Isaiah 45:1-8: God’s work through a pagan king.

1.1 During my last semester at seminary in Toronto, I began applying for pastoral positions at churches across Canada. It was January 2015. By August, I had submitted close to a hundred applications. Not a single church responded.

1.2 Looking back, it makes sense. To Canadian congregations, I was a foreigner. My English was limited. I had no experience in Canadian ministry. Even churches that were struggling to find a pastor had good reasons to hesitate. Choosing someone like me wasn't an easy decision to make.

1.3 Then a church in Saskatchewan reached out. I flew out for the interview. During my time there, I was hosted by one of the deacons — a ninety-year-old Canadian man, a faithful servant of that congregation for many years. At some point during my visit, I asked him directly: "What made you want to interview me?"

1.4 He paused, and then he said something I have never forgotten. “If I took a knife right now and cut your arm, and then cut mine — we'd both bleed red. And underneath, the flesh would look the same. The bone would be the same colour." He smiled and kept going. “I'm old. I wear hearing aids, and sometimes I can't hear well. And you — your English is still finding its way. So here we are: two incomplete people. But if two incomplete people come together to serve — don't you think that's exactly the kind of thing God would delight in? When God is at work, maybe our completeness would just get in the way. His work doesn't need perfect instruments. It just needs willing ones, shaped to His purpose."

1.5 Those words moved something in me. I said yes. We packed up and moved to a town of two hundred and sixty people. We became the first Korean family that the community had ever had. And I became the first Asian pastor in that denomination's two-hundred-and-fifty-year history. That deacon saw something I hadn't seen yet. And I keep coming back to this question:

 What was it that he could see that I had missed?

2.1 Before we look at this passage together, let me give you just enough background to stand in it.

2.2 The people of Israel are living in Babylon, in exile. The empire is not crumbling. There is no sign that anything is about to change. And for a people who believed that God dwelled with them, that He had chosen them, that He was working for them, and this silence felt like abandonment. Their king was gone. Their temple was gone. And God, it seemed, had gone quiet. Into that silence, the prophet speaks.

2.3 There is a man named Cyrus, king of Persia and a foreign empire rising in the east. He does not worship the God of Israel. He does not know YHWH. By every measure that Israel would have used, he is an outsider. He is not one of them. And yet. God opens His mouth, and the first word out of it — the very first thing He says about Cyrus — is this:

"Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus." His anointed. Māšîaḥ. Messiah.

2.4 That word had always belonged to the line of David. To Israel's kings. To the one God set apart from within His own people. And now God places it on the head of a pagan king who doesn't even know His name. That should stop us. Let's just read what's actually on the page.

Isaiah 45:1–8 ESV

Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and to loose the belts of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed:

“I will go before you and level the exalted places, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord,

the God of Israel, who call you by your name. For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I name you, though you do not know me. I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God;

I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.

“Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit; let the earth cause them both to sprout; I the Lord have created it.

3.1 Let's just see what's here. No conclusions yet. Just  look at this with me. The first thing God says in this passage is a title. And the title is māšîaḥ, anointed one. Messiah.

3.2 Now, Israel knew that word. They had grown up with that word. It belonged to a specific story, the line of David, the covenant people, the one set apart from within. When they heard māšîaḥ, they already had a picture in their minds. They knew what that person was supposed to look like. And then God finishes the sentence. "Thus says the LORD to his anointed — to Cyrus."

3.3 And honestly, that picture made sense. It wasn't an unreasonable thing to expect. History had shaped it. God Himself had shaped it, through the promises to David, through the psalms they sang, through the stories they told their children. The Messiah would come from within. He would know the name of God. He would carry the covenant in his bones.

3.4 But here is the thing about pictures we build over a long time. They stop being expectations and start becoming requirements. We stop holding them loosely and start holding them tightly. And at some point, without noticing, we move from saying "I believe God will work this way" to "God can only work this way."

3.5 Israel had done that. And if we are honest, so have we. We have our own picture. The person God would naturally use looks a certain way, comes from a certain background, speaks a certain language, belongs to a certain tradition. The church God would bless is the one doing things the way we recognize. The movement of the Spirit is the one that fits inside the category we already have.

3.6 Last week we talked about shrinking God to fit inside our frameworks. This is what it looks like in practice. We don't just shrink God. We shrink the people He is allowed to work through. We shrink the places He is allowed to show up. We draw the borders of His working, and then we hand Him the map. And then God opens His mouth. And says: Cyrus

3.7 Cyrus. A Persian king. A man who worshipped other gods. A man who, as far as we know, never once bowed his knee to YHWH. God says this plainly, without apology, without softening it. He simply places the word māšîaḥ on the head of a man who would never have made Israel's shortlist. That's the first collision.

3.8 The second one comes just a few verses later, and it's almost more unsettling. God doesn't just use Cyrus — He arms him, guides him, goes before him, levels mountains for him. And then He says: “I called you by your name — though you do not know me." Not because you know me. Not after you come to know me. Though you do not know me.

3.9 Recognition is not the condition. Faith is not the prerequisite. The call comes before any of that. The hand is extended before the introduction has even been made. That should make us uncomfortable. Because somewhere along the way, many of us have quietly assumed the opposite — that God works through people who are in the right category, who know the right things, who have the right background, and who are, in some meaningful sense, qualified.

3.10 The text doesn't say that. And then verse 7. This is the one that cuts the deepest.

Isaiah 45:7 NLT

I create the light and make the darkness. I send good times and bad times. I, the Lord, am the one who does these things.

We have a tendency, a very human tendency, to divide the world. This side is God's. That side is not. Light belongs to Him. Darkness does not. Blessing comes from Him. Difficulty must come from somewhere else.

3.11 But God refuses that division. He stands over both. He claims both. The hand that holds the light is the same hand that holds the darkness. So here is what the text is doing. Quietly, without raising its voice, it is dismantling a picture. A picture of how God works. A picture of who He uses. A picture we built carefully, brick by brick, out of our expectations. We built that picture. And the text walks up to it, and it says that's not quite right. And then verse 8 takes it even further. 

Isaiah 45:8 ESV

Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit; let the earth cause them both to sprout; I the Lord have created it.

God doesn't just use a pagan king. Rather, He commands the heavens, the clouds, the ordinary earth itself to sprout salvation. The most common matter, enlisted for the most holy purpose. The reason God shakes the heavens and opens the earth to pour down righteousness in verse 8 is this: His holiness does not remain hidden in an isolated mystery. Instead, He is the God who guarantees that His covenant faithfulness (Tsedeqah) and His justice (Mishpat) will bear concrete fruit right in the midst of our broken, everyday lives.

4.1 This passage doesn't stay in the sixth century. It moves. It walks across the room, and it sits down next to different people in different ways. For those of us who see ourselves as the clean instrument,

4.2 There's a detail in Isaiah we can't skip. A few chapters earlier, in chapter 42, God looks at Israel, His own chosen people, and calls them blind. Spiritually blind. Unable to see, unable to hear, unable to respond to what He was doing. That's why Cyrus was drafted, not because God preferred a pagan, but because His own people had grown too comfortable in their categories to be useful.

4.3 That's not a comfortable thought. But it's an honest one. If we have spent years assuming that we are the ones God naturally works through because we are the church, because we know the right things, because we have the history. This passage wants to sit with us for a moment. This week, the same God is asking: have we also shrunk the people He's allowed to work through? For those of us who feel unqualified,

4.4 Cyrus never had a conversion moment. He never came to know YHWH. He went to his grave likely still crediting his victories to Marduk. And yet God used him. Completely. Significantly. In ways that shaped the entire history of God's people.

4.5 Think about what that means. God did not wait for Cyrus to get his theology right. He did not wait for him to clean up his beliefs, sort out his loyalties, or arrive at the correct understanding of who was really in charge. God simply reached out, took him by the right hand, and went to work.

4.6 Some of you are waiting. Waiting until your faith feels more solid. Until the doubt quiets down. Until you've read enough, learned enough, recovered enough from whatever broke you. Until you feel like the kind of person God could actually use. You have a picture in your mind of what that person looks like, and you are not there yet.

4.7 But the call in this text does not come after the knowing. It comes before it. "I called you by your name, though you do not know me." The hand is extended before the introduction has been made. Before the credentials are in order. Before you feel ready.

4.8 I think of that deacon again. He didn't wait for me to become fluent. He didn't put my application aside until my English improved. He looked at two incomplete people across a table and saw something that hadn't happened yet. He saw what God could do with willing hands, even unprepared ones. You don't have to have it all together. You just have to be willing to be held.

4.9 Cyrus commanded the greatest empire on earth. And in this passage, he is a tool in a hand he cannot see. That's it. That's the whole picture. The most powerful man in the known world, a tool. God is not threatened by the empire. He is not scrambling to keep up with political change, cultural pressure, or the rise of things we don't understand. He holds Cyrus by the right hand. He holds all of it.

4.10 Across all three of these, whether you feel too confident, too small, or too afraid, the text is saying the same thing. God's work is not bounded by the categories we have built. And that is both more humbling and more freeing than we might have expected.

5.1 That pattern in Isaiah 45 did not end with Cyrus. It kept moving. In Acts chapter 10, God gives the apostle Peter a vision. A sheet descends from heaven, filled with animals that no faithful Jew would ever touch — unclean, forbidden, outside the boundary. And a voice says: eat. Peter's response is immediate. "Surely not, Lord. I have never eaten anything impure or unclean." He has a list. He knows what belongs on the right side and what belongs on the wrong side. He has been keeping that list his whole life.

And God says: "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean."

5.2 Then He sends Peter to the house of Cornelius. A Roman centurion. A Gentile. A man completely outside the boundary of what Peter understood God to be doing. And there, in that house, the Holy Spirit falls. On all of them. Before Peter has finished speaking. Before they have been properly instructed, properly initiated, properly brought into the right category. Peter stands there and can barely find words. 

"Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?"

5.3 Just as we have. The shock in Peter's voice is the same shock that runs through Isaiah 45. God is not staying inside the lines we drew for Him. He is not waiting for people to arrive at the right address before He shows up. He reaches across the boundary, takes hold of a hand that doesn't know Him, and goes to work. This is not an accident. This is not God improvising. This is who He has always been. Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 2:11-13

Ephesians 2:11–13 ESV

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ,
alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

5.4 Far off. That was us. That was the Gentiles, the outsiders, the ones on the wrong side of every boundary Israel had carefully drawn. And God reached across that boundary anyway. Not because they had earned their way in. Not because they had cleaned themselves up and presented themselves correctly. But because that is what God does. He reaches toward what is far off. He takes hold of hands that don't know Him. He brings near what was outside.

5.5 Cyrus didn't know the hand that held him. Peter didn't expect the Spirit to fall where it fell. The Gentiles had no claim on the covenant they were brought into. And a ninety-year-old deacon in Pelly, Saskatchewan, sitting across a table from a Korean pastor who could barely string his sentences together — he didn't know he was reading Isaiah 45 either. He just saw two incomplete people, and trusted that God would be in the middle. And yet.

5.6 This is what Paul means when he writes in Romans 12 — do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. 

Romans 12:1–2 NASB 2020

Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

The renewed mind is not handed a new checklist. It is given new eyes. Eyes that can finally discern what God is actually doing, rather than filtering everything through what we expected Him to do. Eyes that can look at a Cyrus, a Cornelius, a ninety-year-old deacon with hearing aids, and say — yes. God is here too.

5.7 This is not a one-time shift. It is a daily one. Every morning, the same renewal. Every day, the same choice — to look at the people and circumstances around us through our pre-made categories, or to hold those categories a little more loosely and watch. Just watch.

5.8 So this week, not as an assignment but as an invitation — what if you paid attention to the hands you haven't recognized? The person you had already filed away. The situation you were certain God couldn't be in. The part of your own story you assumed He had nothing to do with.

What if the hand was already there?

What was it that deacon could see — that I had missed?