Christ in Isaiah
ID
jsb001
Idioma
EN
Duração total
06:25:36
Quantidade
6
Passagens bíblicas
Isaiah
Descrição
6 addresses about the books Isaish in regard to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Transcrição automática:
…
I shall read the greater part of the seventh chapter of the prophet Isaiah. Prophet Isaiah
chapter 7. And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jopham, the son of Uzziah,
king of Judah, that Rezin, the king of Syria, and Pekah, the son of Ramaliah, king of Israel,
went up toward Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told
the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate with Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the
heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind. Then said the Lord unto
Isaiah, go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou and Sha'ar Jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the
upper pool in the highway of the fullest field, and say unto him, take heed and be quiet. Fear not,
neither be faint-hearted, for the two tales of these smoking firebrands, for the fierce
anger of Rezin with Syria, and of the son of Ramaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son
of Ramaliah, hath taken evil counsel against thee, saying, let us go up against Judah,
and vex it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set a king in the midst of it,
even the son of Tebiel. Thus saith the Lord God, it shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass,
for the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin, and within threescore and
five years shall Ephraim be broken, let it be not a people. And the head of Ephraim is Samaria,
and the head of Samaria is Ramaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be
established. Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy
God. Ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask,
neither will I tempt the Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David. Is it a small thing
for you to weary men? But will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you
a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel. Butter
and honey shall he eat, that he may know how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before
the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be
forsaken of both her kings. The Lord shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy
father's house, days that have not come from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, even the
king of Assyria. Because I'm otherwise certain to forget at the end of the meeting, there's one
thing that I'd like to say at this particular time for no better reason, and that is that if
the brethren are agreeable, I propose, God willing, on Saturday to reverse the two subjects
given, so that in the afternoon the subject would be the anointed one in chapters 61 and 63, and in
the evening the subject would be the servant of Jehovah, that's the second part, and the reason I
would like to do this is that I cannot escape by any means from the strong desire that I have that
we should end our series on Isaiah chapter 53 in the evening, and I feel that the distortion of
the order will not be too serious to arrange the meetings on Saturday like this. So unless I have
some very violent protest about a breach of faith, this is how I propose to arrange it on Saturday,
God willing. On the afternoon of the third day after Jesus died, two of his disciples were
walking the seven miles, that's the distance from Newcastle to Ponteland, walking seven miles from
Jerusalem to a village. There were no buses, and it was unlikely that they could thumb a lift from
a Roman chariot, but they were used to walking, and so they walked on. But this time, accustomed
as they were to walking, their feet were lead and their hearts were stone. So disappointed were they
at the fact that Jesus, in whom their hopes had been brought to center, had died. And we can see
them as they walk along, with their faces lined with grief, and trudging along with their heads
close together, talking to each other. And they're so intent upon their talking to each other that
they don't notice that a stranger has fallen in alongside them, and begins to walk with them,
and soon enters the conversation, and says to them, what can you be talking about which makes
you look so sad? And they said, we're talking about Jesus of Nazareth. He said, what about Jesus of
Nazareth? What things are you talking about? And they suddenly stopped, and they looked at him and
said, you must be the only person staying in Jerusalem at this feast time who doesn't understand
the things that are happening there these days. There was Jesus the Nazarene, a prophet from God,
whose sermons and his miracles were of terrific power in the sight of God and man. And we'd come
to believe that he was the one who would redeem Israel. But our rulers have delivered him up to
Roman court, and he has been crucified. And we thought he had been the one who would redeem
Israel. And they said, but just listen to the rest of the story. This morning, some of our women folk
burst in and caused us to be greatly excited by telling us that they'd been to the tomb, and they
found the body wasn't there. And then they'd seen angels who'd said to them that he was alive, but
they didn't see him. So some of our men went to the tomb, and they found it just as they'd said,
but they didn't see Jesus. And so the stranger said to them, how slow you are to understand and
believe. Those same scriptures which made you think that he was to be the deliverer of Israel,
didn't you understand from those same scriptures that it must be, it had to be, that he was going
to suffer and die? And while they were talking about this, he then began, at the book of Genesis,
at the beginning of their ancient scriptures, and he began to go through the whole of those
Old Testament books and explain to them in all the scriptures, all the things about himself,
explaining how it was necessary that the Messiah should die, suffer death, and rise again from the
dead the third day. And of course they arrived at the village, and he made that he was going to go
forward. But they said to him, oh stay with us, it's evening now, and it'll soon be dark. And so
they persuaded him, and he went in. And they soon had a meal ready, and they sat down to it. But then
they got another big surprise, because the stranger became the host. And he took the food, and he gave
thanks for it, and gave it to them. And in that instant, they recognized that it was Jesus. And in the
same instant, in front of their eyes, he vanished out of their sight. And they looked at each other and said,
it's just dawning upon us, that while he was talking to us, our hearts changed. Instead of being like
stone, they began to warm up. And they began to burn within us, while he was speaking to us, by the way. And
they got up that same instant, and walked those seven miles back to Jerusalem. If anybody, um, wants to
know what is our object, in speaking of the passages that we are speaking about this week, then we are
seeking for that experience of the burning heart. We're speak—seeking for that experience that our hearts will
burn within us, as he speaks to us in all the scriptures of the things concerning himself. Would the Lord Jesus
Christ speak to the mouth of the prophet Isaiah? He would indeed. And that's a very good reason why we should
seek to find Christ in Isaiah. They arose, and they went back the seven miles to Jerusalem. Where did they get
the energy from, at the end of that long, toilsome, sad road? It was the burning heart that gave them the energy.
They knew the Lord in the midst, after having got to know him by the way. And in a very short time, their feet
were beautiful upon the mountains, spreading abroad over the world the gospel of peace, the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the crucified, and the risen Savior. And we would make no secret of the fact that what we are asking
for the Lord this evening is the experience of the burning heart that provides the fuel for burning up the
sadness that is upon so many of us, due to various kinds of disillusionment, that we also might know the Lord by the way.
And in the midst, that our feet might become beautiful upon the mountains, spreading aboard the glad tidings of peace.
An eminent prophet, I once heard say, that gives you to understand that it is a prophet of our own times, and not one of the Bible prophets.
An eminent prophet, I once heard say, that the objectives of true ministry are two, to open up the scriptures and to engage the hearts of the Lord's people
with himself. And that brings true to me, to open up the scriptures and to engage the hearts of the Lord's people with himself.
Regarding the first, when as quite a young man, I first began to devote myself, not enough, but when I first began to devote myself to serious study of the scriptures,
one of the first books that I tried, with the help of God, to delve into, as far as he would enable me to do so, was the prophet Isaiah.
And I found there a pasture of such exceeding richness in the things of God and of Christ, that it has left a mark on my heart that has never left me.
And it is for this reason, amongst others, that I have taken the presumption of inviting you to read with me in the prophet Isaiah.
With, I trust, real humility, I want to think of myself as a very inferior under-shepherd, under the rod and the staff of the chief shepherd himself,
so that we may walk together through this rich pasture of the prophet Isaiah.
The second proposition that was made is that true ministry engages the heart with the Lord Jesus Christ.
And truly, and surely, there is no portion of scripture which more stirringly and movingly and more with a greater charm presents to us the Lord Jesus Christ himself,
and the thing that has been called by the poet Isaiah's wild page, so that we might be led by this to do like Thomas did, to fall at his feet and say, my Lord and my God.
And it's a very interesting thing to see that the first clear reference to our Lord in the prophet Isaiah is the same name that has been written on the opening page of the New Testament, which is Immanuel, God with us, Immanuel, God with us.
That's interpreted in Matthew chapter 1 to be fulfilled in the birth of Jesus at Nazareth.
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son, and thou shalt call his name Immanuel.
And this name says, that child that was to be born, it says, he is God, Immanuel.
It adds with us, but it says he is God.
I love to dwell upon those instances, and they're quite numerous in the Gospels, where in an instant, with one flash of impression, so to speak, we get the impressions.
There are the twin pillars of the temple of revelation, the absolute deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the perfect humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And the story of this birth of the Virgin Mary, and the story of the name given, is like this.
There are certain marks which distinguish man as distinct from God, like, for example, weariness and sleep.
But there is not a more striking one than being conceived, and being born, and being nursed, and being fed as a baby thus entering in the world.
This was truly God. This was truly man.
This child was to grow up, to enter the world in a manner which betoken absolutely that he was perfectly a man.
And yet, on the same instant, the name given said that he is God.
And we have there the absolute deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You might say to me, does that mean that any person called Emmanuel must be God?
Is Emmanuel Shilmul God? No, indeed.
But in this case, the whole of scripture before and after demands the fullest possible meaning to this name given to this baby in Bethlehem,
that his name was Emmanuel. He was, overall, God, blessed forever.
And we have these twin revelations to us.
The fact that the name goes on is a separate, I think, and an additional thing that it is God with us.
And whatever else we may learn as we seek to find Christ in the prophet Isaiah,
you can take this and I can take this and we can make it our pillow tonight that God, the Almighty God, is with us.
In spite of all the things that there are to disillusion us and to disturb us and to make us sad,
we can lay our heads down upon our pillows tonight and every night
with the knowledge that springs out to us from this name given to the baby of Bethlehem,
and that is that God is with us.
There hasn't only been a Hiroshima and a Belsen, a Bermuda and a Belfast,
but there has been a Bethlehem.
And that Bethlehem assures us, the great event of Bethlehem assures us that God is with us.
And we are entitled fully to reason, as the Apostle Paul does, from this event and all that sprang from it,
if God before us, who can be against us?
And all the facts which make it possible for us to say this, if God before us, who can be against us?
Notably, the cross and the resurrection.
They're all here in the bud as we contemplate the child in the virgin's womb whose name was to be Emmanuel.
And they justify us in saying, if God before us, who can be against us?
This is upon the opening page of the New Testament,
and it's fitting, therefore, that upon the early parts of the prophet Isaiah,
we should have this name brought before us as we have done.
Now, I want to deal this evening with the first seven chapters of the prophet Isaiah.
And you'll agree with me that there's something of a problem here.
I cannot assume that we're all familiar with the pages,
and that there must be some means whereby we turn over these pages together,
and we first of all do something to get a general idea what are the contents of these chapters,
so that we may then pick out the salient points.
Now, the first large section of the prophet Isaiah is, of course, chapters 1 to 39.
Everyone who reads the book can see the sharp division at the end of chapter 39.
It's a kind of a second volume of the book after that.
It's dominated by an entirely different set of circumstances.
But from chapter 1 to 39, there is one particular situation in its developing stages,
which dominates the book, and in it, the power of God and the promise of his Christ is developed.
Now, within that, the first major division is the first 12 chapters.
And I don't think there's anything more appealing to the heart than that 12th chapter,
which brings this section to a close, when it says,
Thou wast angry with me, but thine anger is turned away, and thou comfortest me.
I will trust and not be afraid, therefore we shall with joy draw water out of the wells of salvation.
Now, it seems to me necessary to divide that portion into two parts,
and so I'm trying to consider this evening the first seven chapters.
And for a few minutes, if you would open your Bibles,
at the beginning of the prophet Isaiah, we would look over what it has to say.
I won't read it. I'll hope that you are able to pick up the words as your eye stays upon the page,
and you turn over the page as I go on, so that there will be coming to you a general idea
of what the contents of the prophecy are before we come back to some details.
Now, the first chapter stands clearly by itself, and it is a kind of preface or introduction.
First of all, it specifies a particular period, and that is in the days of Isaiah,
Jopham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
We shall have quite something to say, particularly about the reigns of Ahaz and Hezekiah,
but there's no question at all about this portion of the book,
and I presume that this refers to chapters 1 to 39.
It fixes our attention upon the reigns of these four kings.
Then in verse 8, this preface fixes our eyes upon a particular situation,
and that is that Jerusalem is left all by itself,
and the rest of the cities of Judah are overrun by a foreign power.
Verse 7, strangers devour your land in your presence, it is desolate as overthrown by strangers,
and the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard,
as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.
Now, that situation certainly did not arise until the story we have in chapters 36 and 37.
It's in these chapters that the story comes to that point,
when the whole of Judah is overrun by a foreign invader,
except the city of Jerusalem, which is left alone.
Now we might say, why is it that such a thing has happened?
And the answer is given partly in verse 4,
and that is that God's people have forsaken him.
They were worse than the ox and the ass who knew their master's crib.
But in verse 4, they have forsaken the Lord,
they have provoked the Holy One of Israel, and to anger they are gone away backward.
And in verse 23, we have an example of the kind of results,
of a kind of actions in which their forsaking God have manifested themselves.
Their princes are rebellious, and in the end they judge not the fatherless,
neither does the cause of the widow come unto them.
I don't know whether it strikes you how unchanging, in some ways, our God is,
through all the progress of the revelation of himself that comes to us through Holy Scripture.
Almost at the end of the book of God, it says,
This is true religion, undefiled, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction,
and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
These are actions in tune with the deep compassion of God,
that God missed from his earthly people,
and in them they are a manifestation of their forsaking his will.
God is still looking, but if his people are in tune with himself,
they will have compassion on the underprivileged,
and particularly on the people who are so described as the fatherless and widows again and again,
both in this book and in other parts of the Word of God.
They gave up judgment, and particularly the care of the fatherless and widows.
In verse 18, we read that the Lord wants to reason with them about this,
and perhaps this is the clearest indication of what the book is all about.
It is God reasoning with them about the reasons for which his heart is sad about them,
and he wants them to hear his voice, and he wants to bring them back into the ways of peace.
Because we read that although in verse 25 he has to turn his hand upon them,
yet in verse 27 we read that Zion will be redeemed with judgment after all.
Now we shall find that the idea that he's turned his hand upon them
to be a dominating idea in the rest of the prophet.
Now chapter 2 to chapter 4 has some very precise indications.
It seems to be a kind of second introduction,
and it assures them that Zion and Jerusalem will be at the head of the nations in the end.
Because although in chapters 1 to 39,
Jerusalem is protected by the Lord from the foreign invader,
it's a little later in the book, it does come.
And in chapter 65, it says,
Our holy and beautiful city is burned with fire and strangers devour it in our presence.
So you only have to go further and you find that this city is overrun and destroyed.
But God assures us in chapter 2, for example verse 2,
It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord's house
shall be established from the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills.
Now this description, and it's a very lovely one, if we had time we shall come back to it,
ends with the words,
Neither shall they learn war any more, in verse 4.
But it goes on to say that the land at the present time is full of things that are distressing to the Lord.
Verse 7, the land is full of silver and gold.
Verse 8, the land is full of idols and they worship the work of their own hands.
And because of this in verse 12, the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon everyone that is proud and lifted up.
And through the rest of this passage, again and again, we read, in that day.
Verse 17, the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.
Verse 20, in that day a man shall cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold to the moles and to the bats and so on.
Verse 7 of chapter 3, in that day.
And so this is a description of the final blessing of God's beautiful city Zion.
But in the meantime, God's judgment must be upon them.
Now in chapter 5, particularly in verses 1 to 7, we have a song that the prophet sings about his beloved or his friend.
And that gives in greater detail the reason why the hand of God is turned against his people.
It describes the fact that he did all he could with Israel to bring forth fruit.
But he found, when he came to it, he found wild grapes.
It says that he came and looked for fruit.
In verse 4, wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes.
And because it brought forth wild grapes, God has broken down the fence and God has had to punish, to chastise his people.
And from verse 8, almost to the end, down to verse 25, we have various woes in which the Lord is explaining to his people wherein they have grieved him.
And in the end, he says in verse 25, therefore is the Lord, the anger of the Lord kindled against his people.
He has stretched forth his hand against them and has smitten them, and the hills did tremble, and so on.
At the end of that verse, for all this, his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
Now don't forget this, because it forms a refrain, which we'll come to much later.
Again and again and again it's repeated, but the anger of the Lord, in spite of all the chastisements that have come upon them,
the anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
And in verse 26, he says that he will carry out his chastisement, because they have so displeased him by hissing from a distant nation to come and overrun his land.
Now this is the very bottom, so to speak, of the hill.
This is the very lowest point, when God has sought to find fruit from his people, and he has found none.
He has found wild grapes, and therefore his anger is turned against them.
And when we get to the lowest point, then God begins by intervening himself.
How does he intervene?
He intervenes by bringing one man into his presence, and there, by conviction, confession, cleansing, and commissioning him, the Lord begins to recover again his people to himself.
This is the story of what happened to Isaiah when he found himself in the presence of God.
And although he is apt to pronounce woes against the people, he has to say in verse 5, in the presence of God, woe is me, for I am undone.
And yet it says in verse 8, the Lord says, whom shall I send and who will go for us?
And Isaiah said, here am I, send me.
And he became Shiloh, he became Siloam, he became a sent one, with the lovely accents of the grace of God, who was to recover his people from their error, and to recover them to the ways of peace.
And then, in chapter 7, we find that there's another intervention.
There may be some, there certainly was a fairly considerable lapse of time between the two, but we find another intervention when God sends Isaiah to meet the king Ahaz.
And when he finds that Ahaz is set upon not responding to God's overtures, then he gives him, on the one hand, a sign that Jerusalem will be delivered, and these people will be overcome, but God will bring upon him the one who will chastise him.
From other passages we find that Ahaz had in fact already, probably already, invited the king of Assyria to come and help him.
And it is in verse 17 of our chapter that we get an extremely dramatic situation.
While all the time Isaiah has been asking Ahaz to ask for a sign, Ahaz is saying in his heart, presumably hoping that Isaiah won't know, my hope is in the king of Assyria.
The king of Assyria is my hope.
I refuse to commit myself to hope in the Lord.
The king of Assyria is my hope.
And when after he had been assured of the intervention of God for their immediate deliverance, as far as he himself is concerned, in verse 17,
the Lord shall bring upon thee and upon thy people, upon thy father's house, days that have not come from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, even, would he pause, even the king of Assyria, the very person that Ahaz in his heart of hearts has been reliant upon, because he was refusing to commit himself to trust in the Lord.
Now it'll be necessary for me to explain a little about the background to these events.
I would like to remind you that when the Lord Jesus Christ was speaking to Jewish disciples in Luke chapter 24,
he was speaking to people who were absolutely soaked in the Old Testament history.
And they knew what was the background to these events.
I'm told that in the synagogues of the Jews, in the parts of the world where they're less restrained than they are in England,
at the present time, when they read the book of Esther at the Feast of Purim, the whole congregation boos and shouts at the name of the man who tried to betray them.
Whenever the word Haman is mentioned, they all boo and shout at the idea.
They're well aware of the Old Testament story and who were the enemies of God.
But we have to have it explained to us, and we have to have it reminded.
Now in the world wherein these things happened, the dominant factors were the two superpowers of Egypt in the south and of Assyria away in the far northwest.
Egypt is quite well known since the Exodus.
They've been fairly peaceful and non-aggressive, although we do hear of them from time to time.
But Assyria is a very different proposition.
It's an interesting thing to see that for many, many generations of English people and others,
knowing their Bibles and knowing something about the king of Assyria from them,
the rest of profane history was an absolute blank to these people until the middle of the last century
when their palaces and their cities were opened up by the excavators.
And in most cases where they did cover the same grounds, their inscriptions on the walls of their palaces
related to the same things, the same events, the same people, the same names of the Jewish kings,
as are told us in our Bibles.
And although Assyria is far away to the northeast, it was in fact the higher part of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates,
called Mesopotamia later.
The higher part towards the sources of the rivers was Assyria, and the lower part down to the sea was called Babylonia.
But of recent years, this great power Assyria has been stirring.
King Uzziah died in 740 BC, and about 120 years before that, an Assyrian campaign appears in the inscriptions
which began a sustained pressure against the west, and this was bound in the end to bring Assyria into conflict with Israel and Judah.
The first Assyrian king to be mentioned in the Bible is called by two names, Paul and Tiglath-Pileser,
and he first appears in 2 Kings chapter 15 and 19.
But after that, chapters 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 of 2 Kings, then they're full of the king of Assyria.
They're as full of the king of Assyria as the prophet Isaiah is,
and page after page and page after page of Isaiah, the king of Assyria, occupies the greatest possible name.
During the period that followed the death of Uzziah, and to the death of Sennacherib, of which we read in chapter 37,
of course the Assyrian kings changed.
Shalmaneser there was, and then Sargon, and then Sennacherib after Tiglath-Pileser died.
And they had sacked many famous cities, including Babylon.
And the great trouble was, of course, that if these two great powers, Assyria and Egypt, came to blows with each other,
then they must reach each other by way of that narrow coastal strip which contained Judah and Israel.
Now, a sidelight, of course, upon these considerations, which, while not entirely found in the scriptures,
is absolutely at one with some, is the terrifying ferocity of the Assyrian army.
In the Bible we read that they depopulated whole countries completely.
And it was as part of their stated policy.
The Rabshaker sent by Sennacherib said,
Just you stay at peace until my lord and master sends and carries you away to a wonderful land that will be your own.
They depopulated whole countries as part of their policy of conquest.
But the inscriptions which reveal what would be known of them in the ancient world tell an additional story.
I've myself seen in the British Museum and in pictures,
pictures of the Assyrian army with their captives on the floor and their spears
and having their foot upon the prisoner and simply poking out his eyes with the spears like this
and going from man to man with their spears, putting their eyes out one by one.
There was never until our own days such horrible ferocity as was shown by the Assyrian armies.
And we can see what a terrifying prospect it was
that they should have had the shadow of the king of Assyria over them all the time.
Now it was in 734 BC, we read about it in 2 Kings chapter 16 verses 5 and 6.
We read that Syria and Ephraim, that is the two little states immediately to the north of Judah,
they formed a treaty, a confederacy in order to attack Judah.
You know of course that Judah and Israel or Ephraim were once a united kingdom.
But under Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, they broke away from each other
and they were often at enmity with each other.
And here Ephraim was confederate with Syria in order to attack Judah and Ahaz.
And we read in 2 Kings what we don't read in Isaiah,
that Ahaz had actually called for help to the king of Assyria.
So far as size is concerned, it was something like Luxembourg calling in Russia
to protect them against a combination of Holland and Belgium.
Something very like that it was.
And behind this story that we've read is the fact that Ahaz,
who was of the house of David and was one of the line of David
to whom the promises of God had been made,
he had utterly refused to trust in the Lord.
He had brought heathen idols found with the king of Assyria into the temple of the Lord.
And refusing to commit himself to trust in the Lord,
which Isaiah gave for his message day by day,
he had actually called in the king of Assyria.
And the chastisement that was to come was described like the waters of the river.
We'll come to this in chapter 8.
The Lord will bring upon you the waters of the river strong and mighty, the king of Assyria.
And in chapter 28, like an overflowing scourge, the king of Assyria would come down upon them.
This was what God was speaking about.
Now Egypt, all this time, appears shadowly in the background as a possible ally,
especially in the later parts of this part of Assyria,
appears as a possible ally of Judah against the Assyrians.
They brought in the Assyrians as an ally against Ephraim of Syria,
and then they were constrained to call in Egypt as an ally.
Now I'm going to turn aside at this point and ask you if you remember,
because the two things are very closely interrelated,
and one of them will cast light upon the other,
and that is that in what we read about the last days,
the end of the age, in Daniel chapter 11,
we find at the end of the age that Israel would be attacked by the king of the north,
or Assyria, in its part Syria.
And the king of the north would sweep through them with a terrific invasion
right down to the south against Egypt.
Secondly, we learn that Judah, the Jews,
would be relying in that day upon a treaty with a foreign power to protect them.
And we also learn that although the mass of the people were committed to this alliance
and refused to trust themselves to the Lord,
there were a small number who had committed themselves to the Lord
and who were trusting in him.
And we shall find a great deal of light
both cast upon the rest of prophecy about the end of the age
and also upon the meaning of the book of Isaiah
by the very obvious connection between Israel, Judah,
attacked from the north by a terrific invasion
and concerned also with the south and Egypt
and whether they should rely upon another power, Egypt, to help them.
In the later part, in chapter 10, in fact, of Isaiah,
it says,
When the Lord hath performed his whole work upon Mount Zion,
I will punish the stout heart of the king of Assyria.
Has the Lord yet performed his whole work upon Mount Zion?
No, he hasn't.
Therefore, when the Lord hath performed his whole work upon Mount Zion,
when the whole story is told,
then the Lord will punish the stout heart of the king of Assyria.
That means that the king of Assyria is an important element
in the set up of the revolt against God of the last days.
And this is another reason why these matters are of such interest to us.
William Kelly has said that the Assyrian affects the same objects
and in the same places as the king of the north.
And he finds it always, therefore, perfectly acceptable
and helpful to identify the two together.
The Assyrian in the last days, who appears so plainly in this book,
is the same personage in the same lands as the king of the north
or the prophet Isaiah.
And they will all be dealt with by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ
when he comes again.
Now, I must pass over the earlier passages
about which I might have spoken a little
and come in this chapter 7 that we read
back just for a few minutes to it.
If we look down the verses, we find
that we have a reference to the fact that
for which I refer to 2 Kings chapter 16
that Israel and Syria were confederate against Judah.
Now, I want you to think of this passage
as we go down it under the first 17 verses
as it stands.
Without bringing in the light cast by the New Testament,
without bringing in the distant future at all,
but we'll see how it's an epic of faith
on the part of Isaiah against the most terrific odds
which in the end are completely vindicated
and they encourage us in the presence of whatever may be
the difficulties that come upon us
to put our trust in the Lord and his word
and in the meantime to possess our souls in peace and in patience.
We shall find that this is a lesson, a wonderful lesson
even if the other more important meanings
were not available to us.
There was this confederacy in the first verse
and someone told Ahaz, the house of David,
that they were actually coming.
It says, the heart of his people was moved
as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.
That's a very wonderful picture.
If you look down from a distant place upon a wood
you can see the wind sweeping over it
and every tree bows its head as the wind passes by.
The trees of the wood are moved by the wind.
So were the hearts of Ahaz and his people
with terror at the idea
that these kings were confederate against them.
Then the Lord, who has in the previous chapter
identified and cleansed and commissioned his servant
If you want to be the means of revival in the things of God
then it's Isaiah 6 you must take your beginning
to find yourself in the presence of the Lord
confessing your sin
and then being cleansed and commissioned by him
to be in the way that we can be his sent one
and then immediately the Lord has a work for Isaiah to do.
He says to Isaiah, go forth now to meet Ahaz.
Thou and Sha'ar Jashub thy son.
Now that name, the names of Isaiah's children
are very important as it tells us in Hebrews 2
quoting from these chapters.
It says, I and the children that God has given me.
Mershal al-Hashbaz in the next chapter
and Sha'ar Jashub are very important names.
And this one means a remnant shall return.
It's almost the root of all that we read in Holy Scripture
but the remnant of the Jews who shall return.
God sends him to meet Ahaz
at the conduit of the upper pool
in the highway of the fullest field.
This turns out to be exactly the same place
that Rapshaker came and took his stand in chapter 36.
Those who saw both events would certainly connect them together.
And Isaiah said to him, take care,
be careful, and be quiet.
For he said, their confederate against you
and their settlers go up against Judah.
But in verse 7 Isaiah continues,
thus saith the Lord God, it shall not stand,
neither shall it come to pass.
And looking perhaps at the incredulity
he sees in the face of Ahaz,
but if you don't believe, if you don't have faith,
then you shall not be established.
And so because of this reluctance of Ahaz
the Lord, presumably by Isaiah,
in verse 10 and 11 offers a sign.
Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God.
There was no limit in its height or its depth,
in heaven or on earth.
He could ask a sign of the Lord his God.
And Ahaz said, I will not ask,
neither will I tempt the Lord.
In other words, he will not commit himself
to faith in God.
And so Isaiah says, behold,
a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son
and shall call his name Immanuel.
And in verse 16, before the child
shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good,
the land that thou abhor'st shall be forsaken
of both her kings.
Now that before makes it absolutely inescapable
that there was to be a birth there and then,
which was to be the sign.
That child was to be the sign to Ahaz.
Before that child would know to refuse the evil
and choose the good,
then Syria and Ephraim
would be forsaken and abandoned.
But the very one upon whom you have trusted,
God will bring him against you.
But just as certain as in this passage taken alone,
the child and the son to be born
were a sign there at that moment,
by which they could be certain
that the Lord would deliver Judah and Jerusalem.
So we are assured in the 23rd verse of Matthew chapter 1,
so very well known to us,
that Joseph is informed
that the child promised to him
was promised in fulfillment
of these very words that we know so well,
a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son
and shall call his name Emmanuel.
Now, just in closing,
it's a very important thing
that at the very forefront of the whole New Testament story
and uniquely amongst Old Testament prophecies,
in the forefront so far as the prophet Isaiah is concerned,
we have this emphasis upon the promise
of the miraculous birth of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And I'm sure that many Christians at times
and young Christians very frequently
ask themselves why it is so important
that we should believe in the miraculous birth
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I've said already that what I've called
the twin pillars in the Temple of Revelation are here,
the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ
and his perfect manhood.
But what introduces them,
what brings them in,
what makes such a truth possible
is the miraculous birth of the Lord Jesus Christ,
a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son
and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel.
If we were to think
of other Old Testament prophecies,
then the coming savior
must be of the woman's seed,
Genesis chapter 3.
The seed of the woman
shall bruise the serpent's head
and it shall bruise his heel.
The seed of the woman must be
the coming deliverer or messiah.
The person born must be the son of God.
It must be an incarnation of the eternal God himself.
About this very event,
a contemporary prophet Micah says
about Bethlehem Ephrata,
out of thee shall he come forth unto me
whose goings forth are from everlasting.
He must be God.
He must be the son of God.
And also we understand
from the types of the Passover
and from the types of so many sacrifices
in the Old Testament story
that the savior must be without taint of sin.
There's only one way
in which requirements like these could be met.
It must be by that miraculous birth
of the Lord Jesus Christ
which permitted him to be the seed of the woman.
The virgin Mary was his mother.
But he must also be the son of God.
Even Mary couldn't understand this
but in the wonderful words of the angel to her,
the Holy Ghost, the power of the highest
shall overshadow thee.
Therefore that holy thing that shall be born of thee
shall be called the son of God.
God was the originator of that life
and only thus could the one
who was born and bore the name Jesus the savior
and Emmanuel God with us
only thus could he truly be the son of God.
And also
if he was to be a sinless savior
and yet a man in every real sense of the term
then this could only be brought about
by his miraculous birth of the virgin.
Well might we say
all the depths, using the words that the apostle Paul used
in another connection
but they're very fitting in this connection
all the depths of the riches
both of the wisdom and knowledge of God
how unsearchable is his wisdom
and his ways past finding out
to him glory and majesty
forever and ever.
Well for us the one who actually bore
the name of Jesus when he was here amongst men
his name is Emmanuel
and we
indeed pray that as we
reflect upon the wonder of his miraculous birth
which contained the bud
of all that afterwards should come
that he became in his life the son of God
and in his death a sinless sacrifice
all to be developed on these pages of Isaiah
then we desire as I've said already
we desire that at the word
coming to us from the page of holy scripture
about himself that our hearts should be
caused both now and afterwards to burn within us
and that that burning heart
may lead to the kind of action
which is glorifying to the name
of him who is called
Emmanuel, God with us. …
Transcrição automática:
…
Isaiah chapter 9, verse 1.
Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation,
when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,
and afterward did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea,
beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the Gentiles.
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.
They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy.
They joy before thee according to the joy in harvest,
and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.
For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder,
the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.
For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and the garments rolled in blood.
But this shall be with burning, and fuel of fire.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God,
the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.
Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom,
to order it, and to establish it with judgment,
and with justice from henceforth even forever.
The seal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
In my bookshelves at home there stands a small paperback,
which in looking for other books I often come across,
and take down, and dip into it, and it's always with profit.
It's an account of the life of John Wesley,
and I expect you know that amongst other places he came to,
was very frequently Newcastle, and very frequently Stockton.
When I think of my urbane and gentle-mannered friends in Newcastle upon Tyne,
I often smile when I think of his description.
He came and he says, I addressed a large crowd
of the rude, staring blasphemers of Newcastle.
And whether that takes the prize over the fact that when he came to Stockton once
he said, I addressed a rude and barbarous multitude on the north side of the town's house.
Well this book has, it's what really pleases me about it,
is its title, and its title page.
It's a picture of John Wesley on horseback,
very cleverly superimposed upon a map of the roads of Britain.
But the title is Knight, K-N-I-G-H-T, Knight of the Burning Heart.
And that word knight is intended to make one think of high endeavor.
When they made the knights in medieval times,
at a certain stage in the proceedings,
someone said to the knight in antique French,
Fais ce que doit, c'est demander au chevalier.
Do your duty, it is expected of a knight.
Now John Wesley's life was a life under God of high endeavor.
For many, many long years in proclaiming the word of God and the gospel.
And that title is intended to remind us,
and it does remind me every time I see it,
to ask the question, from whence came the energy
for such a life of high endeavor,
pursuing such an enterprise as the kingdom of God,
so selflessly as he did,
over his life of something like 88 years to the very end.
And the implication is there,
that he found the energy for such a life
in the service of the master in a burning heart.
Now when we began yesterday evening,
we tried to make it clear to each other,
that our aim, as we read this week in the prophet Isaiah,
our aim is to see ourselves in the position of those two disciples,
who with flagging feet dragged their way from Jerusalem
to Emmaus until the Lord Jesus came,
the heavenly stranger, and spoke to them.
And when afterwards in the house,
when he broke the bread and gave it to them,
and then on an instant they recognized him,
and in front of their eyes he vanished out of their sight.
They looked at each other and they said,
didn't you notice that while he talked with us,
our stony hearts began to go and our hearts burned within us,
as he spoke with us by the way.
And in the strength and energy of that burning heart,
not only did they flood the seven miles back to Jerusalem with a new spirit,
but they then came to meet with the brethren and the Lord.
And soon afterwards their feet were swift and beautiful upon the mountains
to bring the gospel of peace.
And we prayed, declaring our aim this evening,
that the Lord may speak to us and make our hearts burn within us,
as in the pages of the prophet Isaiah,
he speaks to us of all the things concerning himself,
that he may give us the burning heart.
And in the energy of that burning heart,
all the flagging footsteps due to disillusionment and other sorrows
may vanish away.
And by the energy and power of that burning heart,
we may not only know the Lord in the way,
all the disappointments of our daily lives,
and perhaps of our service too,
but we might know the Lord in the midst,
and we might follow out there upon the mountains with the gospel of peace.
The burning heart is what we're aiming for this week, and nothing less.
The burning heart, which is the response to the words of the Lord himself.
Now, our particular subject this evening is, as David reminded us,
is centered on the sixth verse of chapter nine.
There, undoubtedly, we have a most heart-moving presentation
of the Lord Jesus Christ.
His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor,
the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
Now, since the three later members of this series, these names,
are represented by pairs of words,
I would like to suggest to you that we take this evening
the first one also as a pair of words, meaning one title.
Wonderful Counselor is the first name by which he shall be called.
Wonderful Counselor.
Second, the mighty God.
Third, the everlasting Father.
And fourth, the Prince of Peace.
It's of great interest to you and me to know that this world
will enjoy a golden age under the reign of the Prince of Peace.
That peace will be founded upon what the world has never known before,
judgment and justice.
But we are still more interested in the fact
that the one who sits upon the throne in that day
is none other than our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
And it is in the representation of the character
which fits him for the throne,
for the diadems of character and worthiness that sit upon his head
that make him fit to rule over all things in heaven as well as in earth.
That we, the Christian heart, we find great interest
and food for our hearts and our spirits
in this picture of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When the government shall be upon his shoulder
and the increase of the increase of his government and peace,
there shall be no end.
When there shall be peace through judgment and justice
and at the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
Now, before we come to speak in detail of this
and other heartwarming themes that are presented to us here,
I want to return for a few moments to the theme
of the background in history, largely Bible history,
which is necessary to have in our minds
to understand this passage aright.
Because I would have failed in my purpose
if we went away from this series of meetings or this meeting
with still only a few texts out of the book of Isaiah
as our knowledge of that book.
It is our purpose, it is the purpose that we have before us,
first of all to open up the book itself
and secondly to seek to know more of Christ from its pages.
Now it's necessary for us to understand the background
and of course we have to remember always
that these disciples to whom the Lord Jesus Christ spoke
in all the scriptures of the things concerning himself,
when he came to Isaiah,
they didn't need to have the background explained to them.
They were absolutely soaked in the history of their people.
They knew it and it was all part of that instant understanding
of what he said to them,
that they could see this book in its setting
in the history of their people.
Now I'd like perhaps to make the matter a little simpler
as well as a little shorter than I tried to make it last night.
The world of Isaiah and his people,
Judah and Jerusalem,
in the seventh century before Christ,
or the eighth century before Christ,
was dominated by two superpowers,
Egypt in the south and Assyria in the north.
Since before very long we shall find
that this book is transporting us into the last days,
it's very interesting to us to find
that this is exactly the same picture
as presented by Daniel and his kings of the north and the south
attacking the Holy Land, Palestine.
In Daniel 9 we have a sweeping invasion from the north
and we shall see that in Isaiah
we have one of the most interesting and complete pictures
of that sweeping invasion from the north
and it's a very important part of Isaiah's story that it is so.
Now if we turn over, please,
to the second book of Kings, chapter 16,
then I shall be able, I hope,
to point out to you three critical points
in the relations between Assyria
and the little state of Judah
in which Isaiah was prophesying.
Because you only have to read
the first 39 chapters of Isaiah
to see that the Assyrian is a character
who appears so many times
that it's obviously quite impossible
to understand the book
unless we have some understanding
of what was the relations over this period,
what were the relations over this period
between the Assyrian power
and this little state of Judah
and its neighboring states of Ephraim and Syria.
First of all, then, in chapter 16,
verse 5,
we read of the first climax to these relations
and that is that Syria and Ephraim
made a confederacy against Judah.
Then Rezin, king of Syria,
and Pekah, son of Ramaliah, king of Israel,
came up to Jerusalem to war
and there besieged Ahaz,
but could not overcome him.
Verse 7,
So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pelaza,
king of Assyria,
saying, I am thy servant and thy son.
Come up and save me out of the hand
of the king of Syria
and out of the hand of the king of Israel,
which rise up against me.
And Ahaz took the silver and gold
that was found in the house of the Lord
and in the treasure of the king's house
and sent it for a present to the king of Assyria.
Could you imagine such a lamentable state of affairs
that the member, the king,
of the house of David
should so far forget himself
as to take alliance
and take up the idolatry, indeed,
of a heathen king
instead of trusting in the Lord.
Secondly,
the second great climax
came twelve years later
and we'll read about that
in the next chapter, 17, verse 6.
In the ninth year of Hosea,
the king of Assyria
took Samaria
and carried Israel away into Assyria
and placed them in Hala
and in Hebo
by the river of Gozan
in the cities of the Medes.
And then there's a long description of the fact
that this came about because they had forsaken
the Lord their God
and had worshipped idols.
So that the second great climax
in the story of the relations between these powers
was the deportation
of the total population
of the sister kingdom of Israel
twelve years
after this alliance between Syria and Ephraim.
And finally,
thirty-six years later,
we read,
I won't read it all because it's a very long story,
it occupies the 18th and 19th chapters of 2 Kings,
but it is told almost word for word
in chapters 36 and 37 of our prophet.
It's the story of how
Sennacherib,
the king of Assyria,
swept through the northern lands
and on into Judah
and came right up to the point
when all the cities of Judah were invested
and only Jerusalem was left alone
and besieged by that power.
The Lord granted a deliverance
but that's part of the story
that's to come.
Now,
when we were reading yesterday
chapter 7,
chapter 7 was centered
on the first of these events.
The confederacy against Ahaz
and it was in connection with that
that Isaiah
told Ahaz by special message from the Lord,
now be careful but be quiet
and trust yourself to the Lord.
And it was in connection with this
that he gave him a sign
that the virgin would conceive
and bear a son
and his name would be called Emmanuel.
Obviously, since it says before the child
should know to choose the good and the bad,
it was to be fulfilled there and then.
There was a sign there visible,
a child to be born
and its birth would mark a date
and from that time,
after a certain passage of time,
then her enemies would be destroyed.
But,
we have also
the clear and
ever-shining testimony
of Matthew 1, verse 23
that that was intended to be
and is indeed a prophecy
of the miraculous birth
of the Lord Jesus Christ
and his name is called Emmanuel.
This we meditated upon yesterday.
Now, the deportation,
the driving off into the darkness
of the distant lands
is really dealt with in chapter 8
that we are coming to this evening.
And finally,
the great sweeping
into Judah
by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib
and how God, in connection
with the words, the prophecy of Isaiah
to his people all the time,
delivered his people
and that's the story of the
36th and 37th chapters
and the other chapters lead up to it.
And, of course, the great thread
that connects them all together
is that when everyone else
was overcome with alarm
at these terrible threats,
Isaiah was quietly saying,
Trust in the Lord.
The Lord will deliver you.
The Lord is even willing
to give you signs that he will deliver you.
Trust in the Lord.
Trust in the Lord only.
Depend not upon the arm of flesh.
It will fail you.
That's a later part of the story.
Isaiah's faith was abundantly
vindicated.
Now then,
it will be necessary
for me to ask you to
gird up the loins of your minds again
and open your Bibles
and look at the passages and turn over
the pages because I'm going to
attempt to survey
chapters
8, 9, 10,
11, and 12
rapidly as possible
and briefly, but please
attempt to follow in your Bibles
looking at the verses and turning over
the pages because I have to rely
upon these few minutes
given to this purpose to give you
a view of the book in general
and not only the few verses
that you know so well.
We did this yesterday for chapters
1 to 7
and we're going to try to do this
today for chapters
8 to 12
just as briefly as we possibly can.
Now
chapter 8
to the
7th verse of chapter 9
where we
finished our reading today
it completes
a larger section
which includes the story
of Isaiah's
commissioning from the presence of the Lord
in chapter 6
and the story of Ahab's
confrontation
by Isaiah
in chapter 7
and we shall see afterwards
how very clearly
these passages
stand together.
Now most of our section this evening
concerns, although it's
addressed to Judah and Jerusalem, it concerns
the northern, the sister kingdom
also part of the people of God
of Israel or Ephraim
which constituted the ten
tribes. Now if we
look at the first four verses of chapter 8
we find that
Isaiah once again intervenes
remember this is probably sometime
subsequent to chapter 7
he intervenes in a very
striking way, he takes a huge
placard
writes upon it a name
and takes two important men for witnesses
and the name written upon it is
Mir Shalal Hashbaz
and when shortly afterwards his wife
gives birth to a son
that child is given the name Mir
Shalal Hashbaz and
the name and the child
are also a sign
to the people that they are going to be
the spoil and the prey
once again for the foreign invader.
Before the child
verse 4 shall acknowledge
to cry my father and my mother
you see how very much like that is
chapter 7, before the child shall know
how to distinguish the good and evil it said
there, that was the first child
Shaar Yashub
this second child with this strange
name, it says before he
shall acknowledge to cry my father and my
mother the riches of Damascus
and the spoil of Samaria shall
be taken away before the king of Assyria
and then
in verse 5
to 8 there is a section
to which I hope to come back because it does
contain a very lovely
passage with a very charming
message for us
it says for as much as this people refuses
the waters of Shiloah that go softly
and rejoice in Rezin
and Ramaliah's son
now therefore behold the Lord shall bring upon them
the waters of the river, the king of Assyria
because they
refused the message of
Isaiah, because they
refused to trust in the Lord
the Lord will bring judgment upon them
and that judgment will be in the form
of a terrible invasion flowing
over the invasion by
the king of Assyria
if we look at verse 9
we find that Isaiah
so to speak with the way the
prophets had is turning to
address distant nations and in the
middle of the verse far countries
and he's warning them
that no plots they make
no combinations of
powers, no confederacies
can possibly stand against the
counsel of the Lord
and it cannot come to pass
regarding Judah
why? because Immanuel
God is with us
and that
gives us another idea why
the word Immanuel was so
distinct a sign to them at that
particular time
and then
in verse 11
he
down to verse 15
he says that the Lord
has spoken to him particularly and
specially and
has instructed
him that
he should keep himself clear
from the currents of opinion
that are going about him
and he should sanctify the Lord of hosts
himself and let him
be his fear
because on the one hand
the Lord of hosts will be a sanctuary
and a protection for those who trust in him
but for those who refuse to trust in him
he will be a stumbling block
and a rock of offense
and then in verse 8-16
we find that Isaiah
so to speak has finished his open
testimony with these signs
confronting the people and his
retiring
retiring within his own circle
of his children and his disciples
he's band up the law on the
testimony and he's waiting upon the
Lord that had at his face on the house of
Jacob
and then we find in verse
19
that he's issuing
a warning against the people who
since they were afraid of the Caesarean
terror and it was a terror
they were going in for
spiritism and occult practices
and it is a people should
seek the Lord and not seek to know
the dead for the living
a people should seek the Lord
and then at the last verse is the description
of what will happen to these people
they shall pass through it, that's the land
hardly be stead and hungry
and it shall come to pass that when they
shall be hungry they shall fret themselves
and curse their king and their God and look upward
and the last words they shall be
driven off into darkness
now that is their fulfillment
that is the description beforehand
of the way the Assyrians
deported Sargon
king of Assyria deported the whole
population of Israel and took
them away and this should have been a warning
to his people
now in chapter 9
we obviously take several enormous
leaps forward
those of us who are accustomed
to reading Bible prophecy will be well
aware by this time that we must be ready
for these enormous leaps forward
he said these people
in Zabulon and Naphtali
the land of Israel they were driven off into
darkness
but it won't always be
darkness for the people
in Galilee of the Gentiles
by the way of the sea
they that sit in darkness shall see
a great light and we know
from Matthew chapter 4
that this is directly a prophecy
of the fact it is amongst these people
that the Lord Jesus Christ
a great light should appear
and then another tremendous leap forward
and we find that
that child born
and that son given will be the
universal king in the verses we
read and to us a child is
born a son is given
and the government shall be upon his
shoulder now once again
we come back to read
a little more about that later
now
from the
8th
verse of chapter
9
down to the 4th verse of chapter
10 we have
a very striking series of
brief striking paragraphs
each one of them
ending with the refrain
the anger of the Lord is kindled against
his people and his hand
is stretched out against them still
in other words in spite of all these
afflictions that have fallen upon
his people
that were going to fall
upon his people
the Lord was still
with them
now in order to connect with the part
we spoke of last night
and in order to
represent to those who weren't here
last night what this means
after
Isaiah in chapter 5
has explained to the people that the Lord
was looking for fruit the heart of the Lord
looking for fruit as it is looking for fruit
today the heart of God
is still looking for fruit from his people
because they brought forth wild
fruit because they didn't
cleave to him and because they
displeased him in their hearts
verse 25 of chapter 5
therefore is the anger
of the Lord kindled against his people
and he has stretched forth
his hand against them and has smitten them
and at the end of the verse for all
this his anger is not
turned away but his hand is stretched out
still now we have this
long parenthesis
leading up to
the 7th verse of chapter 9
and then from the 8th verse of chapter
9 we go on
look at verse 12
although they had the Syrians before and the
Philistines behind all kind
of inflictions from the Lord for
all this his anger is not turned away
but his hand is stretched out still
we come to
verse 17
although other kinds of
troubles ancient and honorable
and the prophet they taught
lies yet it says in verse
17 the end for all this
his anger is not turned away but his hand
is stretched out still
verses 18 to
21 it says
there is enmity between Manasseh and
Ephraim and at the end of verse 21
for all this his anger is not turned away
but his hand is stretched out still
and so the last of these paragraphs
ends in verse 4 of chapter 10
for all this his anger is not turned
away but his hand is stretched out
still do please keep this
refrain in mind because the
end of our section this evening
is very lovely indeed
about this again and again
and again this reiterated
statement coming from
the heart of the Lord so deeply
grieved by his people his hand
is stretched out against them still
the anger of the Lord is kindled against his people
and that's the cause of all
these afflictions
because they have grieved him
by forsaking him
now in the
fifth verse of chapter 10
we have an entirely new
oracle or prophecy
and that is that the prophet turns aside
to tell them
all about the Assyrian
we might say
well how is it
that the Lord could use such a power
as this how is it
that such cruelty such
ferocious cruelty
as they showed towards the people they
conquered could be under God
well it's all explained
when in verse 5
the prophet says
O Assyrian
the rod of mine anger and the staff
of mine indignation
now the Lord
says about him
presumably by Isaiah
I sent
him to chastise them
I sent him
I gave him a charge the middle of verse 6
to take the spoil and take the prey
in verse 7 how be it he meaneth
not so neither doth
his heart think so but it is
in his heart to destroy
and cut off nations not a few
in other words whereas the Lord
intended him to chastise his people
it was in his heart to destroy
and therefore
the Lord takes up the fact that he had also
done despite to the God
of Israel by assuming that he was the same
of the gods and the idols of the
other kingdoms whom he had destroyed
and then in verse 12
the most important verse
wherefore it shall come to pass that when the Lord
hath performed his whole work upon
Mount Zion and on Jerusalem
now did that
take place in the time of Isaiah
indeed it didn't
did it take place in the time
of the gospel story indeed it
didn't it hasn't taken place yet
the Lord has not yet performed
his whole work upon Mount Zion
but when he has performed his
whole work upon Mount Zion he says
I will punish
the stout heart of the
king of Assyria and the glory
of his high lukes
so that we are told
that the very important way
in which the Assyrian
is yet to come
under the hand of God
in punishment
for his cruelty
and ferocity and his
blasphemous impiety
in what he said about
the Lord
and so the king of the north
or Assyria
they are amongst those who in the
last days are going to
have to come under the hand
of the judgment of God
and the rest is largely
concerned with the kind
of boast that the king of Assyria
made a very striking one in verse
14 it says
he went and gathered eggs
like a schoolboy truant
I went and gathered eggs and not
a bird dead chirp
when I put my hand there he said
not a bird dead open its mouth or peeped
and so
this is a
is a statement that this is going to come to pass
in verse 20
then the prophet once again
speaks about his earthly people
it shall come to pass in that day
when the Lord takes up his
controversy with the
king of the north and there shall be a
remnant such as escaped from
the house of Jacob and there shall
no more again stay themselves
upon him that smote them
because they did rely in the first place upon
the Assyrian but they shall stay upon
the Lord the Holy One of Israel
and that remnant
is the remnant referred to in the
name of Isaiah's first child
Shaar Shashu
it will be a remnant of those who listen
to Isaiah
it will be a remnant in the days of Hezekiah
when Hezekiah himself was one
in spite of all the evil around
him feared the Lord but above
all as we know well from
other passages in the
crises of the future there
will be a people, a Jewish people
small in number yet their
hearts are given to our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ and
they will be the remnant of the future
and the means of salvation to
others
therefore
they are warned those who
will be the remnant and listen to his voice
not to be afraid of the Assyrian
now
if we turn over
to verse 28 you have something very
striking they can no doubt at all
that our mind
first of all runs to the
invasion we read of in chapter 36
in the time of Hezekiah
it is a series of newspaper
headlines
or else
a broadcast summary
moment by moment a running
comment upon this terrific
invasion flowing
down from the north upon Jerusalem
you see how it reads
exactly like the
punctuations of
newspaper headlines he has come to
Ayas, he has passed to
Migron, he has laid up his
carriages, they have gone over
the passage, they have taken up
their lodging at Geba and so
on right down
verse 32 as yet shall he remain
at Nob that day
he shall shake his hand against the
mount of the daughter of Zion
the hill of Jerusalem
behold the Lord
of hosts shall lop the bow with terror
and at the moment when he shakes his
hand against Jerusalem
then the stroke of the Lord
will fall upon him not the hand of man
and he shall be destroyed
now since you go on
immediately to the messianic
kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ
in chapter 11 it's quite
plain that this staccato
rapid comment
upon the progress of that invasion
rarely refers to the Assyrian
invasion or the invasion
by the king of the north in the last
days and so we come
in chapter 11
to the fact that
a rod out of the stem of Jesse
and a branch out of his roots
shall reign
you couldn't really
have a more direct reference
to the miraculous virgin birth
of the Lord Jesus Christ
you see, the life that he lived
it stemmed back further
than the throne of David
it stemmed back further than that
it was a stem right out of the roots of
God's promise and
upon him the spirit of the Lord
would rest and he would
judge the world in righteousness
and then
we are told as the second part
of that account of the kingdom
from verse 10
that the Lord
all his people
this is to me one of the mysteries of prophecy
but it's very plain here
it isn't only
the Jews, it isn't only Judah
and the remnant, but it's all
the house of Israel will be gathered together
and we are told that they will
no longer be at enmity
with each other. The envy, verse 13
the envy also of Ephraim
shall depart and the adversaries
of Judah shall be cut off
Ephraim shall not envy Judah
and Judah shall not vex Ephraim
therefore in that time of the future
kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ
then the ten tribes
as well as the Jews will be restored
to rejoice under the reign
of the Prince of Peace
now the last chapter that we are considering
is chapter 12
now
you'll forgive me for having stressed
so many times, the anger
of the Lord is kindled against his people
and his hand is stretched out still
because of their awful iniquity
in forsaking him
and in going in for idolatry
and refusing the pleadings
of his prophets to rely upon him
for their salvation
well, when that kingdom comes
it will all be past
and in the beginning of chapter 12
we have the song of salvation
thou wast angry with me
thine anger
is turned away
and thou comfortest me
this is a song of salvation
for the redeemed
of the Lord
back in his land
under his king
but it's a song of salvation for all those
whose trust is in God
through the Lord Jesus Christ
we can say
God was wroth with us
but his anger is turned away
and he comforts us
and we can say I will trust
and not be afraid
for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song
and he also has become my salvation
therefore with joy
shall ye draw water
out of the wells of salvation
I've seen
most of you at any rate
striving very hard to follow
that analysis
and if you have done so
I'm sure you'll take away an impression
of something that lies behind
the odd verses
that we've known up to now
and there lies behind it
brooding over it all
the great desire of God
in all ages
the desire of God that cannot
and will not be turned aside to have fruit
for his own heart
from his people
fruit really, fruit of character
if we were to take
the one thing that's
referred to again and again
in the social life
of his earthly people
they did not judge
they did not give their rights
and their true compassion
to the fatherless and the widow
and we are brought right back to that in the New Testament
it is this compassion
of the heart of God
that we should show to each other
as brethren
and in the like sense the children of God
we should show this same
compassion that God has ever
required to see in his people
this is true religion and defiled
to visit the fatherless
and the widows in their affliction
and to keep oneself unspotted from the world
I know the fruit of the spirit
in the New Testament to which we ought
to come if we wanted to go into the matter
for it is very much wider than this
but oh how much we do despite
to the compassionate heart
of our father if we forget
that amongst the saints
there should be seen
this mutual care, the one for the other
the heart of God
in all testament days
longed for it
and he has now said
he has taken the kingdom away
from them and given that
kingdom into a nation bringing forth
the fruits thereof it is because
God has started anew
but this time put his very spirit
within us so that walking
in that spirit we may bring forth the fruits
of the spirit and so God
can have ascending
to his heart the fragrance of
Christ produced
in the character of Christ seen in his
people the fruit that he desired
now let us
go back
I'm assuming that I'm
permitted to close the meeting about
quarter to nine
I want to go back to
speak more particularly about one or two
highlights
and first
we have this passage
in chapter 8 verse 5
the Lord
spake also unto me again
saying for as much as this people
refuses the waters of Shiloh
but go softly
now notice in this passage
a very distinct mark of the prophet
the use he makes
in his poetry
of the various images of
running water
this is one of the
things that makes
the reading rather strange to us
because it's poetry
and that means there's a kind of
magic in the words
themselves there's a kind of
loveliness and beauty that the spirit
of God has put into the words themselves
and in Isaiah's
poetry
he makes a great deal of use
of the various aspects
of running water first of all
there's the waters of Shiloh
that flow
softly
the very wonderful
representation
of the gentleness
of the grace and kindness of God
pleading with those who've turned away
from him and forsaken with him
it's the waters of Shiloh
now in the direct meaning
of this passage
this is quite plainly Isaiah
Shiloh means sent
and Isaiah in chapter 6
has said in answer to the Lord
whom shall I send
the Lord will go for us
Isaiah has said here am I send me
and when God wants to put things right
and put a new life
into his people
he wants to begin with an individual
it might be you it might be me
God can deal with all of us
but God deals with individuals
and like Isaiah
there must be
conviction and confession
and cleansing and then
there can be the commission
and he had sent Isaiah
the first meaning of this
that they refused the waters of Shiloh
that flow softly
it was Isaiah
the storm might be roaring all around
and there might be panic stations everywhere
and everybody charging about
and getting excited but Isaiah
of whom you can say
that in quietness and confidence
the Lord will be his strength
was quietly saying to them trust in the Lord
be quiet don't be
afraid of these smoking firebrands
these tales of a worn out
stick burning
don't be afraid of them be quiet and trust in the
Lord but they refused
and because they refused
the waters of Shiloh
flowing softly
then the terrible waters of judgment
like a tremendous
overflowing river charging down
upon them would come
because
this people refuses the
waters of Shiloh that go softly
and rejoice in Rezin and Ramaliah's song
now therefore behold the Lord
bringeth upon them the waters of the river
strong and mighty
even the king of Assyria
isn't that
you know
taken in its general principle
isn't that a lovely picture
of the grace of God
in long suffering mercy
holding out his hand
when you preach the gospel
when you accepted the gospel what was it
but it was the waters of Shiloh
the gently flowing stream
and the words and the persuasion
of the lovely grace of God
in the Lord Jesus Christ
it was the waters of Shiloh that flowed gently
when we see the love
of the compassion of God in the Lord Jesus Christ
when we know it still
because Jesus is
seeking the wonder as yet
it's the softly flowing grace of God
in the waters of Shiloh
but if the waters of Shiloh
are effused
than the terrible
overflowing stream
destroying all of the wrath
of God must be
looked forward to by those who refuse
the waters of Shiloh that flow gently
oh how this might
animate our
tone and our
attitude in the presentation of the gospel
that what God is doing now
is a facet of this
that the waters
of the sent one
are flowing softly and gently
with accents of love and grace
seeking to rescue men and women
from the wrath to come
and bring them to himself
in chapter 9
I won't say any more about
the
the people in darkness saw a great light
because I want to concentrate just for a few minutes
upon this verse
chapter 6
where we read
these names
of the prince, perhaps we might call him
the prince of four names
wonderful counselor
the mighty God
the everlasting father, the prince of peace
and I'm sure what interests you
and me in this
is that these names
portray a character
these names portray
the fitness
of our beloved saviour
to have the government
upon his shoulder
he is our lord
and they portray
his wonderful fitness
that our lives should be committed to him
he's worthy to rule them
he's worthy of every diadem
that sits upon his brow
wonderful counselor
now perhaps
the most striking indication of what the word
wonderful means in this connection
we bandy it about
and I'm as bad as anybody else
just as though we didn't know any other word than wonderful
but it has a very
special definite meaning
especially in the Old Testament language
and there isn't a place which more decidedly
shows what that meaning is
than the story in Judges chapter 13
of the parents
of Samson
Manoah and his wife
his wife
received a visitation
from an angel
and we read in the 13th chapter
of Judges how that particular
episode ended
when Manoah himself
was
brought to meet
this representation
of the lord
verse 9 of Judges chapter 13
God hearkened
to the voice of Manoah
and the angel of the lord came again
unto the woman as she sat in the field
but Manoah her husband
was not with her
so she went to call him
verse 11 Manoah arose
and said unto the man
Art thou the man that spakest unto the woman
and he said I am
and then they asked about
ordering the child
and how his
he should be brought up
and
in the end
Manoah
wanting to be
recognizant of
the blessing that had come to them
Manoah verse 17
said unto the angel what is thy name
that when thy
sayings come to pass we may do thee honour
and the angel of the lord
said unto him why askest thou
thus after my name
seeing it is wonderful
so Manoah took a kid with a meat
offering and offered it upon a rock
unto the lord
and the angel did wondrously
that's the same word secret
wonderful the angel
did wondrously
for it came to pass when the flame went up
towards heaven from off the altar
the angel of the lord ascended
in the flame of the altar
and Manoah and his wife looked on
and fell on their faces to the ground
in other words
the word wonderful
and this can be supported in the widest sense
by studying other uses in the old testament
it means something
so remarkable as to be
outside the possibility
of man to do it at all
it's wonderful
in the sense that and marvelous
in the sense that it's something
beyond the scope of man
it's something that can
only be done by
God
and the first name
of our savior as the king
is that he is wonderful
counselor
now I love to compare all these
wonderful statements
I love to compare them with the gospel
of Matthew which as we know is the gospel
of the king and I suggest to you
that we have wonderful counselor
in the so called sermon on the mount
here is
counsel
applied to human life
and for the formation of a human society
such as
if it existed everyone
would want to live in such a society
it's totally different
from the society we know
it has been
said that a society
is
revealed in its true qualities
by its heroes
what will future
ages say of a society
like ours which
worships the idols of entertainment
and sport in the manner that it does
it shows what kind of society
it is that it heaps upon them
all its honors
we don't covet these honors but it reveals
the society now the lord Jesus
Christ says blessed are the poor
these are the really happy men
the poor in spirit the mourners
those that hunger and thirst after
righteousness these are the ones
who are the happy characters
why because they will be
fulfilled by the lord
and they will have their reward
in that kingdom and so without going
into detail we know that the wonderful
counsel of the lord
Jesus Christ applying to rule
and that applies to rule over us
as well as what will be manifested
in the world to come for he is our
lord and it manifests himself
as the wonderful counselor
there are many rights
that men have to rule
there is the right of birth
there is the right of
conquest there is the right
of wisdom the right
men even approximately the right men
don't always get their rights
but these rights exist in theory
and every right
to rule sits upon the
lord Jesus Christ every
diadem of royal splendor
rightly sits upon him
and him alone he is
wonderful counselor
now the next pair
which make up the name is
the mighty god
now I tried to dwell a little yesterday upon
the way the deity
the perfect
splendid pure deity
that rests upon
that is the lord
Jesus Christ he possesses it
it shines out absolutely clearly
in these pages of Isaiah
Emmanuel means god
with us in that child
born of the virgin
it says here that he is the mighty god
it means the god of
mighty acts
and many of you have heard
the fact that I have been meditating
a great deal lately upon
the later chapters in Matthew
especially chapters 8 and 9
the real
falls of mankind
that either very little or no
progress is made in bringing them under
subjection like disease
and natural
disasters like tidal waves
and terrific storms at sea
these
appalling scourges of mankind
under the part of
which mankind can never be really happy
they were instantly at the
mastery of Jesus there was no
long period of trial
in disease of ours he was concerned
there was no trial and error
and going up the wrong road and then
finding the new disease
root stock and branch instantly
yielded to him and
was he not the mighty god
was he not the god of
mighty deeds for the deliverance
of those who came into contact with him
yes
if mighty acts
are necessary as well
as wonderful counsel
then that crown also sits upon
the brow of our lord
Jesus Christ he is
the mighty god
and even if
for his good purposes
spring his love of discipline
he does not at this moment display
these mighty acts
upon his people
here in the world yet
the power is with him
and in his good time it will be
manifested not only
upon earth here but in the saints
transformed into his likeness and taken
to glory but he is
the mighty god
and absolutely uniquely
among all the kings
who have ever been known the
diadem of mighty acts fit
for the ruler sit upon
our lord Jesus Christ
then it says
the everlasting father
now
what do you think about this
it seems to me it is
quite hopeless to
bring confusion into the trinity
by making this a statement
that the king is god the father
it seems to me
I'm humbly suggesting to you
that it will be
hopelessly confusing
to try to make this
although the translators
have put and the printers have put
a capital F here
it would be quite wrong
because it would bring
confusion into the doctrine of the
trinity if we made this into
a statement that the one who occupies
the throne is god the
father I suggest
that we have to take it in
the
in the context
and in the context you see
a king doesn't only want to have
wisdom and counsel
a king doesn't only want
to have the mighty arm that can
set his people free but a king
needs to have a father's compassion
and in
superlative
and inexhaustible
because it's everlasting
in superlative and inexhaustible degree
our saviour has a
father's compassion
for those who are under his hand
and I suggest to you that if we
look again through the gospel of Matthew
we'll find four or five
times again he had compassion
he had compassion
upon the suffering
he had compassion upon the
multitude and when in chapter
18 he talks about the
debtor who was forgiven
and the other debtor refused to forgive
he said you ought to have had
compassion
and it reminds us that we ought to show
to each other the compassion
that god has shown
to us in forgiving us
our sins and setting
us free the lord Jesus
Christ showed this
compassion for all those
who were in need of any kind
and this also this great
great quality of kingship
that is so seldom seen in the real
men of action
that quality sits in superlative and
inexhaustible degree upon the
lord Jesus Christ he is
the everlasting father
and he's the prince of peace
well now
peace is a tremendous
theme in Isaiah
and it's a very wonderful thing
to me to realize that god
in all ages
in the past and in the future
god in all ages
want to give his people peace
and I hope we shall have opportunity of
saying a lot more about
this peace that is so
often found in the pages of Isaiah
but I just want to close
with chapter 12 the song
of salvation
and I want you to look at
verse 2
you'll think of the world
shattering events
that tore apart these little kingdoms
that were the people of god
was there not cause for them to be afraid
when we think
of the world shattering events
that roar around us today
when we think of how many
of our brothers and sisters
are in trouble
and distress and pain and sorrow
when we think
of the afflictions of life
that may lie ahead
for us if the lord tarry
is there not room
for fear
to creep in as a dominant
crippling sensation
in the heart of every believer
there is indeed
the person who says I'm not afraid
is a person whose eyes are fast shut
on life inside
and around but these
people when all the story
is told in this song of salvation
they'll say I
will trust
and not be afraid
you can say that
you can put your head upon that pillow
tonight and no one
who isn't in the hand of the saviour
will ever be able to say it
but we can say it may the lord
by his spirit teach us in real
truth to be able to say
regarding the pathway
of life be it short or long
that stretches before us
I will trust and not
be afraid
you …
Transcrição automática:
…
We'll read to begin a few verses in the 28th chapter, Isaiah chapter 28.
Verse 2, Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which, as a tempest of hail, and
a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth
with the hand.
And then, verse 14, Wherefore, hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this
people which is in Jerusalem, because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death,
and with hell are we at agreement.
When the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us, for we have made
lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.
Therefore thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation, a stone, a
tritestone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation, he that believeth shall not make
haste.
Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet, and the hail
shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place, and
your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand,
when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.
Now just let us sing a short hymn, number 368, There is no other name than thine, Jehovah
Jesus, name divine, on which to rest for sins forgiven, for peace with God, for hope of heaven.
There is no other name than thine, Jehovah Jesus, name divine, on which to rest for sins
forgiven, for peace with God, for hope of heaven.
Name above every name, thy praise shall fill your courts through endless days.
Jehovah Jesus, name divine, from all salvation above, mine.
A very famous preacher, not very long ago, overheard a conversation between some people
leaving the meeting, and as the story retelled by him, a conversation between two broad Yorkshiremen,
and one of them was overheard to say, it's no good trying to follow this chap, I give
up, it's no good trying to follow any more, and the next evening the preacher confessed
that he had heard this conversation, and he said, I've got a piece of advice for my Yorkshire
friend, it's this, don't give up love. I have heard myself, one or two especially younger
people address to me the information that, well we haven't been able to follow it all,
and I have heard of some also younger people who have said, it's a bit too deep for me.
Now I would like to say how our hearts are rejoiced to see younger people here with us
seeking to share the things of God, and I would like to encourage you in good Yorkshire,
don't give up love, however you feel about it. It is of course an open secret that I
don't understand it all, lots of things are hidden from me, but one very important
lesson that the Lord I think has taught me, and that is, that I try never to let what
I don't know spoil what I do know. And I think that's a very important lesson to learn,
I'd like to pass it on to you. You can seize by the Spirit of God some things that are said,
and some things I think it will almost always be true, throughout your life some of the things
will pass you by. But I remember my father used to use a parable of this kind of thing,
and he used to say, if you see a good meal on the table, and there's one dish you haven't seen
before and it looks a bit doubtful, you surely wouldn't be foolish enough to let that one dish
spoil your enjoyment of all the others, simply because you didn't understand that one. And so
we need to thank God when we can pick up here a little, and there a little. And of course it's
of this very chapter that this expression comes. It doesn't come with a very attractive sound in
this chapter. Nevertheless I think what does come out is, whether it's for good or for ill,
this is the way of human learning. You have it in verse 10 of our chapter 28. Precept must be
upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a
little. And in verse 13, But the word of the Lord was unto them, Precept upon precept,
precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little. And if
at the end of any session that you spend over the word of God in general or listening to the
ministry of the word of God, it's always worth at the end trying to seize in your mind, more
definitely trying to seize the things that the Lord has taught you, the positive things. It
might be only here a little and there a little, but these littles, as life goes on, will make
much. And this is the way that you will, like all the rest of us, learn. And we got to remember
that just as we have been, all of us, seeking to pray this week for the experience of the burning
heart that came to those disciples to whom the Lord spoke on the resurrection day on the way to
Emmaus, it was in that very connection that in the latter part of the chapter it says,
Then opened he their understanding that they might understand the scriptures. And so,
being satisfied with the Lord giving us here a little and there a little, let us always join
in praying that the Lord will open the eyes of our understanding, himself by his spirit,
that we may understand the scriptures. Now, the section of chapters that we are
particularly concerned with this evening is chapters 28 to 37. But the central thought,
the central point, which has given us our title for this evening and to which I hope to return
again, is this familiar verse, which is verse 16 of our chapter. Therefore, thus saith the Lord
God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation, a stone, a trident stone, a precious cornerstone,
a sure foundation, he that believeth shall not make haste. Most of us know that this verse is,
although there are many references to a foundation, and still more references to the Lord
Jesus Christ as the stone, this exact verse is twice quoted, and in particular it is quoted in
the second chapter of 1 Peter, in a passage which I hope is well known to us. But I just read what
it says. We are spoken of as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word. It goes on,
If so be that ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious, to whom coming as unto a living stone,
disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God and precious, ye also as living stones are built up
a spiritual house and holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus
Christ. Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Zion a chief
cornerstone, elect, precious, and he that believeth in him shall not be confounded.
Unto you therefore which believe he is precious. And so we learn that every one of us who has
tasted that the Lord is gracious and has come to him, in doing so we have come to a foundation
upon which God is erecting a house devoted to his worship. And whatever the verse may have
meant in its original setting, this is the way that it's used for our good, for our blessing,
by the Apostle Peter. And it goes on to point out that in one verse in Isaiah,
particularly this one, it says that he is a precious stone. In another place it says he is
a stone of stumbling. And the Apostle says now, to whom therefore is this preciousness?
And for whom is he a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense? And it goes on to say,
to you therefore that believe is the preciousness. Now that's a wonderful
statement of Holy Scripture. To you and to me here this evening who believe,
to us and for us is the preciousness. Let us pray that when we come back to this verse,
as we find it in Isaiah chapter 28, that the Lord will grant that there may come into each
one of our souls some fresh sense of the wonderful preciousness of this stone laid in Zion,
the Lord Jesus Christ. Now I have just a little more to say about the background
with this evening's section. We shall leave altogether the King of Assyria. We hear no
more about him. But it's more than ever essential if we are to understand the oracles that form
this section of the book. It's more than ever necessary that we shall understand what the
background is. We have seen how there is a tiny cluster of states, notably Judah and the other
ten tribes here called Ephraim and also Syria, but there are several other tiny states forming
this cluster of tiny states on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. But their world
is dominated by two superpowers to the south, Egypt, and away to the east and the north,
the tremendous, ferocious, cruel, conquering power of Assyria.
I pointed out, reminded you yesterday, and I'll remind you for the last time now, that the three
points of climax are what is called the Syro-Ephraimitic War, which we hear in chapter 7,
when Ahaz, the King of Judah, was so alarmed as to call in the King of Assyria and refuse the
Lord's sign, and therefore Isaiah had to inform him that the Lord would bring the waters of the
river strong and mighty, the King of Assyria. In chapter 8 we read, regarding Ephraim, that
because they refused the waters of Shiloh that flowed softly and rejoiced in Rezin and Remeliah's
son, therefore God would bring upon them this terrific scourge. And then we took note of the
fact, and take note of the fact again tonight, that even when we come to the section we read
tonight, the depopulation of Ephraim by the Assyrians was evidently still future. But 36 years
after that depopulation, then another Assyrian king, Sennacherib, came with a furious onslaught
against all the walled cities of Judah, and only Jerusalem was left. But in the end,
in accordance with the word of Isaiah, he was turned back and there was a great deliverance.
Now the interesting thing is this, for our purposes this evening, that in the intervening
period between the earlier pair of events, the war with Syria and Ephraim, and the depopulation
of Samaria and Ephraim, there was an absolute welter of parties forming to try to find some
means of protection for Judah against the now certain invasion by the Assyrians. And the
dominant party was all set to bring in the other great power, Egypt, for help. Instead
of doing what Isaiah had said from the beginning, and that is going on in quietness and confidence
in the Lord and realizing this would be their strength and their protection, it appears that
they actually did make a treaty with Egypt for their protection against the Assyrians.
Now I must do what I can again this evening to go through these chapters, asking you to
gird up your minds and to look at the verses and the chapters and turn over the pages,
because there's no other way of our getting an overall impression of the contents of this book
than this way. Now there of course is quite a big gap in chapters between chapter 12,
The Song of Salvation, which we had last evening, and chapter 28, where we've begun this evening.
Now at various periods in the intervening years, because in chapter 28 we must be somewhere close
to the Assyrian invasion, the great fulfillment, the great climax, the great vindication of Jehovah
and his prophet Isaiah. Over those years, Isaiah was from time to time issuing, proclaiming by some
means or other, perhaps by word of mouth but more probably by the written word published abroad,
he was giving various oracles on the other smaller nations mostly surrounding, and they are on
Babylon, on the Philistines, on Moab, on Syria, on Egypt, on Edom, on Arabia, and Tyre. I'm afraid we
shall have to pass these by altogether, practically altogether. Chapter 18 is of particular interest,
and it's just possible that we may have time sooner or later to come back to it, but for the
time being we'll pass these chapters by altogether and come immediately to chapter 28. Now 28 is the
first of what are conveniently called the section of five woes. This is chapter 28 to chapter 35.
It's conveniently called the section of the five woes, but at the end of it, as usual, there is a
celebration of the kingdom of Christ. Now the first woe, beginning in chapter 28, woe to the crown of
pride, the drunkards of Ephraim. Although this particular oracle was almost certainly delivered
in Jerusalem, yet it is an oracle against Ephraim, and it says in verse 2, the Lord has a mighty and
strong one, as a tempest of hail and destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing and
casting down, and the leaders of Ephraim will be overcome by it. Now it's quite easy to see that
this is almost the last reiteration of the warning given in chapter 8, which we read last night,
where the Lord says by Isaiah,
Now therefore behold, the Lord bringeth upon them, that is, this people who have refused the waters
of Shiloh, the Lord bringeth upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of
Assyria, and all his glory. He shall come up over all his channels and pass through into Judah. So
we've come, after all these years, come much nearer, and it turns out very close now indeed to the
fulfillment of these prophecies, when this terrible storm of hail and destroying flood would
come upon the people of Israel. But we read in verse 7, that the leaders of Judah are also implicated
in this matter, and in particular when Isaiah comes to speak to them, he says to them in verse 14,
Wherefore hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people which is Jerusalem,
because ye have said, we have made a treaty with death. Now all the context indicates what this
really means is that they had signed a treaty with Egypt for mutual protection. Egypt was out looking
for allies against this murderous power to the northeast, and even the smaller states that would
be buffers in between were worth having. And the prophet says to the elders, the leaders of Judah,
that they had said to him, we have made a treaty or a covenant with death, and with hell we are at
agreement. They had made a treaty with Egypt. When the overflowing scourge, there it is again,
shall pass through it shall not come unto us, for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood
have we hid ourselves. But the Lord had a message in view of this particular form of judgment,
that is an overflowing scourge, a terrible flood of waters. The Lord had a refuge. Behold I lay
in Zion for a foundation, a stone, a trite stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation, he that
believeth shall not make haste. When a flood comes upon a city, then there is tremendous scurrying
about in haste to find a place of safety. But those whose heart was already set in faith upon the Lord's
salvation would not make haste in that day, because they would be saved. He that believeth in him
shall not make haste, because he shall be saved. But the overflowing scourge should pass through,
and would make absolute nonsense of their covenant with Egypt. It would all be nothing. And yet this
overflowing scourge is said by the Lord to be judgment. But it's a lovely phrase in verse 21
to say that he is doing his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his act, his strange act.
Such judgments, though there be upon the unbelieving and ungodly, there are no happiness,
no pleasure to the heart of God who loves mercy and lovingkindness, and therefore he calls judgment
his strange work, his strange act. The second woe is in verse 29, in chapter 29. And this time,
of course, it is a woe against Jerusalem. It's called Ariel, or the Lion of God,
but it evidently indicates Jerusalem, because it goes on to say the city where David dwelt.
But we read in the first few verses that it will be visited by thunders from the Lord, and would be
brought very low, because of the enemies surrounding it. But in verses 7 and 8, we find that all the
nations, because the Assyrian hordes were composed of many nations confederate with Assyria, all the
nations who fight against Ariel should be brought to nothing. Just as though, verse 8, a hungry man
dreamed, he thinks he eats, and behold he awaketh and his soul is empty. In other words, those enemies
of the Lord would simply vanish overnight. But there is a reproof for those who are spiritually
asleep. And in particular, we have to note verse 13, for as much as this people draw near me with
their mouth, with their lips to honor me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear
toward me is taught by the precept of men. How often, by the way, this kind of, um, this sorrow of the Lord
over his people literally applies to us. How often we find ourselves in the situation when we draw
near to God with our lips and our hearts are far from him. How near home this comes to us. How, uh,
in themselves alike the people of God have been, in spite of his grace, in all ages. And we always
have to be on the watch that we are not amongst the people who draw near to him with our lips,
but in our hearts we are far from him. In any case, in the end, these enemies of the Lord
would come to naught. Now, the next woe is in chapter 30, and this time it is absolutely plainly, um,
about going to Egypt to make a treaty. In verse 2, after saying woe to the rebellious children
that take counsel but not of me, it says, woe to them that are walking at this moment,
woe to them that are at this moment walking to go down to Egypt, and have not asked in my mouth
to strengthen themselves. They are going to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh
and trust in the shadow of Egypt.
We are, they are warned that this confidence of theirs would let them down.
Verse 13, this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall
whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant. But it's very remarkable that although
this has actually taken place, yet in verse 18 the Lord still desires to act in grace
toward them, and says, therefore will the Lord wait that he may be gracious unto you,
and therefore will he be exalted that he may have mercy upon you,
for the Lord is a God of judgment, blessed are all they that wait for him.
Now it's very interesting that at the, um, end of this chapter, we have what is plainly,
uh, the last final end of the Assyrian and the King of the North in the future. We have some
points that are exactly like Daniel chapter 11, which talk about the attacks of the King of the
North on, um, Jerusalem. You remember, for example, all of you who have read this chapter 11 of Daniel
remember how quite suddenly, as it were, out of the blue, the King appears, who shall, um,
be worshipped and take the place of God in the temple of God. The King appears, and then we read
that the King of the North comes against him, and eventually they're all destroyed by the coming
of the Lord. Well, it is evidently exactly the same that is foretold here. In that last invasion,
verse 32, in every place where the grounded staff shall pass, which the Lord shall lay upon him,
it shall be with tablets and harps, and in battles of shaking will he fight with it.
For Tophet, that is the burning, hell, Tophet, the judgment of fire. For Tophet is ordained of old,
yea, for the King, in exactly the same way the apostate King, the Antichrist, appears suddenly
there. For the King it is prepared, he hath made it deep and large. The pile thereof is of fire and
much wood. The breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it. The next war, in
chapter 31, also deals with going down to Egypt for help, but this time it's dealing plainly with
the vanity of trusting in the horses and the chariots of Egypt. First verse, woe to them that
go down to Egypt for help, and stay in horses and trust in chariots, because there are many,
and in horsemen, because they are very strong, but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel,
neither seek the Lord. And the vanity of trusting in Egypt is given. Now there's an extremely
interesting section in verse 5. It's for the comfort of the hearts of those who are not
disposed to trust upon Egypt, but it's what the Lord will do in these desperate days for those
who trust in him. As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem. Defending also
he will deliver it, and passing over he will preserve it. Now I call that interesting because
of its light upon the true meaning of the word Passover, going back to Exodus 12, so far away.
When we read there of the Passover, we're not right in simply thinking that the destroying
angel would leap over and miss the houses of Israel. We're told it means something quite
different, because the words here are exactly the same. As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts
defend Jerusalem. And the Lord would pass, like a bird defending its young and its nest, the Lord
would pass over his people and grant them the protection of his name and his power and his hand.
That's what happened in Egypt so long ago. That's what Passover means. The Lord would pass over them
with a protective hand of power, would protect them in the day of judgment. Why? Because the blood
was upon the doorpost. To the protection of the blood was also granted the protection of the name
of the Lord and his promise to pass over, thus defending them from the destroying angel.
And so it will be here. The main interest, I think, is in the meaning of the word Passover,
which is clearly told there. But so it will be when Jerusalem is attacked. As birds flying,
so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem. And then, in the last two verses, you have
the final end of the Assyrian in the prophetic part for the last time. Not the end as it would
appear here in the story, but the final end. Then shall the Assyrian fall with the sword,
not of a mighty man, and the sword not of a mean man shall devour him. In other words,
it will be no human hand that will in the end destroy the king of Assyria, the king of the north.
It will be the hand of the Lord. And then, of course, after that final deliverance in chapter 32,
we proceed as we did in chapter 11. The destruction of the Assyrian is followed by the
kingdom of Christ, the kingdom when God's king should reign in righteousness. And see what a
lovely verse we have in verse 2. A man shall be as an hiding place from the wind and a cover from
the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
Just as we took great pleasure in the names of the king in a previous chapter, chapter 9, so
we take great pleasure, we who have the Lord Jesus Christ as our savior and shepherd,
in reading here that he is a man who is a hiding place and a cover from the tempest,
rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
In verse chapter 33, we have the last of these woes, and it's a woe against the Assyrian,
the one who was the spoiler. But the Lord intervenes in verses 16 and 17, and we have
a wonderful statement, so far as the Old Testament is concerned, of the real hopes
of those who trust in the Lord. The one who trusts in the Lord and walks righteously,
it says he shall dwell on high, verse 16. His place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks,
bread shall be given him, his water shall be sure, and I shall see the king in his beauty.
They shall behold the land that is very far off. Well, presumably there is a reference to the
earthly king of David's house, but no Christian heart can fail to see a very wonderful promise
for us. Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty. Chapter 34, which I just mentioned in
passing, is a very interesting one, because it tells us that when all the nations shall be
assembled for the last attack on Jerusalem, then, so far as these nations are concerned,
the final place of decision is Edom and Bosra, and the day of vengeance is here. In
verse 6, the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bosra, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea.
Verse 8, for it is the day of the Lord's vengeance. Well, when we come to chapter 63,
we'll have to come back and remember that we are already being told that the final destruction
will take place in Edom and Bosra in the day of the Lord's vengeance. And then finally,
once again, in the loveliest language, we have the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ celebrated,
the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them,
and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose.
Now, this is the end of our summary of these prophetic chapters which set the situation for
the hearts of God's people true and false relative to that judgment, and that was coming relative
also to the prediction of the Lord. But in chapters 36 and 37, we have the fulfillment
of all these previous chapters. There is a tremendous, dramatic, dramatic unity
over all from chapter 1 to chapter 36 and 7. In chapter 1, we read that Zion, Jerusalem,
is left like a house in a garden, all isolated and alone. And that comes about
in chapters 36 and 37. All the walled cities of Judah are overrun and own the Jerusalem.
It begins by saying that Sennacherib, king of Assyria, took all the walled cities of Judah
and sent Rabshaker and a great army to Jerusalem. Now, there is the stage set.
From the very first words of the prophet, this is what he's been looking forward to,
that all Judah will be overrun with its fenced cities taken and Jerusalem standing alone.
And so it all turned out in the end just as Isaiah had said.
Now, the highlights are these. If we've got our eye on chapter 37 particularly,
when Rabshaker came and threatened the city and the people and the king, what did Hezekiah do?
No longer a faithless king like Ahaz, perhaps not as firm as he should have been with those
who wanted to make this treaty, but he was a man of God who comes in for great commendation
in the other parts of Holy Scripture. And I love these words about him.
It came to pass when King Hezekiah heard it that he rent his clothes and covered himself with
sackcloth, went into the house of the Lord, and then he sent a message to Isaiah, who was staying
quietly at home in all this. In verse 4, the message says, it may be the Lord thy God will
hear the words of Rabshaker whom the king of Assyria, his master, has sent to reproach the
living God and will reprove the words which the Lord thy God hath heard. Wherefore lift up thy
prayer for the remnant, here it is again, the remnant that is left. So the servants of King
Hezekiah came to Isaiah and Isaiah gave them his answer. He said, ye shall say unto your master,
thus saith the Lord, be not afraid of the words which thou hast heard, wherewith the servants
of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Behold, I will send a blast upon him. He shall hear a
rumor and return to his own land. I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land. In other
words, just the same as he always said, Isaiah said, be quiet and trust in the Lord, and here
in Zion there will be a great deliverance. But Rabshaker returned and this time sent a very
threatening letter into the hands of Hezekiah. And here is a very wonderful little incident
upon which we might always model ourselves in moments of difficulty. Verse 14, Hezekiah received
the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it. And Hezekiah went up unto the house of
the Lord and spread it before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed unto the Lord and said, let us
always remember what Hezekiah did in a moment of the most critical difficulty. He went in and he
spread it before the Lord. And he prayed, O Lord of hosts, God of Israel,
incline thine ear, O Lord, and hear. And so on appealed against them.
Now in verse 21, Isaiah sent the Lord's answer to the prayer of Hezekiah. Verse 21,
Isaiah sent unto Hezekiah, saying, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel,
whereas thou hast prayed to me against Sennacherib, the greatest king in all the earth,
with his thousands of furious, cruel warriors encamping there,
whereas thou hast prayed to me against the king of Assyria,
this is the word which the Lord has spoken concerning him.
And at the end of this long answer that Isaiah gives in verse 33,
Therefore thus saith the Lord, this is the end of Isaiah's message concerning the king of Assyria,
He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow here, nor come before it with a shield,
nor cast a bank against it. By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not
the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the Lord. For I will defend this
city to save it for thine own sake, and for my servant David's sake. And the angel of the Lord
went forth. No one could have foreseen how it would happen. The angel of the Lord went forth
and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and eighty-five thousand, and when they arose in
the morning they were all dead. So dramatic a moment has come by Byron into English literature.
Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green, that host with its banners at sunset were
seen. Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown, that host on the morrow lay scattered
and strone. The angel of death spread his wings in the blast, and breathed in the face of the
foe as he passed, and the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, and their hearts but once heaved
and forever grew still. There is an immense lesson in this for us, and it stands alongside the lessons
of Elisha and Elijah. For the man of God and of faith in any age, when the conditions
of utmost confusion obtain amongst the people of God, and evil seems to prevail amongst them,
it was the man who had been in the presence of the Lord, convicted, cleansed, and commissioned,
who knew how to act and speak. He was able to be the single salvation of God's people by his faith
and his trust in the Lord, and this is because he was habitually so near to God in his prayers
that such quietness and confidence were his strength. He must have been a very young man
when this took place, when we take account of the rest of this book. Young men and women,
read this story, go over it in detail, and let every word be engraved in your heart and memory,
and you also can be men and women of God, prepared by nearness to God and faith in his word
for every kind of challenge that will come against you. I have a feeling that this part
of the story, on which I've been only able to deal very briefly because there has to be so much build
up to understand it, but I have a feeling that this part of the story is one that we nearly
always miss. The lessons of Elisha and Elijah are an open book to us, but the tremendous
triumph and vindication in deliverance for God's people and peace and quietness to them
that was achieved by Isaiah's faith in God, it passes us by because there's a greater thing
here. It is undoubtedly a greater thing to have here the things directly concerning the Lord,
but don't let us miss this lesson of the wonderful triumph of the faith of Isaiah
in days of deepest confusion and darkness that by this fact are very much like our own days.
Now, I have two special points to go back to and to draw your attention to in this passage
before we close. If you turn your pages back to the 26th chapter,
which is the usual celebration of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God's Christ, after these
oracles on the surrounding nations, which I said we would pass by for the time being, in verse 3
we have this wonderful promise given out by Isaiah.
Now, one of the most wonderful threads that pass through the writing of Isaiah is this theme of
peace. Just as we were speaking yesterday about the use that he makes of running water,
the waters of Shiloh, the gentle murmuring of the peaceful brook, representing the gracious way that
God speaks when he does speak in grace. He has spoken above all through Shiloh, his sent one.
It's the gracious message, the gracious tenderness of the Lord Jesus Christ in his
offers of mercy and grace. They are the waters of Shiloh that flow softly, and the murmuring
brook with its peace and quietness is a picture of the grace and the tenderness of the Lord Jesus
Christ bringing God's grace to men. And then immediately afterwards, the roaring tempest,
a river in spate, destroying all before it, bringing down buildings and destroying every
kind of shelter. That's in the next verse. This is the picture of the judgment of God.
But in the end of Isaiah, there's yet a third very wonderful picture arising from the observation
by the prophet of running water. If they had kept my word in chapter 48, verse 18,
I would have extended to them peace like a river. And almost the last words of the prophet,
I will extend to her, to the blessed Zion, when all the judgment is passed,
and God's blessing rests upon his city and his people, I will extend to them peace like a river.
And it's a very wonderful picture. You see, in these Mediterranean and eastern lands,
a mere brook dries up completely in the warm weather. All the water courses,
the small water courses, are dry and hard and barren. But a river can still continue flowing
with a smooth piece of its surface, and therefore being an emblem of the peace of God.
Our hymn writer has it, when peace like a river attendeth my way, or sorrows like sea billows
roll. You see, he's using the same kind of pictures that the prophet Isaiah is using.
Well, it is to me a most wonderful thing that in all ages, the Lord has been disposed
to give his people peace. What is peace? Well, of course, primarily, and even in the Bible
primarily, it's an absence of war. But that is an emblem of such in deeper. The peace of God,
given to us men and women, is that tranquility which settles upon the spirit of the children
of God because of the knowledge that every vital issue is settled. What gives men, robs men of
their peace? They have no sure knowledge of the future. None of the vital issues of life in this
world and death and entrance into the dark future, none of these issues are settled for them. But
for the Christian, for the child of God, every vital issue is settled and he walks with the Lord
and therefore making his requests known unto God, the peace of God which passeth all understanding
keeps the heart and mind through Christ Jesus. We were speaking yesterday about the idols of
sport and entertainment upon whom our society lavishes its honors and its rewards. But you
could go to these men and women, young and old, and you would find that not for one moment have
they experienced true peace. But you are promised by the living God his peace if you only make your
requests known to him and rest in him. And I think it's never been more wonderfully summarized than
it is in this third verse. Thou will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon thee
because he trusteth in thee. You know this is very closely allied to the song of salvation we had
yesterday. I will trust, the writer says, and not be afraid. And it's only because I can trust that
I can say I will not be afraid. And so it is here. Thou will keep him in perfect peace because his
mind because he trusteth in thee. Well here is a pathway and a habit of mind and thought which is
presented to us by the prophet here. God speaking to his people so long ago with the same accents
of peace that he is speaking to us in the apostle Paul in the New Testament.
We are promised this perfect peace and the conditions are that our minds are stayed upon him.
Well we could spend a fortnight trying to explain what it means to have the mind stayed upon the
Lord. But when you think of the rock-like stability of God and his absolute mastery over all things in
heaven and earth, if only our minds are resting upon his greatness and his wisdom and that he has
committed himself in grace to a relationship with us that never can be broken. How wonderful it is
and how obviously true it is that for those of us whose minds are stayed upon him and his wisdom
and power and grace and the absolute finality of the relationship we now stand in him into him
which can never be broken we can easily see that if our minds stayed upon him this promise is
fulfilled to us we shall be kept in perfect peace. God will extend to those who rejoice in his
salvation. God will extend peace like a river. Now if we come back to chapter 28
and look again at this verse and the surroundings of it, verse 16.
If the imagery that is being used is of a roaring torrent, of a flood overflowing rivers,
then what is required is some foothold of stability that can resist this tempest.
And the circumstances will certainly be that if this news breaks suddenly then there will be a
tremendous alarm with people running hither and thither to try to find how they can get onto
solid ground away from this. Up in the north here, not so very many years ago they had it.
Didn't they in the border country around grant houses? In the middle of the night the news comes
that the rivers are flooding and the waters are roaring down the valleys.
What alarms! What rushing about to find a place of safety. What is required is a rock on which
they can stand and they can rest and it will be able to resist the flood. And therefore it's
absolutely true to this imagery that the Lord here speaks of his salvation as a rock that's
able to save them when the overflowing scourge of God's judgment comes. And it's very easy to see
with what lively exactitude the Spirit of God takes up this figure and applies it to our Lord
Jesus Christ who is to be our salvation against the storms of judgment. They shall never reach the
one who are resting upon that rock. Therefore thus saith the Lord God, behold I lay in Zion
for a foundation. That's what we want. We want something that won't be moved
in view of that approaching storm of judgment. A trite stone, a precious cornerstone,
a sure foundation he that believeth shall not make haste. A trite stone. Now
what can it mean to say that our Lord Jesus Christ is a trite stone?
Well there are two possible meanings for this that spring to my heart. One is that he has
already withstood the storm. And the other is that multitudes have rested upon him and they
have been kept in perfect peace. And it is true indeed that our Lord Jesus Christ has withstood
the storm. All thy waves and billows passed over me, he said by the psalmist.
It says, deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water spouts. The deep of God's demands
against sin and wrath of God on sin. They were met and sustained by the deep of the capacity
of our Savior to stand in our place and to bear on our account that storm which broke upon him.
He is indeed by Calvary's cross. He is the trite stone. And if our faith is in him,
we shall never even come into judgment. He is a trite stone. And then think of all the
multitudes of those in all ages and especially since first he came. All those who have tasted
that he is gracious. All those who have come to him as to the living stone. They have indeed
tasted that the Lord is gracious and they've experienced the peace that comes from those
who are absolutely certain that they're cleared of all suspicion of the application to them of
the judgment of God that's coming on the unbeliever. Our Savior is a trite stone and with absolute
security we can rest our souls upon him. It says he is a precious cornerstone. A precious
cornerstone. Well, in Peter this is applied and it is said to us that although the Lord Jesus
Christ is in other places called a stone of stumbling and rock of offense, this is for the
unbeliever. But the preciousness of that stone is for the believer. All about him, especially
in Peter there, is precious. The precious faith that he's given that rests in him. The precious
blood which has redeemed us and made us his own. But there is a lasting satisfaction of heart and
mind for those who know him which comes from the realization of his preciousness. Is it not a
striking transformation that the same stone can be on the one hand the granite to withstand the flood,
the overflowing scourge, on the other hand a precious stone to be for the everlasting delight
of all those who know him and rejoice in him. Unto you therefore that believe is the preciousness
that belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. A preciousness that God has always seen in him
to the full. He is a precious cornerstone and in the end it says he is a sure foundation.
Well of course in this verse this obviously means that he is a sure foundation against the
overflowing scourge. Against the storm of judgment he is a sure foundation. But in the New Testament
it's taken further and that sure foundation which we first meet in our liberation from the fear of
judgment, it becomes something upon which God is building. And we can become stones by contact with
the living stone. We can become stones in God's building and we can become part of that house
that is surely being erected and is already certainly functioning for the worship of the
Father in spirit and in truth. We, that is everyone who has come to him and tasted that he is gracious,
they are being built up a spiritual house and holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. When we think of the last phrase of this verse
then the different ways in which the Holy Spirit not perhaps translates it but interprets it to
others is very striking. Here it says he that believeth in him shall not make haste.
He that believeth in him shall not make haste. When I was very young and presumed upon my privilege
to reprove an old workman for not making haste he said you ought to know your bible.
It says that believers shouldn't make haste and I was absolutely stumped in those days.
What can it mean? Well in its setting it's quite plain what it means. When the flood comes and
people suddenly become aware of it then there's a tremendous making haste to find the means of
safety. But for those who are on this rock there never will be that alarm. There never will be that
need to hasten here and there. Why? Because we have an eternal salvation which nothing can ever shake
in the Lord Jesus Christ. One of the ways it's put in the New Testament is he that
believeth in him shall not be ashamed and another place he that believeth in him shall not be
confounded. And the issue of the matter is for us here taking the words of Isaiah to ourselves
and seeking to see in them our blessed savior the Lord Jesus Christ. What it's saying to us is this
that once our faith is in him, once our lives are committed to him and to the tremendous enterprise
of his service we shall never in time and eternity have cause to be ashamed of the fact
that our trust is in the Lord. He that believeth in him shall not be ashamed.
Now let us sing hymn number 99. We'll sing the whole hymn and I'll read the last verse.
But most adore his precious name his glory and his grace proclaim for us
condemned despised undone he gave himself the living stone.
He gave himself the living stone. …
Transcrição automática:
…
The reading tonight, again from the book of the prophet Isaiah, is taken from chapters 40 and 42.
Chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah first, from verse 25 to 31. Prophecy of Isaiah, chapter 40,
verses 25 to 31. To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal, saith the Holy One. Lift up
your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by
number. He calleth them all by names, by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong
in power, not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, my way is hid from
the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard,
that the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is
weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that
have no might, he increaseth strength. Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young
men shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall
mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.
And now in chapter 42, verse 1, Isaiah 42, verse 1, Behold my servant, whom I uphold, mine elect,
and whom my soul delighteth. I have put my spirit upon him. He shall bring forth judgment to the
Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised
reed shall he not break, and the smoking flux shall he not quench. He shall bring forth judgment
unto truth. He shall not fail, nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth. And the
Isles shall wait for his law. That's all we're going to read tonight. Book two of the Prophet
Isaiah is divided by the Spirit of God. I mean by that that we are not dependent upon the modern
chapter makers for the division. Book two of Isaiah, from chapters 40 to the end, chapter 66,
is divided by the Spirit of God into three equal sections of nine chapters, the first of which
forms our theme for this evening, chapters 40 to 48. The first and second of these two sections
are both ended by the words, there is no peace saith my God to the wicked. It's perhaps the last
of those very vivid allusions to moving water that Isaiah uses to paint his word pictures and give us
his impressions, that the wicked are like a troubled sea, all the time casting up dirt and everything
that's objectionable. The wicked are like a troubled sea. There is no peace saith the Lord to the wicked.
In the first two cases, then the section ends with this, and we take this as part of the arranging of
the Spirit of God. Now in this whole part of the book of our Prophet, that is from the whole book
from chapter 40, the most interesting subject to every Christian heart is the appearance there,
and only there, of the personage who is called the Servant of Jehovah. This might appear to us
to be a fairly common kind of designation for a person in Holy Scripture, a Servant of Jehovah,
but when we gather together the things that are said in these four Servant poems, then we very
quickly realize that this is no ordinary person. The Servant of Jehovah is himself the living God,
come down in order that he might do a work, perform a tremendous work on the part of the Lord
who sent him. And I do pray most earnestly that the great object that we have before us in these
meetings might in a very particular way, today and tomorrow, if it please the Lord to tarry,
that our hearts might be made to burn within us as we meditate upon these beautiful Servant poems.
The first one we read this evening, the first few verses of chapter 42, Behold my servant, mine elect,
in whom my soul delighteth. And then there's quite a gap, and it's in the next major section
of the book, in chapter 49, beginning, Listen, O Isles, unto me. The Lord hath called me from
the womb, from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. This is the second of
the Servant poems. In chapter 50, especially when we come to verse 4, The Lord God hath given me the
tan of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. We
have the third of the Servant poems, and then, I need hardly say, the last and the highest and the
most wonderful, beginning in verse 13 of chapter 52, Behold my servant shall deal prudently. And
going on to the passage we all know so well in chapter 53. These are the four Servant poems.
Now, if there was any need to do so, we could very easily confirm, most indisputably, if there was
any need to do so, that it is the intention of the Spirit of God that these passages to speak to us
of none else than the Lord Jesus Christ. The first passage that we read in chapter 42 is quoted with
the usual differences that, changing from one language to another, make in Matthew 12, verses
18 to 20. And for the moment, passing over the others, chapter 53 is frequently quoted, we know
so well, By whose stripes we are healed, Peter says, who his own self bear our sins in his own
body on the tree, by whose stripes we are healed. Or the familiar story of the Ethiopian eunuch,
how he was reading, how his life was taken from the earth, the life of this servant of the Lord.
And he asked the question, Of whom speaketh the prophet, of himself or some other man? And
beginning at that scripture, Philip preached unto him, Jesus. We hardly need, most of us,
to have it pointed out to us that we're an absolutely solid ground in detaching these
four passages from their context, however vile as that may seem, and allowing them to speak
directly to our hearts of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now it would appear, since it's
the intention of the Spirit of God that we should apply this title, the servant of Jehovah, in a
very special and distinctive way to the Lord Jesus Christ, it's worthwhile to stop, although the
question is simple, and ask what exactly is the idea of a servant? It must be given its pure and
full significance in passages like this. And we must think, I suggest therefore, as the word
servant does, meaning a person who undertakes a commission or commissions for another, and that
commission involves toil and hardship. We shall see how, in a sense, far deeper than any such
definition could present to us. This definition, as it enerates, gives us a beginning to understand
the way it's applied to the Lord Jesus Christ. He was the servant of Jehovah. He came to fulfill a
commission, and in the end we find that that commission involved, in the deepest, deepest sense,
it involved the trouble of his soul. Now one of the puzzles of this particular chapter 42 that we
have in our passage this evening, one of the puzzles is that there isn't the slightest doubt
that in the first place, the term the servant of Jehovah applies to God's earthly people, Israel.
Look at chapter 41, the chapter before the one we read, verse 8, chapter 41, verse 8,
But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen. If we look in the latter part of
the chapter of which you read the first four verses, chapter 42, verse 19, Hear ye death,
verse 18, Hear ye death, and look ye blind, that ye may see who is blind, but my servant,
or deaf as my messenger that I sent. Who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord's
servant, seeing many things, but thou observest not, opening the ears, but heareth not. Now it's
very plain, right through to the end of this section that we're speaking of, although the
concept occurs nowhere else than in these particular nine chapters, yet it's very plain
that in these chapters, in the first place, first approach to the subject, in these chapters,
the servant of the Lord is Israel, his earthly people. In the very last verses of the section,
in verse 20 of chapter 48, in calling the captives to come out of Babylon, the word says,
The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob. So not only before this passage, first four verses of
chapter 42, but right through to the end of this whole section, the servant of the Lord is Israel.
And we shall see very plainly how, although called to be the servant of the Lord, and given that
great honor to be his witnesses in the world, yet they lamentably failed. They were deaf,
and they were blind, and their hearts were dull, and they failed altogether to fulfill the work
that's involved in being the servant of the Lord. How then can we understand, amidst all these plain
statements, how can we understand chapter 42, verses 1 to 4, as applying to the Lord Jesus
Christ? Well, I suggest, can do no more than suggest, but it certainly is a thought that has
given great satisfaction to myself at any rate in mind and heart, and that is that in those four
verses in chapter 42, we have the outline of what the servant should be. We have the statement of
what the servant is in ideal, so that, since it says that Israel was a failure as the servant,
and blind and deaf, both they could see, when the words were addressed to them, and we can see what
the servant of the Lord ought to be. That explains the presence of this passage amongst the others
that apply the term to Israel, but it also makes it very plain how the passage was fulfilled in
the Lord Jesus Christ. It removes all difficulty, so far as I'm concerned, to think of these first
four verses as being the Lord's servant in ideal, and therefore, obviously, they are to be fulfilled
in the Lord Jesus Christ. And the only way to understand another puzzle, when we come to the
next servant poem in chapter 49, is that in that chapter, we read of the moment when the Lord Jesus
Christ is substituted, or substitutes himself, for Israel as the servant of the Lord, and from
henceforth, there's no doubt at all, the one who fulfills this delineation is the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so, a little later, I hope we shall come back to this particular delineation of the Lord's
servant in ideal, recognizing and just immediately going to the fact that it was fulfilled by the
Lord Jesus Christ. These particular verses in chapter 42, they present to us his work, what
the job was for which the servant came and was sent, and his character. The wonderful character
of the Lord Jesus Christ, seen here in a series of negatives, to which we shall come a little later.
But certainly, how very sweetly, this point of view, that here we have the servant in ideal,
an outline which can only be fulfilled by one, and that is the perfect blessed Son of God, how
sweetly it speaks to our hearts to think of this chapter 42 and its first four verses like this.
Now, I must again spend a few minutes on the background to these chapters, because it presents
to us how vastly different the circumstances are from the circumstances which dominated the story
in chapters 1 to 39. In the first place, in these chapters, Israel is captive. If you like to look
in the same chapter 42 and verse 7, then it says the Lord, in verse 6, the Lord has called his
servant, going on to verse 7, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison,
and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. If we look at verse 22, we find the people
who are the subject of these chapters described similarly. But this is a people robbed and spoiled,
they are all of them snared in holes, and they're hid in prison houses. They are a prey and non
deliverance for a spoil and non self-restore. And of course other verses could be quoted to indicate
that in these chapters, God's people Israel are regarded as prisoners in captivity, in exile. Not
only so, but we find that the power that has captivated them is named. There are several cases
in these chapters which we will make reference to, but in particular in the end of chapter 48,
at the very end of the section, the point to which in its first meaning everything goes forward is,
go ye forth from Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, with a voice of singing declare ye,
tell this, utter it, even to the end of the earth, say ye, the Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob.
And one final thing, in chapter 44 verse 26, we find that their own land is now desolate,
with the cities broken down. Chapter 44 verse 26, he confirms the word of his servant,
and performeth the counsel of his messengers, that saith to Jerusalem, thou shalt be inhabited,
and to the cities of Judah thou shalt be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof.
In other words, Jerusalem has been depopulated, and the cities of Judah have been burnt down,
and that land is decayed and desolate. So that the first great point about the
circumstances of the background of these chapters is that God's earthly people,
for the very reason that they fail to be the witnesses for the Lord,
they're captives in the distant land of Babylon. The next thing that can be seen very plainly
about the background is that the chapters make a very plain reference to a great conqueror who
has appeared, and he's very quickly named as Cyrus. In chapter 41, for example, the Lord is
addressing a concourse of peoples, and he says, Who raised up the righteous man from the east,
called him to his foot, gave the nations before him, and made him rule over kings. He gave them
as dust to his sword, as driven stubble to his bow. He pursued them and passed safely,
even by the way they had not gone with his feet. In other words, there is a tremendous conqueror.
At the same time as God's earthly people were in captivity, a great conqueror had gone out,
and he's very soon named as Cyrus, who is the person, as we know, who eventually delivered
God's people by bringing down Babylon. Now if the people are still captives, and yet this great
conqueror Cyrus has gone forward, then there's no question at all that all this took place very
close to 200 years after the death of Isaiah. You remember the first verses of the book tell us that
Isaiah was the first person, the first ruler of Judah, in whose reign Isaiah prophesied, and we
have the reference in chapter 5 to the death of King Isaiah. These events took place very close
to 200 years after the first messages that the Prophet wrote. Now, how is it possible that this
should be so? Well, since these chapters name the deliverer Cyrus, then of course the hostile critic
has had to have resource to believing, or pretending, that someone else wrote these late
chapters. Well, the whole of the New Testament so utterly and simply disposes of that, and assures
us that these chapters are part of the book of Isaiah, and part of the work of the Prophet Isaiah,
we don't need to stop and think about this, but it does involve the fact that 200 years before he
came, or nearly 200 years before he came, God named beforehand the great conqueror who would
set his people free, bring down the great city of Babel on the Lady of Kingdoms, and set free his
people. And it's not surprising that we shall see that again and again in this section. The Lord is
appealing to the fact, I told you long before, I'm telling you long before. When they come to read it,
he says, I told you long before, and this proves that I am God, and there is none else. Ask your
false gods to tell you 200 years before. It cannot be done. I am God, and there is none else. Now,
this is a very straightforward situation. It's not the way we would normally imagine it,
but evidently the fact of the matter is that by the power of the Spirit of God, Isaiah took his
place in spirit amongst the captive exiles in Babylon, 150 to 200 years later, because they
were captives for 70 years. He took his place amongst them in the spirit, and he wrote to them,
he wrote to them words which would apply directly to them, and encourage them in their captivity,
and present to them promises and encouragement of their deliverance, and he wrote it all 150
years beforehand. This is absolutely so miraculous as to be outside the mind of man to admit that
such a thing took place. But for us, we realize full well that the future is an open book with
our God. And he does indeed show, not only in this, but in many another page of Holy Scripture,
that since he tells from olden times that it will come to pass, he has proved, I am God,
and there is none else. Now, once again, I must ask you to put your eyes down to the pages of
the Bible, and to turn over the pages, and we shall go as rapidly as we can, consistent with
a measure of clarity, go through these chapters to indicate what they mean. In chapter 40,
from verse 1 to verse 11, we have an introduction which has often been called the four voices.
First of all, comfort ye my people, speak ye comfortably, or speak to the heart of Jerusalem.
That's the first voice. The second one, the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,
prepare ye the way of the Lord. The third voice, in verse 6, the voice said cry, and he said,
what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is the flower of the grass.
And a fourth voice, in verse 9, O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the
high mountain. O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength. Lift
it up, be not afraid, say unto the cities of Judah, behold your God. Now, if ever there was
a passage which obviously had a minor meaning for the present time, and yet a far greater meaning
for the future, this is it. Because when you remember that the Prophet is addressing the
desolate city, rubbed of all her people, broken down and in ruins, when you remember that the
Prophet, under these circumstances, is addressing Zion, he is saying to her, look, your long sorrow
is over. The first voice that breaks the stillness after all these years, although written so long
before, is the voice that comforts you, and says, look, your long trial is past, because God has
indeed sent his afflictions unto you for your sins. And then the next voice talks about that great
journey across the desert, that the exiles would take as they were coming back, and a highway was
prepared for the Lord, who himself was bringing his people back again. And finally, when those
captive exiles are returned in verse 9 to Zion, and the great rejoicing was caused, then it was
just as though God himself appeared there. But of course we know that each one of these, with a far
greater truth, is speaking for the future. John the Baptist, announcing the coming of the Saviour,
in verse 3, and the presence of Jehovah God amongst his people, according to the other voice. Now in
verse 12, we have a most magnificent representation of the incomparable majesty of Jehovah. And I hope
we should come back and think about this very particularly. The language of Isaiah in these
parts is in itself incomparable, because it has a theme so absolutely magnificent as to surpass
altogether the ordinary subjects of human words. It's talking about the incomparable majesty of
Jehovah, and there can be none like him in heaven or in earth. And this representation of the
incomparable majesty of Jehovah is made to show how foolish are those who make idols to bow down
to them. But the wonderful part of the passage is that this tremendous majesty and wisdom and power
of Jehovah is brought down in the end to the comfort of those who feel themselves to be abandoned.
They say, in verse 27, they say, the Lord has forgotten us. Here we are, captive exiles. It's
long since we had a word from the Lord. The Lord has forgotten us altogether. My ways hid from the
Lord, and my judgments passed over from my God. But they are assured that although they are faint
and weary, yet the incomparable strength and power of the Lord is for them to renew their
strength. And here is a promise that has sounded out to the people of God and sounds out to us
especially this evening. Are we faint and weary? Does the thought sometimes creep into our hearts
unbidden, but with unbelief that the Lord has forgotten us? He's not aware of our afflictions.
Well, under these circumstances, the word says to us today, absolutely directly, speaking straight
out of the sacred page, they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount
up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.
Now, as I said before, chapter 41 addresses a great assembly of the nations about the sudden
brilliant appearance of a great conqueror. That's quite plain. I read part of it in verses 1 to 7,
and I won't repeat it again. But after verse 7, we find another revelation, another delineation by
the prophet of the utter folly of idols. When all the peoples of the world, all this great assembly
of nations, heard of this tremendous conqueror who'd been let loose, then they turned to their
idols. But the Lord says to his servant in verse 8, but thou, Israel, art my servant. As much as to
say, as my witness, you won't turn to idolatry. Thou art my servant whom I have chosen. Thou whom
I have taken from the ends of the earth and called thee from the chief men thereof. Thou art my
servant. I have chosen thee and not cast thee away. And there again, I repeat, we find Israel
as a servant of the Lord. Verse 25, when the question has been raised in the beginning,
who raised up this great man from the east? And Cyrus, by the way, did arise in the far east of
the Persian territory, territory of the Medes. Verse 25 gives the answer, I have raised up one
from the north. He was, of course, from the northeast. Could be either north or east. I
have raised up one from the north, and he shall come. From the rising of the sun shall he call
upon my name. He shall come upon princes, upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth the clay.
And then once again, who has declared from the beginning that we may know, and before time that
we may say, he is righteous? Well, it was the Lord who had declared from long beforehand that
this would come. In chapter 42, considering the question has been raised about idols and witness
against them, we have in the first four verses, to which we shall return, a statement of the
ideal delineation, the object and the character of the servant of the Lord. After this, we find,
from verse 5 to verse 17, that the Lord pledges his righteousness, that he will in the end restore
his sanctuary. He pledges his righteousness to do so. He then speaks in verse 14 as though,
during the captivity, the Lord has been silent, as though inactive regarding his people. But this
time is past. The time of his afflictions upon them is past. I have long time hold in my peace.
I have been still and refrained myself. Now will I cry like a traveling woman. I will destroy and
devour at once. I will make waste mountains and hills, and dry up all herbs, and so on. The Lord
was going to come in and act. At the end of that chapter, we have the statement I've already referred
to, that in the face of all this, then the servant of the Lord is blind and deaf. He has not been able
to perceive the words that the Lord has spoken to him, and this is why he has failed as the Lord's
servant. Now in chapter 43, and the greater part of 44, in the face of their long experience of
desolation, and in the face of the rapid approach of their deliverance, then the people of God are
given comforting promises to support them. Look, for example, at verse 2. When thou passest through
the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee. When thou
walkest through the fire, they shall not be burnt, neither shall they flame kindle upon thee. For I
am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy servant, and so on. You have through that chapter
the most encouraging promises. Once again, in the middle of chapter 44, you have, that's the next
chapter, you have one of the most terrific of these passages about idolatry. Why is the Lord
so keen about idolatry here? Well, because, of course, it's the greatest possible despite to the
revelation that he made himself to his people, and through his people. Against this, above all
things, there should have been his witnesses for the unique majesty of Jehovah, the God of Israel,
and their greatest failure was not doing this. Although they had fallen into idolatry before,
they were in great danger of learning idolatry again in Babylon, and therefore it's witnessed
that the Lord witnesses against it. But when you see, say, from verse 10 of chapter 44, but
especially the irony, the folly of idolatry, it speaks out in verse 16. A man chooses, in verse
14, a piece of wood, and then it says in verse 16, part he burneth in the fire, part he uses to roast
and eat flesh, and is satisfied. He warms himself and says, aha, I'm warm, I've seen the fire, and
the rest thereof he makes a god. Even his graven image, he falleth down into it and worshipeth it,
and prayeth unto it, and saith, deliver me, for thou art my God. The utter folly of idolatry is
represented in those verses. Of course, we have to remember that there are very, very explicit
references in the New Testament to the danger of idolatry for the people of God, for taking that
which is of ourselves and our own desires, and falling down and worshipping them. The greatest
statement of this, of course, is ye cannot worship God and mammon. And after the revelation of the
true God, and eternal life, in the end of the epistle of John, little children, keep yourselves
from idols. So we have to be on our guard against something equally stupid and foolish, as well as
equally and desperately sinful, of putting some other thing which is really from ourselves only,
in the place that God only should have in our hearts. In the end of chapter 44, we have Cyrus
named. 44, in verse 28, the Lord is describing himself and his works. Thus saith the Lord,
thy Redeemer, he has done these things, confirms the word of his servants. Verse 27,
that saith to the deep, be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers. Verse 28, that saith to Cyrus,
he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure. Even saints of Jerusalem thou shalt
be built, and to the temple thy foundation shall be laid. Now when you reflect upon the fact that
this was written 150, 200 years, 200 years beforehand, what a wonderful prophecy this is,
and how clearly it locates what the circumstances of the people of God are. And chapter 45 is very
largely about Cyrus, and the fact that he would deliver God's people by coming upon Babylon,
in verse 14, we find, thus saith the Lord, the labor of Egypt, the merchandise of Ethiopia,
and of the Sabaeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine. The
work of Cyrus was going to be to liberate his people from all their afflictions, and that
occupies chapter 45. Now in chapter 46, we have the downfall of Babylon's gods. As a matter of
fact, when Cyrus was beginning his conquests, then the king of Babylon carried away all their
gods in order to rescue them from the conqueror. And this utterly absurd situation is made the
purpose of a most touching appeal to his people, which also has its application to us. First verse
of chapter 46, the names of the principal gods and idols of Babylon were Bel and Nebo. Bel bowed
down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts and upon the cattle. They are a burden to
the weary beast, and themselves have gone into captivity. These gods, whom they worshipped and to
whom they prayed to support them and help them, they themselves were a burden to weary beasts,
and they themselves were carried away into captivity. But the Lord goes on to say, hearken
unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, which are born by me from
the belly, which are carried from the womb, even to your old age I am he. Even to whore hairs will
I carry you, I have made, and I will bear, even I will carry and will deliver you. This is a wonderful
representation to the hearts of the people in all ages, the people of God, that God, being our
creator, those who trust in him, those who are really his people, worship and serve him, he will
carry them and bear them and support them and strengthen all the days of their life. He says,
as the Lord Jesus said, I am with you to the end of the age. And then in chapter 47 we have a kind
of long ode on the fall of Babylon. In verse 1, Babylon is addressed, come down and sit in the
dust, O daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground. In verse 5, we learn that she had called herself
the Lady of Kingdoms, but it says, thou shalt be no more called the Lady of Kingdoms. In verse 11,
we're told in the end of it, desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not
know. And in the end, verse 15, it says in the last words, there are none to save. And so we have
it clearly brought to a point when what the Lord is leading to regarding his captive people in these
verses is the destruction of Babylon and their liberation from it. And in the end of chapter 48,
we have the call, come out of Babylon. It was soon to sound forth. We know that the permission
was given by the Persian king to Shesh-Bazar, and they did return. As many as wished to do so,
they did return to their own city. Go ye forth of Babylon, flee from the Chaldeans, with a voice of
singing declare ye, tell this, utter it even to the end of the earth, say ye, the Lord hath redeemed
his servant Jacob. And they thirsted not when he led them to the desert. He caused waters to flow
out of the rock for them. He cleaved the rock also and the waters gushed out. And then the refrain,
because of the wickedness of many and the obstinate refusal of many to hear the word of the Lord,
there is no peace, saith the Lord to the wicked. Now I feel that it has been necessary for us to
see very plainly what the circumstances are. I want to go back for some minutes now to three
particular parts which are of great help to us, and in them I trust we may hear the Lord speaking
directly to us. There is the one passage which directly speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, and
certainly it would be one of those things in all the scriptures concerning himself that he spoke
of. But the others are things that were addressed to the piety of the people of God to strengthen
them in their day. Would you doubt that although their horizon was earth, and we have realized
ourselves since we are united to Christ by the Holy Ghost to be a people for heaven with him,
would you doubt that while we are on earth all the promises of God to the godly can be taken to
ourselves? If in Hebrews the writer can say, the Lord hath said, I will not leave thee nor forsake
thee, and then goes on to say, therefore I may boldly say, if the Lord is my helper I will not
fear what men shall do to me, that opens the door to all the promises of God of this kind,
to the pious and the righteous of his people upon earth. And it's with this particular thought in
mind that I direct your attention once again to the latter part of chapter 40. Now I was pointing
out how the real subject here is God's heart. Although his people were in affliction, yet his
heart is to them. And especially now that the moment is coming when he calls them to action,
then he finds that many of them are unbelieving, and they feel that the Lord has forgotten them,
their ways hidden from him. They are faint and weary, but it's to these people that God gives
this promise. They that wait upon the Lord. There is a way whereby in faintness and weariness our
strength can be renewed. Do you want to know by what means when you are faint and weary you can
have new strength from God? Do you want to know how when you feel like not moving a step further
in the way, you can mount up with wings as eagles and run and not be weary, you can walk and not
faint? The promise is this, they that wait upon the Lord shall do these things. And everything
comes down really to what kind of a person is this Jehovah upon whom his people are called to
wait, to give time to come to him. Well, I use the expression again and again because I don't
know anything better. The incomparable majesty manifested in a measure of wisdom and power that
absolutely beyond all human thought is represented in these verses in so magnificent and exalted a
manner as I suppose appears nowhere else in the Holy Scriptures. We would all do well to learn
these expressions because they are the word of God to represent to people here upon earth the
incomparable exaltation and majesty of Jehovah whom his earthly people were privileged to worship
and serve, and indeed they are also part of the character and power of the Father who has revealed
himself as the same God through our Lord Jesus Christ. A fuller revelation, a revelation of his
grace that proposes far greater things since the coming of Christ, a revelation of his love, a
revelation that he wants to take us into relationship with himself, but not a witless in
the incomparable majesty of his wisdom and power than under his name of Jehovah the God of Israel.
Verse 12, who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand? You take the vast waters of
the earth, the waters in all their depths covering the greater part of the globe, and so far as the
Lord is concerned it is as though a man were to take a few drops of water in the palm of his hand
and measure them like that. All the waters of the earth, the waters above and below, the Lord can
be like a being who measures those waters in the palm of his hand. He comprehends the dust of the
earth in a measure, and with the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance. Verse 15, the
nations, you think of the 400 millions, is it, of China and something like an equal number of
India, all the nations, the mind boggles at the numbers concerned in our day with all the nations.
The nations are like the smallest of the balance. When I was a laboratory worker, this is one of
the things on my first days which struck me. Of course, this was a long time ago, and balances in
those days worked very different than what they were in Isaiah's day, although they're very
different nowadays. But one of the first things that struck me is, the chemists are already smiling
at this, but you could look at the pans of a balance and swing them, and they would not be
equal, nothing at all to see. But you restore them to stability and brush the one that appears to be
heavier, you can see nothing, but you swing it again and you find that they are indeed balanced.
The smallest of the balance, too small to see, yet it has put the balance right to remove it. And all
the nations of the world are like the small dust of the balance in the eyes of God. Verse 15, and so
it goes on, verse 18, to whom then we liken God, or what likeness will he compare to him? And in
this earlier part, it talks about his counsellors. Who were the counsellors of the Lord when he made
all these things and established them all, when he set the stars in their courses? Who were his
counsellors? The point is that there were no counsellors, that it's the wisdom of God and the
power of God that shine out so uniquely in the creation of all things and the preservation of all
things, that there's nothing at all that would possibly happen to the people of God here upon
earth that could for a moment stand beside the measureless wisdom and power of that God who's
speaking to his people. And yet, in the end, after saying to them, he's like the God who sits as a
seat upon the circle of the earth. He says in spite of all this majesty, which you have again in verse
26, lift up your eyes on high and behold who hath created all these things. With the unaided eye,
you can see the massive content of the heavenly sphere. Who created all these things? Who bringeth
out their host by number? He calleth them all by names in the greatness of his might, for that he
is strong in power not one faileth. Why is it that the heavenly bodies never go wrong? Why is it that
mathematically they preserve absolutely the course that has been set for them? It is because God is
strong. It's not simply can be passed off by a law of nature. It is because God, Jehovah, is strong
that they are preserved in their courses. And he commands them and they stand to attention when he
speaks to them. The God whom Israel was called to worship and the Father whom we worship is a God of
incomparable majesty and wisdom and power. There's no plumbing the depths of that wisdom and that
power. And we know there's no plumbing the depths of that compassion and that grace and that love
to his people. Well, they were found faint and weary. Do you feel that your ways hit from the
Lord? I'm quite sure that with a small number of Christians together like this there will be some
who within a measurable time of this have had the thought creeping into their heart, God has
forgotten me. So great are the troubles that have passed over my head and afflicted me. You thought
the temptation is encompassing that God has forgotten you. And that's what the Lord says to
these people. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, my ways hidden from the Lord? How is it possible that a
God who gives such care and maintains with such wisdom and power the heavenly bodies in all their
their vast number? Our way cannot be hidden from God. My ways hit from the Lord and my
judgment is passed over from my God. And the prophet goes on, hast thou not heard that the
everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary, and
there is no searching of his understanding. He cannot be weary, and he cannot forget his people.
He gives power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increases strength. What a, what a
reservoir beyond our highest imagination of renewal, of power, and of strength there in
connection with every individual one of the people of God in all ages. He gives power to the faint,
and to them that have no might he increases strength. Even the youth shall faint and be weary,
and the young men shall utterly fall. That indicates that nature, with all its powers at
its best, is liable to failure and to decay. It's got neither the wisdom nor the power to maintain
its sense. The youth shall fail, faint and be weary, and the young men shall fail. But here is
a point of contact between you and me, and the incomparable majesty and wisdom and power, as well
as the compassion and the grace and love of God. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength. What does it mean to wait upon the Lord? Well, I suppose it's very plain in the first place
that it means give time to him. Give time to linger in his presence, that the impress of all these
attributes that belong to him might have time by his grace and his spirit to impress themselves
upon us. If we wait in his presence, then I think this will happen. And then of course to wait upon
the Lord means to seek his blessing. And in the New Testament we have the particular point put
like this, make our requests all unto him. Well, a God of such wisdom, a God of such knowledge,
cannot possibly be ignorant of our requests, but he does invite us to make our requests all unto
him. And in the New Testament he promises us his peace, but here he promises that we shall renew
our strength. I feel, and you feel, sometimes of all the things that you need is a need for a
renewal of strength, the kind of strength that only the Lord can give. That promise is given,
and that promise stands tonight. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They
shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall have an eagle's view, seeing things down there
in their true perspective. They shall run and not be weary, run with endurance the race that
before us, looking often at Jesus. And they shall walk and not faint. Now we turn over the pages.
In chapter 42, the first four verses, we have the first of these servant poems. And we're not
bringing in the greater scope and depth of the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, which you
will all notice has been pretty well absent from the representations of the Messiah that we've had
in the past. It's the majesty of his person as God and man. It's his wisdom and power as the
wonderful counselor and the mighty God, which enable him to be the Prince of Peace. But we're
now just treading in the vestibule of the scriptures which present to us all that he
would achieve and could only be achieved by his death. But his person, his work, and his character
are here displayed. Now we can see that the object of the servant's toil in the setting of
the prophets is given us by one word which occurs in practically every verse. Verse 1,
he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. Verse 3, he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.
Verse 4, he shall not fail nor be discouraged till he has set judgment in the earth. Now we
tend to think, of course, of judgment as an outpouring of the wrath of God, either here
upon earth or at the great white throne. But of course judgment, in its widest sense, we saw,
for example, in the earlier parts of the book, it represents holding the balance fairly and justly,
and making sure that the poor and the widows and the fatherless and the underprivileged have their
rights, which have always been neglected in the world. That was a facet of what is meant by
judgment. We know that in the end judgment does include an outpouring of the punishment of God,
for the correction of what is evil. But I suppose that a definition which might include all is that
judgment means the regulation of human conduct by the will of God. In the Old Testament,
the regulation of human conduct by the law of God. In the New Testament, the regulation of
human conduct by the Spirit of God, which comes down to us from the Lord Jesus Christ. But
judgment, I think, could be—an approach could be made to understand what it means,
that the object of this person, so far as this earth is concerned, is that all human conduct
should be regulated by the will of God, and that will be to the truest blessing of man. It will
involve social justice, which has never been really seen in the world, and it would also
involve the glory of God, because this is what his law was directed to do. Now, this servant is going
not to fail or to be discouraged till he has established judgment on the earth. The horizon
of the prophets is the earth, and in Christianity we have a far greater and more wonderful horizon,
as I've said, being joined to Christ in heaven, and destined to share his heavenly home and place
with the Father. But so far as the earth is concerned, and the prophets' horizon, then the
servant must come to set judgment. Now his character is given in negatives. Verse 2,
he shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. That's the first one.
Verse 3, a bruised reed shall he not break. That's the second one. And the smoking flax shall he not
quench. This is the third one. And they're very wonderful indeed. Then, in order to bring about
such a result, with the earth filled with violence and corruption, then hostile men and nations are
going to have to be ridden over and brought low. The lofty looks of men shall be brought low in
those days. And the strength, which is divine strength, will be needed to overcome and to put
away what is evil. But when the Lord Jesus Christ appeared here upon earth, then we read that this
was fulfilled in him. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street.
I think one of the most striking indications of what this means is in the end of 2nd Timothy.
Because we shall find that although Israel, as the servant of the Lord, has to be displaced,
yet we'll find in the end of the book that the Israelites are again called the servants of the
Lord. And we find in Christianity that we are called, we have the privilege of being called
the servants of the Lord. But in verse 24 of 2nd Timothy, chapter 2, these words occur.
The servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach patient.
Now, of course, this is one of those ways in which we have to compare Scripture with Scripture. We
do have to strive and contend earnestly for the faith once delivered for the saints. There is
one sense in which there must be, with the help of God and the power of his Spirit, a striving,
a contending for the faith. But the manner of that contending is not to be the strident calls
that shriek across the world in the headlines. No, the servant of the Lord must not strive,
but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach patient. This is the representation of that great servant
of the Lord. In meekness, instructing those that oppose themselves, if peradventure God
will give them repentance, the acknowledging of the truth. The point is that it is not anything
else than the power of the Spirit of God that can bring about the change the servant of God
requires to bring forth. And it is this, not striving, and being gentle unto all men, and
patient, which is indicated in this character, he shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice
to be heard in the street. When the Lord Jesus Christ was here, these words were quoted of him,
and they were shown by him. A bruised reed shall he not break. The idea of the reed, I mean the
original word which is translated reed, is something which betokens basically a straight,
tender growth. An upright, straight, tender growth. But as we have it here, the foot of man
or beast has ruthlessly crushed it. It's a broken reed. It's bruised, it's not broken,
it's a bruised reed, ready to be broken. But we hear of this, the Lord Jesus Christ,
that when a reed is bruised, he does not break it. How often do we feel, although brought by
the Lord to be that upright growth, yet so fragile are we in every way that we can easily be bruised
by the ruthless cruelty or thoughtlessness of others around us. But we have to do with one
who binds up in these circumstances, and he will not break the bruised reed. The smoking
flax shall he not quench. Well, in the lives of the people of God, there are always moments when,
according to all human sight, the temper of a touch means all, the difference between
extinguishing and being brought again to flame. Simon Peter is surely the best example. After he
had denied the Lord with oaths and cursing, surely he was a smoking flax, to all appearances,
on the very edge of extinguishing altogether. But the servant of the Lord was his master.
The servant of the Lord was for him the tender shepherd, and the Lord Jesus, seeking him out
with tender and strong words. And the Lord Jesus, by praying for him that his faith did not fail,
he was restored again, and the flame of his love and devotion and witness brightened again. Why?
Because he had to do with a master who will not quench the smoking flax. The Authorized Version
obscures a very striking statement here in verse 4. He shall not fail, nor be discouraged. Now,
if we were to translate that, translating the same words as we have in verse 3, we would say
like this. He shall not burn low or be bruised. The Lord Jesus Christ is one who, though he was
meek and lowly, and though he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, there was never any
question with him that he would be bruised in the sense of being near to being broken, nor would he
burn dim in the sense of appearing to be extinguished. He will never, he shall not be bruised,
and he shall not burn low. This is a wonderful element in the character of our Saviour. So far
as earthly masters and kings and friends are concerned, it's very often only the weak who
themselves can show sympathy with the weak. The strong are often devoid of sympathy for the weak,
but our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, he is the mighty God. He is the one who holds all power in
his hand. He is the one who will certainly set judgment in the earth, but he is the one who has
compassion on the feeble. He's the one who will not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking
flax. And it's a very wonderful thing that we have contact with such a Saviour before ever we come
to speak of the deeper things that the servant of the Lord presents. And finally just one word about
verse 2 of chapter 43. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the
rivers they shall not overflow thee. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned,
neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. We have spoken about the experiences of the past, and we've
often been called, caused to feel faint and weary, a very frequent experience. And the heart of the
Lord in all ages has looked down with sympathy and comfort and strength upon these feelings of
his people. But we also have the promises for the future. And this verse, which is given to describe
the Lord's strength for his people in that terrifying journey back from Babylon to their
own land and to their own city, when they're, if even if they came to pass through the waters or
through the fire, then they would not be harmed because he would be with them. And that promise
is for us. Whatever, if the Lord tarry, may be the experiences that lie ahead for us, then we have
this promise that when we pass through the waters, he will be with us. When we pass through the fire,
they shall not kindle upon us, for we have the Lord Jesus Christ who has said on the part of God,
I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, and therefore also we can boldly say, I will not fear.
Now let us sing number 174. Oh, fix our earnest gaze so wholly, Lord, on thee,
that with thy beauty occupied we elsewhere none may see. Number 174. …
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The subject this afternoon will be the Anointed One and our reading will be
from Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 to 3, the book of the Prophet Isaiah chapter 61.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings
unto the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to
the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable
year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all that mourn, to
appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy
of mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called
trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord that he might be glorified. Chapter 63
verse 1. Who is this that cometh from Edom with thy garments from Bozrah, this that is
glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in
righteousness mighty to save. Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments
like him that treadeth in the wine-fat? I have trodden the wine-press alone, and of the people
there was none with me. For I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury,
and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stay in all my raiment.
For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come. And I looked,
and there was none to help, and I wondered that there was none to uphold. Therefore mine own arm
brought salvation to me, and my fury it upheld me. And I will tread down the people in mine
anger, and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.
And lastly one verse in chapter 57 and verse 15. For thus saith the High and Lofty One,
that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place,
with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble,
and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.
Those of you who have not been here at earlier meetings may be surprised to find that we are
considering this afternoon the subject at first announced for this evening, that is,
the Anointed One, the Messiah, in chapters 61 and 63. And this involves the fact that the section
which we shall be studying this afternoon is chapters 58 to 66. I did take the liberty of
announcing this at the beginning for no better reason than that I felt most urgently pressed
upon my spirit that we should bring our meetings to a close on the subject of Isaiah chapter 53,
which so strongly speaks to our hearts now and always. So if this is a surprise to you,
I trust I shall be forgiven. Another thing which I haven't mentioned before is that I would like
to draw my remarks to a close early enough this afternoon to allow time for questions or for
comments, as the case may be. I mention it now so that you could at least give some thought to it
as you are listening in the meantime. But quite a number of questions have been addressed to me
during the week, and I would only ask if possible that the questions should not lead us away from
Isaiah, but be directed towards helping us to open up the book and to find in it our Lord Jesus
Christ. Now we have, for the purpose of this afternoon's meeting as I have said, we have
omitted the section which begins with chapter 48, 49 rather, and ends with chapter 57. We shall speak
about these, if the Lord will, this evening, but we all understand how they complete the marvelous
picture begun in the earlier chapters when the Servant of the Lord appears, and this ultimately
turns out to be one of the most heart-moving representations of our Savior, the Lord Jesus
Christ, that the Word of God contains. And it brings us, after this confession and repentance
by God's earthly people, it brings them once again, as they've been brought many times in the
promise of the prophet, to the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Now the chapters that we
have read, from which we have read this afternoon, and which we shall be considering, that is chapters
58 to 66, it will be necessary for us to do as we have done for previous sections, and that is
consider what is the background to them. We saw that we took a great deal of care to see what
were the backgrounds to the sections composing the first 39 chapters, that is book 1 of the
prophet Isaiah, and we gave quite a deal of care yesterday to seeing what was the circumstances,
the background, lying behind the first nine chapters of the book of Isaiah, Isaiah book 2.
And it's necessary to ask this question about this section also. And the answer is that as we read it
through, we find that it is almost entirely independent of background circumstances, except
for one particular verse or couple of verses, it might have occurred anywhere within the times
covered by the prophet. And that one section, that one little collection of verses, which perhaps
supplies us with the means of saying what kind of time these verses are to be understood to refer
to, is chapter 64, verses 10 and 11. Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness,
Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy, our beautiful house, where our father's praise be, is burned
up with fire, and all our pleasant things are laid waste. Perhaps we would not be surprised
at the general air of sadness and intense longing and prayer that permeates these chapters if we
were to take it, that they apply to some part of the time when Israel were captive in Babylon,
and their holy and beautiful city lay desolate and burned with fire. Many words are addressed
by the prophet to the people who would be willing to listen to him, who were captives in Babylon,
and this is a part of them. Now from this point we must plunge straightaway into an attempt to go
through these chapters from chapter 58, and once again I would ask you to open your Bibles and bend
your heads and put your eyes on the page, and because I shall not be able to read many of the
passages concerned, we are going to go through these chapters together and try to seize the
general import of them, and the general message which comes through to God's people of those days,
with all the time words that can be applied directly to ourselves, and words which present
to us the Lord Jesus Christ. I see this is in fulfillment of our declared objective of opening
up the book of Isaiah, and in particular to find therein that which will feed our souls and cause
our hearts to burn the things concerning himself. So we begin with chapter 58, and in chapter 58 we
find that the Lord is denouncing amongst his people a spurious superficial observance of
fasts and sabbaths in a manner which does not please him, because it is with the spirit that
elsewhere spoken of as being they are drawn near to him with their lips, but their hearts are far
from him. Verse 2, He seek me daily and delight to know my ways as a nation that did righteousness,
and forsake not the ordinance of their God. Verse 3, Wherefore have we fasted, saith they,
and thou seest not? Wherefore have we afflicted our souls, and thou takest no knowledge? Behold,
in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours. Behold, ye fast for strife,
and debate, and to smite with a fist of wickedness. Ye shall not fast as ye do this day,
to make your voice to be heard on high. Is this a fast that I have chosen? And so on the Lord is
remonstrating with his people, but they are devoting themselves to the superficial observances
of religion, whereas their hearts were far from him. But on the other hand, when the time comes
that their light breaks forth as the morning, in verse 8, in the end, then they will truly keep
his sabbaths, and they will truly devote themselves to obedience to his law. Verse 13, If thou turn
away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the sabbath a
delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable, and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways,
and so on, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord. If they, with their hearts in
subjection to him, and seeking his will, if they kept his ordinances, then they would delight
themselves in the Lord. What a wonderful promise to them. In chapter 59, once again, the Lord
denounces the fact that the fact that they are in oppression and desolation is not because the
Lord's hand is shortened. Whenever the people of God feel under it, feel overcome and defeated,
and cast down and desolate, it is not because the heart of God has changed. It is not because the
heart of the Lord has changed, but it says here, your iniquities have separated between you and
God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. The Lord, whatever may be
the covenant relationship between himself and his people, can never tolerate acknowledged,
known iniquity and sin amongst his people. It must be the cause of separating them in heart
from himself. There is in fact an extremely vivid picture here, which I think forms the
background to the armour of God, the whole armour of God in Ephesians chapter 6. It begins in verse
14, and the Lord is describing the way in which their behaviour is hateful to himself. It's a
vivid picture of a city, and people watching at the gate. Verse 14, judgment is turned away
backward, justice standeth afar off, truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter,
truth faileth, and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey, and the Lord saw it and
so on. Now you see there, once again, very vivid, these things, in a very vivid way,
these qualities that the Lord requires in his people in all times are personified. And when
the people have allowed themselves to be separated from God by their iniquities, then these things
are turned away from the city of God and the community of God's people. Justice is turned
away, judgment is turned away, truth lies wounded in the street, and equity cannot get in,
and truth faileth. Now what a deplorable situation this is amongst the people of God. But when we
come to a little later, verse 17, after there is deploring that there was previously no intercessor,
therefore the Lord's arm brought salvation unto him, and his righteousness it sustained him.
Verse 17, what does the Lord do when these qualities that he loves are excluded from his
people? He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation upon his head. He put
on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloak, according to their
deeds, accordingly he will repay. Fury to his adversaries, recompense to his enemies, to the
islands he will repay recompense. So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his
glory from the rising of the sun. Now this is a very wonderful picture of the Lord coming in with
the armor of light on the right hand and upon the left. The qualities that go together to make his
name and his fame, he's armed with these. And this ensures that evil will be put down, and the
kingdom of light and truth will be established. And I suppose we are clearly to take this verse
17 as being the real background of the armor of God. If we want to be with God, and like him,
then we also shall want to put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon
heads, and so on. In the case of God, they had to come first, as we shall see a little later,
vengeance, but then the restoration of those who feared his name. In chapter 60, we have a song of
Zion and its future salvation, right through. Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory
of the Lord is risen upon thee. Whenever the Lord comes, when the time comes for him to put on these
weapons, this armor, and intervene, and that time will result in a time of real blessing for the
Lord's people. Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising, and so
on, right through to the end of the chapter, it deals in this way. And then in chapter 61,
there is the fulfillment of a verse at the end of chapter 59 that says, and the Redeemer shall
come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob saith the Lord. Now this,
is the verse quoted in Romans chapter 11, but in chapter 61, it's not surprising that we have the
person of the Messiah introduced here. And he speaks, the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek, and sent me to bind up the
brokenhearted, and so on, as our brother read to us. Now, the two passages that Mr. Bajer read to
us are joined together, as we can easily see, by the recurrence of a phrase, which you've already
heard, in the middle of verse 2, the day of vengeance of our God. So the predominant character
is that this Messiah, who had brought such good tidings and comfort for the mourners, has now come
for the day of vengeance. And we have the same expression, when the day of vengeance is more
clearly here, in chapter 63, verse 4, the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my
redeemed is come. Because in the circumstances of his people Israel, the time of vengeance,
the answer to the cry that the blood of Christ arouses for vengeance upon such deeds, it is
also the time of liberation and salvation for the people of God. In between, we have one of the
marks of these closing chapters, which present to us the spirit that the Prophet, and the Lord God
by the Prophet, wishes to leave with his people in response to all the wonderful things that have
been disclosed to them. And that is in chapter 62, the most fervent prayer by the Prophet, in view
of the blessing that's to come. For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's
sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation
thereof as a lamp that burneth. And it goes on to speak of the time that is being prayed for. Verse
6 is a very special verse I hope to come back to. I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem,
which shall never hold their peace day or night. Ye that make mention of the Lord keep not silence,
and give him no rest till he establish, until he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. So the
Prophet, for the people, is praying for the moment when by the intervention of God, salvation comes,
and the righteousness of Zion shines forth as the morning. In the latter part of chapter 63,
beginning at verse 15, we have another most intensive outburst of prayer. You see, I said
already that the people are reminded, those who are the Lord's remembrances, those who make mention
of the Lord, they're not to keep silence. And we have this wonderful example of the deep and
burning intensity of the desire that these things are awakened in the heart of God's people. This
is the kind of spirit that such things are intended to arouse in the spirits of the people
of God. The burning intensity of this prayer could never be surpassed. Verse 15 of chapter 63,
Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness, where is thy zeal
and thy strength? Verse 16, Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us,
and Israel acknowledge us not. Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer. Thy name is from
everlasting. And then right on to the end of chapter 64, the first verse of chapter 64,
All that thou wilt render heavens. Every one of the children of God in all ages who have prayed
in times of difficulty have sometimes felt that the heavens are as brass, and the heavens are
like a closed door preventing access. But of course this isn't true, there is access. And this
prayer asks that the Lord will burst the dome of heaven and appear as a savior. Thou wilt render
heavens, and thou wilt come down, that the mountains may fall down at thy coming. And then
the prayer, the person praying, reminds God of interventions in times past. Since the beginning
of the world, men have not heard nor perceived by the ear. Neither hath the eye seen, O God,
besides thee what he has prepared for them that waiteth for him. I just pause to say that this
is the verse quoted in 1 Corinthians chapter 2. But in verse 8, But now, O Lord, thou art our
Father, we are the clay. Verse 9, Be not wroth, very sore, O Lord, neither remember our iniquity
forever. We beseech thee, we are all thy people. Verse 12, Wilt thou refrain thyself of these
things, O Lord? Wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore? Now, surely one of the
great lessons, and I repeat, I hope to come back to this, of such a passage as this, is the deep
intensity of desire after the Lord, and after his intervention, for the putting down of every
four of his people, and for their bringing them into the full light of their blessing. That spirit
is represented for us here in this prayer of the prophet for the blessing of God. And then,
in verse chapter 65 and 66, the last chapters, we have the Lord's answer to that prayer.
I am sought of them that ask not for me, I am found of them that sought me not. We know also
that these verses are quoted in Romans. But the Lord still explains to them that it is not with
him that there's been the distance. I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people,
which walketh in a way that was not good after their own thoughts. A people that provoketh me
to anger continually, and so on. But, although there are, verse 7, your iniquities, and the
iniquities of your fathers together, which have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed
me upon the hills, therefore will I measure their former work unto their bottom. But in the end,
God would intervene. Verse 13, Behold, my servants shall eat, but ye who persist in resisting the
Lord, ye shall be hungry. My servants shall drink, that ye shall be thirsty. My servants shall
rejoice, that ye shall be ashamed, and so on. Now the only striking thing here, because the great
subject of the first 18 chapters of the book of Isaiah, is the single person called the Servant of
the Lord, who has undertaken on behalf of the Lord this great work of salvation, and has carried it
through. He has borne the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. He's the
Servant of the Lord. He replaced Israel as the failed Servant of the Lord. But the wonderful
thing about the end of this book, is that the character of that person is reproduced in those
amongst the people who hear his word, and are before the Lord in humility and contrition. And
that applies to us. Quite clearly, we had the verse yesterday, in 2nd Timothy, chapter 2,
the Servant of the Lord must not strive. Now I could not be persuaded myself, that there isn't a
direct reference in that expression, 2nd Timothy, to the Servant of the Lord in Isaiah. Especially
when it said, he should not strive, nor cry, nor lift up his voice in the streets. The Servant of
the Lord must not strive, but be up to teach, in meekness instructing them that oppose themselves.
In other words, for those who do heed the word of the Lord, for those who really are converted to
him in repentance and faith in his people, they are given the privilege of replacing the character,
representing the character of that great Servant of the Lord, and continuing his character,
representing it here upon earth. This, the remnant of Israel separated, my servants should be blessed,
but ye who refuse should be outside. And then right on into the New Testament, where we know
very well that the remnant of Israel was the nucleus of the church, so we have the Servant
of the Lord must not strive. It's therefore our privilege, when we read of these chapters,
it is our privilege to recognize ourselves in some tiny measure as being, representing the
character of the Lord Jesus, as being the Servant of the Lord. In verse 17, we have the most
remarkable part of the promises of the Old Testament, I create new heavens and a new earth,
and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. That is to be an absolutely new
beginning for the earthly blessing of those who have, who are receiving the blessing of God in a
new heavens and a new earth. And at that time, there will be the kind of blessing that has been
promised throughout this book. The wolf and the lamb, verse 25, shall feed together, and the lion
shall eat straw like the bullock, and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor
destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord. When we think of the days in which we live, and
you and I might be sometimes tempted, as I confess I am, and I expect you are, and I've heard many
people, truly the people of God, who are tempted to turn aside to do something about the frightful
corruption that's involved in the horrible violence of the days in which we live. Should
we be tempted to turn aside to do nothing, to do something? No indeed. No indeed. Our work is to
present the gospel of Christ, the power of God unto salvation, that gives men and women a new
life, and sets them with Christ apart from the world. Does that mean we are careless about the
needs of the world? It does not. But we are absolutely certain that the time will come when
the nations will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. We are quite
certain the time will come when the nations will learn war no more, but we leave it to Him,
our Saviour. In His good time He will put all things right, and in the meantime it's our
privilege to represent His message by the gospel. When His time comes, when we think of our world,
think of these words, they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain. In verse 2 of
chapter 66, there is an echo of the verse in chapter 57 that Mr. Beatty read for us, to which
I hope to come back. Very striking verse, appealing to the hearts of the saints, I'm sure. In verse 2
in the middle, to this man will I look. For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those
things have been, saith the Lord. But to this man will I look, even to him that is a poor and
contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. And so on we have the time of blessing brought, and I
sometimes think as I contemplate the end of this book, although at the very end we have a reminder,
as we have in the book of Revelation at the end, that the punishment, the fire that falls upon the
ungodly is everlasting fire. Yet we have a wonderful representation of what it's all directed
to. Just go back in thought for a moment to Isaiah chapter 53, which we haven't yet considered in
detail. By his stripes we are healed. That's what the remnant of God's people in the future day will
say. By his stripes we are healed. And in the end, those people who are healed are sent out into all
the world with a new gospel to preach. Verse 19, I will set a sign among them, and I will send those
that escape of them unto the nations, to tarshish, pull, blood, that draw the bow, and so on. They
shall declare my glory among the Gentiles. Those who have been healed and blessed, they are sent
out into the world. What's the end of it all? Is that going out with the gospel that belongs to
their time, declaring the glory of the Lord, is that the end of the matter? No, the true end of
the matter is in verse 23. It shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one
Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. The true worship of
Jehovah is the end to which all the disclosures and all that we have about God and his Christ,
the true end of such revelations is, that they should be spread abroad amongst all flesh. The
true worship of Jehovah in his holy mountain of Jerusalem. And so it is with us. We are to be
devoted to the gospel. We are to be like those whose feet are swift and beautiful upon the
mountains with the gospel of peace. If we have forgiven, been forgiven, then it's our privilege
to declare the message of forgiveness through the Savior's blood to all the world. But this is not
the end of the matter. This is not the end in itself, but just as all the wonders of this book
end in all flesh, worshiping Jehovah at the holy mount of Jerusalem, so so far as we are concerned,
in our time and place, if we are cleansed and forgiven, we are indeed sent out into all the
world to preach the gospel. But let us never forget that the end of the matter is that the
Father seeketh those who will worship him in spirit and in truth. And we can easily read our
own Christian New Testament truth into these words when we find that the end of it is that all flesh
comes up to the holy mountain of Jerusalem to worship Jehovah. Now let us turn back to, just
for a few minutes, to one or two, what I have previously called one or two highlights, and in
particular the verses that we have, from which we are given a title to this afternoon's meeting,
in chapter 61 and chapter 63. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord hath
anointed me. Now we often use the term Messiah, and we have given a title here, the Anointed One,
but here we have the Messiah, because as we all know the word Messiah means the Anointed One. The
Redeemer who has come to Zion is the Messiah. And it's a very remarkable the way, even though the
activity of the moment, so far as the setting of these chapters is concerned, even though the
activity of the moment is the day of vengeance of our God, is it possible that God should
altogether overlook the fact that the hands of wicked men have been placed upon his beloved
Son? He has been scorned and despised and crucified and cast out of the world. Well, first of all,
that precious blood of Christ speaks better things than that of Abel. It speaks mercy to
all who will hear and repent and believe. And we can thank God that most of us here today have
indeed heard that the blood of Christ has spoken to us better things than the blood of Abel. But
when in God's long-suffering love has lingered over the world and the day of salvation is complete,
be assured, and let all the world be assured, that the day of vengeance will come. And in that
one who spoke these words in his own city of Nazareth in Galilee, the time will come when the
day of vengeance will be in his heart. The first verses certainly specify the person and the grace
of that person. I've often thought of the dramatic situation in Nazareth of Galilee that day.
Now, Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, he wasn't only the son of the carpenter of Nazareth. I think
it is in Mark that he is called the carpenter of Nazareth. Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth,
went into the synagogue, and they delivered him the book to read. And I have every reason to
believe that the portion designated in the ordinary course of reading for that day was
this verse from Isaiah chapter 61. And the very words of the Messiah himself uttered these words,
the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. Who would have thought, when we asked the question in Isaiah
61, why is it the first person? Why does the Messiah speak? Because the time would come when
he would take the very words upon his lips and say, the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because he has, oh, beautiful words, he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor,
to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of prison to them
that are bound. We are told that he delivered the book up again and sat down. And then we can
imagine the blank incredulity with which these faithless men heard the words, this day is this
scripture fulfilled in your ears. There isn't the slightest doubt in anybody who reads this Bible
how these words were fulfilled. They were fulfilled at that very moment in Nazareth of Galilee and the
synagogue when Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, said, this day are these words fulfilled in your
ears. And he proceeded to manifest forth in words of grace and deeds of mighty power. He proceeded
to demonstrate the good tidings to the meek and the binding up of the brokenhearted by his word,
and the proclaiming of liberty to the captives, and the opening of prison to them that are bound.
It was then the acceptable year of the Lord. But you see, it is in the light of our knowledge,
after the event that we know, that all the long extent as it has turned out of the church period
comes between the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God. Don't let
us forget that day of vengeance of our God was the manner and the moment of the liberation of
God's people from Soldom. That day of vengeance was upon those who held them captive. That day
of vengeance was upon those who had persecuted them and destroyed them. And therefore, the day
of vengeance of our God was not only the day of vengeance, but it was the day of salvation and
the day of liberation for his people. And we have to reckon, and it is very well indeed that we have
to reckon with the fact that God's arm is not shortened, that God can deal with the evil,
the violence and corruption that's in the world. It's a heartbreaking thing to contemplate,
but on the other hand, what a stabilizing thing it is to contemplate that God will and can,
can and will deal with the violence and corruption that's in the world. We look around and we see it
in our own country and we see it in other countries. How is it possible to find a person
wise enough to know how to reconcile in the seemingly equal claims of conflicting parties?
Where's the wisdom going to come from? And if it's done, who's going to have the power to put in an
execution? And who's going to be able to rule with judgment and with equity? Well, we have it all
here. Our Savior is the wonderful Counselor and the mighty God, as well as having the compassion
of the Everlasting Father, and he is the Prince of Peace. And therefore, we shouldn't be stumbled
or amazed at the fact that he is here represented as treading the winepress of the wrath of God upon
earth in order that the guilt of man might be avenged and that his people might be liberated.
The figure of the winepress, as we all know, which comes alongside the figure of the grain
harvest in the Revelation, the grain harvest is a discriminating judgment. It's so presented to us
by the Lord Jesus Christ. There will be gathered out that which is good and there will be the
destruction of that which is evil. But the winepress is the casting of the whole mass
into the winepress and it's trampled with judgment. And that's the figure that's given to us here.
In chapter 63, it is as though you have a watchman at the gates of Jerusalem. And he says,
who is this who is coming from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah? Edom, we have already had,
and Bozrah, in chapter 34. We won't take the time now to refer to them, but we have had them. Edom
and Bozrah, these are the places where the enemies of God's people in the immediately
surrounding countries will be brought down and trampled on the foot and brought to acknowledge
that the Lord is God. Armageddon is the place where the Western powers and their head will
be brought to nothing. The valley of Jehoshaphat, the valley of decision, may be the place where
the king of the North or the Assyrian is brought down. But here in Edom and Bozrah is the place
where these nations immediately surrounding Palestine, who have been so treacherous at
various times to the people of God, it's there that they in the end will be brought to destruction.
And he comes from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah. Who is this glorious in his apparel,
traveling in the greatness of his strength? Although the moment is one of judgment,
doesn't the majesty of the words appeal to us, describing the majesty of our Saviour? Who is
this that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? The answer,
the answer, I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save. That reminds us that this
destruction is a destruction to result in salvation. We often take those two words and
use them for our salvation. He's mighty to save, we say, and we do it rightly. But in their setting,
it means that he's mighty to save his earthly people by the destruction of their enemies by
his righteousness and his judgment and his equity and truth. I that speak in righteousness,
mighty to save. I'm the one who's coming from Edom. Verse two, wherefore art thou red in thine
apparel and thy garments like him that treadeth in the wine fat? Answer, I have trodden the wine
press alone and of the people there was none with thee. Verse four, for the day of vengeance is in
my heart and the year of my redeemed is come. Verse six, and I will tread down the peoples,
not the people, the peoples who immediately surrounded the land of Israel. I will tread
down the peoples in mine anger and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their
strength to the earth. How much on the one hand we must rejoice at the fact that violence and
corruption and evil will ultimately here upon this earth be dealt with by our Savior. But it's
all in order that he may go on to speak of the loving kindness of the Lord. Now I have just two
other points that I want to draw your attention to. I've mentioned them already. In chapter 62,
verses six and seven, this is part of the call to prayer. But in verse six, it says,
I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day or night.
Now let us read the margin. Ye that are the Lord's remembrances, keep not silence and give him no
rest till he establish and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Well, this is a most
striking call to prayer and a most striking indication of the kind of rationale, the true
spiritual rationale of prayer. We must not think that we can change the mind of the Lord by our
importunity, that we can fix our minds on some particular thing and decide to pray for this and
change the mind of the Lord. The Lord's remembrances, those who really continue steadfast
in prayer in this day, the Lord's remembrances were the people who knew what God desired to do
and entered into fellowship with him by giving him no rest day or night until his purposes are
established. And although the matter comes to us in a more spiritual guise, yet did it not strike
you that this is a very lovely word to us? Ye that are the Lord's remembrances, keep not silence,
give him no rest until he establish, until he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Of all the
verses, and there are many verses, and there are difficulties, as no one knows better than I do,
there are difficulties about the rationale of prayer. We don't need to worry too much about
being able to understand them, but it seems to me that one of the most striking lights upon prayer
is the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, if ye abide in me and my words abide in you,
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done for you. In other words, the conditional prayer
is given us, we shall certainly ask what we will, but it supposes that we are abiding in Christ.
And if we are abiding day by day and moment by moment in Christ, and his word is abiding with
us, then what we will will be what he wills. And this great miracle will have taken place that God
has produced in my heart and your heart, in the ordinary details of life, a request that is
according to his will. And then we are to remind him of that request. Whatever we may think about
the rationale of this, ye that are the Lord's remembrance, keep not silence until he make
Jerusalem a praise in the earth. And one of the great messages that I suggest that we might take
away from this prophet Isaiah is this verse, ye that are the Lord's remembrances, keep not silence.
Let us read over, when we go away, the burning intensity of desire that is in this prayer of
chapter 60. For all that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, now that dost deliver
thy people in days of old, all that thou wouldst come down and deliver us now, ye that are the
Lord's remembrances, keep not silence. About all the details of what the Lord has promised us
in our individual daily lives, of all that the Lord has established and given us to understand
about his will regarding the church in the present and in the future, we must never weary in prayer.
In the old and new testament, for the people of God in all ages, when all is said and done,
it comes back to a call to prayer. No Mohammedan Muezzin from the minaret of the mosque ever gave
a more constant call that comes to us from holy scripture, in answer to the things that God has
revealed, ye that are the Lord's remembrances, keep not silence, and he will make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
Now finally, you see I'm casting a side eye on the clock this time. Finally, I want to put together
these two verses in chapter 57. I'll read it again because it's so short.
Thus saith the high and lofty one that inhabited eternity, whose name is holy, I dwell in the high
and holy place with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit. And the second verse of chapter 66,
so closely parallel, to this man will I look, even to him that is of a poor
and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.
One of the things that I failed to mention, of many things that I failed to mention,
is that one of the predominant names of God used by Isaiah is this, the holy one of Israel.
It's used about 30 times altogether, almost equally divided between books one and two,
and one of the marks that they were both written by the same prophet Isaiah, although the subjects
are so widely differentiated in time and in subject. The holy one of Israel, and here he
speaks to himself as the high and lofty one that inhabited eternity, whose name is holy.
I suppose the root idea of God's holiness is the fact that he's separate. Separate in the
incomparable majesty that he has declared, for example, in the 40th chapter.
Separate in his utter rejection and distance from all that is unclean and evil. This is the God
revealed from cover to cover of the book of God. He's the holy one. He inhabits eternity.
I read a very striking sentence about this, which I will endeavor to give to you verbatim.
Man might be said to inhabit three score years and ten.
Call on him during that time when you will, and you may find him at home.
But then he is gone, and his place knows him no more. But Jehovah dwells and is alive from
everlasting to everlasting. I am the high and lofty one. I dwell in eternity. There never will
be a moment when God is inaccessible to us. We may knock at the door of our closest friend
and find that they're not available. And in the end, a man's place knows him no more,
and those who have looked to him for help cannot find it. But here is one
of whom he says in this context that he inhabits eternity. But there's one other place where he
dwells. One other place where he dwells. Be it that we take into account all the truth about
the dwelling place of God in time and eternity, all the truth about the church in which dwells
God by the Spirit, this remains true. There's one other place that God dwells in, and that is
with him who is of a humble and contrite spirit. If you and I desire to take anything away from
this book which is really of God, and we want to be close to him and realize his dwelling with us,
then that which ever comes to us from all parts of scripture is that God resists the proud.
Oh, how much of pride, how much of self-importance is mixed in with the very best that is in our
hearts as the fruit of the Spirit. You know, we are creatures of such terribly mixed motives.
One sometimes tries to analyze the action of ourselves or another and say,
he did it for so-and-so, he did it because of so-and-so. The fact of the matter is not only
is it impossible for us to analyze the motives of others, but nothing is ever done from a pure
motive. Nothing is ever done, so long as we're here in creatures of flesh and blood, with the
very best of motives in our hearts, there will always be that whisper of pride and self-importance.
But God, by the example of him who was meek and lowly in heart, he took the lowly place and he
did not resist when others gave him the lowly place. By the contemplation and the feeding upon
him who is meek and lowly in heart, we shall by this means and no other be of a humble and
contrite spirit. And if we turn over to chapter 66, what else does it say? What have we got to do
about this word that we've been reading? How often we might be satisfied with being informed
in our minds and having a clear outline of truth and a proper understanding of the skeletal
structure of the truth presented by the Word of God. All this is good, but amongst many other
manners of response and manners of reception that is here suggested and enforced to us is this,
that we tremble at this word. If God is going to deal with evil, if God resists and hates evil,
he hates it in you and me. And it's therefore necessary for us right to the end of our days
that we go on as well as begin in what the scripture truly means by the fear of the Lord,
and we want to be amongst those who tremble at the Word of God. This is what God says,
and we'll leave it at this for this afternoon. I am the holy, high, and lofty one that inhabits
eternity, but with this man also who is of a humble and contrite spirit and trembles at my word.
Now, as far as I understand what I said to the sisters who asked me what time to have tea,
there is at least 20 minutes or so when we could deal with questions relating to any part of the
book of Isaiah. I said to you at an earlier stage, there are very many things I don't understand
about it, and more than ever I feel the danger of exposing myself to questions, but it isn't
only questions, it's contributions of any kind we may have, and we will seek humbly to speak
of them together. So please let us spend these few minutes in questions and perhaps suggestions
about the prophet Isaiah.
I don't need somebody to give us a start, and we shall never be able to stop.
We've lived, some of us, to see Judea restored and other powers come into existence,
but we don't see much of the Assyrian world. Can you give us any light on that?
I did mention before, and would like to say it again for the sake of those who were not here,
that if we remember what we have previously talked about in Daniel chapter 11, which talked
to us about the kings of the north and the king of the south, we read there at the very end,
before the coming of Christ, of a sweeping invasion from the north, and when we were reading
the first 39 chapters of this book, we realized that this is exactly what is said of the Assyrian
in the future day. The Assyrian scourged the people of God in the past, in the days of Ahaz
and Hezekiah, but we also read that when the Lord has finished his whole work, he's going to deal
with the Assyrians. Therefore, the Assyrian is one of the evil personages of the last days,
and we, for the time being, took it that he was synonymous with the king of the north.
But he's one of those who will come streaming down upon Palestine for the crisis immediately
preceding the coming of the Lord. Now, your question, Mr. Irwin, is that although we see
the other nations, many of them, on our maps and on the headlines, that is Egypt and Israel
and Syria, for example, we don't yet see the name Assyria on the headlines or in the news.
That's the particular point it is. Well, the Assyrian area, whether we regard it as being
in the time of Isaiah or whether we regard it as being in the time of Daniel chapter 11,
when he was first of all speaking, then there was a great arc, a great curve of territory,
which began in the east in what we now call Iraq and curved away to the north and then came down
from the north onto Palestine. Now, the particular part of that great curve coming over from
Syria in the east, Mesopotamia, the particular part of that curve which comes down
to impinge upon Israel was from the time between the testaments called Syria. So for our purpose,
the name Syria is the name of that part of the ancient Assyria which actually touches on the
people of Israel. So that the present picture that we have of Israel being threatened not only by
Egypt from the south but by Syria from the north is the thing that's in line with this. Now,
considering that the scripture talks about the king of the north and the scripture talks about
the Assyrian and the scripture talks about Gog, the prince of Rosh, Meshach, and Tubal, there are
various names that are used in describing in prophetic terms this great power who will sweep
down from the north. We already, it is suggested, and I believe it myself, we already see the name
Rosh in Russia. We already see the name Syria, and it could very well be that this is the nearest
that we shall ever get to the word Assyria, both historically and in language. They're both
very closely associated with each other. It's not the nearest we shall see, but it is possible,
of course, just as in so miraculous a way others of these ancient names have reappeared, Assyria
may do so. We wouldn't be surprised if it did, but because of the variety of names used in
scripture for this great power, it may be that one of the others will still be the predominant name.
The point is this, if we, am I making it clear? I did think of using maps, but I haven't done so.
If we think of starting our sight of the map in the upper part of Mesopotamia, coming up in Iraq,
that is the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, we think of a curve of land coming
over and coming down onto the Mediterranean seaboard and impinging upon Israel. Well,
both in ancient times and in the times of Daniel, that is the time of Alexander the Great, this was
one kingdom, it was one authority, and it was all called Assyria, after the part of it that
really originated in Mesopotamia. But for the part of it, immediately in contact with Israel,
the name Syria, the Greek name Syria, was invented in the time between the Testaments,
taken presumably from the word Assyria, but it was invented to represent that particular
part of the ancient Assyrian power which directly impinged upon the land of Israel. So without
doubt, both by language and by geography, the two names are very closely associated with each other.
Yes?
Yes, there's a confusion here which is easy enough to explain, but
you have to take it away and think about it. The Old Testament word Syria, you see, is the word
that the translators used because they lived after Alexander's time. But the Old Testament
word which is translated Syria is Aram, and we ought completely to forget Syria in the Old Testament
in the context of the Syria that is now attacking and is to be part of this Assyrian power. It's
just one of these strange language confusions that the Old Testament word Aram was seen to
represent that bit of territory, and therefore the translators called it Syria. But there's
absolutely no justification except for the usage of hundreds of years afterwards for doing so. The
Bible name for the place where Naaman lived is Aram and not Syria. But that's not an easy
point to take, and I think a little bit of reflection upon it will be needed.
I should like to ask a question.
You referred us in Isaiah 28 to what you said was a covenant which the Jews would make for
the Assyrians, the king of the north, under the heading of your covenant with death and with
love. You also made a remark of the effect in these prophecies, you often get a leap forward,
and whilst there might have been a partial fulfillment historically of the king of the
north and his historical past, would you agree, or would you not, that Isaiah 28 would look on
to the day when a treaty should be made between the Jews under the king of the east and the
north? Yes, Mr. Anderson, this must have been one of the moments when I was
spluttering with eagerness, because you've misheard me, I'm afraid. What I said was that
they made a covenant with death, and then in brackets, so to speak, Egypt, not Assyria.
They made a covenant with Egypt against Assyria, but the Spirit of God does not say Egypt. All the
surroundings of the passage would give us to understand it was Egypt to which they were
looking for help from Assyria. But I believe the very reason why the Spirit of God doesn't say
Egypt, it says a covenant with death and a covenant with hell, is because it has not only this
reference to the past, but it has a reference to the future. The people were in wickedness and
unbelief relying upon a covenant, both in the past and in the future. In the past it was Egypt,
in the future, as you say, it will certainly be Rome. And I think that's why it doesn't specify.
They were relying upon a covenant, and it's that fact that they were relying upon a covenant or a
treaty in a complete lack of fidelity and confidence and trust in the Lord that is the
thing deplored, one might say, there. They were relying upon a covenant, a treaty, instead of
trusting in the Lord, when in quietness and confidence they could have had their strength.
So with a little bit of explanation of what I'm afraid I must have spluttered out somewhat
indistinctly, I do entirely agree with what you say.
And the prophetic leap forward is what is given first in beautiful language in Isaiah 25.
Yes, yes. Now, this, Mr. Anderson, I'm very delighted with this point because it's one of
the things I had to miss out, and I should love to get you to turn to Isaiah 25 and have a look
at what it says there, all of us, Isaiah chapter 25.
It's talking, of course, about the future kingdom, and it's after the various passages in which
the prophet is dealing with the surrounding nations, and the chapters before it talks about
the Lord making the earth empty and the Lord reigning, the last verse of chapter 24,
the Lord reigning on Mount Zion. And then the prophet turns to praise the Lord in chapter 25,
he praises the Lord on behalf of his people. And in verse 6, in this mountain,
now that means the mountain which is the future kingdom, the millennium, the kingdom of Christ,
in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of
wines on the leaves, and so on. Verse 7, in this mountain he shall destroy the face of the covering
cast over all people and the veil that is spread over all nations. Then verse 8, he will swallow
up death in victory. First Corinthians 15, the full meaning given to it, he shall swallow up death
in victory. The Lord God shall wipe away tears from off all faces. This is twice quoted in the
New Testament, and what a lovely statement of the end, one facet of the end to which our God is
working, what no other power has ever been able to bring about. There have been comforts here and
there in the mercies of God for the sorrowful and the weary, but no one has ever conceived of such
a thing except the word of God, that he will wipe away all tears from off all faces. There will be
no more crying, no more tears, no more sadness. The Lord God shall wipe away all tears from off all
faces. This is the kind of God in whom we trust. And the prophet puts into the people, the mouth
of the people, the response in verse 9, and it shall be said in that day, they will say, Lord this is
our God. We have waited for him. You know, without the slightest doubt, this is what we want to say
for ourselves. What are we doing about the sadness in the world and the injustice? We are preaching
the gospel of peace, the gospel of peace and life and freedom. But we are preaching the gospel of
one who is absolutely certainly going to wipe away all tears from off all eyes. And when the time
comes with these people, we can well be able to say, lo, this is our God. We have waited for him
and we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation. I think it's one of the most wonderful passages in
Isaiah, to think that we can ourselves rejoice in the fact, in the character and the aims and
the heart and the power of the God for whom now we are waiting while we seek to please him and to
serve him in his gospel and in all the ways that he puts to us. This is our God. We have waited for
him and we shall be glad and rejoice in his salvation. I think you're quite right, Mr. Anderson,
and I'm very pleased that you have drawn our attention to that very wonderful passage. This
is our God. This is the kind of God of whom we shall never have cause to be ashamed,
that instead of putting out our own efforts to rectify things in the world, we have waited for him.
Yes, it could be, the veil there could be, the fact that the knowledge of God is hidden from them
as well as all these other things, death and tears. Then this could be, I quite agree,
connected with the fact that there's a veil over those who don't believe,
and it's for this reason that they do not know this God for whom we wait.
Thank you.
No other question for a last one?
Well, let us close our meeting this afternoon with hymn number 318.
O Lamb of God, still keep us close to thy piercing side.
It is only there in safety and peace we can abide. With foes and snares around us,
and lusts and fears within, the grace that sought and found us alone can keep us clean.
Number 318. …
Transcrição automática:
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We are going to read together Isaiah chapter 52 verse 13 to the end of 53.
Isaiah 52
Isaiah 52 verse 13
Behold, my servant shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.
As many were astonished at thee, his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.
So shall he sprinkle many nations. The kings shall shut their mouths at him.
For that which had not been told them, they shall see. And that which they had not heard, they shall consider.
Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
For he shall go up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground.
He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.
The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.
He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is done, so he openeth not his mouth.
He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who shall declare his generation?
For he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people was he stricken.
And he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death.
Because he hath done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him, he hath put him to grief.
When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.
By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoiled with the strong.
Because he hath poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and he bear the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
For the beginning of our meeting this evening, I should like to go right back to the very beginning.
At the point where we started last Tuesday evening, in going over again the story of those two who were walking out from Jerusalem to Emers, seven miles.
They were accustomed to walking, but this particular afternoon, the third day after Jesus died, their feet were led and their hearts were stoned.
And we can very well imagine them with their faces lined with sorrow, and trudging along with their heads together, and talking with each other about their sorrow.
And so engrossed were they in this that they didn't see a stranger who came, and coming alongside them, fell in step and joined in the conversation.
What can be the things that you're talking about to make you, Luke, so sad?
And the stranger said, What things?
And they stopped and said, You must be the only person staying in Jerusalem these days who hasn't heard about the things that are happening there.
And he said again, What things?
And they said, The things concerning Jesus the Nazarene.
We had hoped that he would be the deliverer of Israel, but our rulers delivered him up to the Romans, and he was crucified.
And all this took place three days ago.
But this morning, some of our women made us very surprised by saying they'd been along to the sepulchre, and they had found it empty.
And someone else, the men had gone to see, and they came back and said that they'd seen an angel who had said to them that Jesus was not there.
He was risen, and it was very true that they did not find his body.
And that's the rest of the astonishing story that we have to tell.
And the stranger said to them, Oh, how foolish, how slow you are to believe those very scriptures that you've been telling me about.
You said that they had led you to think that he would be the redeemer who would deliver Israel.
And beginning at the beginning of the scriptures in the book of Genesis, he went through all the Bible, telling them of the things concerning himself.
By this time, the afternoon had worn on, and they said it will soon be dark.
And although he would have made to go on, they persuaded him to come in with them, and they soon had a meal ready.
But then they got the last big surprise, because the stranger became the host.
And he took the food and blessed it and gave to them.
And suddenly they knew him.
It was Jesus, and in an instant he vanished out of their sight.
And they sat looking at each other and said, Did you realize that while he was talking to us, our hearts of stone suddenly began to warm up, and they began to burn with fire.
And at that same instant, tired though they were, they arose and they walked back the seven miles to Jerusalem.
Now I wonder if you can, like I can, see myself in those two believers trudging along from Jerusalem to Emmaus.
They were terribly disillusioned with the faith that they had embraced as they saw things at that moment.
And their disillusionment made them sad, and their hearts of stone were so depressing that it gave them feet of lead.
Where did they get the energy to walk that seven miles back to Jerusalem?
They got it because of the burning heart.
And the fact that when Jesus spoke to them, it made their hearts burn within them, by the way.
This was what gave them the energy to burn up their disillusionment and to send them back to meet again with the disciples.
And very shortly afterwards, in the power of that same heart of burning love, responding to the Lord, they were amongst those who went out into all the world to preach the gospel.
And we might well ask ourselves, can we have an experience like that?
Do you think that the Lord Jesus Christ included the book of Isaiah in the things in all the scriptures concerning himself? Indeed he did.
And what we have prayed for this week, and I am thankful to say that I believe that in some measure the Lord has already granted our request,
what we have prayed for is that we might have the burning heart.
We ask him to give us the burning heart, to burn up our disillusionment and the fact that we are so often sad and cast down.
And to make us, enable us to know him by the way along life's journey.
And in the midst, in the church, where there is so much privilege and at the same time often such disappointment.
And also out there in the world, to use the language of this book, beautiful upon the mountains are those who preach good tidings of peace.
And so what we are aiming for, what we have been aiming for this week, and what we are aiming for and praying for tonight,
is just this simple thing that the Lord may make our hearts burn within us as he speaks to us by the way of the things in the scriptures concerning himself.
Now we have, in order to attain that aim for which we have asked the Lord, we have tried to go together through the book of Isaiah,
to open up the book and especially we have sought to see in it the Lord Jesus Christ himself.
And believe it or not, except for these eight chapters, which are the subjects of our meeting this evening, we have dipped into every chapter in the whole book of Isaiah.
And I don't know whether you have ever heard of a marathon, but it seems to me that the brothers and sisters who have been here,
they have really done a marathon in giving their prayerful attention to dip into every chapter in the book of the prophet Isaiah,
seeking to have the book opened up to them and seeking to find the Lord Jesus Christ therein.
Now the chapters that surround this central chapter that we have, Mr. Vernon was just reminding me during the interval what I have read before,
that if we take the last part, the twenty-seven of the sixty-six chapters of the book, then chapter fifty-three,
where our eyes behold the Savior in his suffering love, this is the central chapter of these chapters,
and of that chapter itself, if we take the proper confines of it as he read it, then the central verse of that central chapter,
and indeed something which every believer must recognize, lies at the very heart of our knowledge of the Lord.
He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the justicement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed.
Now regarding these chapters that form this particular section, chapters forty-nine and fifty-seven,
I want to contrast this section, just for a few minutes by way of background, with the chapters we had before us on Friday evening, that is chapters forty to forty-eight.
In a couple of sentences, in chapters forty to forty-eight, we saw God's people, the Israelites,
in the rigors and sorrows and hardships of their captivity in Babylon, and crying to the Lord, thinking that he had forgotten,
we saw them unable to look forward to their liberation from that city where they were captives, and their restoration to their holy and beloved city, Zion.
We saw that in announcing this to them, the prophet, in announcing this to them, delivering his message from the Lord,
he entered into God's controversy with his people when he thought about that backward look, about idols.
And we saw that this, although we may not immediately be able to cause a matter to spring to mind,
there is always a possible controversy between the Lord and his people about idols.
Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
I had a letter from a brother in Germany the other day in which he said that one of the causes of the weakness amongst us, is what he said,
is the materialism that has swept over the Western world and is adored by everybody.
He saw the point. He cannot serve God and mammon.
There is a controversy now between God and his people about idolatry.
Little children, keep yourselves from idolatry, from whatever takes the place in your love and your devotion and the employment of your time,
that only God in Christ Jesus ought to have.
The people were taught to look forward in these chapters to their liberation from bondage,
and in looking forward, the prophet opened up the controversy that they had forsaken God and they turned to idols.
Now in these chapters, and this may surprise you, but I would like to ask you to make an effort to take the point.
In these chapters, they're looking backward to Calvary.
Have you ever wondered why this story of Isaiah 53 is in the past?
He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities.
The reason is that it is primarily the confession and the affliction of soul to which God's earthly people will give expression
when they look upon him whom they have pierced, and therefore they're looking back and seeing what they saw in him
and confessing their dreadful error, but in the end saying he was wounded for our transgressions and by his stripes we are healed.
So they're looking backward to Calvary, and the prophet is opening up a far greater controversy between God and his earthly people
in that they rejected the Messiah.
When he came to his own people and stood at his own door, they refused him,
and this matter had to be gone into between God and his people,
and it resulted in this conviction and this confession, and then the fact that through his stripes and their faith in him they were healed.
Now that's the general aspect that this section of the book presents to us.
It is that God's earthly people are looking backward to Calvary, and they in the end are brought to confess their sins.
Now, once again, I must ask you, open your Bibles, chapter 49, and bow your heads to look at them,
and please strive to follow with me while I assume that you've got the words under your eyes,
and we go through the remaining nine chapters of the prophet Isaiah to complete the tally of 66 chapters of mighty privilege.
In chapter 49, Israel speaks first and says that he is Jehovah's servant.
He says, Israel says in verse 1,
The Lord hath called me from the womb, and in verse 3,
And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.
Now, one of the difficulties of understanding this book is in the question, who is the servant of the Lord?
Again and again, we are assured that the servant of the Lord is Israel,
but it's perfectly plain from every word of quotation in the New Testament
that the servant of the Lord in these wonderful four servant poems that we've begun to study,
the servant of the Lord is undoubtedly the Lord Jesus Christ,
undoubtedly the one who came here to do a work on the part of the Lord.
He was undoubtedly the one who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities and by whom we can be healed.
But at this point is where the explanation occurs and the transition takes place.
In verse 3, Israel says,
Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.
In verse 4, Christ speaks and says,
I have labored in vain, I've spent my strength anote,
yet surely my judgment is with the Lord and my work is with my God.
And now saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant,
there is Emmanuel again,
that formed me from the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob again to him.
It would very well, might very well be concluded by those with an external view
who saw the lifetime of the Lord Jesus Christ upon earth,
that he had labored in vain.
He had spent his strength anote.
It might have looked so,
but then the Lord said to him,
the true servant, the Lord Jesus Christ,
verse 5,
Though Israel be not gathered at that time,
this emphasizes the backward look,
yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord and my God shall be my strength.
And he was going to be in the future,
not only the restorer of the tribes of Jacob,
but in the end of verse 6,
he was going to be for God's salvation to the end of the earth.
In verse 7, he speaks very wonderful words about himself.
It says,
He was the one whom man despised,
whom the nation abhorred.
And this was the description of him when he was here amongst men.
In verse 8,
after the servant poem is finished,
the Lord speaks
and he indicates
that Israel will come from afar
and they will come back to Zion.
Verse 9,
Go forth, he says to them that are in darkness,
show yourselves.
They shall feed in the ways
and their pastures shall be in high places.
They shall not hunger or thirst.
In verse 12,
These shall come from far
and lo, these from the north and the west
and these from the land of Sinim.
In other words,
a universal recovery,
not only of the Jews,
a universal recovery of all God's earthly people
in that future time
are going to come back to Zion.
And then we have a very remarkable part indeed
when Zion
is likened to an astonished widow
who has lost all her children.
And she says,
verse 18,
Lift up thine eyes round about,
the Lord says to her rather,
Lift up thine eyes round about,
and behold,
all these gather themselves together
and come to thee.
As I live, saith the Lord,
thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all,
as with an ornament,
and bind them on thee as a bride doth.
For thy waste and thy desolate places
and the land of thy destruction
shall even now be too narrow
by reason of the inhabitants,
and they that swallowed thee up
shall be far away.
The children which thou shalt have
after thou hast lost the other
shall say again in thine ears,
The place is too straight for us,
give place to me that I may dwell.
In other words,
Zion is being addressed
as a mother bereft of all her children.
And then to her astonishment,
she suddenly finds children
she never dreamt of
gathered to her
so that her habitation
is too small for them.
And that is very plainly explained
when the Lord addresses her
when she says,
Who hath begotten these,
seeing I have lost my children?
Verse 21.
The Lord says in verse 22,
Behold, I lift up mine hand to the Gentiles
and set up my standard to the people
and they shall bring thy sons in their arms
and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.
In other words,
the explanation is
that God himself has set the nations
to restore all the dispersed of Israel
back to their mother, Zion.
Now in chapter 50,
once again,
very definitely
from the standpoint of that future gathering,
the Lord said,
Why were you away from me,
seeing I did not put you away?
Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement
whom I have put away?
Or to which of my creditors
is it to whom I have sold you?
No, he says,
it's your iniquities
for ye have sold yourselves
and your transgressions.
Wherefore when I came,
was there no man?
There's the controversy, you see.
When Jehovah,
as the humble Nazarene,
appeared and spoke to them,
when he came,
there was no one to answer him.
But when we come to verse 4,
we find the voice
with which the Lord Jesus Christ
spake when he came
on the part of the Lord
to be his servant.
Verse 4,
The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned,
that I should know how to speak a word in season
to him that is weary.
Verse 5,
Not only his tongue,
but his ear.
The Lord God hath opened mine ear,
and I was not rebellious,
neither turned away back.
I gave my back to the slighters,
smiters, and so on.
Verse 9,
Behold, the Lord God will help me.
Now let us notice very particularly
the last two verses,
in the verse 10 and 11 of chapter 50.
Who is among you,
this is addressed once again
to these restored people,
who is among you that feareth the Lord,
that obeyeth the voice of his servant,
that walketh in darkness and hath no light.
Let him trust in the name of the Lord
and stay upon his God.
Behold, all ye that kindle a fire,
that compass yourselves about with sparks,
walk in the light of your fire,
and in the sparks that ye have kindled,
this shall ye have of mine hand,
ye shall lay down in sorrow.
So that these people of God,
in view of their restoration,
they are divided,
you see,
into some,
we know by other passages,
the majority,
who walk in the light of their own fire
and the sparks they had kindled,
but there were some
who listened to the voice of his servant.
And here,
we have very plainly,
the remnant of the Jews
in a future day.
We read about them in Matthew 24.
We find that just as
the disciples were these people
in the gospel story,
so there will be in the future
people in exactly the same situation
who will be Jews but believers in Jesus
and they will be the remnant
through whom God will bless his people
in a future day.
So just as in Matthew 24
you deal with the disciples of the past
and the remnant of the future,
the instructions to the disciples of the past
become word for word
the Lord's instructions
to the remnant of the future
who will be his disciples
immediately prior to the coming of the Lord
and then from that point,
that remnant here
in chapter,
beginning in chapter 50 verse 10,
that remnant is taken on to the point
of their full salvation
when they look upon him
whom they have pierced.
Now, it's a very remarkable piece
of symmetrical poetry
in which this is done.
You notice the three times
hearken unto me.
Chapter 51 verse 1,
verse 4 and verse 7.
Three times hearken unto me.
The first one says
your father Abraham and Sarah
they were alone
but I increased them
until there were many
and so that remnant
that are only a tiny few
when they first believed in the Lord
they will be increased
until they made a blessing
to the whole of God's people.
And so the second
hearken verse 4
hearken my people
a law shall proceed for me
and I will make my judgment a rest
for a light of the people.
My righteousness is near
my salvation is gone forth.
Verse 6, lift up your eyes
to the heavens
and look upon the earth
for the heavens shall vanish away
but my salvation shall be forever
and my righteousness
shall not be abolished.
And lastly in verse 7
hearken unto me
and once again it ends by saying
my righteousness shall be forever
and my salvation
from generation to generation.
In other words these few
tiny few believers of the future
who are Jews
they're encouraged step by step
to establish and increase
their faith in the Lord.
And then you have three times over
awake, awake.
Verse 9 of chapter 51
verse 17 of chapter 51
and verse 1 of chapter 52.
In verse 9 of chapter 51
it is the arm of the Lord
that is addressed.
Now this is very important
because of the
occurrence of the expression
the arm of the Lord
in chapter 53.
To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
What does the arm of the Lord mean?
It tells us here
awake as in ancient days
in the generations of old.
These few are calling upon the power
that liberated Israel from Egypt
to liberate them
and to bring them into blessing.
Awake O arm of the Lord
as in the generations of old.
Art thou not it
that hath cut Rahab or Egypt
and wounded the dragon?
And so on.
They're calling upon the strength of the Lord
personified as the arm of the Lord
to be their deliverer.
And then Zion is addressed
in verse 17
and again in verse 52
Zion is addressed.
And just see what it says to them there
in view of the salvation
that's so soon coming.
Put on thy beautiful garments
O Jerusalem, the holy city.
For henceforth
thou shalt no more come unto thee
the uncircumcised and the unclean.
Shake thyself from the dust.
Arise O Jerusalem.
Verse 7
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him
that bringeth good tidings.
What are the good tidings?
The good tidings is
that the Lord Jesus Christ
as the King is reigning
that saith unto Zion
Thy God reigneth.
When that moment comes
as far as his earthly people are concerned
they shall see eye to eye.
They shall sing together
when the Lord shall bring again Zion.
And so they are called to depart
from the place of their dispersion and captivity
and to come together.
And so we come to the part that we have read
Behold my servant shall deal prudently.
And there we have the last
of these four servant poems.
And we have the Lord speaking
saying my servant
behold my servant
oh this is what we want to do this evening
we want to look to him
we want to behold him
we want to contemplate him
he'll be exalted and very high.
But then Israel speaks
and they say who hath believed our report
and they're looking back to his earthly life
which occupies the first three verses
and then in the verses four to six
we have this central point where
they do recognize the fact
that it was for their transgressions
just as we can say for our transgressions
that he was bruised and by his stripes we were healed
and so we find that it goes on to speak about
his death and his burial
and yet the fact that he shall
prolong his days and the pleasure of the Lord
shall prosper in his hand
and he shall see of the trouble of his soul
and shall be satisfied.
Now chapter fifty-four
returns again to the idea of Zion
as a mother who has been bereft
astonished at the restoration of all these children
all the people of Israel to her
sing oh barren
thou that didst not bear
break forth into singing
and cry aloud
thou that didst not trouble this child
for more are the children of the desolate
than the children of the married wife
and this goes on to call them to enlarge
the place of their abode
to make room for all the children
who have been given to her
and this goes on to encourage them
although they have been afflicted in the past
verse eleven
for thou afflicted, tossed with tempest
and not comforted, behold
I will lay thy stones with fair colors
and lay thy foundations with sapphires
and so to the end
no weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper
and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment
thou shalt condemn
this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord
and the righteous is of me, saith the Lord
Now the remaining three chapters
fifty-five, fifty-six, and fifty-seven
they come, change entirely
in order to impress upon God's people
the behavior that is in accordance
with what God is going to give them
and of course there are words that spring out of the page to us
take for example in verse two
wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread
and your labor for that which satisfieth not
it has been said that this might be written large
over all the world at the present time
and why are you spending your money
on that which is not bread
and how we need
to face such a word as this
to make sure that we are not spending the precious currency
of our life's treasure
upon that which is not bread
when there is presented to us
old and young
the very delights of the bread of God
and the bread of life
and so it calls upon the people to seek the Lord
while he may be found
and call upon him while he is near
there's a very interesting part
which is well known to us
in verse eleven
so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth
it shall not return unto me void
but it shall accomplish that which I please
and it shall prosper in the thing to which I send it
and so we have right on to the end
in the last chapter of fifty-seven
there is a warning to the wicked
the wicked are like the troubled sea
when it can't rest
whose waters are cast up mire and dirt
verse twenty
and so to the end
there is no peace
saith my God to the wicked
now I would like to come back
and to consider
these three servant poems
that we have in these chapters
in a little more detail
very little indeed for the first two
but afterwards in more detail
as I've said
in back to chapter forty-nine
in the second of the servant poems
the first one being in chapter forty-two
then in verse four and five
the Lord Jesus Christ substitutes himself
for Israel as the Lord's servant
now of course there are several parallels for this
if we find it difficult
in other parts of the word
for example
when the Lord Jesus Christ says
I am the true vine
that's a very important parallel
because Israel was the vine brought out of Egypt
we have had in our own book
this song
in chapter five
of the vine that the Lord planted
and how he tended it
that it brought forth wild grapes
and because it brought forth wild grapes
God tore down its fences
and the wild boar of the forest tried it
and it failed altogether to be the vine
for Jehovah's pleasure giving joy to him
and when the Lord Jesus Christ said
I am the true vine
it meant that he took the place of Israel
where they had failed
and he would not fail
in rendering true joy and delight
by his fruit to God and to his people
or in another case
in a similar kind of way
concerning the Lord Jesus
the evangelist quotes
I've called my son out of Egypt
rehearsing again
the fact that the history of failed Israel
is to be taken up
and their work is to be done
by the one who would not fail
but in the meantime
although it is certain that he is going to be
for God's salvation
unto the ends of the earth
in the meantime think of these
amazing words
to him whom man despiseth
the Lord said this
to him whom man despiseth
and to him whom the nation abhorreth
to a servant of rulers
that's what it was in the past
he was despised
what a fate
what a lot to come
to the very king of heaven
what a thing to befall
the one who came to earth as the father's delight
it would have been a terrible thing
to say that they rejected him
but they set him at naught
they made him of no value
they despised him
the king of heaven
the one whom man despiseth
that's the estimate of man
we can never be sure
that the estimate of man is of any worth
whom man despiseth
to him whom the nation abhorreth
then the future will hold
that kings shall see and arise
and princes shall worship
because of the Lord who is faithful
and the Holy One of Israel
now let us take out of this
second of the servant poems
this point
he is going to
raise up the tribes of Judah
the middle of verse six
and to restore the preserve of Israel
it's going to be his work
and he won't fail in it
and the rest of the verse
he's going to be
for a light to the Gentiles
that he might be God's salvation
unto the end of the earth
now
when we come to the third
of the servant poems
we find that there is a contrast
with the way the Lord can speak
he can clothe the heavens with blackness
in verse three of chapter fifty
he can make sackcloth their covering
but when the Lord's servant came
verse four
the Lord God hath given me
the tongue of the learned
that I should know how to speak
a word in season
to him that is weary
oh right out
right beyond
stretching to the very bounds
where mankind can be found
is this
that that servant
is able to speak
here is the tongue
of the servant of the Lord
he was
and he is
and he ever will be
able to speak a word in season
to him that is weary
the class of weary
is very wide indeed
there's physical weariness
there's heart weariness
there's the weariness of the slave
at his toil
there's the weariness of those
over whom the afflictions of life
have trampled and torn their hearts
very wide indeed is the class of the weary
and some of us here this evening
are bound to be feeling ourselves
amongst those weary in spirit
and cast down
it is true
and all the thousands and millions of those
who've proved him
have found that it's true
our master, our saviour, our lord
to speak a word in season
to him that is weary
and these sentences
that spring out of this old writing to us
how many times have there been already
words in season to us
when we are weary
to speak a word in season
to him that is weary
he wakeneth morning by warning
he wakeneth mine ear to hear us the learned
we might suppose
that the lord Jesus Christ
didn't need to learn
but we can only take holy scriptures
we find it
he did increase in wisdom
and in stature with God and man
he never ceased
from his conception and his birth
from the manger at Bethlehem
he never ceased to be fully God
but the same word that assures us
that he was Emmanuel, God with us
assures us that he increased
in wisdom and stature
and favour with God and man
and this verse tells us
that morning by morning
morning by morning
his ear was opened to hear
so that he became the one who had learned
oh what a lesson for us
we might be able to speak words in season
on the part of God
to bring words of comfort to the weary
that only God himself could bring
if only morning by morning by morning
our ears are opened
so that we may learn
the comfort that we could then
pass on to others
verse 5
the lord God hath opened mine ear
and I was not rebellious
neither turned away back
oh the sadness of the words that speak to us
of the way he suffered at the hands of men
I gave my back to the smiters
and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair
I hid not my face from shame and spitting
we are so familiar with what happened
to the lord Jesus Christ
that the wonder of such a prophecy
can pass us by
seven centuries before he came
this is what it says about the saviour
the divine comforter
the one who will be God's salvation
to the ends of the earth
he gave his back to the smiters
and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair
and hid not his face from shame and spitting
the lord God will help me
therefore shall I not be confounded
there have I set my face like a flint
and I know I shall not be ashamed
it's our habit
and it's surprising how wide the habit has become
and there's absolutely no harm in it
but it's our habit to put together
two scriptures
one from Isaiah chapter 50
and one from Luke chapter 9
and say
and I've surprised more than one Christian
looking for the passage that said
he set his face like a flint to go to Jerusalem
in the gospel story it says
when they saw
that he was set to go to Jerusalem
it's true
he was set to go to Jerusalem
but the two aren't the same scripture
although there's no harm in our putting them together
but here it is
he set his face as a flint
the one who was so gentle
the one so ready to comfort the weak
he was the one
who says he set his face as a flint
I remarked when we were speaking about
the first servant poem
in chapter 42
how he did not
break the bruised reed
nor quench the smoking flax
but he would not fail nor be discouraged
till he had set judgment in the earth
there is this delightful
this lovely combination
of tender sympathy
for the weak and the suffering
and the most gigantic strength
when it comes
to the establishment of the will of God
on earth and in heaven
and the Lord Jesus Christ
the same one who spoke a word in season
the same one who gave his back to the smiters
he set his face like a flint
when the moment came to go
and be offered at Jerusalem
in obedience to the will of God
as a sacrifice for our sins
now turning over to chapter 52 verse 13
to the end of chapter 53
I did remark
before
how
this chapter
is really
the confession of Israel
now
although we do deeply desire
that our hearts
may be reached
and touched by this
I think a little word of explanation
is perhaps permissible
I don't know whether you remember
the feasts of the Lord
in Leviticus chapter 23
you had first of all
the Passover
and the Feast of Unleavened Bread
then we had
the Feast of Firstfruits
then after
fifty days the Feast of Weeks
then in the seventh month
a new beginning
we had the Feast of Trumpets
and after this the Day of Atonement
when Israel
were called to afflict
their souls
and finally the joy
and rejoicing of the Feast of Tabernacles
you see how
this is very plainly
a summary
of the prophetic future
from that time
the Lord Jesus Christ
when we think of the Passover we read
even Christ, our Passover
is sacrificed for us
therefore let us
eat the feast
not with the old leaven
of malice and wickedness
but the unleavened bread of sincerity
and truth
all our knowledge of what the cross means
is tested by this that we are not to eat the feast
all our lives long
with the leaven of malice and wickedness
but the unleavened bread of sincerity
and truth
that's what the cross really means for us
if we see it for our lives
as God sees it
then the Feast of Firstfruits
represents the resurrection
of the Lord Jesus from the dead
he's the firstfruits of them that slept
the Feast of Weeks
which is Pentecost
is exactly the moment when the Holy
Ghost was given and the church was
formed and this
concludes you might say
the events relative
to Christianity that these
feasts of the Lord foretell
but there is a second
series applying to God's
earthly people, the Feast of Trumpets
when they would be gathered
from all the world
including the land of Sinim
they would be gathered, the Lord would
call and they would come
that's the fulfillment of the Feast of Trumpets
and then when they come
they would have a
day of atonement
they would afflict their souls
in another passage they would look upon him
whom they pierced and they would
mourn for him and here
in Isaiah chapter 53
we have God's people
afflicting their souls
when they say we saw
no beauty in him that we
should desire him
he was a man of sorrows acquainted
with grief and we hid as it were
our faces from him
then they realized that it was our
sins and our griefs
and our sorrows
and so they were healed
and they were able to rejoice
in his resurrection
now this poem begins
by in the end
13th verse of chapter 52
I've already
referred to it, we'll begin there again
behold my servant
and there for the last time
in the fourth servant poem
where the whole thing is brought
to its climax and conclusion
the Lord Jehovah
is saying to his people as he
said to us behold my
servant one of the most wonderful
beholds
of which there are so many in scripture
comes to us sitting here
this evening the Lord
God Jehovah
we may well say our
father he
urges us to look at
to contemplate
his servant
at the moment of his suffering
before it all begins
we are assured of his victory
but we are assured of his victory
in the most tremendous
terms relative to his suffering
as
you have in verse 14
and so you have in verse 15
as
many were astonished
at thee was not that
Roman centurion
when the people went over beating their
breasts were he not astonished
at what he had seen
as many were astonished at thee
and then in brackets his
visage was so marred more than any
man in his form more than the
sons of men
those sufferings of the saviour
whether we understand it
from the straight forward record in the
gospels or not I believe
that this verse out of the page
of Isaiah tells us that
so intense were the physical
sufferings of the Lord Jesus
that he was bruised and
beyond recognition as a man
his face would marred
more than any man's
and his form more than the sons of men
if it be indeed
true that the physical
sufferings of the Lord Jesus had such a
result what can we think
of the moment of the
hours when darkness came
upon the scene and when
he cried my God
why hast thou forsaken
me deep
calleth unto deep
at the noise of thy water spouts
the deep of the divine
love that gave him
the deep of the divine justice
that had to be satisfied called
to the deep of the saviour's sufferings
and all God's waves and billows
passed over him
that was what took place
when he passed out of the situation
when the eyes of man could see him
and there darkness shrouded the scene
and from it came
my God why hast thou
forsaken me but just
as we have this as
in verse 14 so we have
the so in verse 15
just as those who saw there
were astonished
at the unbelievable sufferings
that came upon him even in the bodily way
so shall he sprinkle
and I am assured
that this word signifies also
astonish so shall
he astonish many nations
kings shall
shut their mouths with astonishment at him
for that which had not been
told them shall they see
and that which they had not heard shall they consider
why because the one who
was so despised
the one who so
suffered the one who was
so bruised and smitten
he shall be exalted
and he shall be very
high and so we begin by
the assurance that the one who
stooped so low
shall be with all the meaning that
God himself puts into the words
he shall be exalted
now if you come back
to the first verse
of chapter 53 it's plain
isn't it that the first
three verses of chapter 53
represent
Israel
those who pierced him
looking back and recollecting
what those who pierced
him saw
who could have believed
that in the lowly form
of Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth
there could be the arm of the Lord
it was the arm of the Lord that had smitten Egypt
and dried up the sea
and made it away for the ransom
of the Lord to pass over
and a few chapters back they're calling upon
the arm of the Lord to come to their rescue
and the deliverance but they didn't know
they didn't see
only the eye of faith which few possessed
could see
under the lowly form of Jesus
the carpenter of Nazareth
the very arm of the Lord
that had destroyed the sea
and destroyed the enemy
and liberated and redeemed his people
with power
who hath believed our report and to whom
is the arm of the Lord revealed
the Lord Jesus Christ was here
for all his meekness
and lowliness
for all his gentleness and his words of comfort
he was the very arm of the Lord
come down for the liberation of all who
trust in him
he shall grow up before him
as a tender plant
and as a root out of a dry ground
now that's a very wonderful statement
about the earthly life of our Saviour
he grew up
he grew up
in a place where there
was absolutely nothing to sustain
the divine life
he grew up
as a plant that can grow without sustenance
from the ground but gets it from somewhere else
as a root out of a dry ground
but with his ear
wakened morning
by morning
and where within he read the secrets
of the divine comfort that was never
absent from his heart as a man
he grew up as a root
out of a dry ground
but there was no form nor comeliness
that they could see
nor should desire him
he was despised
and rejected
I often think of these two pairs
of participles
and how
transiently they speak to our hearts
as we meditate upon them
despised
that's the estimate
in which they held him
our beloved Saviour the very treasure of heaven
he was despised
this is what man does
he also rejected him
but the answer is that he will be
exalted
and we shall come to the fact that he shall be
satisfied
in times past
despised and rejected
but in the future exalted
rather exalted in the past
and in the future satisfied
now let us look
in the middle of verse three
a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief
this is what they thought of him
now these are very striking expressions
aren't they
they've passed over our minds
so many times that they can pass over
without our attending to them properly
a man of sorrows
that doesn't mean a man
who at a moment
experienced a sorrow
it doesn't mean a man
who was frequently
experiencing sorrow
it means a man
the principal mark
of whose life
in the eyes of those who saw him
was that he was a man of sorrows
he wasn't a man of laughter
he wasn't a man of rejoicing
except in the inward sense
that we read of in the private way
but he was seen to be
by others a man of sorrows
and just think of this acquainted with grief
that doesn't mean
a passing nod
that doesn't mean that he knew it
occasionally but acquainted
all the time
again and again
it was seen that grief
was his companion
every day and every moment
by those who saw him
that's what they saw
but what was the truth
they're now beginning to see the truth
it says in the middle of verse 3
a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief
were our faces from him
but did you ever notice in verse 4
it refers to griefs
and sorrows
again the first two lines
of verse 4 griefs and sorrows
again this was the thing
that now staggers them when they come
to verses 4 to 6
they're now realizing the truth
the griefs that they saw
in him were our griefs
and the sorrows
that were his hourly companions
they were our sorrows
surely he hath
borne our griefs
and our sorrows
and it was our griefs and our sorrows
that made him a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief
in him was the well of everlasting
joy, in him was the well
of unmovable peace
but it was our griefs
and our sorrows
that made him a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief
in these two verses of their affliction
then it dawned upon them
that the sorrows they saw
and the griefs they observed
were our griefs
and our sorrows
although they esteemed him stricken
smitten of God and afflicted
but the truth is
he was wounded for our
transgressions
he was bruised for our iniquities
the chastisement of our peace
was upon him and with his stripes
we are healed
we've already spoken
about the
the distinction that we are bound to make
between the
outward sorrows
and they saw that he was a
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief
and that which he
sustained at the hand of
God in order that we
might be justified
and that we might be healed
but it's all here in this verse
all the
terrific
afflictions, strokes
that can fall upon man, the whole of
languages ransacked in order to let
us know what he there suffered
he was bruised, he was wounded
he was smitten
but it was for our sins and our
transgressions and the immediately
joint result is that we are
healed. I often
think of the Ethiopian eunuch
it's not surprising is it
when he was reading this passage
and Philip directed by the
spirit of God joined up with him in the chariot
and said understandest thou what thou
readest, this was his question
this he, him
his, who is this he
that the prophet speaks about
is it himself or of
some other man, but when you look
down it, it's not surprising that he said this
he hath borne our griefs
he was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised
for our iniquities, the chastisement
of our peace was upon him
and with his stripes we are healed
and although all we
like sheep have gone astray, the Lord
hath caused to meet on him
the iniquity of us all
oh what a load
is hidden
in that little expression
caused to meet upon him
the sins of all who
trust in thee, not
for ours only but for the whole world
there were caused to meet
upon him
oh what a load we say was thine
to bear, no thought of ours
can extend to the width
or plumb the depths of what came upon
him there when
the Lord caused to meet upon him
the iniquity of us all
he was oppressed, he was
afflicted, he is brought as a lamb
to the slaughter
you know this word slaughter in English
and I believe it's quite true to the original
languages
this word slaughter
is the
is the same
class of words
as the word slain
if a beast was slain
then
the act was called slaughter
the two words belong to each other
slain is one
form, slaughter is another
form, and when I read
in Revelation chapter 5
that the lamb there
appears
as a lamb
as it had been slain
directly
paraphrased that is he was a lamb
fresh from
the slaughter, here
we read he was taken
like a lamb to the slaughter
but there in heaven
where there is every crown upon his brow
he is there from the slaughter
and we know the result of this
that the one who was there so
abased is now crowned with glory
and so I must
hurry on to the
familiar statements that they
appointed his grave with the wicked
presumably the common
grave of the crucified felons
but he was in fact with the
rich in his death in the grave
the new tomb of Joseph of Arimathea
and then in the last
three verses we have
a summary of the results
but first of all the
assurance that hasn't directly
occurred before that the
sufferings by which we have
been healed
the sufferings that have dealt with our sin
they were inflicted
by Jehovah, it was under his
hand that the real suffering
was endured by which we
are set free, I pointed out a few
minutes ago how he was to be
God's salvation to the end of the
earth
now there are many schemes for salvation
to the ends of the earth
but without exception
they ignore the facts
of the situation and they are
sin and sorrow
and death
you know there are some people who are benighted enough
to think that Christianity
is dope
that it ignores the real
facts of life and the human plight
did you ever hear
such nonsense as this? hear
in these words of a prophet written so long ago
planted right down at the
heart of the human plight
in sin
he was wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our sins
in sorrow he was a man of sorrows
unacquainted with grief, in death
because he died
and they appointed
his grave with the wicked
but he is God's salvation
to the end of the earth
because these mighty problems
the mighty deep enemies of men
have been overcome by what he suffered
in the manner that's described
in this passage and therefore
only can he be
God's salvation to the end of the earth
there's no chance of any human
scheme
for the salvation
of the world
it has no chance of success
not even in part
but this really has
got success
we can now proclaim
on the basis of this the liberation
of men from the sins
that bring them to condemnation
and bring them comfort from the
saviour who died for them
and bring them absolutely certain of salvation
in the end and we know
we know we don't need to do anything
about that because our saviour
will be on this ground
God's salvation
to the ends of the earth
and in verse 11 he shall see
of the trouble
of his soul and shall be satisfied
we've often
meditated upon this
is it not a matter
of the deepest wonder
and the greatest joy to us
every time we contemplate
his passion and his
suffering that the story
does end like this
the one who had
the human sadness
of being despised
and rejected
and the one who suffered the appalling
stroke
of Jehovah's wrath
falling upon him
we are assured not only that he is
exalted but that he will be
satisfied
not only within the horizon
the earthly horizon
of the prophet when Israel
is gathered and they
acclaim him as their king
and they make this confession that he
was wounded for their transgressions
and now lives to be their intercessor
but I suppose we are
entitled to say that God
in his love and wisdom
has made a provision
whereby in pursuance
of his own word
that it is not good that man should be alone
in the bride of Christ
to be with him
to be
ready for him
in the day of his joy
and the day of his power
in these ways
perhaps in a manner far exceeding the horizon
of the prophet but open to us
and made good to our souls
and made our rejoicing
by the spirit of God in the new testament
we rejoice tonight in the fact
that our savior
will be satisfied and by
the infinite mercy of God
he has picked us up
and given us to be amongst that body
that will contribute in that day
to the satisfaction
of the one whose travel was so deep
and so we come
in the last words to say he makes intercession
as we
have thought about
the disciples in Luke
chapter 24
and how they met with him
and how he commissioned them
in the end of the story we read how
in front of their eyes
with his hands
uplifted he went into heaven
and there with those uplifted
hands of blessing
and also of intercession
we can now think of him
and know him day by day
as the one who can
save us to the uttermost because
he ever lives to make
intercession for the saints according to the
will of God
now shall we sing
number 162
and I'll read the last verse
our joy
unhindered then with thee
our eyes undimmed
by glory see
whilst worthy praise we give
through that eternal
cloudless day
our burning hearts
with rapture say
he died that we might live
number 162
the
great
eternal
God
of grace
shall
freely unfold
through
endless
days
when the
mind shall
cease to
be
round
and around
the
Lord
shall stand
as
each
people
joined
together
by
all to
love
and
be
free
he
shall
the
Savior's
blindness
bear
a royal
crown
his
crown shall
bear
and
his
crown
shall
be
his
crown
shall
be
his
crown
shall
be
his
crown
his
crown
shall
be
his
crown
shall
be
his
crown
shall
be
his
crown …