We have spent four weeks inside one Hebrew image. In our story, ten men saw themselves as grasshoppers in a land of giants. The comparison, the inadequacy, and the fear overwhelmed them. They looked at the giants, looked at themselves, and assumed they would be devoured. Yes, the giants were large.
They had been sent to scout a land that had been promised to them for generations. The anticipation was decades in the making. And the land was abundantly good.
But they judged themselves too small, too weak, too incapable to advance. They bought into the grasshopper lie.
So, for weeks we have sat in the smallness of grasshoppers.
…and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
However, we have not yet asked where else the word for grasshopper shows up and what light it might shed on our journey. So, today we return to the center of the lie – the grasshopper – to see how it informs our reading.
And it changes everything.
A Message of Comfort#
We turn to a message of comfort from the prophet Isaiah to a displaced people. The descendants of the generation who felt like grasshoppers at the edge of the promised land now find themselves in exile from the very land that had been given to them.
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem….
Isaiah is writing to a lost and hurting people. They are weary. They are dwelling in a foreign land. This is more than a location change for them. It is a loss of identity.
Into their weariness, God offers words of comfort and hope for Isaiah to pass on to the people. Good News is on its way. While the plants of the earth come and go, the Lord remains steadfast. While even the strongest grow weary, His strength does not. While the seas are chaotic, dangerous, and disconcerting, the Almighty holds them in the palm of His hand. While the mountains and hills are enormous, He measures them. Where nations dominate – as they had in this very moment for Israel – they are as nothing before Him.
All of this speaks of hope, confidence, and comfort to these people.
In this chapter that is familiar to many, most have never noticed the grasshopper.
Same Grasshoppers. New Eyes.#
Right in the middle of that comfort chapter, we find these verses:
Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in, who brings princes to naught and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
"...its inhabitants are like grasshoppers."
Chagab. The same word.
The word the spies used about themselves in their own eyes – chagab – Isaiah uses to describe how God sees the inhabitants of the earth.
In Numbers 13, the spies were grasshoppers in their own eyes. In Isaiah 40, all of us humans are grasshoppers in God's eyes. While the word remains the same, the eyes are entirely different.
In Numbers 13, they are seen as small by themselves. The result is fear. In Isaiah 40, they are seen as small by the Almighty. The result is comfort, strength, and trust.
Consider how this chapter ends.
He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted, but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
The same chapter that calls humans grasshoppers also says they shall mount up with wings like eagles. Both are true. Smallness in God's sight does not crush. It is the characteristic of those He lifts up.
In this chapter, grasshopper is not a verdict of failure. It is an invitation to be lifted up.
We were afraid of being small. We were afraid of being grasshoppers. But we were right that we were grasshoppers. We were wrong about whose eyes we were going to be standing under.
Whose Eyes#
When the spies were comparing themselves to the giants, they had not chosen the wrong measurement. The giants really were larger. The cities really were fortified. The threat assessment was honest.
What the spies had chosen wrong was whose eyes they were standing under.
They were standing under their own eyes. They were standing under the imagined eyes of the giants. Those eyes had a verdict to deliver, and the verdict was crushing.
But there were other eyes in the picture the whole time.
The Lord had been with the spies through forty days of scouting. The Lord had been with Israel through the escape from captivity in Egypt before that. The Lord had been with their ancestors through every promise that brought them to this border. The eyes that had been on them all along belonged to the One who sits above the circle of the earth and gently leads those who have young.
Those were not the eyes the spies turned to.
When they came back from the land, the verdict they delivered was a verdict their own eyes had reached. It was confirmed by the eyes they imagined in their enemies. But it was never the verdict of the eyes that mattered most.
The grasshopper lie depended on us standing under the wrong eyes. And it works on us the same way today.
When you are pacing in a parking lot before a meeting that matters, the eyes you are imagining are not the eyes of the One who sits above the circle of the earth. You are imagining the eyes of the people in the room. You are imagining the eyes you would catch in the mirror if you looked. You are imagining the eyes of the people who weighed in on you years ago and never quite stopped.
None of those eyes are wrong about your smallness. You are small. We all are. Chagab.
What those eyes are wrong about is what smallness means.
Smallness in the wrong eyes is a verdict. Smallness in His eyes is tender attention.
And there is more. The eyes that hold you are not just kind eyes. They are eyes of a scale we have not seriously imagined.
The giants the spies feared were larger than they were. That comparison was honest as far as it went. But the spies were not measuring against the only scale that mattered. Above the giants — above the walled cities, above the strongholds, above every threat that has ever made you feel small — sit the eyes of the One who measures the mountains and weighs the hills. In those eyes, the giants are grasshoppers too. The nations are as nothing. The princes are brought to naught.
Small in the eyes of the One who is truly big — at a scale beyond any giant we will ever encounter — is not the same as small in the eyes of a giant.
The spies looked at the giants and looked at themselves and saw the gap between them.
But the gap between the spies and the giants was nothing compared to the gap between the giants and God.
The lens you have been looking through is also the eyes you have been imagining looking back at you. Both have been the wrong ones. The lens has been measuring you against the giants. The eyes you have been bracing for have been the giants' eyes, your peers' eyes, your own.
The Lord's eyes have been there the whole time, holding you at a scale that makes every giant small too.
What This Does to the Lie#
We have spent four weeks looking at a lie that starts inside, gets confirmed by the world, and lodges in us because it matches a story we were already telling ourselves. None of the usual responses have touched it.
We have tried willpower. We have tried preparation. We have tried reminding ourselves we are capable. We have tried telling ourselves we are not small.
But we are small. We are chagab. The smallness is true.
What changes the lie is not removing the smallness. What changes the lie is moving the eyes.
The grasshopper lie depended on us looking up at giants while standing under our own anxious gaze and the imagined gaze of those who would devour us. The grasshopper truth is that we have been standing under different eyes the whole time. The eyes that hold us are not eyes that diminish us. The eyes that hold us are tender, attentive, and at a scale that makes every giant small too.
The verdict in the parking lot was always pronounced by a voice that was not the Lord's. The voice that has been with us the whole time has been saying something else.
Smallness in the wrong eyes crushes. Smallness in God's eyes does not.
You Are Held#
Next week, we will look at what it means that the eyes holding us are not distant eyes. They are with us eyes. The grasshopper of Isaiah 40 is also the grasshopper of Caleb's the Lord is with us speech. Same God. Same vantage point. Closer than we knew.
For this week, just the move. Chagab — the word at the center of the lie — was always going to come back. And it came back inverted through the lens of the One who is truly big.
You are small.
And you are held.
You always have been. Held by the One whose eyes make every giant small too.