I was struck by something I recently read in Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy.  He discussed an aspect of God’s interaction with His creatures which he calls “The Great Inversion.”  For something to be “inverted” means that it is turned upside-down.  And somehow God does this to us and to our world.  Why?  Well, we assume a certain pattern and path in order for achievement.  We have standard measurements for how to succeed.  There are known ways to get ahead and we all run fiercely toward them.  But then God tells us that we are like a pilot who is unknowingly flying upside-down.  All our glorious attempts to rise up to the heights will be met with the unforgiving soil of the earth.  So, “The Great Inversion,” by God, of ourselves, actually turns us back to flying right side up again.  But then how does God show His world that they are inverted, misaligned, and askew to start with? 

The Bible presents us with a story of a people who have turned off their communication signal with the tower, and disregarded their navigation system.  To them, up is down, and down is up.  So God contradicts them.  He challenges their point of reference by selecting those whom we never would.  And with these “loser” He wins.  Willard writes,

“We see this inversion at play in the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: drifters who yet managed great wealth and owned by promise the land in which they wandered.  Everything rested on the fact that God was obviously, tangibly with them.  They were positively frightening to their neighbors (Gen. 26:27-29).

“Again, the children of Israel were the most deprived segment of Egyptian society.  Yet they ‘triumphed over the horse and the rider in the midst of the sea.’  The barren, the widow, the orphan, the eunuch, the alien, all models of human hopelessness, are fruitful and secure in God’s care.  They are repeatedly invoked in Old Testament writings as testimony to the great inversion between our way and God’s way (e.g., Isa. 56:3-8).”

Now don’t go too fast.  Think for a moment about this list: the barren, the widow, the orphan, the eunuch, the alien.  In the ancient near east, such descriptives spelled defeat.  There was no kingdom on earth, great or small, in which such people could rise to the top.  And yet, in the greatest of all kingdoms—the kingdom of God—the pathetic, despised, and helpless become the building blocks.  Just look at the genealogical family tree of Jesus himself as given in the New Testament (Mt 1:1-16; Lk 3:23-37).  In a day and age when kings would whitewash their pedigrees and claim to be the offspring of various gods, or other great kings, Jesus’ lineage unabashedly included those like the barren, the widow, and alien, as well as the prostitute, the deceiver, and the adulterous.

Now “The Great Inversion” is not to claim that any of these above mentioned qualities are blessings or are somehow inherently good, but rather that God is not limited by any of them.  As Willard puts it, “There are none in the humanly ‘down’ position so low that they cannot be lifted up by entering God’s order, and no in the humanly ‘up’ position so high that they can disregard God’s point of view on their lives.”   The Apostle Paul referred to this same Divine inversion in his first letter to the church at Corinth:

“Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.  But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.  He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1 Cor 1:26-29).

REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
1. How do you think the world responds to observing this great inversion?
2. What character from the Bible stands out to you as someone who exemplifies this inversion most?
3. How has God used or redeemed your weaknesses and bad experiences to bring about His transforming love?
4. Does God only use those who are “losers”?  What about those who are at “the top of the game”?  Have we missed half the story?