The unlikely deliverer

It is one of the most jarring sentences in the prophets. The LORD speaks of His anointed — the word is messiah, the title saved for kings of David's line and finally for Christ Himself — and the name He attaches to it is Cyrus. A Persian. A pagan emperor who worshipped other gods and had, until that decree, never given Israel's God a thought. God says He took this man by the right hand, the way one leads a chosen instrument, that He called him by name and gave him a title of honor. And then, lest anyone soften the scandal, He adds the line that makes the whole thing stranger still: though you have not known me. The deliverer who ends the seventy-year exile is not a returning prophet, not a hidden Israelite hero raised up in secret. He is an outsider who does not know the God using him, going about his own imperial business of subduing nations, unaware that his right hand is being held. The hinge of an entire people's rescue turns on a man who could not have named the One who chose him.

We have a quiet assumption that God's deliverance will come through approved channels — the faithful person, the sound source, the help that arrives already speaking our language and sharing our convictions. Cyrus breaks that assumption clean in half. The instrument God appoints to end the exile fails every test we would have set. He is foreign, he is pagan, and he does not know the LORD at all. And he is, nonetheless, the LORD's anointed for this work, because the Lord of history is not confined to the means His people find respectable. This does not collapse every distinction; it does not make every outsider a Cyrus or every secular force a deliverance. But it should permanently loosen our grip on the idea that God can only reach us through the doors we approve. Your rescue may arrive in a hand you would never have shaken, through a person who has no idea they are being used, by a means you had ruled out as unspiritual. Do not despise the unlikely instrument. The hand holding it may be the LORD's.