(Isaiah 49:14-50:11; Romans 9:6-8)

I said last week that in the first part of this chapter, which is the second of the Servant Songs, I believe we see God accept Israel’s rejection of him and respond by sending the Servant beyond Israel to the nations; rather than trying to force his people to accept their part in his plan, this is the point at which he simply incorporates their refusal to do so into his plan and moves forward despite them. I noted that this isn’t the common reading of that passage, but it is what the passage says, and there’s really no good reason to reject it, while there are a number of good reasons not to.

One good reason is the way Israel responds, beginning in verse 14—which, granted, could be just another ridiculous complaint, since we’ve seen a few of those from them already; but it fits. God tells the Servant, “Don’t worry that Israel has refused to respond to you—that’s too small a job for you anyway; I will make you a light for the Gentiles and my salvation for all people,” and Israel complains, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.” You can see where they’re coming from, right? It is, again, the same concern that Paul wrestles with in Romans: if God broke the branches from the olive tree that he might graft the Gentiles in, does that mean that he’s replaced his people? Has he simply written off the Jews and dropped them from his plan?

As we saw last week, Paul says, “no,” and for good reason; here, God says the same thing. He has allowed his people to reject the work he had prepared for them, he has given that work to the Servant instead, but that doesn’t mean he’s rejected them in turn. His care and concern for them isn’t just for what he can get them to do—he didn’t choose them merely as a tool to accomplish his purposes; his love for them is real and sincere and unfailing, and he will never forget them. “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast, and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Not likely, but even if she does, I won’t,” declares the Lord. Take the highest and greatest example of human devotion and faithfulness you can think of, and God still exceeds it—and it isn’t close.

Note what he says. He’s been promising his people that he would bring them back to their own land, the land he had given them, and that they would be blessed on the way; now he promises them great blessing in the land. Note the blessing he offers, and how he describes it—not material wealth, not power or conquest, but family. The Lord will gather his people, his children, home to Jerusalem, and they will see far more people gathered than there were in the nation before the exile—so many more, in fact, that there won’t be enough room for everyone. The nation that seemed to be in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth will be larger than before; the family that was afraid it would die out will instead find children returning—so many, in fact, as to raise the question, “Where did they all come from?”

Where did they come from? This is what God says: they came from the nations. They came from the Gentiles, from all those folks out there who aren’t Jews—from us; we are part of the fulfillment of this promise. The terms of his blessing haven’t changed, because his heart hasn’t changed. He loves the Israelites, yes, but not exclusively; he loves everyone else, too, and his blessing on them involves all the nations, as it always has, going all the way back to the beginning. What they need to understand, what Isaiah is moving them towards, is what Paul’s talking about: God’s promise isn’t just for those who are descended from Abraham, and it isn’t automatically for everyone descended from Abraham regardless of their faithfulness to God (or lack thereof); God’s promise to Abraham is greater and broader than that. What matters most isn’t whether you have Abraham’s DNA, but whether you have his heart for God and his willingness to follow.

As such, in order to accept God’s blessing, the Israelites have to let go of the idea that they alone are God’s people, that his blessings are for them and no one else, that they are somehow superior to and favored above all others, and let the nations join them. It’s important to note, God isn’t asking Israel to take a secondary place; quite the contrary, the nations will honor them and bow before them in recognition of how much they owe the people of Israel. That said, it can be hard to forgive your enemies, and even harder to welcome them into your home as friends, let alone as family, and that’s what God is inviting Israel to do—making it clear in the process that he isn’t giving them the option of returning his blessing and asking for another one. But then, God never does give us blessings that are just for us—he blesses us so that we can use them to bless others. We aren’t merely recipients of his blessings, we’re conduits. That’s just how God works.

For all his reassurances, Israel still wonders: is it really possible? Can plunder really be taken away from mighty warriors? With the second line, I think we’re better off following the Hebrew rather than changing it: can captives be rescued from the righteous? Which is to say, can lawfully-taken captives, captives whose fate was just and right, really be set free? Can a warrior who has both might and right on his side really be deprived of his captives? This is the situation for Israel: the country that conquered them is a great power, and their conquest of Israel was just, for it was ordained by God as his judgment on his people for their faithlessness.

In response, God makes it clear that he both can and will set them free. He has the power to overthrow the fierce warriors, to strip them of their plunder and free their captives; and he has the force of right to make his case against them. The word the NIV translates “contend” is a legal term; those who hold Israel captive can make their case that they have the right to do so, but God will make his own case against them, and as we’ve seen several times in Isaiah already, he’s unstoppable in a courtroom. His action in setting his people free is entirely righteous, and no claim to the contrary will stand before him.

Of course, this won’t happen gently, for those who conquered Israel are fierce, greedy, rapacious, and bloodthirsty; they’re very like the greedy python in the classic children’s picture book by Richard Buckley and Eric Carle: “Half hidden in the jungle green, the biggest snake there’s ever been wound back and forth and in between. The giant snake was very strong and very, very, very long. He had a monstrous appetite, his stomach stretched from left to right.” In the book, the python proceeds to eat everything in his path, from a mouse to a porcupine to a leopard to an elephant, before his greed becomes too much for him: “And when they all began to kick, the snake began to feel quite sick. He coughed the whole lot up again—each one of them—and there were ten.” 

Now listen to the ending here: “He soon felt better, and what’s more was hungrier than just before. He hadn’t learned a single thing: his greed was quite astonishing. He saw his own tail, long and curved, and thought that lunch was being served. He closed his jaws on his own rear, then swallowed hard . . . and disappeared!” His greed was so far out of control that when there was no one else he could turn on, he turned on himself, and destroyed himself. That’s the Babylonians: their sin is self-destructive in the end, as in truth all sin is; the appetite that drove them to empire will ultimately drive them to ruin.

Despite all this, Israel still feels forsaken and forgotten; and so God asks, “When I sent you into exile, was there anything to seal that and make it permanent? When I sent your mother away, was there a certificate to finalize the divorce?” Implicitly, the answer is “no”; and then the Lord turns the tables on them. Who was it who created this separation? Was it God? Did he fail to answer when his people called on him? No: when he answered their cries and came to them, there was no one to answer—not a single response—and so he asks them the question, “Why? Did you not believe I could answer you, or that I have the strength to save you? I can do things far greater than this; I can dry up the sea and turn the rivers to desert—remember all the things I did for you to lead you out of slavery in Egypt—why do you not trust me?” In the end, the separation of which Israel complains is their own doing—they blame God for what is their own fault, and accuse him for the consequences of their own insistence.

And here again, into God’s grief at his people’s refusal to understand, the Servant speaks—this time, with a new sense of the cost of his mission. “The Sovereign LORD has opened my ears,” he says, “and I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back.” He has heard, and he has listened “like one being taught,” which is to say, like a disciple, with close and careful attention—and not just occasionally, but “morning by morning,” day by day, beginning each day by listening to God, and then following through by living as God teaches him to live. And look at the consequences: “I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.” This is the obedience God required from his Servant? Well, yes, in part because that tended—and tends—to be the lot of a true prophet. A prophet who stood at the center of power and told the powerful that they were OK would be either unnecessary or lying—and given human nature, rather more of the latter than of the former. True prophets stood, and stand, on the edges, challenging godless behavior, challenging society’s comfortable assumptions, challenging people’s unwillingness to change and to deny themselves; and that’s never a popular message, and so it brings retribution.

More than that, however, the Servant must accept suffering without even trying to avoid it; he’s called to trust God to vindicate him in the end, to hold fast to God’s promise that he will not end in disgrace, but will be found righteous and will see his victory at the last, and set his face like flint to take the mockery and the beatings. He is confident that his trust in God will be justified and his message and mission will be proven true and right, and so he accepts the abuse and the punishment that his enemies hand out without fighting back, knowing that their end will come in due time.

And his reward for this? Because he listened as a disciple, he has the tongue of a disciple, to know the word that sustains the weary. This is a precious gift, and a gift the world cannot match. You can’t get that from the world’s conventional wisdom, or from self-help books; you can’t get it from anything the world has to offer, because the world really doesn’t do grace, and isn’t half so good at love as it thinks it is. The world is impatient with human weakness, intolerant of human frailty—of any frailty it takes seriously as such, anyway—and it’s afraid of death, so anything to do with death, dying, and loss, it just wants to put out of its mind as quickly as possible. Its advice is always about doing this or that—“Just do it,” “Just work harder,” or perhaps “Work smarter, not harder,” as the case might be—and tends to be of the sort that only burdens the weary, rather than sustaining them. Or perhaps I might say, us?

No, the word that sustains the weary is a word from God, and can only come from one who has not bowed the knee to the way of the world and its expectations, and who has accepted the world’s abuse and not fought back. It can only come from one who trusts in God, not in human strength, and so is able to see clearly just how limited human strength really is, and how little it really counts for in the end. Ultimately, it’s a word that can only come from Jesus Christ, though he gives his followers the privilege of speaking it through us to those who need to hear it. It’s a word of grace and mercy, of forgiveness and healing—that says that it’s OK if we can’t suck it up and “just do it” in our own strength, because that’s not what God asks of us anyway. It’s God saying to us, “Just trust me—it’ll be all right. I’ll take care of you, I’ll provide for you, I’ll guide and protect you if you’ll follow me—just trust me.”

(Isaiah 49:1-13; Romans 11:11-21)

Isaiah 48 ends in a difficult place, with a real conundrum. God is not abandoning his plan for the world, nor is he willing to turn away from his people; but they’ve rejected the part he had prepared for them, and he’s conceding their refusal to change, and to play that part. He’ll still deliver them from Babylon and return them to Jerusalem, but he will no longer depend on them, or entrust his mission to the nations to them. Chapter 48 brings their corporate part in that mission to a close. Which raises the question: if Plan A is dead, then what’s Plan B? What does God do now?

The answer to that question begins in chapter 49 with the reintroduction of the Servant of the LORD. We’ve seen the Servant just once so far, in chapter 42, where he was already associated with God’s mission to the Gentiles, but not in a way that ruled out Israel’s involvement in that mission. Here, however, things have shifted, and the Servant has clearly replaced Israel; God’s promises to his people will still be fulfilled, but they will be fulfilled in a different way than they might have been.

Some things, however, haven’t shifted at all. One is that God still has no intention of reaching the nations by force of conquest. Thus the Servant says of himself, “The LORD . . . made my mouth like a sharp sword.” Now, it’s true that anyone who says “The pen is mightier than the sword” has probably never been stabbed with either, but words do have power, and the word of God most of all; God himself promises in Isaiah 55:11, which we’ll read in a few weeks, that “my word . . . will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” The Servant would speak that word which pierces until it divides soul from spirit and joints from marrow—which, in other words, is so sharp it can separate even the inseparable—and which judges our innermost thoughts and intentions, and that would be all he needed to carry out God’s mission; but bear in mind that the power of words is not a power which protects those who wield it. That’s why the First Amendment enshrines freedom of speech and freedom of the press, because those who stab with the pen tend to end up skewered by the sword. Such people also often don’t see the fruit of their labor, which is left to later generations to pick and enjoy.

Clearly this is the case for the Servant. God says to him, “You are my servant—you are the ideal Israel—in you I will glorify myself”; but the Servant looks around and thinks, “That’s not what I’m seeing.” He sees no result from anything he has done, except that he has become “deeply despised and abhorred by the nation”; all his efforts have brought him no reward, only suffering. In a world that measures us by our success, he is a clear failure, and so he says to himself, “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.”

And yet . . . and yet. The Servant knows God is with him, and he knows that God’s word carries with it his power. He knows that the Lord will always accomplish his purpose, and that he takes care of those who follow him, and so the Servant says, “But—the justice due me is with the LORD, and my reward is with my God.” I may be done wrong now, I may have to suffer injustice—but the justice due me is with the LORD, and this injustice won’t stand. I may suffer now for speaking the word of God and doing what he calls me to do—but the justice due me is with the LORD, and all will be made right in the end. I may be attacked and persecuted for the sake of the truth, but my reward is with my God, and in the end this will seem a small price to pay. My faithful service may go ignored and unappreciated in this life, but my reward is with my God, and he doesn’t miss a thing. All my efforts may seem to get me nowhere, but if I speak his word, whether I see any results or not, that is enough, because his word carries his power and it never fails of its purpose. Regardless of what I see around me today, the justice due me is with the LORD, and my reward is with my God—and he never fails to accomplish what he sets out to do.

That is the Servant’s consolation in the face of his apparent failure; and after all, isn’t it backed up by his own life and ministry? God established Israel for a purpose, to be his faithful servant to be his salvation to the whole earth, but Israel was a faithless servant and failed in that purpose; now, not only has God’s plan not been carried out, but Israel itself has gone so far off the rails that it has been carried off into exile. God’s people have become part of the problem, not part of the solution. But even if Israel has derailed itself, that doesn’t mean God’s plan has been derailed; rather, he has raised up a new, ideal Israel, a new Servant who will be faithful to follow God’s will, and the plan goes forward. God always accomplishes his purposes.

But does this mean that God is settling for second-best? Is the Servant merely Plan B? Did Israel’s disobedience force God to come up with a backup plan?

Yes and no; but mostly no. There’s something very interesting going on in verses 5 and 6, but our English translations treat it as a mistake that must be corrected; that’s the reason the NIV’s translation of verse 5 is so choppy. You see, what we have in verse 5 isn’t the Hebrew text as it stands—it’s an amended version. A straightforward reading of verses 5 and 6 runs like this:

Now the LORD, the one who made me from the womb 
                     to serve him,
             resolved to turn Jacob to him,
                     but Israel would not be gathered;
      yet I am honored in the eyes of the Lord,
             for my God has been my strength.
He said, “It is too small that you should be my servant
             to raise up the tribes of Jacob
             and to restore the survivors of Israel;
      I will make you a light to the nations,
             to be my salvation to the end of the earth.”

In other words, the Servant sees himself as a failure, because he’s been sent to turn the hearts of the Israelites back to God, and they’ve rejected him—they’ve refused to be gathered; and God says in response, “It’s OK—that’s too small a task for you anyway. We’ll move on with the mission: I will make you my light to the nations and my salvation to all the world.”

Now, later generations of Jewish scholars really didn’t like that, and so they looked for ways to amend it. They came up with a couple that are pretty iffy by normal standards, but when the alternative is unacceptable, you take the best you can get—and so they did. They decided that the word meaning “not”—in the Hebrew, it’s “lo”—should be read as another “lo” (which is actually spelled differently), which means “to him.” Reading the text that way requires making a preposition or two behave in an unusual fashion, and it gives you a passage that doesn’t really fit together very well—but it makes the meaning of the text much more palatable, and so they went with it, leaving a note in the margin to indicate that this is how this verse should be understood. Our English translations follow that note, and so we end up with the reading we have.

If you don’t follow that note, however, if you don’t try to explain away the Hebrew text but take it straightforwardly as written, this passage makes perfect sense; it fits better with the rest of what’s going on in this part of Isaiah, and it helps us to see connections to other parts of Scripture. In particular, it reveals a link between this passage and Romans 11. In Romans 9-11, Paul deals with the question of the future of the Jews in God’s plan; he struggles with the fact that so many of his own people had hardened their hearts and refused to accept the Messiah, and builds an argument that in the end, Israel will be redeemed. In our passage this morning, he argues that even the Jewish rejection of Jesus served a purpose, because it provided an opportunity for Gentiles to come into the people of God. Though Paul doesn’t base his argument on Isaiah 49, it seems that Isaiah was looking forward to that same point: Israel’s refusal to be gathered back to God created the opportunity for the Servant to be the light to the nations.

This is not, of course, to say that all Israel rejected God, which is clearly not the case; nor is it to say that God has rejected Israel—an idea which Paul refutes at length in Romans 11, finally making the statement in 11:26 that “all Israel will be saved.” It is, however, to say that even when the Jewish leaders and people failed to turn as a whole and accept Jesus as the Messiah, God had included that refusal in his plan and made it an occasion of blessing for the Gentiles—for us. Israel’s earlier disobedience, refusing to be a faithful servant, Israel’s later rejection of the Messiah—these may appear to have forced God to Plan B; but in truth, God already knew they were coming. That’s not what he wanted to happen, but he knew they would, and he allowed for it in his plan.

This is an important point: God’s sovereignty is such that we can’t prevent him from accomplishing his purposes. He allows us freedom to choose, and he uses whatever we do, whether we choose to obey him or not. When we disobey him, obviously that’s not part of his perfect will and plan for us, but it doesn’t disrupt what he’s doing or force him to change plans, because he knew what we would do before we did; and though it isn’t best, he’ll use it for good. There is no failure he cannot redeem, no sinner he cannot restore, because in everything and everyone, he is still Lord, and he is the God who grows white flowers from even the blackest roots. He will work through our obedience or through our disobedience; if we obey, that’s better for us and for all concerned, but whether we do or don’t, none of it catches him off guard. Even his Plan B is Plan A.

And in this case, his plan was to bring his people back to himself—not just Jews, but people from all the nations. Thus God’s word to the Servant in verse 6, which the NIV mistranslates a little: “I will make you a light for the Gentiles, to be my salvation to the ends of the earth.” The Servant will not be merely the messenger announcing God’s salvation, he will be the one in and through whom God will extend his salvation to all people everywhere. Thus he says in verse 8—and don’t be misled by the NIV’s heading there, this section is addressed to the Servant, and talking about more than just the exiles in Babylon—“I will give you as a covenant to the people.” God’s people had broken his covenant with them in pretty much every way imaginable, but he wasn’t willing to give up on it, and so he would offer it in a new form—the form of his Servant. Only this time, the covenant would extend beyond the descendants of Abraham; it would involve the re-turn of the Jews, yes, but it would also draw people from every point of the compass. Look at verse 12—“from afar” denotes the east, then around the compass—from the north, from the west (literally “the sea,” the Mediterranean), and from the south—“Sinim,” at the southern edge of Egypt, the southern border of the known civilized world.

From every direction, God promises his Servant, from every tribe, nation and language of the earth, people will come home to me because of what you have done. My mountains will become a highway for them, and my blessing will be so abundant that even the barren places will provide them enough food to keep going; they will have food and water, and they will be protected from the heat of the desert. This is the imagery and the promise of Isaiah 40, now opened to all nations, including us, by the work of the Servant, Jesus the Messiah; Jesus, whom he gave to us to be his salvation for the whole world. By the power of his word, through his faithfulness, through his suffering, Jesus became the salvation of God for us and the covenant of God with us, so that we too might be called children of God.

(Isaiah 48; Matthew 23:37-39)

In these passages, we see the grief of God.  If ever there was a people who had reason to trust God, it was the Israelites. Just look at all the miracles and mighty works God did for their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then for them as a nation. They were a slave race, being worked to death—literally—by the Egyptians, and God broke them out, and led them through the Red Sea to get the army off their trail; you’d think they’d respond with unstinting gratitude and trust. Nope. Before they’ve even halfway escaped, they’re already complaining and reminiscing about the good old days—when, sure, the Egyptians worked them to exhaustion every day from morning until night, and if they ever slacked off, the overseers would whip them back to work—but hey! they had onions!

Things didn’t get better from there, either; God would keep raising up leaders, and for a while, the people would follow, but as soon as they got the chance they were off chasing after other gods again. Finally, things got so bad that God allowed his people to be conquered and dragged off to Mesopotamia; but they didn’t learn their lesson. Indeed, his proclamation of deliverance, of an end to their exile and a return home, was met with distrust, complaints, and resistance, as we’ve seen over the past number of weeks. In consequence, Isaiah has responded alternately with frustration and anger at his people’s stubborn disbelief and by pleading with them to trust God for all he’s done for them, and for what he’s going to do.

Both of these things reach their peak in this chapter. As we’ve been reading through Isaiah 40-55, what’s commonly called Second Isaiah, I’ve talked about it as one section of the larger book, and it is; but in its turn, it’s most definitely divided into two parts. This chapter is the end of the first part; with chapter 49, something new begins, and we’ll talk about that next week. What we can see here is a clear statement of the problem Israel presents—their stubborn refusal to be faithful to God, and his equally stubborn determination to be faithful to them anyway.

Look how this chapter begins. Remember, we’ve had God’s repeated promise to bring his people back out of exile, and his repeated statements that he will do so by raising up Cyrus, king of the Medes and the Persians, to conquer Babylon and carry out his purposes. We’ve just had, in the passage we read last week, an extended description of the judgment God will visit on Babylon through Cyrus, bringing them down from their pride and arrogance to a point of utter defeat and humiliation. All this should be good news—but as far as response from God’s people, we’ve seen disbelief that he can actually do what he promises, refusal to turn away from their idols to put their trust in him alone, and nationalistic whining that God would use yet another pagan to set them free rather than enabling them to free themselves. What we haven’t seen any sign of is faithful obedience to the commands and will of God.

As a consequence, God begins by addressing his people through his prophet, and he piles on the descriptions: “Listen to this, O house of Jacob, you who are called by the name of Israel”—the name which God had given to Jacob—“and come from the line of Judah, you who take oaths in the name of the LORD and invoke the God of Israel.” All this marks them as the people who belong to him: he’s the one who chose them, he’s the one who named them, he’s the God with whom their nation is identified and in whose name they take their oaths. He is, we might say, the God of their civil religion, in the same way as our public officials and witnesses in our courts swear on the Bible and end their oaths of office with the words, “so help me God.” But just as we have a lot of people who say those words and mean nothing by them, so Israel’s outward participation in the rituals of their faith said little for the reality of their beliefs; and so God says, “Though you call upon me and take oaths in my name, it’s neither in truth nor in righteousness.” Their faith, he says, is false, because it’s not based in real knowledge of him nor does it produce any real willingness to live as he wants them to live.

This is a pretty strong charge. In contemporary terms, he’s saying that the faith of the nation as a whole—not of everyone in it, of course, but of the nation as a whole—is nominal. It’s a matter of outward show with no inward reality, of religious exercise without any real faith. This wasn’t an issue which was unique to them, of course; if we want to be honest, looking around at the church in this country, we’d have to wonder if God would say much the same sort of thing to us, if Isaiah were alive in our day. There certainly are other voices saying this; one is Michael Spencer, who had a column in the Christian Science Monitor this week—you might have seen it—in which he predicted the complete collapse of American evangelicalism within the next ten years, to be followed by “an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West” in which “public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity” and we’ll see actual persecution of believers in this country. His reason for this conclusion, though he doesn’t put it in the terms Isaiah uses, boils down to pretty much the same thing: American Christians invoke the name of the God of Israel, but not in truth or righteousness. As a consequence, he argues, the church in this country is as hollow as a soufflé rising in the oven; all it will take is one slam of a door to bring it down.

Now, I happen to think, and have argued elsewhere, that Spencer’s conclusions are overstated; I also think he’s left the Holy Spirit out of the equation altogether. That said, I think he’s called attention to a real problem in much of the American church; I think we need to realize that Isaiah’s words to Israel here hit a lot closer to home than we might like to think. It seems to me that verse 2 offers us something of a clue as to why. At first glance, this might seem like an odd follow-up to verse 1; but consider the description of the people of Israel here: “you who call yourselves citizens of the holy city and rely on the God of Israel.” Here as in verse 1, God is identified as the God of Israel; and what does the prophet say in response: “The LORD Almighty is his name.”

That’s subtle, but I think it’s a rebuke to the parochialism of Israel. Their concern is only for themselves, and they see their God as just “an amiable local deity who exists to keep track of Israel’s interests,” as John Oswalt puts it. Instead of seeing themselves as a nation formed by the only God of all time and space for the purpose of bringing all the nations to the worship of that God, they see themselves as a nation like any other nation, with a god like any other nation, out for their own best interests like any other nation; and since they’re a small nation, they must have a small god, and thus they keep running after the gods of the bigger, more powerful nations in hopes of improving their geopolitical standing. What God wants them to see is that the nation ought to be only of secondary importance; he’s promised to return them to their homeland, yes, but not because their political independence or political power are of any significance whatsoever. It is, rather, for his own sake, for the sake of his reputation and his glory. What matters is God’s plan for the world, and their faithfulness to serve him by doing their part in it.

Of course, they don’t get this, and they don’t particularly want to; but God keeps working on them. He reminds his people of the many times in the past that he had told them what would happen, and then brought about what he predicted; and look at verses 4-5. Why did he do this? “Because I knew how stubborn you are”! If God had simply done good things for them, would they have given him the credit? No, they would have given the credit as they saw fit, to the idols they themselves had made. God told them what he was going to do before he did it so that they would know who was truly responsible. They could always refuse to admit that knowledge—and sometimes they did; that’s why God has to say, “You’ve heard these things. Won’t you admit them?”—but they would have no excuse and no justification for their refusal.

This is also why he says, “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. They are created now, not long ago; you have not heard of them before today, and so you cannot say, ‘Yes, I knew of them.’” This is the reason, or part of the reason, why God chose to use Cyrus to return the Jews to Israel: because it was a new thing, something he hadn’t done before, and that his people couldn’t and wouldn’t have predicted. It also gave him the opportunity to predict—by name—the appearance and success of someone from a pagan nation, someone who didn’t worship him or even know of his existence, and thus to demonstrate in a new way that he truly is the God of the whole world, the LORD Almighty, not just the God of Israel.

And he does all this despite Israel’s willful refusal to listen. “See,” he says, “I have refined you, but not as silver.” During Advent, we looked at Malachi 3, where the prophet says that the Lord will sit as a refiner of silver, and we talked a little about what that meant; we talked about the fact that the refiner of silver burns away all the dross, all the impurities, until only the silver is left, and in its absolute purity he can see his face reflected in it. Here, the Lord is giving up on that, at least where Israel is concerned. Their time in exile hasn’t brought them around to repentance, it hasn’t brought them to a spirit of true faithfulness—but there’s no point in leaving them in the fire; there’s no point in refining them further, because it wouldn’t accomplish anything. To try to refine them as silver would leave nothing of them at all, because everything would burn away, and so God declares, “I delay my wrath . . . I hold it back from you,” simply for the sake of his own reputation and his own praise.

There is, I said, a sad tone to this chapter. After all God has done for his people and all the promises he’s made them, and even after the promise to bring them back from their exile in Babylon, they remain obstinate, unwilling to open their hearts, unwilling to seek him first; and so here, it seems to me, we have God conceding that that isn’t going to change. Their neck remains unbending iron, their forehead remains obdurate bronze, and their ears remain insistently closed, refusing to hear what God would tell them; and so he says, “I am the LORD your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go”—the very thing his people refused to believe, because they thought they had a better idea what was best for them, and which way they should go.

They thought they knew best, and they refused to accept his correction, and so all God can do is cry out, “If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Your descendants would have been like the sand, your children like its numberless grains; their name would never be cut off nor destroyed from before me.” If only . . . if only. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cried out, “how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings; but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate, and you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

And yet, despite it all, God remains faithful. He delivers his people from Babylon, bringing them back to Jerusalem, even though it won’t be the deliverance he desires, even though he knows it won’t bring them his peace because their hearts remain wicked; he delivers them because he has promised, because his nature requires it, because who he is is to be faithful and to keep his word. He remains faithful and delivers his people because even though they don’t believe in him, even though they don’t listen to him, even though they don’t trust him, yet he is who he says he is; he is faithful even when his people don’t expect him to be, don’t trust him to be, maybe at some level don’t want him to be, and even when they will never respond to his faithfulness with faithfulness of their own.

You cannot outrun God, and you cannot go beyond his faithfulness; no matter how far you may go in your sin, repentance isn’t about turning around and trying to find your way back to God, because he’s already there—repentance is simply about accepting being found. No matter what may come and how far you may push it, you cannot go beyond the faithfulness of God until you’re dead—and maybe, somehow, not even then. You just can’t. If you don’t believe that, just look at Jesus; just look at how far God has already gone, and think about it for a while.

So what does God ask from us? To trust him. To trust in his faithfulness, and to live out of that trust. Being faithful to God isn’t a matter of doing certain things, or living in a certain way; that’s what results from faithfulness. The faithfulness God desires is a matter of trusting him enough that we live as he calls us to live, not out of duty, but because we really believe that he teaches us what’s best for us, and because we trust him that he truly is directing us in the way in which we should go.

(Isaiah 47; Revelation 18:1-8)

If you look in your bulletin or up on the screen, you can see that I titled this brief message “Arrogance Judged,” because that’s what our passages this morning are about—God’s judgment on the arrogance of Babylon. I might have called this message “The Other Side of the Coin,” because that too is what it’s about: the other side of the coin to God’s promise of deliverance. For God’s people to return to Israel, they must first leave Babylon; after the Babylonians went to all the trouble to drag them away from Israel to begin with, they aren’t going to say, “Sorry about that, never mind, we shouldn’t have done that, we’ll just send you all back home now.” Babylon is arrogant in its power, confident in its mastery, and sees no reason to accommodate the wishes of one of its subject peoples. The Jews existed to accommodate them, not the other way around. Daniel and his friends had an effect on Nebuchadnezzar, but not enough to change that mindset. As such, Israel’s deliverance wasn’t going to come as part of a win-win situation—it was going to come together with God’s judgment on Babylon their oppressor.

And isn’t that usually the way it goes? The oppressor, the abuser, the manipulator, the evil people and movements and governments of this world, don’t generally stop doing what they do and start doing what’s right just because somebody says “pretty please.” Most of the time, his deliverance of the oppressed means his judgment on the oppressor; his love requires his wrath. There are those who complain about the book of Revelation, or about the Old Testament prophets, because they use the language of war and blood and fire; but the truth is, the prophets are just realistic. They know that God’s deliverance isn’t going to come at no cost to anybody—and they know that it shouldn’t; those on whom God’s judgment falls have earned that judgment by their actions and attitudes. The message of the prophets is that the judgment the wicked have earned is coming—not necessarily quickly, for God shows his mercy and his patience even with the worst of us, but it is coming, as sure as sunrise and as utterly unstoppable.

There is in this both a warning and a promise. The warning is that we aren’t exempt; and indeed, it may be that the more sure we become that we have nothing to worry about, the more reason we have in truth to be concerned. After all, part of the indictment against Babylon was that Babylon was oblivious to the judgment she was storing up by her actions; her leaders and her people thought they’d earned their success and that it would continue indefinitely. The problem was, they’d built their nation and their culture on the wrong foundation, and put their faith in gods of their own invention, gods who could not save; their confidence in themselves was misplaced, because it lacked the necessary support to hold up. They thought judgment would never come, that they would never pay the price for their actions; but it came anyway, and Babylon fell.

The promise is that God’s justice will come. It may not come as swiftly as we wish—after all, we want God to show his mercy and patience to us, while we’re usually not as keen for him to do so to those who make our lives miserable—but it will come. It may come as it came upon Babylon, or it may come in other ways; it’s instructive that in the Psalms, when David is praying that God would take care of his enemies, he tends to ask God to destroy them either by killing them or by bringing them to repentance. Sometimes that’s the result of God’s patience with our enemies—sometimes they bring themselves to their knees and come to ask our forgiveness. That can be a hard thing for us to think about; it’s easy to be like Jonah and really want God to blast our enemies and the people who do us wrong. But as we see in Jonah and as we see in the words of Christ on the cross, even the Ninevites, even the Babylonians, even the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus, are not beyond his love and redemption; even for them, Christ died. It’s his desire to destroy his enemies by making them his children; it’s his desire to destroy the evildoer and the wicked by humbling their pride in repentance. But if they will not, then the time will come when they will reap the whirlwind they have sown, as Babylon did.

This means, finally, that we must be careful; this is why the warning comes in Revelation 18:4: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues.” The Israelites of the exile had been dragged into captivity, but they weren’t in prison; they were part of Babylonian society, and they had the very real option to go native, if you will, to just become Babylonians themselves. This can be a powerful temptation, even in extreme situations—the most extreme form of this is what we call “Stockholm syndrome,” which some of you may remember from the case of Patty Hearst, who went from terrorized kidnapping victim of the SLA to an active participant in their crimes. Under more normal circumstances, we see it in the temptation to go along to get along, to go with the flow, to compromise with the world; it’s easier to just not fight it. This is a temptation we need to resist. This isn’t to say that we need to separate ourselves from the world—I don’t say that no one’s called to that, but most people aren’t; rather, we need to differentiate ourselves from the world even as we live in it. We need to separate ourselves from the ways of the world and to live the Jesus way in the midst of everything the world is doing.

(Isaiah 45:14-46:13; Romans 11:33-36)

I said last week that Isaiah 45 is a hard chapter, that it digs into things that are neither easy to understand nor easy for us to accept; it deals with truths that are hard like granite, sharp-edged and unyielding as stone. There is comfort in these truths, but not comfort that comes to us on our own terms; it isn’t the comfort of an overstuffed easy chair in a warm room, but rather of the great stone wall that holds out the storm. It’s a comfort that does not promise to give us what we want, but rather asks us to trust God for what he will give; which is, I believe, a better thing in the end, but the truth of that is not always obvious. Indeed, it’s sometimes far from obvious.

Which fact, I think, sets up the last of the really hard statements in chapter 45. We begin this section of the book with another prophecy of the nations coming to Israel—focused this time on the peoples of northern Africa, where Israel had once been enslaved; now, those nations will come and voluntarily submit themselves to Israel, even to the point of making themselves slaves. Why? Because they recognize that the God of Israel is the only true god, and they’re willing to do anything—whatever it takes—in order to get in on Israel’s worship.

And then comes this statement: “Truly you are a God who hides yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” “Truly you are a God who hides yourself.” What are we supposed to make of that? It’s hard to say, because we don’t even know who’s speaking here. It’s just been the nations who were talking; is it still? Is this the response of the people of Israel to the promise God has just made? Is it the prophet? We don’t know. There are scholars who argue for each of those possibilities, but none of their arguments are all that strong; the simplest reading is that this is still the people of the nations talking, but that’s really not a great reason all by itself to come to that conclusion. In the end, I think we just have to accept that we don’t know who’s speaking here; it’s obviously not God, but it could be just about anyone else.

And in the end, perhaps it really doesn’t matter all that much. One of the reasons we don’t know who’s speaking in verse 15 is that nobody else argues with this statement—Isaiah doesn’t, Israel doesn’t, the nations don’t; whoever says it, it stands unchallenged. Which means that we should probably read this as a statement they all agree with, one that makes sense from all their perspectives, and see why that might be—and particularly, why it makes sense in this context. Taken by themselves, these words might seem bitter and cynical, but they clearly aren’t; they’re a response to a very good thing, to the nations discovering and coming to faith in the God of all creation, the Lord of the world. These words might be taken to mean that God plays games with people for some negative purpose, but that’s clearly not true either; God himself disclaims that in verse 19: “I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’”

What then does this statement mean? I suspect there are three truths in view here. First, God could be said to hide himself in that he’s often not to be found where we look for him, in the ways in which we expect to find him. From the perspective of the nations, this is the most basic meaning here: they didn’t find the true God working in any of the great nations of the world, playing the game of conquest. According to the way they understood things, that was how you knew which gods were greater than others; thus, for instance, when the expanding Babylonian empire conquered Assyria, that was understood as a victory not just for the emperor of Babylon over the Assyrian emperor, but also for Marduk, Bel, and Nebo, the gods of the Babylonians, over the gods of the Assyrians; by their conquest, they had proven themselves more powerful gods. The idea that there might be only one God, and that that God might be found not with one of the mighty empires of the world but with one of the small nations they had conquered, was a radically strange idea for the peoples of the world. Indeed, that idea was even a strange one to the people of Israel, to God’s own people, which is why God keeps having to make his case even to them, as he does again in this passage, that only he, not the idols of the nations, is to be worshiped and obeyed.

The problem is, Israel kept buying into the world’s conventional wisdom, that the power of God is with the strong, and worldly success is proof of divine favor; as a consequence, they kept concluding that the logical thing to do, the logical way to improve their situation, was to worship the gods of other nations as well as their own. This is a problem because God is not to be found in our conventional wisdom; he doesn’t do things in the ways that we expect, according to what makes sense to us, because he isn’t limited by our knowledge and understanding. That’s why the gifts he gives aren’t limited by our knowledge and understanding, either; that’s why he kept trying to give Israel something so much bigger than they wanted—he kept trying to give them the gift of being the ones through whom he would redeem the nations, when they just wanted him to help them conquer the nations. That’s why the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins spoke truth when he said, “If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity.” Because that’s so often the problem, that we’re looking for a god who makes sense to us on our terms; it’s not really that God is hiding from us, but that our expectations and assumptions are blocking our eyes and ears.

What this means is that God is not found by those who are unwilling to find him; he isn’t found by the proud and the haughty, by those who have all the answers, by those who are confident in their own strength to conquer life on their own terms. He isn’t found by those who aren’t really seeking him, who aren’t willing to surrender their lives to him; he isn’t found by the assertive and the self-sufficient. God is found by the humble and the contrite, by those who know they need him. This is why it’s said at times that he hides his face from Israel in judgment—Israel knows he’s there, not because they sought him and found him but because someone else did, but too often, they aren’t really seeking him at all, they’re only seeking his benefits. They want him to give them what they want while they disregard his commands, and so he hides his face from them, he turns away and leaves them in the silence until they will humble themselves and truly seek, not their own best interest, but his face.

There’s another aspect to this as well, that in the ancient world, all the other gods had their statues; only the God of Israel, as far as I know, went without physical images for his people to worship. The nations around Israel expected to be able to walk into a temple and see the god—but in this, too, the Lord was (and is) a God who hides. And while this might seem like a minor thing, it’s really anything but. The gods of the world can be represented, can be seen; the one true God can’t. In theological terms, he is transcendent—he’s so far above and beyond us that, as he tells Moses in Exodus 33, no frail, sinful human being can see him and survive the experience. He is too bright to see; that’s why the hymn we sang last week calls him “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” That’s why the poet Henry Vaughan, in one of his finest moments, wrote, “There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness”: God’s light is so bright that it overwhelms our ability to perceive it, and becomes to us instead the deepest of darkness. He is too bright, too big, too great, to be seen.

And here, then, is the wonder, and here is the miracle, to which Isaiah has already pointed in chapter 42: this God who was hidden from us in unapproachable light, this God whom no one could see and live, crossed that divide in his own power and revealed himself to us as Jesus Christ. This God who forbade us to make any image of him, who would not allow us to imagine our own version of him, gave us more than just an image of himself—he gave us himself, becoming fully human and living a full human life.

When we talk about Jesus coming, we tend to focus on his death and resurrection—especially in this season of Lent—and there’s certainly good reason for that; and we focus too on all the things he taught, and that’s also completely appropriate. But I think we lose sight, sometimes, of the fact that those aren’t the only reasons he came; and that one of the reasons he came is simply that we might know him in a new way and be able to relate to him more closely. God will always be beyond our ability to fully understand, certainly, as Paul says in Romans 11, quoting from Isaiah 40; and there will always be times when his face seems hidden to us. That’s just the way it is in this broken, sin-haunted, pain-darkened world of ours. But at the same time, even as it remains true that no one in this world has ever seen God in all his glory, yet it’s no longer true that no one has ever seen God: for as John 1:18 says, God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has made him known. The divide we could never cross, he crossed for us, out of love for us; in Jesus, the hidden face of God has been forever revealed.

(Isaiah 44:24-45:13; Romans 9:14-21)

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the one who formed you in your mother’s womb: “I am the Lord, who made all things; I alone stretched out the heavens above you, and no one helped me spread out the earth beneath your feet. I am the one who reveals false prophets for the fools they are and brings their predictions to nothing, and who makes nonsense of the knowledge of those who consider themselves wise, while I confirm the words of my servants and cause their predictions to be fulfilled. I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I form the light and create darkness; I bring well-being and create disaster. I am the Lord who does all these things.”

This is the word of the Lord. In this passage, God gets down to details about how he’s going to set his people free from Babylon—he even names names: he’s going to raise up a conqueror named Cyrus, the king of a pagan nation, and use this pagan who doesn’t even know him to return the Jews to Jerusalem and begin the process of rebuilding the city and temple of God. Such a claim invites two different reactions from two different groups of people. One, what right does he have to claim to do this? And two, how dare God use a pagan conqueror to accomplish his purposes? Why doesn’t he raise up another Moses, another hero of Israel, to lead this second Exodus? The answer to both questions is this star-blasting affirmation of the absolute sovereignty, the absolute lordship and the absolute right of rule, of God. This is of course something that’s been stressed a few times already in the chapters leading up to this one, but it reaches a new level and a new pitch of intensity here. Just consider the levels on which God’s sovereignty is asserted in this passage.

One, the Lord is the one who formed you in the womb. He made, specifically, you. Your character, your body, your gifts, your strengths and weaknesses, the things you value and the things you dislike, aren’t simply the semi-random product of your genes and your environment; sure, God used your genes, and he used the environment in which you grew up and in which you live, but he is the one who created you and who made you who you are. He gave you the gifts you would need to do the work for which he created you, and he gave you the character and temperament he desired you to have to be the person he wants you to be. Granted, to be human and not God is to be sinful, and so you also have traits that aren’t what God wants for you—but even those have been allowed for, and even in those, he’s at work to teach you to trust him and depend on him, and to trust and depend on others. The point is, God knows you far better and far more deeply than you know yourself, because he is wholly responsible for making you who you are, and he is Lord over your life not just at the superficial level, but all the way down to the deepest wellsprings of your character and nature.

Two, the Lord rules all creation because he made all of it. He is the Author of the story, and it’s his word that brought all things into being; as the author, he has absolute authority over everything that is in the same way as I have, under him, absolute authority over this sentence. Indeed, his is far greater, not only because his authority is over me and working through me as I author this sermon, but also because at any given point I might trip over my tongue and say something other than what I intend, while God never does such things. His authority is not only complete, unrestricted by any limitation whatsoever, it’s also perfect, unflawed by any error of any kind, and perfectly sufficient, not shared with anyone or anything beside himself. It’s not just that no power can compete with God’s—it’s that, as he declared in chapter 40, beside him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand. Any resistance or opposition to him lasts only as long as he permits it, and only within the bounds that he sets.

Three, the Lord rules over all things because there is no one else who can compare to him. There is no one else who has the power to do what he has done, and can do; he is unequalled in might. There is no one else who has the wisdom and understanding even to see the future, let alone to bring it about; others may try, but he frustrates their attempts and exposes their futility with no difficulty whatsoever. Only God can declare the future and then bring it about, and he can do so in any way he chooses; only he can raise up Cyrus and then open the way to conquest before him, such that no one will be able to resist his armies until he has accomplished all that the Lord intends for him to accomplish. Only the Lord formed the earth and set the sun, the moon and the stars in motion above it, and only he keeps it all together and keeps it all moving; he is unmatched in power, in wisdom, and in glory, and he has no rival, nor anyone even close.

Four, the Lord is in control in everything that happens—everything. “I am the Lord, and there is no other,” he declares. “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and I create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things.” This is not to say that God desires bad things to happen, as if he enjoyed them; but it is to say that nothing happens apart from God’s power and his sustaining will. There is nothing good that does not come from his hand, and there is no trouble and no disaster that does not happen on his sufferance. God could, for instance, have prevented 9/11; he could have given Osama bin Laden a fatal accident years ago, or changed Bill Clinton’s mind to green-light bin Laden’s assassination, or had him knifed in the back by some Afghan tribesman. He didn’t choose to do that. He could have prevented our current economic crisis—fairly easily, in fact; he didn’t choose to do that either. I don’t know his reasons, for these or for any other disasters, and I won’t presume to declare the mind of God; but whether he decreed them for judgment or permitted them for other purposes, the testimony of Scripture is clear that they happened only by God’s will. Indeed, Scripture is clear that nothing happens, for good or ill, that is not in some way an expression of the sovereign will of Almighty God.

This is a hard word for us. That God sends good things—yes, of course; that only God deserves the credit for the good things that come to us—which is to say, that we can’t take credit for them ourselves—is usually not something we want to consider. Indeed, for many people, that’s a painfully hard idea to accept. But that God sends bad things—that’s something else again. Does that make God the author of evil?

There are those who have believed so, and who have responded either by rejecting God or by rejecting the biblical testimony to his power and lordship. But the truth is, it doesn’t. God did not create evil—he could not do any such thing, because it’s completely contrary to his nature—nor did he ever desire that evil things should happen. However, when our first ancestors fell into sin, he chose not to obliterate them, toss out the world he’d made, and start over, but rather to put a plan in motion to redeem their sin; as a consequence, while he may at times prevent us from sinning and forbid disasters from occurring, there are other times when, for his own purposes, he doesn’t. The important thing is that there is no evil he permits in which he is not in some way at work in order to redeem it—and there is no suffering he allows in which he does not share, in the body of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. God is not aloof from the pain of this world; in Christ, he has borne it all.

In dealing with all this, we are of course in very deep water, looking into mysteries which are beyond our ability to comprehend; which is at least part of the reason why God’s plans are so often mysterious to us, and even at times seem to make no sense at all to us. This is particularly true when we think we have a better idea for what God could and should be doing; if he would just do this thing, we think, everything would be so much better than it is—so why isn’t he doing it our way? That seems to have been the response of some, perhaps many, in Israel when God declared that he would return his people to their homeland through the work of a conquering pagan king, rather than through the heroic leadership of one of his own people; and to them, God directs one further statement of his lordship: “Who do you think you are to argue with me? Does the clay have the right to complain about what the potter makes from it? Does the pot have the ability to question the potter’s skill? Or does anyone have the right to go to a parent and question whether their child has the right to exist? Please, feel free to give me your orders—I’m only the creator of the universe, after all; I’m sure you have much to tell me that I don’t already know.”

This is, of course, a potent blend of irony and sarcasm designed to give a real kick to God’s point: we don’t know enough to question his plans and his decisions. God alone sees everything, and he alone is aware of everything that has to be considered, and it’s on that basis of his total awareness and infinite understanding that he has set his plans in motion; we only see a part of the picture, and a small part at that, where he sees the whole. If he chooses to advance his purposes not by giving us success, but by giving success to someone we don’t like, someone who doesn’t even know him or give him credit, that might not make sense to us—but God sees a lot more of the picture than we do. If he chooses to show mercy to some and not others, to bless some and not others, that’s not unjust, because the truth is that none of us can claim to deserve his mercy and his blessing; God is not capricious and he doesn’t act for no reason, but he has perfectly good reasons for everything he does. We just don’t see them. The mystery of God’s ways really isn’t in God at all, it’s in us—in our limited perceptions, and the limitations of our minds and our ability to understand what’s really going on.

I said last week that the first lesson God tries to teach his people—over and over and over again—is “Trust me. Trust me. Trust me”; and that’s ultimately the point of this passage. In the easy times, when you have plenty of money and everything’s going well, trust God that he’s providing for you, and giving you extra to give away to those in need, and to store up for the hard times when they come. In times of disaster, trust God that he’s still with you and still working for your good, that he’s allowed the disaster and that he’ll bring you through it—that even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need fear no evil, for he is with you, and the rod of his strength and the staff of his guidance comfort you. In times when the way before you is clear, trust God that he has opened the way, and in times when you can’t see where to go, trust him that he’s holding you by the hand and leading you on, one step at a time. As the poet and hymnwriter William Cowper wrote, “You fearful saints, fresh courage take; the clouds you so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.”

Those aren’t just words on Cowper’s part, either; the story behind that hymn is an interesting one. Cowper battled mental illness for years, and the story is told that finally one day he decided to drown himself in the Thames. He called a cab and told the driver to take him down to the river, but the driver got lost in a thick London fog and couldn’t find his way; after driving around London blind for quite a while, the cabbie finally stopped and let Cowper out. Much to Cowper’s surprise, when he dismounted from the cab, he turned and found himself standing on the doorstep of his own home. God had allowed the illness with which he wrestled, but when it drove him to kill himself, that, God prevented; he had sent the fog to save Cowper’s life. Even in our blackest moments, God watches over us.

(Isaiah 43:22-44:23; Acts 17:29-31)

Why is it that we never seem to learn? Granted, there are certainly individuals who learn from their mistakes—and, just as importantly, from the mistakes of others—and occasionally organizations that do; but if you take human beings as a whole, if you look at the national level and the world level, the record just isn’t good. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana is famous for teaching us that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it; the great British historian Arnold Toynbee is famous for his insight that history is essentially cyclical, the same patterns repeating over and over. What does this tell you? Nothing you didn’t already know, that’s what. To take one example, appeasement worked so well with Hitler in the 1930s that we tried it again with the Soviet Union—for a while; we eventually wised up on that one, but did we learn not to do it again? On the evidence, no.

This is not, of course, a new phenomenon—not even close. The disinclination to learn lessons we really don’t want to learn is very, very human, and we can always find some way to rationalize that disinclination, some sort of excuse to justify it. The thing is, though, when rationalizations meet reality, what happens? You ever dropped an egg on a hard floor? If you went up to the top of the courthouse building and threw that egg at the road, do you think the extra momentum would help it break through the pavement? No—you’d just get a bigger explosion. When we refuse to learn from what went wrong the last time—when we convince ourselves that this time, it will be different—that’s what we get. Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

We can see that dynamic at work here in Isaiah—and you know, Israel had less excuse than most nations for this. They didn’t have to work out the lessons of history on their own, or figure out for themselves how to apply those lessons to their current challenges; these are, after all, things that even if you try your best, you can still get wrong. Israel, though, had people to do both of these things for them—they were called prophets. God sent his prophets to Israel, in part, to make sure that they understood exactly what lessons they needed to learn from their history—the primary one was “Trust me. Trust me. Trust me”—and that they knew exactly what he wanted them to do as a consequence. Time after time, when they did, good things happened; and when they didn’t, which was rather more often, bad things happened. But did they learn from this? In general, no—and sometimes, when bad things happened, they had the appalling nerve to blame God for those bad things and complain that he didn’t care about them!

That’s why we have this whiplash effect going on here in Isaiah. Three weeks ago, in the beginning of chapter 42, God announced his servant, who would bring justice to the nations, who would open the eyes of the blind and release those held prisoner in the darkness. Two weeks ago, in the end of chapter 42, we read this powerful image of God’s judgment on a people too hard-headed even to understand why they were being judged. Then, last week, we saw how despite all that, God immediately turns to his people with the promise of redemption and a statement of his undying love for them. And now we have this, as they still refuse to respond to him in the way that he desires: “But it was not me that you called, O Jacob!”

Now, these first verses might be a little tricky to understand, so let me lay out for you what’s going on here. In the ancient world, people believed in religion about the way they believed in magic: you do the ritual the god requires, and you get the results you want. Worship was essentially a form of manipulation; its purpose, as John Oswalt puts it, was “to appease the gods and satisfy any claims they may have on us so that we may use the power of the gods to achieve our own goals.” That’s not the worship God wants. The rituals he had commanded were essentially symbolic; what mattered was the spirit in which they were performed. What he wanted was for his people to give him their lives and hearts so that he could have a true friendship with them. The problem is, they were taking their cues from the nations around them, and they thought all they needed to do was to do the ritual correctly, and they were fine—and that wasn’t working, because it wasn’t the point at all, and so they’re complaining that God is wearing them out with all his pointless demands. To that, God says, “No, I’m not burdening you, you’re burdening me, because you aren’t really doing this for me at all! You’re doing this for yourself. All you’re giving me is your sins and offenses—and I’m sick to death of them.”

And Israel doesn’t get it, because they’ve bought into the world’s idea that worship is just a way to manipulate God—you do the thing, you pull the lever, and you get the treat. They’ve bought the idea that our worship is all about us, and what we want, and what we can get out of it. They don’t understand that worship begins with submission—with laying aside our pride, and our independence, and our own desires, and our own ideas of what we need and what we deserve. They don’t get it—and they’re not alone; too often, we don’t either. This is a universal human problem, because it’s a universal human tendency; it’s just another reflection of the desire to be in control of our own lives that drove our first ancestors into sin to begin with. This is the primal human error, that declares in the smuggest tones Frank Sinatra could possibly manage, “I did it my way.”

So if this is the problem, what’s the solution? Is there a solution? Nothing the world can come up with, certainly—a point Isaiah makes in verses 9-20 of chapter 44, where he gives us his most extended mockery of idols and of those who make and worship them. I particularly appreciate the picture in verses 14-17—a guy cuts down a tree, uses half of it to make a fire to warm himself and cook his dinner, then turns the other half into a statue, bows down before it, and says, “Save me; you are my god.” As Isaiah comes back to the language of blindness to describe the effects of this false worship—“They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand”—you can hear his frustration as he says, “No one stops to think, no one has the wit to say, ‘I burned half of it—should I really bow down and worship the other half?’” Those who worship such things may feed their bodies with the food they cook over that fire, but they feed their souls on the ashes it leaves behind. There is no life in this, and no salvation.

No, the only life, the only salvation, is in God; he is the only redeemer, and the only one who can save, because he’s the only real God. This is the point Isaiah’s trying to hammer through his people’s heads—it’s the core of the message God has given him—because it’s the point they’ve consistently failed to understand. Why else would they keep chasing after foreign gods and falling into idolatry? They believed those other gods existed, and had power, and could provide them some benefit. Perhaps they saw the bargain other nations had with their gods—just do the ritual and get the desired result; perhaps they saw the predictability that came along with that and decided they preferred that bargain to the relationship their God wanted to have with them, which made him much less predictable, and not someone they could manipulate. We really don’t know what exactly it was that kept tempting the people of Israel into idolatry. But one thing seems sure: that temptation only worked because the people of Israel believed that the gods of the nations really existed, and really had power, and really could do something for them. If they’d realized that their idolatry was not only disloyal but also profoundly pointless, if they’d truly understood that they weren’t going to get anything out of it, then they never would have gotten into it in the first place.

God can save his people, and he’s the only one who can. We see that message again and again throughout this section of Isaiah—in chapter 40, God asks, “What are the nations compared to me but a speck of dust on the scales?”; in chapter 41, he puts the gods of the nations on trial; in chapter 42, he announces the coming of his Servant; in chapter 43, he declares, “Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is no savior.” We see it here, in the ringing statement, “This is what the Lord says—Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first, and I am the last: apart from me there is no God.” There is no other god in heaven and no other redeemer on this earth; there is no other name in heaven or on earth or under the earth by which anyone may be saved. There is no one else in whom we can put our hope and faith and trust. There is no other. Period, full stop, end of sentence.

Ultimately, of course, that’s a truth which is realized in Jesus Christ; thus the apostle Peter tells the Jewish leaders in Acts 4, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to humanity by which we must be saved.” That’s our message, to each other and to the world—and make no mistake, we always need to begin by reminding ourselves of that, because it’s so easy to get off into putting our trust in other things. We always need to make sure that we’re really living in the good news ourselves before we try to share it with others.

If we do that, though, if we keep that focus, I believe now is a particularly opportune time to be preaching this message. I know most folks are worried about the current economic situation, and I know our elders are worried about the way it’s affecting our church’s finances; but I do believe there’s a silver lining to this. You see, anyone who reads the headlines and watches the news has figured out something they might not have figured out before: they’ve come to the realization that the economy isn’t going to save them. Their jobs, their resumés, their paychecks, aren’t going to save them. The banks aren’t going to save them, and if they have any investments, those aren’t going to save them either. They’ve figured out that Congress isn’t going to save them; and judging by the opinion polls, folks are starting to figure out that the president isn’t going to save them either. With some of the rhetoric that got thrown around last year, I think a lot of people really believed they’d elected a new messiah; I think it’s starting to register that all they did was elect another politician. Which is something we should also remember two years from now, and four years from now—even if we end up with a new president and a whole new Congress, they aren’t going to save us either.

What’s more, we aren’t going to save ourselves. Our plans won’t save us. Our possessions won’t save us. Our big ideas won’t save us, and neither will our little ones. Our inspirations won’t save us, and our inventions won’t do the trick either, even if we can come up with any. All these are good things, and necessary; none of them are enough, even if we put them all together. We cannot save ourselves, and we cannot save each other; and none of the things we value can save us either. There is only one Savior, and he is Jesus Christ the Son of the Living God; there is only one God who redeems, and there is hope for the future—and for the present, for that matter—in nothing and no one else. This is the message God has given us for the world; our call is to share it freely.

Let me leave you with this. A lot of you have probably heard of the magic act Penn & Teller; they’re great stage magicians, intelligent, thoughtful, mischievous people, can be pretty profane, and have a lot more integrity than a lot of folks in show business. Penn Jillette—the big guy who does all the talking—is an atheist, and quite open about it. He had an interesting experience a couple months ago, though, with a gentle, kind Christian man who came up to him after one of their shows, complimented him on the show, and then presented him with a Gideon New Testament. Penn was impressed by his goodness and sincerity; even though he continues to declare himself a firm atheist, he accepted the gift and the message—in fact, he was honestly grateful for both, and quite moved by the whole encounter. Why? Well, he put it this way: 

If you believe that there’s a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell, or not getting eternal life, or whatever, and you think that, well, it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward . . . how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe it, but that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point where I tackle you—and this is more important than that.

“How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that?” It’s a good question, isn’t it?