Isaiah 28–35

0:01 So, how many of you are familiar with the concept of doom-scrolling? Yeah, it's a concept and a word that I only recently learned about, but I realized that I have been doing it for far longer than I have known about it. Doom-scrolling is the practice of getting on Twitter or Facebook or whatever is your social media of choice, and scrolling it and just being overwhelmed again and again and again by all of the change and bad that's going on in the world.

0:32 And when you reach the end of the feed, you pull down on it so that it will fresh and give you more things to feel doomed about. And then when you get to the top of that one, you do it again and again and again, you are doom scrolling. For those of you who are sort of, you know, sad addicts of doom scrolling like I can be at times, this past week was a doozy, wasn't it? I mean, this was a week for doom scrolling, for refreshing again and again and again and just feeling that new, refreshing feeling of foreboding. I mean, you had the absolutely tragic story of the submersible that was trying to take pictures or take a look at the wreckage of the Titanic.

1:08 You had that going on this week. You had the ship off the coast of Europe that sank and killed hundreds of migrants who were trying to make their way into Europe. And then you had the things that were going on in the country of Russia. Do you remember that? I mean, there was so much doom scrolling that could be done that I imagine some of you are sitting there thinking, wow, I didn't even know about this stuff in Russia. But you could doom scroll what was going on in Russia where the Wagner militarized units sort of turned from their war on Ukraine and actually made a move to invade Russia and made it almost to the capital city of Moscow.

1:42 and there's all these reports of Vladimir Putin getting on his plane and flying to St. Petersburg or wherever he was headed to. And then you pull down on the Twitter and you see, oh, it's over. Like the guy just gave up 100 miles from Moscow. And then the whole thing starts over again as you try to figure out what's going on. It was a banner week for doom scrolling. What would you do if you were watching a world that seemed to be spiraling out of control and you had nowhere solid to stand?

2:15 Let me put the question a little bit differently. Where do you stand when the world seems to be spiraling out of control? That's the question that we're asking today as we look at our text in the book of Isaiah. We're going to be looking at eight chapters of the book. So take a Bible. If you've got one, turn over to page, if you're using a Red Pew Bible, it's page 588. But we're going to be looking at Isaiah starting in chapter 28, making our way all the way through chapter 35. So turn over there. If you've got a Bible, you can kind of flip through.

2:47 If you haven't already read it and just kind of see some of the subheadings of what we're going to be talking about today. Let me take a few minutes to just get you up to speed. If you haven't been with us, it's been a few weeks since we've been in Isaiah anyway. So let me just kind of remind you what's going on in this book. The prophet Isaiah prophesied in the southern kingdom of Judah. You remember the civil war that broke the country in two. Southern kingdom of Judah, northern kingdom of Israel, capital in Jerusalem in the south, capital in Samaria in the north. Well, Isaiah prophesied down in the south, in and around Jerusalem, something like 750 to 700 years before the birth of Jesus.

3:24 And what the book of Isaiah is are all of the oracles and the sayings and the messages of Isaiah that somebody, probably he, actually has stitched together into a whole. It doesn't work like the book of Proverbs. It's not just a grab bag of truth that you just dip into and grab a piece and look at it. It's a whole thing. It makes an argument from start to finish. It's got a structure to it. It's got a point that it's trying to make. And the point that it's making, the message that it's trying to teach us, is really nothing sort of breathtaking.

3:55 Because this book paints a picture of the purposes of God to save his people out of a fallen world that is literally meant to leave you slack-jawed by the end. The overarching structure of the book is that it breaks down into three really big parts. You're going to be familiar with these if you've been with us the last few weeks. In chapters 1 to 37, you've got the book of the coming king. Then in chapters 38 to 55, you've got the book of the suffering servant. And then finally, the last 11 chapters, 56 to 66, you have the book of the anointed conqueror.

4:26 And each one of those, you can kind of tell by the titles that people have given them through the years, focus on a sort of saving figure, right? so in the first part of it the saving figure is the coming king like the great promise of chapters 1 through 37 is that the world may be spinning out of control but God is still on the throne and one day he's going to establish his kingdom in the person of the Messiah the anointed one the king who's going to reign in perfect justice and righteousness forever so the king is the is the saving figure in the first part of the book in the second the image changes and the person who's the saving figure is called the suffering servant. He's said to be the servant of the Lord, and he suffers in the place of his people so that they can be saved from their sins. So if the wages of sin is death, if the penalty for rebellion against God is to die, this suffering servant figure stands in the place of his people and accepts that death and suffering in himself so that his people don't have to. The saving figure is suffering servant. In the end, in the last part of the book,

5:30 56 to 66, that saving figure is an anointed conqueror. He's coming to set the world right. He's coming to save God's people and to put an end to the enemies of God's people. And he conquers the world as he does so. What's amazing about the book, even in that grand structure though, is that as you read through those three big parts, you start to realize, oh my goodness, all three of these figures, the coming king, the suffering servant, the anointed conqueror, They're all the same person.

6:01 You don't realize that until you get about halfway through the book. But then you start to realize, oh my goodness, the things that characterize the king and the servant and the conqueror, they're all the same thing. So the great message of Isaiah's book becomes, yes, the world looks like it's spinning out of control. But it very much is not. God is still on the throne and he's going to set it all right through this royal, divine, suffering, conquering king and servant. who we know as the New Testament unfolds is the Lord Jesus Christ.

6:33 So that's what Isaiah is doing in his whole book. We've made our way up through chapter 27 so far. If you think back to sermons prior over the last three, four weeks, something like that, you'll remember kind of the structure of this thing as it's unfolded. Chapters one to five are a sort of prologue to the whole book and essentially they show darkness closing in on the nation of Israel. So as Israel has rebelled against God, as they've refused to trust God, darkness is closing in. And you get that picture of the sailor looking back toward land as the storm rolls in and obscures the light. In chapters 6 to 12, you've got sort of two major parts.

7:07 You have Isaiah's message to the northern kingdom and then his message to the southern kingdom. And both of those messages end with a mind-blowing picture of this coming king, right? This king who will be wonderful counselor and mighty God, prince of peace and everlasting father, on whose shoulders the government will rest and he'll rule the world in righteousness and the zeal of the Lord will do that. You remember those images of the king at the end of each of those messages. What we looked at a few weeks ago, the last time we were together in Isaiah, was chapters 13 to 27.

7:39 So we actually looked at those 15 chapters all at once. And if you remember the structure of those oracles, those prophecies, is that it's really three cycles of prophecy against Israel's enemies, so against the nations of the world. That's what it's doing. But as those three cycles take place, they sort of corkscrew into the future. So at the beginning, you have very strong, you know, easily identifiable oracles, right? It's just against Egypt, against Babylon, against Assyria, right?

8:11 The Lord just says who he's judging. Second cycle, it sort of fades out, right? And you get these mysterious nicknames for various groups of people. So, you know, silence for the Arabian countries or the valley of vision for Jerusalem itself. It's sort of these shady names for these countries. And then in the third cycle, the whole, you know, mass of enemies of God's people just sort of melts down into one city that has set itself against God. And God says, I'm going to wipe that city off the face of the earth.

8:43 In other words, all opposition and all rebellion against me is going to come to an end on the last day. And that's where chapters 27 ends. Well, today we're going to be looking at the next eight chapters of the book, chapters 28 to 35, which I think really has the same message. The message of 13 to 27, the message of 6 to 12, the message of 1 to 5, the message of all of it is God is still on the throne. In a world that seems like it's spinning out of control, God is still on the throne. And chapters 28 to 35 really have the same message.

9:15 Now, we're still here in the book of the coming king, right? That encompasses chapters 1 to 37. So the message here is still going to focus on God's reign over the world through his coming Messiah. That's kind of what the whole thing centers on. And we'll see that at various points as we study these eight chapters. There's a little bit of a difference, though, between these eight and chapters 13 to 27. The message is still on the king. It's still on God's reign over a world out of control. But it shifts just a little bit.

9:45 See, in 13 to 27, God is focused in these prophecies, Isaiah is focused mainly on God's judgment of the nations of the world. You get little flashes of hope here and there, right? The highway that's going to bring people from Assyria and Egypt into Jerusalem. They're going to worship God. You get little flashes of hope and light. But for the most part, 13 to 27 is just one utter wasteland of judgment. Here, though, the light gets a lot brighter. because Isaiah's message in these eight chapters pushes far more into the future to the last day and instead of just a flash of light you really get to see the sun dawning on the last day in these chapters a new heavens and new earth where not only are God's enemies destroyed but God's people are brought into his presence to live in joy and peace forever so that that's that's more what you get in these eight chapters they're much brighter than 13 to 17. Okay so how do they work? How do these eight chapters of Isaiah work, 28 to 35? Well, if you've been here through the last

10:50 three or four sermons, however many it's been, you have come to expect, I hope, that the structure of these chapters is going to be critically important. And that is going to be true for every sermon that we go through here in the book of Isaiah for the next few weeks. Every time you come to Isaiah, you simply will not be able to understand it unless you understand the way Isaiah has put it together how all building blocks sort of fit together if you just dive into it and start reading or if you just dive into it and say well I'm just going to read this chapter or that chapter the whole thing is just going to feel like a bowl of spaghetti to you it's just going to be gloopy and it's going to seem like it's all kind of doing the same thing except for you know this messianic meatball over here and and you're you're just going to have a really hard time with it and so what I want to do in each one of these sermons is not just pick out sort of my favorite verses in a particular section of Isaiah and preach those to you? I mean, that would be really easy, and we would all love it, right? It'd be familiar verses. Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. Let's do a whole sermon on that, right? I don't want to do that, because what I want to do

11:55 is show you the structure of what Isaiah is saying. Not just my favorite verses, but what Isaiah is trying to get across to his listeners, and then I want to preach that message to you. I want you to understand what's going on. All right, so let's look at the structure of chapters 28 to 35, because it's actually very, very simple this time. So in your bulletin or on the table, something like that, there's a handout like this. You should be familiar with these by now in the book of Isaiah, but it's going to be an outline of Isaiah 28 to 35. So if you look at that, what you will notice there is that these eight chapters consist of six individual poems.

12:43 Now, technically, they're not really poems because they don't have the kind of rhyming and rhythm in quite the same way that a normal Hebrew poem does. They're a little bit of a mashup of prose and poetry. I don't know if you've ever seen at Christian conferences or YouTube or something like that, this sort of new-ish art form of spoken word, which is kind of a mashup of prose and poetry, but that's kind of what's going on here. This is the spoken word section of Isaiah. He invented it 3,000 years ago, and there's nothing new under the sun, guys.

13:16 Absolutely nothing. The eight chapters are broken up into six poems. You can see them there, poem one, two, three, then the second cycle, poem four, five, and six. Each one of those six poems is set off by the Hebrew word for ah or woe. I mean, the Hebrew word is actually hoy. That's what the word is, hoy. But just like it kind of is for us, it's meant to be a sigh. It's meant to be like frustration or disgust or something like that. So you don't, when you're reading it in Hebrew, you wouldn't say hoy.

13:48 You know, you wouldn't do that. You would go, hi, right? It's ah or woe. That's what the word is. in each one of these poems is set off by that Hebrew word, ay. So you can see that if you look at, say, first verse of 28. You see that? Ah, ah, ah. There it is. And then first verse of 29, ah, it's there again. And if you look in the middle of 29 at verse 15, you'll see it again, ah. Then at the beginning of chapter 30, ah, stubborn children.

14:23 Then 31, whoa, that's how it gets translated there, but it's the same word. It's just, it's ah to those, ay, to those who go down to Egypt for help. And then the last time is in 33, one, ah, you destroyer. So that's what's setting off the six poems of this section. That's what structures it. Now, here's what's interesting about it. Once you've got those six poems identified, what you notice in their message, in what they're actually saying, is that, again, we have cycles of prophecies. So we have, in this case, two cycles of three poems each.

14:59 So you can see that on your handout. The first cycle is poem one, poem two, and poem three. And then the second cycle is poem four, poem five, and poem six. And what's super interesting about it is that if you read across your handout, you'll notice that the messages of the corresponding poems are the same. Right? So if you look at poem one, the peril of rejecting God's word and covenant, that's the theme of the first poem. Chapter 28, that's what it's all about, the peril of rejecting God's word and covenant.

15:30 Well, look what happens in poem four when you get to chapter 30. Jerusalem actually does reject God's word and covenant and gets judged for it, but then it presses on into the future, and it turns out that God's purposes, even in the midst of that failure in judgment, are still unstoppable. God does not get beat, right? You look down to two and five. So the point there is that God brings judgment and deliverance. He does spectacular things sometimes, but that doesn't guarantee a change of heart. Just because you see God do big stuff does not mean that your heart has been changed.

16:01 That's the point of poem two. Poem five makes the same point. God delivers Jerusalem. He destroys Assyria, but their hearts are not changed. And what they need to be seeing is not just what's happening right there in history, in their own circumstances, but they need to be looking forward to the coming kingdom. That's what changed hearts will do. And then 3 and 6, same idea. The world may seem under the power of wicked people, but God is sovereign, and he will keep his promises. Poem 6, chapters 33 to 35. The world may seem under the power of wicked people, but God will keep his promises.

16:34 And then he gets very specific about what those are. He'll establish his kingdom. His enemies will be destroyed, and his people will rejoice. Okay, so you see how that works, right? You see the structure of the thing. And, you know, my hope is that in seeing that structure, if you read it this week and you just kind of didn't understand it or, wow, it just seems like a lot of judgment, hopefully it's kind of clicking now. And you're going, oh, wow, that's really kind of cool. And I sort of want to go back and read it with that in mind and see if I can pick that up, right? That's what this is supposed to do for you. So, again, this morning we're not going to read the whole eight chapters.

17:06 That would just take too long. But I hope that by seeing this structure, you can see what Isaiah is getting at in this section. In other words, you can see what he's wanting his listeners, that's us, that's you and me, we are Isaiah's listeners now 3,000 years later, you can see what he's wanting us to learn. He's wanting us to learn that even in a world that sometimes seems to be coming apart at the seams, where doom scrolling seems like the only productive thing you can do, even in that world, God is still sovereign. He's still going to fulfill his promises to his people.

17:39 And our part, in the midst of all of that, in the midst of a world coming apart and a God making promises that he's going to save his people, our part is to trust in him, to trust his promises, to trust his covenant, to trust his word. And Isaiah wants us to know that to do the opposite of that, to distrust him or to fail to trust him, brings only hopelessness and destruction. So that's the main idea. Here it is. No matter how bad things may seem to get, no matter how bad things may seem to get, remember that God will fulfill his promises.

18:16 So trust in him. No matter how bad things may seem to get, remember that God will fulfill his promises. So trust in him. All right, what I want to do with these eight chapters is unfold them this morning in three points. And the way we're going to do that is you're going to need the handout right in front of you. But we're going to look, each of the three points is going to be looking across. the handout, right? So in the first point, we're going to look at poem one and point four. Then the second point, two and five. Then in the third point, three and six. Does that make sense? That's how the points of the sermon are going to work. And here they are. Number one, you should be able to kind of see that. You should be able to see these point titles kind of in the handout. Number one, looking at poem one and four, the danger of rejecting God's word. See what I did there? I just changed the word peril to danger. That's all I did. The danger of rejecting God's word. Number two, looking at two and five, the need for a new heart. The need for a new heart. And then number three,

19:18 looking at three and six, the promise of a new world. The promise of a new world. All right, let's dive into it and see what we can learn. Number one, point number one, looking at poem one and Poem 4, The Danger of Rejecting God's Word. That is the overriding message of the first poem in each of these cycles. So you look at chapter 28 and you look at chapter 30, the first poem and the fourth poem. That's their message, that it is dangerous to reject or ignore God's Word.

19:50 Now, roughly speaking, just to give you a little bit more about this, roughly speaking, you can think of these two cycles on your handout kind of like this. The first cycle, so the first three of them, tend to speak in sort of broad principles about how God tends to act in the world. And they teach a certain lesson about how he does that. The second cycle tends to take those principles that have just been enunciated and apply it very particularly to the historical real circumstances that were going on in Jerusalem in about 705 B.C.

20:25 Okay, so that's generally how they work. It breaks down a little bit with poem six because poem six is just reaching far, far into the future. It's reaching all the way to the last day. But generally, the principle or the structure of it is first cycle is big principles. Second cycle is applying those principles to the stuff of life. Now, to really understand the lessons that God was teaching his people through Isaiah, particularly through this first poem and the fourth one, You've got to understand the historical situation into which these poems and oracles and prophecies were spoken.

21:00 You just kind of have to understand a little history to know what was going on. So, once upon a time, in 705 BC, the empire of Assyria got a new king named Sennacherib, who was proving to be aggressive. In fact, over the last few years since he came to the throne, Sennacherib had established himself as probably the most powerful figure in the region, if not at that time, the entire world.

21:30 And the northern kingdom of Israel had already been taken over by his father and grandfather. So they were off the map already. That happened in like 722 B.C. We're now in 705 B.C. But now that Sennacherib is on the throne and he's saber-rattling and scaring everybody around him, the people and rulers in Jerusalem down in the southern kingdom had gotten terrified. They were scared witless by this great, powerful king with very big armies saber-rattling up to their north and threatening to come and destroy them.

22:02 They were scared by that. And guess who the king was in Jerusalem at the time? Ahaz. Okay, now we've been talking about this long enough. it. Y'all should have like audibly groaned right there. So let's try that again. Ahaz. I know, right? This dude is terrible. He's awful. All you gotta do is read 2 Kings and he's like the worst king that has ever lived on the scene. He's horrible. He sacrifices his children in the fire to the god Molech. He leads the people of Israel into idolatry. He's awful. He's utterly and completely faithless. He's not at all a paragon of faithfulness to God. And sure enough, in the history of it all, instead of trusting God against this Assyrian threat, instead of turning to God and trusting his promises that, you know, Ahaz, I've made promises to David that I'm not going to let your throne be overturned. There's going to be someone sitting on the throne forever. Ahaz,

23:05 Instead of trusting that divine promise, Ahaz and his guys got scared and decided instead to send an embassy down south to Egypt to make an alliance to try to hold off the Assyrian scourge. They didn't trust God, they trusted Egypt. So that's what's going on as we dive into chapter 28. And about that alliance that Ahaz made, God is none too happy about it. So let's read a little bit.

23:36 Chapter 28, verse 1. Ah, the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim. Ephraim's the northern kingdom. So they've already been wiped off the map, and God is going to make a point with that. They were proud. They were drunkards. They didn't care about his promises, and so they got wiped off the map. So ah, the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim, and the fading flower of its glorious beauty, which is on the head of the rich valley of those overcome with wine. Behold, the Lord has one who is mighty and strong, like a storm of hail, a destroying tempest. Like a storm of mighty overflowing waters, he casts down to the earth with his hand.

24:10 Who's this one that the Lord has? It's the king of Assyria who came down and destroyed him, right? So the Lord's got him in his hand. He uses him as a hammer against the northern kingdom. He says this king throws down the proud to the ground. So verse 3, the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim will be trodden underfoot by the Assyrians. And the fading flower of its glorious beauty, which is on the head of the rich valley, will be like a first ripe fig before the summer. When someone sees it, he swallows it as soon as it is in his hand. It's an arresting image, isn't it? Have you ever been like strawberry picking or blueberry picking, blackberry picking at a farm or something?

24:44 I mean, when you first go into the field, you don't like coddle the blueberries, do you? You don't like put one in your hand and take care of it. No, the first thing you do is you see the very first blueberry straw, you pluck it and eat it, right? It's gone, and you don't give it a second thought. Well, that's what God is saying that Assyria did to the northern kingdom. It was just sort of passing through the land and went, oh, northern kingdom, and ate it, right? And it was gone, and that was it. He's saying he didn't even give you a second thought. You weren't even the point. He just ate you as he was passing by. That's what he means by that. So verse 5.

25:16 In that day, the Lord of hosts will be a crown of glory and a diadem of beauty to the—what? Where is that coming from? In that day, the Lord of hosts will be a crown of glory, a diadem of beauty to the remnant of his people, and a spirit of justice to him who sits in judgment and strength to those who turn back the battle at the gate. Why are we getting this flash of light all of a sudden? Well, because that's what Isaiah does with his prophecies. That's what God does. You get all this darkness, you get all these clouds, and then all of a sudden, boom, lightning bolt, and there's light, there's hope, there's promise. It happens all the time in Isaiah.

25:49 Verse 7. These also reel with wine and stagger with strong. Now, who's he talking about there? Because the camera's moved, basically. He's no longer talking about the northern rulers staggering with wine and their crown being thrown down and them getting eaten by Assyria. He's saying now, these also, in other words, the rulers now in the southern kingdom in Jerusalem, they're doing the same thing as the northern rulers. What's going to happen to them? So these also, they reel with wine, stagger with strong drink.

26:21 The priest and the prophet reel with strong drink. They're swallowed by wine. They don't swallow wine. They're swallowed by wine. They stagger with strong drink. They reel in vision. They stumble in giving judgment. All the tables are full of filthy vomit with no space left. And then in verses 9 and 10, you sort of get this accusation against Isaiah from these people. That's what's going on there. So they say to him, to whom will this guy, Isaiah, teach knowledge? To whom will he explain the message? Is he going to teach those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast?

26:54 In other words, what they're saying is, Isaiah, what you're trying to tell us to trust God, that's too simple. It's too simple. It's like you're talking to infants. It's like you're talking to those who have just been weaned from their mother's breasts. What you're saying is just simplistic. We are men of the world. We are worldly wise people. And these things are too complicated. And then he says, they say about his teaching, for it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little. Now, your English Bibles have tried to translate that, but it really doesn't translate well.

27:29 It's actually just a bunch of Hebrew sounds. So it's like, that's all it is. And it's supposed to be mimicking the sort of babbling of a baby. And what they're saying is, Isaiah, that's what you're teaching sounds like to us. It sounds like the babbling of a baby. It's too simplistic. Okay, keep going. So Isaiah returns that taunt in verse 11 and says, okay, by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue, the Lord will speak to this.

28:01 In other words, you're going to get invaded by somebody who doesn't speak your language. The Lord's going to speak to this people by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue. People to whom he has said, this is rest, give rest to the weary, and this is repose. Yet they would not hear. And so the word of the Lord will be to them, in fact, da-la-da, da-la-da, tsa-la-ta, tsa-la-ta, that they may go and fall backward and be broken and snared and taken. In other words, you're not going to listen to my word. You're not going to listen to the word of the Lord. What you will listen to are the tongues of foreign conquerors that you cannot understand.

28:34 So that's what's going on in that chapter. You can kind of see the progression of thought if you back up out of it and just look at what it's doing. So it starts in one to four. You got the folly of the rulers in the northern kingdom. Five and six, this completely unexpected flash of hope and promise. Then in seven, the camera shifts to the southern kingdom. And the question is, okay, these guys are acting just like the rulers of the north. Is the same thing going to happen to them? And then the rest of the poem, if you read it already or you want to later, the rest of the poem all the way through chapter 28 is basically just saying, Yep, yep, the same thing that happened to the north is going to happen to the south.

29:14 They are going to be just as dumb. They are going to be just as untrusting of the Lord's promises. And just like the north, they are going to reject the word and covenant of the Lord. In fact, they're going to despise the covenant that they have with them. Look at 14. He says, therefore, hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem. Because you have said we have made a covenant with death and with Sheol, we have an agreement. in other words what they've done is gone and made a covenant or an alliance with Egypt but Isaiah is saying there if you're trusting in Egypt all you have done is made a covenant with death you have made a covenant you made an agreement you made an alliance with the grave and in the end that covenant's going to be broken and you're going to die that's what he ends up saying you look at verse 20 he drives this whole point home with this image that's just so sort of funnily relatable. You've got, in verse 20 there, a bed that's too short to stretch out in and a blanket that's too narrow to wrap up in, right? You ever tried to sleep with something like

30:20 that, like a little blanket that doesn't cover you up, and you don't sleep. You just spend the night sort of being frustrated with this blanket that won't cover your feet up. Or if you're a tall person and your bed is too short, you know the frustration. You don't really sleep. You just stay frustrated at the bed that you can't stretch your feet out without them falling over the edge. Well, God is saying that's what your alliance with Egypt is like. It's insufficient. It's not going to work. All it's going to do is leave you frustrated. Then the end of the poem, you've sort of got these images of a farmer. So say 23 to 29, you've got these images of a farmer just doing exactly what's necessary to make the crops grow, right?

30:55 So he doesn't use a tool on, you know, if you look at it, dill, for instance, you know, dill pickles. You don't use a big old thresher on dill. It would destroy the crop. You have to use the tool that's necessary for that crop. And the point is that God's judgment of the southern kingdom is going to be exactly what's required. God's judgment of that kingdom is not going to be random. It's not going to be an explosion of undirected anger against them. God's judgment is meticulous like a farmer using the right tool.

31:27 God is going to use the right tool on his people. That's the point of that whole thing. I mean, you can flip over to chapter 30 and look at, you know, just looking across your hand out there to the fourth poem, chapter 30. Problem's the same. Look at verse 1 in chapter 30. Ah, stubborn children, declares the Lord, who carry out a plan, but not mine, who make an alliance, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin, who set out to go down to Egypt without asking for my direction, to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh, to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt.

32:01 Therefore shall the protection of Pharaoh turn to your shame and shelter in the shadow of Egypt to your humiliation. Skip down to verse 8. He says there, now go, write it before them on a tablet and scribe it in a book that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever. They're rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord. There's that emphasis on not hearing the word of God again, right? Da-la-da, da-la-da. That's what they said about the word of God and now they're doing it again. They're unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord. Who say to the seers, don't see.

32:33 To the prophets, don't prophesy to us what is right. Speak to us smooth things. Prophesy illusions. Leave the way. Turn aside from the path. Let us hear no more about this Holy One of Israel. And then in verse 12, you never want to say something dismissive of the Holy One of Israel and have him respond like this. Therefore, thus says the Holy One of Israel. It's heavy because you despise this word and trust in oppression and perverseness.

33:04 Therefore, this iniquity, and he goes on and on and on with the judgment. You see the point there. They didn't want to hear the word of God. When they heard Isaiah, they made fun of it, right? It sounds like you're talking to a baby, Isaiah. And then when other prophets came to him, they just said, shut up, no more of that. We don't want to hear from this Holy One of Israel. Listen, do you hear the warning as we look at these couple of poems? Do you hear the warning that God is sounding here? Right at the beginning of both these cycles of poems.

33:35 Friend, the most important thing in your life, the most important thing you can do as a human being is week after week and day after day hear and heed the word of God. It's the most important thing that you can do. You know what's funny is I doom scroll through Twitter. I've noticed that there's a kind of drive these days on social media to sort of reclaim and reassert what people talk about as classical masculinity, right?

34:08 You go through it and there's all kinds of accounts that will tell you how to be a better man, habits that you need to cultivate, patterns that you need to put in place in your life to ensure that you're centered and solid and at peace. So they tell you what you're supposed to eat and they tell you what cars you're supposed to buy and they tell you what exercises you're supposed to do. I saw a meme yesterday as I was scrolling through Twitter. It was like showing you what you need to do in order to be this like classically masculine man. And it had three little pictures around this cartoon dude. And so it's like three things that he does.

34:39 One of them was a little Bible. Another one was a dumbbell, like a weightlifting dumbbell. And another one was a steak. By which I guess it means religion, exercise, and eating lots of meat is what it would take to be classically masculine. You can find the same thing for women, if you look, how to reclaim classical, true femininity. But friends, listen to me. What God, the God of the universe, the God who made you, is telling you here is that the most important thing you can do to be a based, solid, established man or woman is to hear and heed his word.

35:19 That's what's going to make you a man or woman of God that your creator intends you to be. And I hope you're listening carefully, and I hope you can hear both the sides of that. You hear the two parts, yeah? It's not just to hear it. It's to hear it and heed it. There's a way to hear God's Word, to read the Bible even, or to sit under sermons and walk away like Isaiah's people going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Either that is too complicated for me, or maybe you even think, this is too simple for me.

35:53 I'm above this. This is beneath me. I can take more than the word of God. I'm worldly wise. Give me more, blah, blah, blah. And even though you're hearing, you're not heeding. You're not letting it in. Well, friends, that's the first thing Isaiah is telling you to do. Listen to God's word and react to it. Let your life be shaped by it because that's what leads to good for you for eternity. Look with me to the last part of chapter 30, the end of that fourth poem.

36:26 Last few verses there, you've got this more prosaic section, verses 18 to 26 and then 27 to 33. You basically got there. We're not going to read it, but you've got two images. You can look at them later. The first one is an image of the people of God who actually do listen to and heed God's word, and the other is of God's enemies who do not. And for those who listen to and heed God's word, the picture that's drawn is just this absolutely beautiful picture of peace and serenity and prosperity.

36:57 And I love that image in verse 20, you shall see your teacher. Your teacher will not hide himself anymore, but you shall see your teacher. It's beautiful. It means you're going to see God. That's what that means. Starting in 27, you get this other vision, though, of what's about to happen to the Assyrian Empire, people who will not listen to God's word. And what it is is total destruction. When God wipes them off the face of the earth. Friends, that ultimately, those last few verses of chapter 30, are the danger of rejecting God's word, of blah, blah, blah-ing it, of ignoring it.

37:31 Because when you do that, all you're doing, friend, is batting away the only thing in the universe that can save you from destruction. The only thing in the universe that can save you from destruction is the message of the good news that Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the coming king of Isaiah, saves sinners just like you. And if you'll put your faith in him, in his death, in his resurrection, in his life lived in your place, you'll be saved from that destruction. And the image that will mark your eternity will not be the last one of chapter 30.

38:03 It'll be the one just before that, of peace and serenity and joy forever as you see the face of your God and your teacher. Here's point number two, the second thing that Isaiah says, the need for a new heart. That's the next lesson that Isaiah teaches. He does it in the second poem. So starting in chapter 29, verse 1, and he does the same thing in the fifth, if you look across your handout, which that fifth one runs through chapters 31 and 32. And essentially what he's teaching is this. All right, if poems one and three have taught us that salvation comes by hearing and heeding the word of God, then poems two and five teach us exactly how that salvation is is affected in us it's affected in us it takes root it happens in us not just by noticing that God does good stuff around you what happens through a miracle whereby our hearts are changed and transformed whereby we're brought to new spiritual life by the work of the spirit so that that we see God with new eyes and love him with a new heart so let me show

39:08 you how he teaches that in these middle poems of each cycle. Look with me at the second poem. It starts in 29.1, chapter 29, verse 1. So here's how this one works. In verses 1 to 8, you've got this long poem describing something that's about to happen in the next year or two, we think. We think that that's how this poem is dated. This thing that's been prophesied is about to happen in a year or two. And what's that thing? Well, it's the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, the king of the Assyrian empire. So if you look at verses 1 to 4, you can see it's going to be a terrible time, but then in 5 to 8, you get this astonishing deliverance that God is going to pull off. Now, if you were here for the second king's sermon series, you should have in your mind a bit of an understanding of what event this is talking about, right? It's the time when this guy, the Rav Shaka, he's like the main, he's like the voice of Sauron to Sennacherib the king, right? He swaggers out

40:09 the Jerusalem and he taunts the living God. He taunts the soldiers that are on the walls of Jerusalem and he says, your God can't stand against us. Sennacherib has taken down all of the gods of all the nations everywhere and your God is not going to do any better. And he taunts the Holy One of Israel and then overnight 180,000 Assyrian soldiers are dead. It's an astonishing deliverance that God pulls off for his people. You look at verse 1 there, that word Ariel has nothing to do with the little mermaid.

40:43 Ah, Ariel, Ariel. It's not the little mermaid. It's Jerusalem. That's what it is. So why does he call it Ariel? Well, Ariel is the Hebrew word for something like fireplace of the altar. That's what it means, fireplace of the altar. So if you have in the temple in Jerusalem, you've got the altar, right, where you put the sacrifices on top of it, and it says that the sacrifices get burned, right? Well, it's not like they just take a torch and touch it to the sacrifice up on top of the stone altar. There was actually a grate, right, like a grill sort of on top where you put the animal, right, and then underneath it there was the aerial, the fireplace of the altar, and so you put wood and whatever else in there, and the flames come up through the grate and it It burns up the burnt offering.

41:31 So Jerusalem is here being called the fireplace of the altar. Now, what does that mean symbolically? We don't know exactly, but what it probably means is this twofold image that Jerusalem is, in fact, sacred to God. It's important to him, right? Those people are important to him. They're his people. So they are the altar, very much, but they are also the place where the fires burn. So in other words, you're sacred to God, yes. but you're going to be burned up again and again and again.

42:05 And how true is that so often with God's people? I mean, you and I, even now as God's people, we can kind of look at this and say, yeah, that's us. We are Ariel, right? Because as God's people, we may be redeemed and justified and forgiven. We may have the promise of glorification. We may be sacred to God in that way. And yet, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt because Jesus told us it would be so that we are also the people where the fires are going to burn until that day. Life as a Christian is hard.

42:38 We are aerial, and God knows that. So in 1 to 8, 29, 1 to 8, you've got this amazing deliverance of Jerusalem being talked about in those verses. You've got the destruction of the Assyrians and the deliverance of Israel, These great works of God, 180,000 soldiers dead in one night. But then in the wake of that great deliverance, look at verse 9. Astonish yourselves and be astonished. Blind yourselves and be blind. Be drunk but not with wine.

43:09 Stagger but not with strong drink. For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep and has closed your eyes, the prophets, has covered your heads, the seers. And the vision of all of this, what's just happened, this great deliverance, this great destruction of the enemies, The vision of all of this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed up. When men give it to one who can read, saying, read this, he says, I can't, because it's sealed. And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, read this, he says, I can't read. You see the point? The point is, despite this great deliverance, the people are still blind.

43:42 They don't see it. They don't understand it. Verse 13 sums it up really well. Because these people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips while their hearts are far from me. You see what I'm doing? You honor me with your lips, but your heart hasn't been changed. You say nice things, but your heart is dead. Same points made in the fifth poem. In chapter 31, you get the same thing. I mean, we don't need to look at it in much detail, but God saves his people from the Assyrian armies, and he doesn't need Egypt to help him do it.

44:17 He does it himself. He destroys 180,000 soldiers. But look at the main point. In 32, right in the middle of that poem, it's not just that God has delivered his people right here. The thing that matters finally, 32, is behold, a king will reign in righteousness and princes will rule in justice. What matters is that there's a coming kingdom where the Messiah reigns and you need to be a part of that. Okay, so how does that happen? How does that kingdom happen? Well, look down through chapter 32 you, all the way through it, just let your eye kind of go down through it. The coming of the kingdom and the bringing of people into this kingdom happens through two people.

44:57 Who are they? Do you see them? Look for them. They're both in chapter 32. Okay, here's a hint. One of those people is in verse 1. We already looked at him. The other person through whom this kingdom is created and people are brought into it is verse 15. You see that? It's really astonishing when you think about it in light of the New Testament. The kingdom is inaugurated and established and people are brought into it through the work of the king and the spirit. It's incredible, isn't it? Until the spirit is poured upon us, this is verse 15, until the spirit is poured upon us from on high, the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, the fruitful field is deemed a forest, and then justice will dwell and righteousness will abide. And the effect of that will be peace and the result of righteousness, quietness, and trust forever. You see how you get into the kingdom?

45:49 It's not just by seeing things that God is doing. It's by having the Spirit change your heart so that you look with new eyes of love to the King. That's how it happens. You see the point? I mean, let me just drive it down for just a second. Just because you may have seen God do some extraordinary things around you or to other people in your life, does not mean, friend, that your soul has been brought to life. You can acknowledge God's work from now until the last day.

46:20 That does not mean that your soul has been brought to life. It doesn't mean you're what Christians call regenerate or what Jesus called born again. It doesn't mean that. Just because you see God doing other stuff around you does not mean God has made you a Christian. I don't know how many times I've heard people, when you ask them about their spiritual life, when you ask them about their relationship with God, they'll say something like, well, God has been so good to me. I have the house that I want. I have the car that I want. I have a good family. I have a lot of friends. I get to go to the lake.

46:53 God's done so many good things for me, and I love him for it. No, friend, that's not what matters. And when somebody asks you about your relationship with God, if your heart is drawn to saying those kinds of things, you need to ask questions about your spiritual state. Because what a Christian will say when asked about their relationship with God is God has been so good to me. And what that means is that I don't care about the house and I don't care about the lake and the boat and the car because I have been forgiven of my sins by the crucified Savior.

47:26 That's what a Christian says. Not just looking at what God has done around you, but what God has done in you through the power of his spirit to make you see Jesus clearly. People in Jerusalem saw God do amazing things around them and for them. He was good to them, but their hearts were still dead. My friend, don't let that happen to you. Here's the third point, the promise of a new world. Just looking at those last two on the bottom of the handout, Poem 3 and Poem 6, they also have the same message.

48:07 If you think about it and sort of understand them rightly, these six poems in 28 to 35 have the same kind of spiraling corkscrew feeling that we saw in 13 to 27. They sort of, as you read them, they sort of spiral into the future from problems and troubles in this present age, and they land on the glories of the age to come. So that's what you get in the last poems of each cycle, the third and the sixth. So poem three and poem six. But the point of both of them is that even when the world around us looks hopeless, when history seems like it's out of control, or maybe worse, when history seems like it's under control, but by wicked people, in the end, friends, even in the midst of all that chaos, even when it looks like the enemies of God are driving the football down our throats, it is still the God of Israel, our Father, who sits on the throne and who brings history to its commanded end.

49:05 Let me show you that in these poems. So look with me at the second half of chapter 29. This is the third poem here, middle of chapter 29. Verse 15, it starts with that, ah, ah, you who hide deep from the Lord your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, who sees us? He's talking to the rulers of the age, right? They're trying to keep their evil deeds secret from God, who think that they are in control. right? And they're trying to keep their plans secret. So who sees us? Who knows us? Not the God of Israel. He doesn't know. He can't do anything to stop us. Well, look what he says in 16.

49:45 You're turning things upside down. Shall the potter be regarded as the clay that the thing made should save its maker? He didn't make me. Or the thing formed, save him who formed it. He has no understanding. No, God says, you've got it all wrong. You're not commanding history. All you rulers and presidents and people with your crowned heads, you're not commanding history. It's not in your control. It's in mine. With all your imagined authority, with all your power and crowns and thrones and Air Force Ones and marble buildings and domes and well-tailored suits, you're still just a clay pot.

50:24 I made you. I put you there. And I'm the one who is using even you to bring history to my directed ends. In verse 17, basically there, he says, let me tell you what I'm going to do, right? Despite all your plans, despite all your secrets, let me tell you what's going to happen. And then he describes it for the next few verses. You look down at verse 22, after God says what he's going to do with history. In 22, he sort of says why he's going to do it.

50:56 and why he's going to do it is to fulfill the promises that he made to Abraham. So look at 29, 22. Chapter 29, verse 22. Therefore, thus says the Lord, who redeemed Abraham concerning the house of Jacob. And then he says what he's doing. Jacob will no more be ashamed, no more shall his face grow pale. And he goes on and describes the great blessings that he's going to give to his people because he made those promises to Abraham. It's an astonishing thought, I think. And we talked about it last time, but just as much as it was there, I think it's an astonishing thought when it comes up here, too.

51:28 Have you thought about that any since we were last together? The God of the universe who is driving and directing history has as his main goal the keeping of his promises to his people. He's driving history to keep his promises to his people. That's why everything is happening. Everything that you see in the doom scroll is happening because God is working to keep his promises to his people, all of them. It's an astonishing thought.

51:59 I think sometimes we can think that the movements of history are so distant, so like disconnected from us. So maybe, yeah, we can affirm that, yes, God, of course, has some inscrutable plan that we'll never understand and never grasp. But here, this chapter, just like the ones before are telling us, no, he tells us his purposes and plans right here. What God cares about above all is you, me, us, his people. And even when he moves the gears of history, even when he moves empires and topples kings, his aim and purpose and goal is to do good to us.

52:39 What an astonishing thing that is. I mean, again, you get the same lesson in truth in the sixth poem. So flip over to chapter 33. Right off the bat, you can see the same problem and question as back in chapter 29. And the question is, look, is it actually wicked, godless people who are really driving history? Because sometimes it certainly seems like it. And then the answer comes in 33.1. Ah, you, destroyer.

53:10 It's not clear who he's talking about there because we've corkscrewed into the future. But it's basically anyone who destroys the people of God or who attempts to. Ah, you destroyer who yourself have not been destroyed, you traitor whom none has betrayed. When you have ceased to destroy, you will be destroyed. And when you have finished betraying, they will betray you. So the destroyer, everything that sets itself up, vaunts itself against the glory of God, is ultimately going to be destroyed. And what is our part as God's people in the midst of that?

53:42 Well, keep reading. Verse 2. Oh, Lord, be gracious to us. We wait for you. Be our arm every morning, our salvation in a time of trouble. What do we do? We wait and we pray and we trust God for the day when he's going to set everything right. Now, I love the phrase, if you look down in verse 6, still talking about the people of God.

54:13 And it says about them that God, he will be the stability of your times. It's a beautiful phrase, isn't it? He will be the stability of your times. And the world feels like it's so unstable right now. Everything's shaking. Everything's off kilter. Everything's off balance. And there's nothing unique about that. I think this fallen world always feels off kilter at some level. Always seems unstable and shaky. So where do you find stability in a world like that?

54:45 Well, I'll tell you where to find it. You find stability in the one who is the same yesterday and today and forever. On Christ, the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. That's the whole promise of the rest of the chapter, really the rest of this section. Take a look at chapter 33, verse 17. We're almost done. I think chapter 33, verse 17 is one of the most beautiful and evocative verses in the entire Bible.

55:21 Because as this poem corkscrews into the future and lands in eternity, look what it says there in 17. Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty. They will see a land that stretches afar. It's beautiful, isn't it? It makes me think of a scene in the book The Lord of the Rings when Frodo, the little hobbit, boards a ship and he's headed into the west, right? Essentially to die, that's what it means. Here's how Tolkien describes what Frodo sees as he boards that ship. He says, and the ship went out into the high sea and passed on into the west.

55:52 Until at last, on a night of rain, Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the gray rain curtain turned all to silver glass. and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond a fair green country under a swift sunrise. See, I think the beauty of that image is the same kind of thing that's supposed to be invoked in you when you read something like 3317.

56:25 It's supposed to evoke in you a longing to see your king in his beauty, to turn your eyes from his crowned head to a land that stretches afar, a far green country under a swift sunrise, and know that you have finally made it home. Brother, sister, do you have that hope of heaven in your heart? Is it there? Cultivate it. Grow it. Because it's only by having that light shining brightly in your heart that you're going to be able to stand firm through the darkness of this age. And we're not going to read them or even talk about them much, but that's the message of chapters 34 and 35 also.

57:03 Chapter 34, from start to finish, just describes the judgment of the wicked, unbelieving world. If you reject God's word, then you're going to fall under his wrath, and that wrath is going to be chapter 34 of Isaiah. And then, on the heels of that, chapter 35 is a party. All the redeemed. And Isaiah hasn't even told us yet how they're redeemed. That's coming in the second big section of the book, the book of the suffering. He hasn't even told us how they're redeemed. He just says, they're redeemed. And now they're streaming into Jerusalem with singing and joy. You look at the last verse of the whole thing, verse 10.

57:36 The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing. Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall obtain gladness and joy and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. A friend, don't you want that? Isn't there something in your heart that longs to see the king in his beauty and come to him in joy and singing? In a land where sorrow and sighing shall forever flee away. Don't you want that?

58:08 Come to the king. Come to Jesus the Christ. And take salvation from his hand. And brother, sister, if you're a Christian, never, ever forget what God has promised to you. It's right there in chapter 35. Strengthen your weak hands. Make firm your feeble knees. say to your anxious heart, not just buck up, but be strong. Fear not, because your God will come to save you. Friends, this is a hard, ugly world that we live in. But one day, one day soon, our eyes will behold the king and all will be well.

58:56 Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you for these great promises in your word. We thank you for the promise that one day we will behold the king and his beauty and all will be set right. And we will stream into your house with singing and with dancing and with joy and all sorrow and all sighing will flee away forever. Lord, thank you for these things. Thank you for the salvation that you have won for us through Jesus Christ. Fill up our hearts, oh God, with the light of eternity so that we can live faithfully to you in a dark and fallen world.

59:31 We pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen.