NOTES for Isa 55:10-11

When the prophets speak of the word of God, they always mean something entirely concrete and connected with their own spiritual experience. The word of God is absolutely real to them; they truly hear God's voice as clearly as we hear the voices of people addressed to us. God speaks with the prophets just as we speak with one another. But this is not all: in God's word there is something more than will and revelation addressed to a person.

For God, the word is also an instrument of His action in the world. By the word God creates the world; by the word He governs it. It can appear that the word the prophet hears and the word by which God governs the world are two different realities, called by the same name because of the features of biblical usage, but this is still not entirely so. Of course, the revelation received by a particular person cannot be compared with the power by which God creates the world or directs the movement of natural forces in it. But in both cases there is also an essential similarity: in both there is that meaning which nature does not have and without which there is no created universe.

The science that studies nature, whether physical nature or psychic nature, can find an answer to the question "how," but it does not seek answers to the questions "why this way" or "for what purpose." For God, however, these very questions are central. The world for Him is full of meaning and meanings: meaning as a whole that reflects His design for the world, and meanings as the purposes He has set for everything He created, from a human being to a star and a grain of sand. And in our world only a human being can understand these meanings placed by God in the things He created; moreover, for a human being, meanings are inseparable from the word. It is no accident that even before the fall, it was precisely the human being, who at that time saw God's meanings with complete clarity, who was given the opportunity to give names to everything surrounding him and to everything with which he had to interact directly.

That is why God's will is revealed to a person in the word, not only when the matter concerns personal revelation, but also when it concerns the created universe as a whole. Without the word, the world is a machine, sometimes obedient to man but more often hostile to him. With the word, it is the place where man meets God, a meeting that makes man a participant in the fulfillment of God's plan, if only man himself wants this.