Isaiah 2.6

Prayer Requests

Carol, Jamison great-grandson tumor. Continue to pray for Faye

Mike, prayer for country and government up and running

Jenny, Praise Adrian visa

Arlene, Christyanne, good and bad. STarting chemo again

Suzanne, praise for friends in the Solomon Islands

Nan, praise for son Todd started job, Ashley wife coming

Fremont Men’s retreat

Isaiah 26-27

Chapters 26-27 continue the thoughts and themes of 24-25, the overall emphasis here as it has been since chapter 13 is the sovereignty of God over all creation and over His people. 24-25 moved us to God’s victory and salvation in that day of judgement and, ultimately, the feast for those who are saved. Now, 26-27 shifts to more of a reflection on the meaning of this victory, the meaning of salvation for the people. I appreciate and value that distinction because for us it is one thing to celebrate the victory of our own salvation, but there is another valuable part of the Christian life which is reflecting on that salvation. Letting the good news of the Gospel then impact our lives in meaningful ways. We’ll see that today.

Let’s look at Isaiah 26:1-6

Isaiah 26:1–6 ESV

1 In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah: “We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks. 2 Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. 3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. 4 Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. 5 For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city. He lays it low, lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. 6 The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy.”

A picture is given of a strong city. That strong city is the city of the Lord, salvation is its walls and protection and fortification. And who may find their entrance and life in this city? The righteous, but that seems to be here to be based on what? Faith.

The difference maker is faith! Those who keep faith in YHWH may enter the gates of this holy city and rest in its safety and refuge. Isaiah has given us a strong, compelling case for why a fortified city would be important. What’s the context? THAT day! The day of judgment and desolation. On that day, who can stand? There will be violence and desolation everywhere.

Ah, but not in the city of the Lord! We need the strength of this city for it is only within the walls of this salvation can anyone be saved. The image is that the faithful will take up residence in this city.

Habakkuk said it, Paul quoted it, but this is the paradigm of scripture: the righteous shall live by faith. Not their good words, not their good status or standing. No, the righteous will carry on, they will live because of their faith in YHWH.

Romans 1:16–17 ESV

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

and of course:

Ephesians 2:8 “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,”

Isaiah’s vision here then is this: you may be know the salvation of the Lord, therefore carry on in your faith! Keep the faith. Look at the exhortation of Isaiah 26:4 “4 Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.”

If you were to take away a single thing from these chapters in Isaiah, let it be this: trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God, YHWH, is an everlasting rock! He will not fail, he cannot fail.

And see, from those inside the safe walls of this city, what do they see? They see the proud, those with high status, those puffed up in themselves, those who trusted in themselves for salvation—they are humbled, brought low, so low that even the feet of the poor trample over them.

It is at this point that I feel like getting in our weekly mention of Psalm 1

Psalm 1 ESV

1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. 4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; 6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

You see? Isaiah is playing out the Psalm, the righteous are in the safety of YHWH’s refuge, the wicked are leveled!

Now let’s look at the next section and see how Isaiah further develops these themes and the themes of Psalm 1.

Isaiah 26:7–15 ESV

7 The path of the righteous is level; you make level the way of the righteous. 8 In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. 9 My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. 10 If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the Lord. 11 O Lord, your hand is lifted up, but they do not see it. Let them see your zeal for your people, and be ashamed. Let the fire for your adversaries consume them. 12 O Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works. 13 O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone we bring to remembrance. 14 They are dead, they will not live; they are shades, they will not arise; to that end you have visited them with destruction and wiped out all remembrance of them. 15 But you have increased the nation, O Lord, you have increased the nation; you are glorified; you have enlarged all the borders of the land.

Ok, right away, the path of the righteous is level, you make level…It’s like the language of Psalm 1: He knows the path of the righteous. but the wicked cannot stand.

Now look at how Isaiah develops these two themes of the righteous and the wicked. First, I start with the path of the righteous. Notice this, that righteousness is not a guarantee of anything. Put another way, righteousness is no end unto itself. The goal is to be on the path of God. By that path, is the way of the righteous. And look, what do the righteous wait for?

They wait for YHWH Himself! Not for his salvation, though that is part of it, not his blessing of gift, though yes! But God Himself is their prize. Isaiah will not separate the deliverer from the deliverance. Ultimately, we ought to find the deepest longing in our hearts to be fellowship with our creator and God. Union with Him through Christ!

I was talking about this last night with someone, their teenage son is figuring out his faith and seems preoccupied with making sure he doesn’t go to hell. He’s afraid and wants to make sure he does the right things to get to the right place. But you see, that’s not a good or proper motivator. The reason? Because what happens if we build our whole life around being good and then we fail at that?

We despair! We become despondent. If our identity is around doing good, this will fail us. But if our goal is God Himself, He will never fail, His presence is with us! We wait for you! The prophet says. You are the desire of our souls, we yearn for you, we seek you!

And look at the second part of v. 9: there is a connection between God’s judgments, his law, and learning righteousness, but this comes after yearning for Him.

And this contrast is then made with the wicked in v. 10: If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the LORD.

You see what Isaiah is saying? They could be in the middle of the land of righteousness, surrounded by it, and the truly wicked, the truly unrepentant, those who reject God again and again…they? They will carry on, they will not learn.

They need to be met with the rod of judgment in order to understand the weight of their situation. It makes me reflect on this passage from the book of Romans 2:3-5

Romans 2:3–5 ESV

3 Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? 4 Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? 5 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

It is God’s kindness that punishes our sins and leads us to repentance.

Meanwhile, for God’s people, they continue to express their confidence in the Lord to bring peace (v. 12) and to be the true sovereign that, when they looked for it elsewhere, every other example failed. Other lords ruled over of us, but you alone we remember! They are dead, they will not live. The inverse must then be true of YHWH. He is alive! And He continues to protect and care for His people

Let’s move on to the next section, Isa 26:16-19

Isaiah 26:16–19 ESV

16 O Lord, in distress they sought you; they poured out a whispered prayer when your discipline was upon them. 17 Like a pregnant woman who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near to giving birth, so were we because of you, O Lord; 18 we were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind. We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the inhabitants of the world have not fallen. 19 Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.

OK. A quick reminder of the trickiness of reading and understanding Isaiah, now we come back to the present moment, no longer a future vision of that fortified city, but a present reality, a present lament and crying out to God.

The image is this: the people are in distress! They are under discipline and they pray to for help. They’re crying out to something that could save them…and what is the result?

Isaiah says it is like a pregnant woman who cries and labors and struggles to give birth to her own salvation and what does she birth instead? wind! Air! Nothing! After all that struggle, nothing comes to birth.

What an image! And yet, this is us as soon as we depart from the gospel and make our salvation dependent on our goodness, our good works, our righteous living out of our own strength. Isaiah is clear: We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth…

But then look at Isaiah 26:19 “19 Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.”

The tone shifts to joy! It is like what we read last week in Isaiah 25:8 “8 He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.”

Your dead shall live again! A clear promise of resurrection for those who take refuge in YHWH. Look at how it ends: The earth will give birth to the dead, that’s quite a contrast with the earlier statement that they could struggle all they want in childbirth and give birth to nothing. God will make the ground itself give birth to the dead now alive, but all of our striving and working will amount to nothing.

Let’s move forward, Isaiah 26:20-27:1

Isaiah 26:20–27:1 ESV

20 Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed by. 21 For behold, the Lord is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain. 1 In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.

Here now it a promise: God will act! He is coming to punish the wicked, to judge all, and to ultimately slaw the leviathan, the dragon that is in the sea.

There is a twofold judgment at play in these verses: first God will punish the iniquity of the people. There will be consequences for sin and all will stand in judgement. But, as we see in Psalm 1, it is only God’s people who can remain standing in judgement. The wicked will not stand in judgment, no sinners in the congregation of the righteous. The image there and of here, is that there will be a judgment for sins and the unrighteous cannot stand with the righteous in that judgment. Here Isaiah says, the earth will give up her sins, disclosing the deeds of man. It’s a chilling reminder for us that none of our sin is done in secret, the earth will give us up, and of course God knows.

But that’s not the end of this passage. The second central image here in v. 20-7:1 is the serpent! There is a monster that prowls this earth, the enemy of man and of God and “in that day,” the Lord with his hard, and great, and strong sword, will punish this serpent. Yes, it is the same Hebrew word, nahash, that we see first used in the garden of Eden in Genesis 3. In Genesis 3, God promises to crush the head of the serpent, and that promise is affirmed here in Isaiah, in that day, the serpent will be crushed.

Let’s read Revelation 20:7-10

Revelation 20:7–10 ESV

7 And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. 9 And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, 10 and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

You see, the same imagery is used in Revelation: a city of God’s people who will be forever protected by YHWH. And the snake is defeated!

Isaiah 27:2–13 “2 In that day, “A pleasant vineyard, sing of it! 3 I, the Lord, am its keeper; every moment I water it. Lest anyone punish it, I keep it night and day; 4 I have no wrath. Would that I had thorns and briers to battle! I would march against them, I would burn them up together. 5 Or let them lay hold of my protection, let them make peace with me, let them make peace with me.” 6 In days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots and fill the whole world with fruit. 7 Has he struck them as he struck those who struck them? Or have they been slain as their slayers were slain? 8 Measure by measure, by exile you contended with them; he removed them with his fierce breath in the day of the east wind. 9 Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for, and this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin: when he makes all the stones of the altars like chalkstones crushed to pieces, no Asherim or incense altars will remain standing. 10 For the fortified city is solitary, a habitation deserted and forsaken, like the wilderness; there the calf grazes; there it lies down and strips its branches. 11 When its boughs are dry, they are broken; women come and make a fire of them. For this is a people without discernment; therefore he who made them will not have compassion on them; he who formed them will show them no favor. 12 In that day from the river Euphrates to the Brook of Egypt the Lord will thresh out the grain, and you will be gleaned one by one, O people of Israel. 13 And in that day a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were lost in the land of Assyria and those who were driven out to the land of Egypt will come and worship the Lord on the holy mountain at Jerusalem.”

Then the vision pivots to this final image for us today: God’s delight in his vineyard! He is it’s keeper, we’ve talked about this a lot over our Isaiah study. Look at v. 4: I have no wrath. Would that I had thorns and briers to battle!

I want to show you what’s going on. The enemies of God’s people are the thorns and briers, the unrighteous and unfaithful. God has no wrath for his vineyard so long as their are no thorns and briers. V. 4 seems to tell us he’s ready to go to battle against them! This is perfectly consistent with what we’ve seen in these sections.

But then look at v. 5: And then v. 5: Or let them lay hold of my protection, let them make peace with me. He is giving the opportunity for the weeds of the world to make peace with him! Again, this also is consistent in Isaiah, let the nations come to the Lord.

To make peace with God, it reminds me of our peace with God as described in Romans 5:1 “1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The nations of the world, that’s us, we can have peace with God through Jesus.

As we continue through 27: we see that Jacob will take root, Israel will blossom and fill the whole world with fruit. And how will we get there, again I go through this quickly because it gets at the major themes of Isaiah: V. 7-8, they are first truck, then exiled, removed, BUT they are not totally destroyed. Their guilt will be atoned for and there will be a removal of sin, a removal of their pagan altars, a removal of their asherim poles. And this seemingly fortified city will be laid bare.

Sin will be taken care of! Now, let’s not get confused, we see the language of fortified city and we immediately go back to the fortified city of salvation in chapter 26. This is meant to be a contrast, this is the city of the world and of sin and idolatry, this city will be destroyed (remember we’re in the present) and the future city will come.

The chapter ends with a rpomise that God will doa threshing work, pruning and purifying. And in that day even those in Assyria and Egypt will come to worship the Lord in Jerusalem (that good city of salvation!).

What for us?

Trust in that future salvation! Again and again, turn ourselves to that reality!

But also, take seriously sin. Let’s put it to death in us now, because if we don’t, God will later! That doesn’t mean we’ll be condemned! By no means, we are safe and secure in Christ. No, but all sin will be put to death.

Instead, let us do what it says in Isaiah 26:4 “4 Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.”