Finding Grace

Ah, Ariel, Ariel, the city where David encamped! Add year to year; let the feasts run their round. 2 Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be moaning and lamentation, and she shall be to me like an Ariel. 3 And I will encamp against you all around, and will besiege you with towers and I will raise siegeworks against you. 4 And you will be brought low; from the earth you shall speak, and from the dust your speech will be bowed down; your voice shall come from the ground like the voice of a ghost, and from the dust your speech shall whisper. 5 But the multitude of your foreign foes shall be like small dust, and the multitude of the ruthless like passing chaff. And in an instant, suddenly, 6 you will be visited by the Lord of hosts with thunder and with earthquake and great noise, with whirlwind and tempest, and the flame of a devouring fire. 7 And the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel, all that fight against her and her stronghold and distress her, shall be like a dream, a vision of the night. 8 As when a hungry man dreams, and behold, he is eating, and awakes with his hunger not satisfied, or as when a thirsty man dreams, and behold, he is drinking, and awakes faint, with his thirst not quenched, so shall the multitude of all the nations be that fight against Mount Zion. 9 Astonish yourselves and be astonished; blind yourselves and be blind! Be drunk, but not with wine; stagger, but not with strong drink! 10 For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes (the prophets), and covered your heads (the seers). 11 And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, “Read this,” he says, “I cannot, for it is sealed.” 12 And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, “Read this,” he says, “I cannot read.” 13 And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, 14 therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” 15 Ah, you who hide deep from the Lord your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?” 16 You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”? 17 Is it not yet a very little while until Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field, and the fruitful field shall be regarded as a forest? 18 In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. 19 The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among mankind shall exult in the Holy One of Israel. 20 For the ruthless shall come to nothing and the scoffer cease, and all who watch to do evil shall be cut off, 21 who by a word make a man out to be an offender, and lay a snare for him who reproves in the gate, and with an empty plea turn aside him who is in the right. 22 Therefore thus says the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, concerning the house of Jacob: “Jacob shall no more be ashamed, no more shall his face grow pale. 23 For when he sees his children, the work of my hands, in his midst, they will sanctify my name; they will sanctify the Holy One of Jacob and will stand in awe of the God of Israel. 24 And those who go astray in spirit will come to understanding, and those who murmur will accept instruction.”

Target Date: Sunday, 25 August 2024

Word Study/ Translation Notes:

Ariel – disputed etymologies, but undisputedly a reference to Jerusalem proper. May be a reference to a Lion (of Judah) or to an Altar Hearth (Ezekiel 43:15).

and the altar hearth, four cubits; and from the altar hearth projecting upward, four horns. – Ezekiel 43:15

Thoughts on the Passage:

1 – This lament over Jerusalem is repeated by Jesus in Matthew 23:37:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! - Matthew 23:37

It is undoubtedly a lament, mourning over the near future of Jerusalem.

4 – You who think you are powerful, even righteous, will be shown how much men of dust you are.

You who would command God will discover His holy commands.

5 – And even in that discovery, you will find you are not even the greatest of the dusts.

You might is too small to prevail against God and your numbers are too small to prevail against the nations.

5 - 7 - Know that your strength, by any measure, is not sufficient to guarantee your safety or security from earth or heaven.

To whom will you turn when EVERY nation is against you?

How will you do anything but collapse when the Lord shakes the foundation of your worldly faith?

The thunder and the earthquakes and tempests do not HAVE to be alluding to literal events happening at a single moment. God does not need to shake the ground to rock your world to dust.

8 – It is difficult to determine whether this is a word of comfort to Jerusalem (her attackers only imagine they can destroy her completely) or a word of wrath for Jerusalem (if you think you can escape, you are dreaming).

The point well-made is that the food of a dream does not nourish and the water of a dream does not quench. They are illusions, fantasies, that do nothing to address real hunger or thirst.

10 – Those who would trust in these vain dreams, God has turned over to sleep and slumber. He will not wake them before their doom is sealed.

They do not look to the reality of God’s word and works; they have covered their heads with their pillows, so God will seal them inside their ignorance.

11-12 – The sealed book, reminiscent of the sealed scroll of Revelation. In this book, ALL God’s revelation is there, but they have not the means nor wisdom nor ability to understand it properly.

13 – They loved the commandments more than they loved God. They trusted the Law but not the Lawgiver. Their faith was in their obedience and not in God’s abounding grace.

They considered the Law a friend and abandoned their love for God who gave it.

They DID the Law, but were not CHANGED by God.

They sought greater obedience but not greater grace.

Even their FEAR of God was a commandment to be followed, asking “What does it LOOK LIKE to fear God?”

We ask some of the same things today: “What must we DO?” and “How must we ACT?”

15-16 – We can have the illusions that we control our salvation – but it is simply an illusion. A fundamental misunderstanding of the order of things.

We would build, by our exertions, the great Tower to Heaven, trusting that when we arrive face to face with God, He will allow us to reign as equals.

Isaiah was a Calvinist in this (Or rather, Calvin was an Isaiahist).

The examples of the Old Testament were not given to us to emulate. We do not need Daniel’s FAITH; we need Daniel’s GOD!

Sermon Text:

One of the most important principles of understanding what God has revealed in the Bible is this: always allow the New Testament to interpret the Old.

There is a very good reason for this: the point of all the Bible, all God’s special revelation of Himself, is to bring His people to faith in Jesus Christ and to, through Him, obtain God’s offered grace and mercy.

So when we come to passages like this, our greatest concern should always be to find how this points us to God’s grace through Jesus Christ.

I have said this before, but even in passages of the sternest judgment of God, there is the great underlying truth that God sent His prophet to His erring people to call them to repentance.

And He did this even if the prophet was unaware of the full measure of his prophecy.

Jonah may have suspected God’s mercy on the people of Nineveh when they repented, but he had no idea of how the Spirit would use God’s word through him.

And Isaiah only spoke as he was moved by the Holy Spirit, just like the other prophets.

So it is often POINTLESS to ask the question “What did the prophet intend with his words?”

I can assure you, every prophet of the Old Testament through John the Baptist saw only the outline of God’s promise, not the totality of it.

It is not, after all, the prophet who came up with these prophecies, but it was the Holy Spirit Himself who spoke through these men a perfect and complete revelation of what God would do in Jesus Christ.

Why would I even care to ask how much Isaiah KNEW about God’s plan – why is that important?

In 1687, two years before our Confession was written, a book was published by Isaac Newton. It described this force of attraction that he named “gravity” that he had observed.

Five years later, in a letter to a friend, he confided that his conjecture of gravity was “so great an absurdity that…no man who [thinks] would fall into [believing] it.”

He described what he saw, but he had no great understanding of how it worked.

So when you learned in school about gravity, you learned about what others had discovered along the way, not just the limited amount of knowledge Newton had about it.

When we forget this most fundamental truth in understanding and applying the Scriptures, we can make many mistakes.

For example, I have heard so many sermons and lessons that go something like this:

We should have the faith of Daniel and his friends,

And the devotion of David,

And the courage of Joshua,

And the patience of Job.

Brothers and sisters, if that is all we get from the Old Testament, we are truly impoverished.

Because it is not the FAITH of Daniel and his friends I need; I need his GOD.

The point of the Bible is not to give us a pantheon of heroes to emulate and copy;

It is to tell us about their God who is faithful in all things.

The FAITH of Daniel does me no good – I don’t even KNOW Daniel.

I need Daniel’s God, who shuts the mouth of lions.

I need the God of Daniel’s friends, because He is worth dying for in a fiery furnace.

Do you see the difference?

We spend so much time trying to work ourselves up into being LIKE those we read about in the Bible,

When we should be reading those stories and marveling at the God who has done these things.

Daniel and David, and Joshua, and Job, and Moses, and Abraham are NOTHING – it is their GOD who we worship.

It is their GOD who spoke the heavens into existence.

It is their GOD who made miraculous things take place.

It is their GOD who made covenants with them that revealed His redemptive plan.

It is their GOD who is worthy of all worship and honor and praise.

And here in the 29th chapter of Isaiah, which we read earlier this morning, we see God telling His people that very thing.

V. 13 - And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men…

This verse, in the center of this chapter, is the point of the teaching.

Everything else in the chapter, and there is much here, is the RESULT of this fact.

This verse is twice quoted by Jesus Himself in the New Testament:

Matthew 15:7-9 - You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: 8 “ ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 9 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ 

Mark 7:6-8 - “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “ ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ 8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

Now, before you go and thank God that you are not like those Pharisees Jesus was talking to, make sure you aren’t guilty of the same thing.

The Pharisees were called out by Jesus as an EXAMPLE of who Isaiah is talking about here, but they are not the ONLY ones he is talking about.

It wasn't like Isaiah was looking down through the years and noticing how legalistic the Pharisees would be.

No, there were people in his day, just as there are people in our day, who would try to draw near to God on the basis of their service or faithfulness, but would find themselves rejected.

What is the primary offense Isaiah is pointing out here?

It was not that their SERVICE was necessarily lagging. They were offering sacrifices and observing the festivals:

V. 1 – Add year to year; let the feasts run their round.

They were coming to the temple, offering their sacrifices, doing the things the Law required to the best of their ability.

In Jesus’s day, the Pharisees took the tiniest seeds and counted them, making sure to give their precise tithe of those things.

In Isaiah’s day, the Jews came to God’s temple, not to the Samaritan temple, to offer their sacrifices.

They had been raised to do so.

They were raising their kids to do so.

Their sons were taught the Law. They participated in worship. They were circumcised.

But that service was all about what they DID.

Even their FEAR of God was a COMMANDMENT taught by men.

Somebody somewhere must have asked the familiar question: “What does it LOOK LIKE to fear God?”

“What must I DO to fear God?”

Everything in their religion was geared around “What must I DO?” and “How must I ACT?”

Is that what YOUR religion is geared around?

Is your doctrine filled with “A Christian must…” and “A Christian should…” and “A Christian ought to…”?

Now you know there is nothing wrong with doctrine; there is nothing wrong with obedience.

God’s complaint is this: Their hearts are far from Me.

They don’t love Me even when they try to obey Me.

We see the same complaint in the New Testament, made against, of all people, the church at Ephesus.

This is the church Paul planted, that was possibly the most often-visited church in all the missionary travels.

It was the location Timothy pastored.

And it was the church of which John the apostle was an elder.

The letter Paul wrote to them is deeply doctrinal, loving in its tone.

And these are the elders who hung on Paul’s neck as he went to Jerusalem to be arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed.

But in Revelation 2:2-4, Jesus tells this same church:

‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. 3 I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. 4 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

Their SERVICE wasn’t the problem; their doctrine wasn’t the problem.

The abandonment of their love for Christ was the near-fatal problem.

Some might try to minimize it, thinking Jesus is talking about their mutual love, their love for one another, that had failed.

But make no mistake, your love for others can only fail if your love for Christ has failed first.

It fails when we think DOING things for Christ is LOVING Him.

When stricter obedience, more self-denial, and more restrictions are placed on our lives.

But in speaking to the woman at the well in Samaria, Jesus told the woman:

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. – John 4:23

In spirit and TRUTH.

In other words, God is seeking those who will worship Him TRULY, not simply out of a sense of duty or obligation.

And certainly not because of what you might get out of it.

Or because you think God will crush you if you don’t.

the eyes of the Lord move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His. – 2 Chronicles 16:9

Christian, you can hold the finest doctrine, make the best arguments, preach the best sermons, and live the finest life of anyone you know – and be no closer to God.

All those things are good, but if they don’t grow out of your love for Jesus Christ, what is the point?

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. - 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

So how can we cultivate love in our hearts?

It sounds like a dangerous question – like “What does love look like?”

But the answer is written on every page of Scripture, in every chapter of every book.

I offer you these suggestions as a summary of some of the things we will find.

1. When you read the Bible, concentrate on what God reveals about Himself on that page.

Instead of reading simply for application (although they will come), read to discover more about our infinitely beautiful God.

His holiness, His longsuffering, His love, everything you find – even His justice and judgment.

And let your heart dwell on the perfection of who He is; let it be overwhelmed by the grace you have received.

2. Think about Him throughout your day.

The Bible calls this “meditating”, but it is not the Eastern-mystic “clearing your mind”.

It is the intentional filling your mind with thoughts of God.

It is allowing your heart to embrace Him and to feel His Fatherly embrace of you.

To find in everything something to remind you of His goodness and lovingkindness.

3. Confess your sin in faith of His forgiveness.

God isn’t sitting there waiting for you to mess up so He can swoop in and slap you.

He is bringing you to Himself, little by little.

So you can be sure when you do recognize a sin you have done, He stands already forgiving you, even if you were slow to recognize it.

The most humiliating failures, the most persistent sins, He has already removed from you by the cross of Jesus Christ, if you are His child.

Though your tears may flow over your sin, He wipes them away, whispering gently to you, “I love you, my little child.”

4. Bask in His grace.

The place of greatest comfort for you is in the strong arms of your heavenly Father.

He will never throw you out; He will never even hold His nose at you.

He will never turn away from you because there will never be a need – you are suffused, permeated, with the righteousness of Christ.

His Holy Spirit dwells in you, beautifying you to God.

It is that very grace that brings your heart NEAR Him.

And that is the very reason God sought you out.