The chosen are not who you would guess

 This week's verses are Isaiah 45:1-4:

“This is what the Lord says to his chosen one, 

to Cyrus, whose right hand I hold
in order to subdue nations before him,
and disarm kings,
to open doors before him,
so gates remain unclosed:

‘I will go before you
and level mountains.
Bronze doors I will shatter
and iron bars I will hack through.
I will give you hidden treasures,
riches stashed away in secret places,
so you may recognize that I am the Lord,
the one who calls you by name, the God of Israel.
For the sake of my servant Jacob,
Israel, my chosen one,
I call you by name
and give you a title of respect, even though you do not submit to me.

In these verses Israel has been occupied by a brutal foreign power for over one hundred years. The Babylonian empire had invaded, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and dragged most of its population off to concentration camps near their capitol, where they could keep them under control. And now, God is telling these exiles that one of the neighboring kingdoms is going to be used by him to bless them.

Cyrus was the pagan king of Persia. He rose from obscurity, ruling a small regional kingdom, until one day he entered Babylon without a fight, and declared himself the new king of kings. His empire eventually reached to the edge of Greece. He was probably the most powerful man in history at the time.

Why did God use Cyrus? Couldn't he have raised up someone from Israel, like a kind of Jewish Spartacus? Wouldn't the story have been better if the captives rose up and threw off the Babylonian oppression themselves?

Imagine you were one of the displaced peoples living in Babylon when Isaiah shared this prophesy. After one hundred years, not even your grandparents would have been to Israel. You picture it as a magical land that was destroyed by these pagans. You wish you could take it back, but now you're hearing that that's not God's plan. Instead God is going to use another pagan warlord, and nothing you do will make a difference in the outcome. How humiliating!

Grace can be the same way. We struggle with sin, and try so hard to make ourselves right, and then the gospel tells us that we can't save ourselves. We can't deliver ourselves from its captivity on our own. We don't win the war through vicious battle and determination. Instead, an outside force enters the capital of our kingdom and declares "I am the king of kings. The captives are hereby free to return home."

In the same way as the exiled people of Israel might have chafed against the idea of not being the heroes of their story, we sometimes chafe against the idea of having our righteousness handed to us. Have you ever tried to get a jar open and struggled to the point of defeat, only to have someone else effortlessly open it? We all want to be the mighty jar-opener, not the poor sap who has to have it done for them.

But maybe we can be open-minded enough to see what God is doing and appreciate it for what it is. The thing God says to Cyrus is the same thing he says to us: "I will give you everything, and I will break down walls and open doors, so that you will know that I am God. I will give you a title of respect, even though you don't deserve it."

In that sense, we get to be Cyrus and Israel at the same time. How cool is that? On the one hand, this problem of powerless suffering under sin is solved for us by the greatest power ever to exist. And on the other hand, we get to act like the hero of the story, even though everything is handed to us. We don't deserve either one, but God calls us by name to give it to us. 

We are his chosen ones.