the same God who pitched His tent among us in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:14). The Word through whom the stars were made is the same Word who became flesh. The Holy One who cannot be likened to any created thing is the one who took on a human nature, yet without sin. The one who blows on rulers and they wither is the one who had the breath knocked out of Him on a Roman cross for our transgressions.
Therefore, when you feel small, when you feel forgotten, when you see the grasshopper kings of the earth puffing out their chests and making their decrees, you are to do what the prophet says. Look down and see their frailty. Then lift up your eyes on high. Look at the stars. And remember the God who created them, who marshals them, who names them. He is your God. And because of the greatness of His vigor and the strength of His power, and because of the infinite love displayed at the cross, not one of His children will ever be missing.