Rock Bottom: The Place Where God Meets You
Where to Find God
When our lives fall apart, and we really need help, and we wonder if we can even keep going, where can we find God?
The Bible says that God dwells in two opposite places at once—way up high in his holy place above, where we can’t go, and way down low among the lowly and contrite, where we can go. But it can be hard to find God in the mushy middle.
That world of privilege and advantage, where money has the power to keep trouble out and pleasure in, where we can be “successful” without God—that false heaven is a comfortable trap. It trivializes Jesus as a lifestyle enhancement. He is not high and lifted up, not eternal and holy. He just doesn’t count for that much.
Isaiah 57:15 changes how we perceive him, which also changes where we want to live.
For thus says the One who is high and lifted up,
who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
“I dwell in the high and holy place,
and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly,
and to revive the heart of the contrite.”
Good News at Rock Bottom
Ray Ortlund
With wisdom from Isaiah 57:15, Good News at Rock Bottom helps readers discover Jesus in the hard experiences of life, offering hope to anyone walking through a season of deep sorrow.
Wherever he is—that’s where we’ll find all that we truly need. Our Lord must be easy to find way up there in his heavenly glory. The angels are awestruck by him 24/7! Our Lord is also easy to find way down low at our rock bottom. So many saints can attest to that! But that middle space of worldly desires, with traffic jams of U-Hauls crowding in to move there every day—you and I see it differently now, don’t we?
Now that it’s God we want, rock bottom can start looking like the garden of Eden.
King David understood. He tells of when his very life was hanging by a thread:
I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill. (Ps. 3:4)
Let’s not miss the surprising geography—both literal and metaphorical—in that verse.
Psalm 3:4 pictures God atop holy Mount Zion, 2,500 feet above sea level. As he prays this psalm, David is in the Jordanian Rift, nearly 2,500 feet below sea level—literally the lowest point on earth. . . . The language is intended to draw attention both to the depths of David’s plight and to the transcendent God who rules over all.1
Apparently, our Savior loves these extremes—up high, down low. It must mean that he is not too glorious to bother with us down here; he is too glorious not to care about us.
Sadly, not every place that passes as “Christian” will help us. Some might break our hearts even more deeply. But putting all our hope in the real Jesus, we take our stand here. “If your religion doesn’t help you, it is no religion for you; you had better be without it.”2 Therefore, we gladly descend to God’s dwelling place, where he brings real help for real sufferers.
Isaiah 57:15 is good news, isn’t it? When we’ve lost so much that we fear we’re stuck now with a Plan B existence—that scenario is where God dwells. As we stumble into his healing presence, he greets us with a gentle question: “Would you like a hug?” Remember that father whose longing heart waited for his knucklehead prodigal son to come back home? “His father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). Would you like that hug from your Father?
Maybe you’re still uneasy. Maybe you suspect that what God really wants is to chew you out: “If you’d been paying attention, you wouldn’t be down here!” But the Bible says the opposite. What God wants is to “revive” the spirit of the crushed and the devastated. What he wants is to breathe fresh life into you. And Isaiah 57:15 is not exaggerating. Its hopeful message is not even exceptional. This verse is vintage Bible truth.
James Muilenburg, in his 1956 commentary on Isaiah, writes, “The whole New Testament provides a running commentary on these words.”3 And John Oswalt, in his 1998 commentary, calls Isaiah 57:15 “one of the finest one-sentence summations of biblical theology in the Bible.”4
Earlier in the Old Testament, Psalm 34 says,
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit. (Ps. 34:18)
And “the crushed in spirit” there translates the same wording as “contrite” does in Isaiah 57:15. God is not aloof from devastated people, but he is very near: “The Lord Jesus knows what it is to be crushed in spirit.”5
But Psalm 34 also says, “The face of the Lord is against those who do evil” (Ps. 34:16). They “do evil” by choosing ease, control, and big-deal-ness rather than the Father’s embrace. The mushy middle is where they want to dwell, precisely because God doesn’t dwell there. That desire is evil. And it breeds more evils, as we see every day in this world.
When we’ve lost so much that we fear we’re stuck now with a Plan B existence—that scenario is where God dwells.
C. S. Lewis explains the staggering choice confronting every one of us:
We are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, “I never knew you. Depart from me.” . . . We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.6
Here is what Jesus said about the lowly and contrite who collapse in the Father’s arms: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). That word “blessed” is not a pious cliché. That strong word is a joyous high five. Jesus is congratulating the poor in spirit. He looks at them with beaming approval and says, “Way to go!” Who are those lucky guys? Who are those who end up not on the bench but out on the field with the team, celebrating their come-from-behind championship victory, and then in the locker room are shaking up bottles of champagne and spraying each other for the sheer joy of it all, and then are going out together to the postgame party and dancing the night away? Who gets in on that joy? Not the swaggering big shots of this world. Jesus ignores them. But the true celebrants are the poor in spirit, who have nothing to offer him but their defeat. He congratulates them as the winners. He welcomes them into his kingdom. They are where the high and holy one dwells.
Having him near is our only “success”—if that’s even the right word for it. To everyone with enough regrets to know that his grace is their last hope, Jesus opens up the treasures of himself forever. And the smug insiders up in their self-exalting middle space? All they have is themselves, and forever.
Here’s one more New Testament verse, near the very end of the Bible: “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev. 22:17). All you need is need—like burning thirst, like unsatisfied desire. Where Christ dwells, your lack is your wealth. Don’t wish it away. Bring it to him. Keep on bringing it to him. He invites you to come, and he invites you to take—without price. He has already paid the price at his cross. As Spurgeon said, “When Jesus is the host, no guest goes empty from the table.”7
What cracks our hearts open more deeply to his love is our loss of everything except his love. There, in our devastation, he welcomes us with happiness that’s real and purpose that’s satisfying. It’s the real life he wanted for us from the start.
Notes:
- Bruce K. Waltke and Fred G. Zaspel, How to Read and Understand the Psalms (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 55.
- Mark Rutherford, The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (New York: Cape and Smith, 1929), 266
- James Muilenburg, “The Book of Isaiah,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick, vol. 5, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah (New York: Abingdon, 1956), 672.
- John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 40–66 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 487.
- Dane Ortlund, In the Lord I Take Refuge: 150 Daily Devotions through the Psalms (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 94.
- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 12.
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (1874; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1955), March 19, evening
This article is adapted from Good News at Rock Bottom: Finding God When the Pain Goes Deep and Hope Seems Lost by Ray Ortlund.
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