(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?