"The Advent of God's Peace"
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!
Text: Isaiah 2:4
Theme: "The Advent of God's Peace"
Date: December 2, 2001
Day: 1st Sunday in Advent
The text for our consideration this morning is taken from the Old Testament Lesson read earlier. We call your devout Christian Attention to the following words of God:
He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. This is our text.
Dear Friends in Christ: I bring you greetings from God our Father, who is so kind to you, and who gives you peace through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen!
It was a time when men's hearts ached for peace. It was not abundantly clear to Judah that no nation could be isolated from the international wars and rumors of wars of that era. With the destruction of the ten tribes in the North, Judah in the South now faced imminent destruction at the hands of the powerful nation of Assyria to the North and East. Although Egypt might have power to be a strong ally, Judah soon leanred that Egypt was of no help. When the Philistine city-state of Ashdod rebelled against Assyria, Assyria thoroughly crushed the revolt of Ashdod. And Egypt not only gave no help to Ashdod, but even returned Ashdod's rebel leader to the Assyrians when he fled to Egypt. It was now abundantly clear to the people of Judah that it was no longer a question of whether a confrontation with Assyria would take place, but it was not a question of when. So the people yearned for peace--no more political tensions.
Yet when the people saw the formidable foe of foreign forces in the Assyrian threat, they reacted in two different ways: one group in blind and fanaticl confidence thought that Yahweh, the Lord of hosts (armies would be on their side right or wrong. The other group lost faith in Yahweh and returned to the pagan practices of bygone years.
Into such a situation God called the prophet Isaiah to prophesy to the people of Judah. He warned God's people that they had to repent of their idolatry, their decadent drunken debaucherty, their conspiracy to rob the helpless of their rights. People who felt that Yahweh was on their side right or wrong looked to all the sacrifices going on in the temple area as their assurance that God had to be on their side. They failed to see their sins as a far greater type of warfare and hostility against God, and the true people of Godthan all the armies of the Assyrians. By their lack of love for one another, their greater love for material possessions, pampering and pleasures, their love of foreign ways and religion, these rich leaders in Judah were a far more serious menace to the people of God than the external threat of terror from the Assyrians.
The other group of people, who gave up any hope in Yahweh, turned to many of the same practices of the riche: they turned to pagan gods, and the practices of the Canaanites with their religion of sexual gratification and drunkenness to insure the growth of the gross national product. Loveless to one another, blindly chasing after selfish pleasures in the face of the terror from without, these people, too were creating more harm for the people of God than the Assyrians.
Isaiah's message was that those who put all their trust in the political establishment, who thought that Yahweh was on their side right or wrong, and yet who hungered after a selfish pleasure at the expense of the care and cocern for their brothers and sisters of the covenant, that all those who groveled in the pagan religions, WOULD INDEED FACE DESTRUCTION at the hands of foreign foes, and that their only hope was repentance for their sins and faith in Yahweh, the God of the Covenant, who ALONE would establish peace for the nation both within and without. HE alone could do this--not political alliances or the adoption of foreign practices and idols, only God Himself--and He would establish this peace in His own time.
Then the people of G od would have a peace that the world could never give them. So God was telling His people then that He was ultimately in control of the world events (as we have also been seeing in our time in these last few monthgs!), that He did want peace not only for His people, but for all nations, yet it would be a peace that He would establish, not mankind.
What prevented the message of Isaiah from working repentance in Judah? Although there was a small remnant who did indeed repent, for the vast majority of people, it was not the terror of international war, but the very social disintegration and religious paganization of the people themselves that brought them down. Their lack of covenant love for one another, their making the sacrifices of the temple into an idol, and their love for the lusty side of the Canaanite religion built the wall of hostility between themselves, and most importantly between them and God.
Judah eventually suffered destruction and deportation. And in the midst of the destruction of Judah, God taught His people that the promise He made through Isaiah, that He would judge