Isaiah 54:5: Your Maker Is Your Husband

For your Maker is your husband— the Lord Almighty is his name— the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.

Isaiah 54:5 (NIV)

Your Maker Is Your Husband

The storage place calls a woman four hours away because hers is the only number on the card. Three months unpaid, and the contents go to auction on the fifteenth. Her uncle has been dead since March. Two of his brothers are alive and neither of them will take the call.

She drives up on a Saturday. At the counter she pays the arrears and the lien fee and a charge for the cut lock, and she asks what’s in the unit. The man tells her he isn’t allowed to say. She pays anyway and takes the new key and puts it in the coin tray of the car, and she does not drive around to look.

Isaiah 54 is spoken to a city. She’s addressed as a woman who never had children and told to sing, told to make her tent bigger because she’s going to need the room, told she’ll forget the shame of her widowhood. Then God tells her who he is to her: your Maker is your husband; the Lord Almighty is his name; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.

Both of those are jobs. A husband has to do something about his wife’s trouble. A redeemer, in Israel’s law, was the near relative whose work it was to buy back what the family had lost, the field or the person, whether or not he wanted it and whether or not anyone thanked him for it. God takes both names for himself and says them to a people who had lost everything.

He isn’t describing a feeling he has about her. He is telling her what he is on the hook for, and the God of all the earth is the one saying it.

She’s home by dark with a key she hasn’t used. The unit is hers now, and so is whatever is in it. Somewhere in that county a man owed three months on it, and he never found out who covered it.