Isaiah 65:19
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Good morning church. Let me start us off with something we don't normally do and it's not because we don't obviously believe in prayer, but given the nature of today, it will help all of us and certainly myself if we begin the sermon with some prayer. Let's pray. Father, we acknowledge as we have so many times already, even together this morning, that you are sovereign, that you are good, that you are wise, that you are loving.
God, the events of the past week have not caught you by surprise, and therefore we can trust you. Father, we pray that you would pull our hearts and our minds, and especially my mouth, together to focus on what your word tells us in Isaiah 65. God, we pray that you would open our ears to hear it, our hearts to receive it, and that you would then cause us to trust you and to believe you. God, we know that you want us to hear how you love us and how you care for us in our suffering. So we pray you would do that very thing by your spirit this morning. We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen. So obviously, if you've been a member of Third Avenue, you get the emails. You were even here last week. We were scheduled to go through Colossians chapter 3, marching on into the next section. That's not happening this morning, given what you've already heard about what's happened in the past week or so in the life of our church. So here we find
ourselves in Isaiah chapter 65. You'll actually want to turn there. We'll read more than just that verse, but this is a passage that we've even looked together as a church in the past year and a half or so. And so it seemed appropriate to go back to this passage again this morning. So please turn there to Isaiah 65. You know, as the holidays approach, one of the things that all of us will be doing is buying gifts. And in a day and age of instant gratification, in a day and age of instant kind of pleasure, we think that buying gifts is something similar, that you just buy it And there you have it.
Yet this is actually somewhat of a modern miracle. The way we buy gifts, I would venture to guess that almost all of us in this next month, month and a half, will be making online purchases. You'll find something online. You'll find something on your phone. You'll find something on that computer screen. You'll click away through a few different buttons, and voila, there you own the thing. And yet, if you stop to think about it, what's actually happened there is that there's a transaction that's complete. You have had money taken from your account.
You have purchased something. You can even begin to think about what that thing will look like on you or what that gift will feel like to give it to someone or how that thing will bring you some measure of joy. And yet, in all reality, you don't yet see it. You don't yet have it to taste and touch and hold in front of you. And yet the thing is complete. The thing is on its way. The thing is yours. Well, our text here describes this very same type of thing, but from a spiritual standpoint instead, a much more significant standpoint.
A transaction has happened. Its future is 100% certain, and it should actually affect the way we live now. We don't yet see that final product. We don't yet have it in our hands. And so with that in mind, let's read the larger passage surrounding the verse we're going to zero in on. I'm going to read beginning in verse 17 of Isaiah chapter 65. And this is the Lord speaking.
For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create. For behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people. No more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days.
For the young man shall die a hundred years old, And the sinner, a hundred years old, shall be accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them. They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit. They shall not plant and another eat. For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be. And my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity. For they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord and their descendants with them. Before they call, I will answer.
While they are yet speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall graze together. The lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord. So this passage here, this beautiful description here of what's yet to come, situated at the very end of the book of Isaiah, is really this long poem, this long chapter that shows a glimpse of what is yet to come for God's people.
It is a glimpse of the eternal home for us as Christians. There will be eating and drinking and rejoicing and gladness. There will be no more death, no more fruitless and vain work, no more weeping. All the curses, every last curse that sin has brought will be reversed. The new creation will be what this, the first creation, should have been. And there will be a final restoration of a perfect peace with God. And this verse, verse 19, this is perhaps the pinnacle of that extended poem, of that extended glimpse into the future of what the new heavens and the new earth will look like.
If you were to take this whole section and distill it down into one little thought, I think this verse captures it well. In the end, God rejoices in his people and his people no longer suffer. That's what we're seeing here. So for the next few minutes, the main point I want us to linger on, the main idea I want us to consider is this very truth. God will rejoice when we no longer suffer. God will rejoice when we no longer suffer.
This might sound self-evident, right? You just might assume, well, of course God will rejoice when I don't suffer. But here's the deal. I think that so often we as people, especially in the midst of our own grief, have an understanding of God and how he relates to or thinks about our suffering that makes him distant from and detached from our suffering. We probably wouldn't go so far to say that he's absent in our suffering, or certainly that he finds joy in our suffering.
But we do often live and think and function as though God is mostly uncaring about our current situation, as though he's fine if we're doing well, and he's really just not too bothered if we're not doing well. But friends, that's simply not the testimony of Scripture. God cares deeply about our present realities in this life. And it gets to the core of his love for us to say that he won't be indifferent when his people's sufferings cease forever.
He will rejoice with them. So that's what we're going to be saying here in just the next few minutes as we work through this in two different points. Our future hope and our current reality. Number one, our future hope. So the heartbeat of this vision that we read, this lengthier passage, this heartbeat or this vision of the new heavens and the new earth that's yet to come, the main focus of it is this, that God is going to restore his created order by making all things new.
Right? Verse 17 lays it out clearly. I create a new heavens and a new earth. There's going to be a radical break in history. There's going to be a radical break in the cosmos. There's going to be a before and an after. There's going to be something in the future, a yet-to-appear side of things that's going to be revealed that we don't yet know fully what it's going to look like. This new order will be unlike, in many ways, what we know today. Look, we don't have to wonder if there's heartache and sadness and weeping.
in this room. We know that there is. We don't have to try to imagine it if there are effects of sin, if there are effects of the fallenness of sin on us today. We see it all around us. There are little frustrations. There are minor setbacks that show that. And then there's massive heartaches and tremendous suffering that knock us back and threaten to topple us with that reality. We as a people, we as Christians, we as members of Third Avenue Baptist Church together know all too well what verse 19 says is the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. Work feels tedious, maybe even loathsome. Dreams keep getting delayed, perhaps even crushed. There's unsettledness in major aspects of your life.
Loved ones die. Debilitating disease strips away health. And then there's constant spiritual battles that threaten to pull you away from the faith, and on and on and on we could go. That's what we as a people know now. That is our reality now. Look, maybe that's not you. I get it. maybe some of you came in here to this room this morning even expecting just a normal Sunday morning and this has all caught you by surprise but I promise you that's not the case for the person next to you or the person in front of you this is what we collectively, corporately feel and experience today but it won't always be that way look back at how this is all described in verse 19 it's called a sound a cry things that enter into the ear something physical that enters into the
ear but it's being used here in a metaphorical sense as well that sound of weeping that sound of distress those things create a sort of soundtrack of the heart that constant noise in our lives of angst and frustration of chaos and futility of death and destruction it's pictured hear almost like the soundtrack of pain that that just seems to be building in our lives to a crescendo and all the while our hearts are tempted to break out an outburst at the heaven saying God I can't take this anymore why are you doing this and as that soundtrack of weeping and crying continues on sometimes more muffled than others and as the suffering of this age gets louder and louder in our hearts all to the point where we can't find ourselves thinking about anything else and we're only screaming, Lord, why, we must remember what God has told us here.
That sadness, that hurt, that pain, that complex of emotions you feel today, that distress, as loud as it feels for you, it will one day cease and grow completely silent. Friend, that sound of pain will never again be heard in your heart. this is amazing, this is incredible news, this is perhaps the only news we need to hear today as a church, but how do we even begin to describe what that will look like?
What does that mean? What does that feel like? Oh sure, we confess that we believe that, we must as Christians, but what will that be like when those sufferings actually cease? Well, I think verse 19 gives us a huge piece of the answer to that. We'll be with our God who rejoices in us. Look at verse 19 again. The Lord rejoices in Jerusalem, which is another way of saying his people, and he's glad in his people. Going all the way back to Genesis 1, all the way back to the beginning, the refrain of the original creation of this first creation has been that God saw it and it was good God saw it and it was good and by the very end he says it was very good and yet even that pales in comparison to this truth here that one day God will create something new his people and in that people he will rejoice friends it's like what Mac talked about we trust that God by the power of his word creates
and he's created a people. He's created us, Christians, to be with him. Like this is one of the key ways that the Bible talks about Christians. They are new creations. We were dead in our sins and then God made us alive together and created in us new spiritual life. But we don't do this. We don't create ourselves. We don't make ourselves into something that God suddenly likes.
God doesn't rejoice in us because we fixed ourselves and we solved the problems in front of us. He doesn't love us because we created something new. No, as we've seen so many times together as a church in God's word, God loves us and rejoices in us because he loves us and created us. Look more to the point that the Lord's rejoicing and gladness here consists in his people no longer suffering. Do you see that logic in this verse? The Lord's gladness is intrinsically tied.
It's absolutely tied to his people no longer suffering. When we don't suffer, he is glad. The creator is not a distant God. He's not uncaring for us. He's not uncaring about our pain. The creator isn't one whose heart is filled with joy when we suffer. No, the creator is one whose heart fills with joy at our well-being and whose heart fills with grief at our suffering. Friends, do you feel like your pain and your suffering today, do you feel like your hurts and your trials simply are?
They simply exist? And that the Lord's basically indifferent to them? Or worse, do you think he sees it and he's heaping them on you as punishment for some past sin? The Lord finds no joy in that. Our Heavenly Father is not made glad by watching you writhe and squirm and suffer here. In fact, His joy and His gladness are wrapped up together in a future vision of you and I no longer suffering. Friends, in this new creation that we're awaiting, the one that's yet to come, both God's delight in it and our experience of it will be different than this first creation because of the stain of sin.
This first creation has so often been the source of grief and disgust and rage for God. But the new creation will bring him only joy and only gladness. And he will rejoice because his compassionate heart will no longer be wrenched by the suffering that wrenches our hearts. He won't rejoice because we're perfect. He'll rejoice then because we no longer hurt. But an important note as we move on, as we think about all of this.
What this passage is describing up to this point is really the life that all of us know. Every single person in this room. There's weeping and distress and suffering. And that's all in one way or another tied back to our sinfulness and to our sin and what our sin has done in destroying this first creation. Christians certainly aren't the only ones who suffer though. What's being implied through this text, through this passage, and it's spelled out very clearly in other places in the Bible, is that it's all of humanity that's suffering under the effects of our sin.
But the incredible promise here is for God's people. They are the ones for whom this suffering would one day cease. But the Lord never promises, not once, that this weeping and crying and distress would stop for those outside of his people. In fact, the implications of this are chilling, absolutely chilling. The sounds of weeping and the cry of distress will continue forever for those who are not God's people.
Maybe this is you today. Maybe you're a guest. You came here with a friend. Maybe you've been out of church for a long time. You used to attend church. I don't know. But maybe this is you today. You are not a part of God's people. You're outside of God's people, not because you're not a member of this particular church or a member of some other particular local church necessarily, but you're outside of God's people because you've never trusted in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and for your salvation.
Well, friend, the grand message of the Bible is that Jesus, God's Son, lived a perfect life and died on the cross for our sins and rose again to defeat death so that we would have a way to enter in and become this people of God. You need to hear that. You need to believe that so that you can become a part of this people that he's creating as well. The truth that God will rejoice when we no longer suffer is future.
It's the future hope we have. But we don't have to look far to see That's not what we taste and feel right now. This is not yet our current reality. So number two, our current reality. The day is coming. It's coming perhaps sooner rather than later when the weeping and the crying stops. But we're not there yet. So how do we live? What do we do? If we're not there yet, and yet we know that it's coming, how do we live in the meantime?
How do we deal with our suffering? A few different things for us to consider. Number one, recognize that the problem itself, sickness, poverty, betrayal, pain, etc., whatever you think the problem is, it's not often the biggest issue you actually face. The spiritual challenge the problem presents is actually the bigger issue in the end. So we must grapple.
We have to wrestle and come to terms with the fact that many forms of suffering in this creation, in this life, have no remedy until that final day when verse 19 is our reality. Your disease that you struggle with now may take your life. Your disability may never be cured. The injustice you face will not be dealt with in your lifetime. Your spouse or parent or close friend has died or will die. The relationship that you had is broken, never to be restored.
The money is gone. There may be partial remedies for some of these, but for so many of them, they'll never be fixed. That suffering you feel, it will never be fixed here. In this lifetime, some of those are going to linger all the way to your last breath. But as a Christian, the spiritual challenge remains then. What will I do?
Will I trust the Lord in my suffering? Will I let my pain define me? Friends, in what ways are you tempted to let this trial, whatever it is, cause you to question God's faithfulness and goodness to you? Brothers and sisters, don't be surprised that you'll need to spend just as much time, certainly corporately as a church and individually as Christians, over these next weeks and months and years perhaps, dealing with the spiritual matters of our current suffering just as much as any physical suffering that comes your way.
That is our call as Christians, is to recognize that the problem itself, the presenting issue itself, is often not the biggest issue we face. The biggest issue we face is, will we trust the Lord through it all? The second one, pray that God would help you to set your mind on things that are above. Pray that God would help you to set your mind on the things that are above. Look, this is not an effort to minimize pain here or just kind of pretend that it doesn't exist and kind of sweep it under the rug.
But it is an attempt to reorient and to recalibrate our hearts and our suffering. The picture described here in verse 19 is of a new creation. It's of our eternal home. So if the very thing you desire in your suffering is the removal of pain, Lord, just take it away. Please make this go away. No more weeping. I want to stop crying. Friend, what you're actually really desiring at the end of the day is heaven. That's what the promise is here. That's when that will happen.
That's what your heart longs for now. You don't desire this world at the end of the day. You desire ease and comfort and absence of suffering, but that's never been promised to us here. What has been promised to us here is that there's one day coming when there's a new world, a new creation, and there we will no longer suffer. Oh, friends, in light of that, set your eyes there. Set your mind and your heart on the throne of Christ where he is in heaven.
It's so easy to look around and wish that we simply had it easier, better, without suffering, without heartache, without turmoil. But friends, that's not promised here. Sometimes God will give that good gift. He's given that good gift for many years to this church and to most of us as individuals in many different ways and in many different seasons. But it's not a promise he's made to us.
The promise he's made to us is to give that to us one day there in heaven. So we set our eyes and our mind on the things that are above. Friends, pray that God would give you eyes to see how this present suffering is actually one of his providential and loving ways that he's pushing you to look and to long for that thing that you most want anyway, to be forever with Jesus. Number three, your suffering is our suffering, and your joy will be our joy.
Look, by that, what I mean here is that you are not alone. You, especially as a member of this church, are not just an individual in your suffering, nor will you be one day an individual in your joy. You're not only not alone from the far more important standpoint of God. He's creating, he's bringing together a corporate people. You are not alone here among this church. The joy and gladness that God has as well as the absence of weeping and distress is for and about a collective people, not a bunch of individuals.
We are bound together as brothers and sisters in Christ forever. And this means that we bear each other's burdens and sorrows now as well. If you're a member of this church, then a part of the covenant that we've made for one another is to endeavor with tenderness and sympathy to bear each other's burdens and sorrows. And friends, I can think of no more important time than now to cling to that promise that we make to one another. If you're hurting, if you have questions, If you're wondering what has happened, why is all of this unfolding in front of me, ask for help.
Don't seek to suffer silently as though that wins you a particular badge of honor. Your suffering is our suffering. And when asked, or when you see someone who should be asking, their suffering is also our suffering. Go to them and help them. Friends, we suffer together, and more importantly, one day, we'll rejoice together. So if it's true that God rejoices when his people no longer suffer, then we can take heart in the midst of our current suffering, in the midst of our current heartache. God will have, he absolutely will have what brings him joy, and what brings him joy is to see us no longer suffer. One day, day, friends, this pain, this trouble, this heartache, this disappointment will no longer be.
A few chapters earlier, Isaiah chapter 63, verse 9, we're told that in our affliction, God is afflicted. And now here, in chapter 65, in our joy, He rejoices. Remember this, we have a future hope that our Lord will rejoice in us when we no longer suffer. We must set our eyes on that and let it give us strength to keep pressing on today and the next day and the next in the struggles that we face now.
Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, today is a difficult day. And yet there is nothing more that we need to hear and need to be reminded of than your love for us in it all. Oh God, you have not abandoned us. You've not left us on our own in this suffering or any other suffering we've ever faced or will face. God, you've been right here with us, a very present help in trouble.
God, we praise you for that reality. And yet as your people hurt and as your people struggle and suffer, we pray that you would be kind to them to lighten that. to carry them, to bind all of us together as brothers and sisters in Christ and help us to set our mind on the things above where our Lord is now ruling and reigning from heaven. We pray in his name. Amen.