Isaiah said, “Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob, O little Israel, for I myself will help you, declares the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.”

Great metaphor, Isaiah. It is nice to know that the Lord cares for us, and exaggeration does make a good illustration. But, worm? A little heavy on the condemnation, don’t you think? We are, after all, created in His image. How about something we can identify with, something more like us?

Indeed. How about the common house dust mite (Dermatophagoides farinae)? This eight-legged creature inhabits carpets and bedding, consuming the three-tenths of an ounce of skin cells we shed every day. The old ones live a month and grow to 16-thousandths of an inch long. That makes us 4,500 times bigger than the average mite. If they were six feet long, we’d be over five miles tall. Neither knowing nor caring, we feed them, yet they have no clue we exist. We’re more like God than like mites.

Of course, they do demand food, air, water, and light and survive only in a narrow temperature range. And they inhabit the birth, life, and death cycle, clearly making them fellow prisoners with us in space-time. God, on the other hand, needs no food, no air, and no water. He creates light, exists eternally, and defies measurement. The distance to the nearest edge of the home He made for us—think cardboard box with pencil-poked holes called ‘The Observable Universe’—is 4,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than we are. On that scale, we are indistinguishable from our brother mites. Worm complements us.

Except for one small detail: He loves us.

He chooses us.
He knows us.
He reveals Himself to us.
He takes us into His counsel.
He calls us son, daughter, friend, and beloved.
He permits, calls, and even beseeches us to know Him.
He seeks us out.
He commands mercy and goodness to follow us all our days.
He gave up His most precious possession to rescue us, his most ungrateful, rebellious, stiff-necked creatures.

Considering all that, how is He vanquishing fear to help you, O’Little Israel?

Isaiah 41:14; Romans 12:3; John 3:16; John 15:9-17; Hebrews 10:19-22