Isaiah 57:15
“For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.’” Isaiah 57:15
The One who dwells in the High and Holy place is also He who dwells with those who are lowly and crushed in spirit…cascading from the heights to the depths and so raising the depths into the heights through the presence of the high and exalted God in the lowly place. Outside the camp, amidst the outcasts and the castoffs, surrounded by those who take and take and take and have nothing to give; that is where God is found. And if that is where God is, then that is where heaven is, that is where life and light and peace are, that is where holiness is, indeed, that is where the Holy of Holies is to be found.
And is this not where God is because this is where (Calvary-defined) Love goes, and God is (Calvary-defined) Love? Returning to Isaiah’s earlier image of water breaking out in the desert (35:6-7), is Love not the true spiritual water that—like physical water—always flows to the lowest point, always rolls down to fill the deepest places, those places furthest from its source?
Yes, the water of our world is—like all things—an image and parable of who God is in Christ. Water seeks the lowest point, pouring itself from the heights to the depths, and it does this because it is a shadow and symbol of True Water, the True Water who is the Father, given in the anastasiform Son, through the crystalline river of the Spirit. This Water, this Fountain, this River, pouring into creation from the riven heart of the incarnate Son—who is Stricken Rock, and Ezekiel’s Temple, and Enthroned Lamb—flows down to the place of greatest need, gathering as a shining pool in the lowest depression of human brokenness, filling in the fissures and crevices of the sin-torn world, its dark surface radiant with the reflected light of heaven’s face in the deepest pit of earth’s torment.
