December 6, 2020. Isaiah 40:1-11 Sermon. Grace-Vail, Grace-Benson. James was desperate to get the sliver out of his big toe, and when he did, he breathed a sigh of relief. Then his wife asked, “Aren’t you going to do something about your broken foot?” John figured out a way to pay the water bill for a few hundred dollars, but then realized he had no way to pay his mortgage of a few thousand dollars. Jack figured out a way to land a crashing plane, but then realized he was about to be captured by enemy soldiers. We all have times in life where we solve one problem, only to realize a much bigger problem needs solving. God saw Judah in the days of Isaiah with a problem, the main problem on their mind up to that point in Isaiah’s life wasAssyria, who came with an army and threatened to kill, destroy, and conquer. God in Isaiah chapters 1-35 told the people he had a solution for the Assrian problem, they only needed to trust in him. And in chapters 36-37 he made Assyria go away. You could imagine Judah easily saying, “Great, problem solved. Life is good..” and getting complacent in their walk with God. God knew they’d face more problems and need to rely on him for more solutions in the future. We also can have times when we come to God for help with our problems, but as soon as a solution comes, we get complacent and rely on God less. We need to be trained to trust in God for solutions to future problems as well. We can learn from Isaiah 40 that God offers solutions for problems, and he offers SOLUTIONS for PROBLEMS. Before we dive into Isaiah 40, I want to you to know what happened in Isaiah 39. After God had solved the Assyria problem for King Hezekiah, in chapter 39 God told King Hezekiah about a future problem that wasn’t even on his radar. He told him about a nation called Babylon. At that time, Babylon wasn’t powerful or intimidating, just a small far away country who came for a visit. But God told Hezekiah that in the future Babylon would come and carry away everything from Jerusalem as plunder. Right after sharing those details about a future problem that hadn’t even happened yet; the next words in Isaiah’s prophetic book are chapter 40. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” To a people who he had just announced a troubling future, in the next breath God says, “Comfort.” As you face this future challenge I want you unworried, unstressed, not frantic; but comforted, relaxed, peaceful, at ease with what the future will bring. War, massive destruction is coming, but Take a deep breath, be consoled. Be comforted to know that God still invites you to call him my God, and he still calls you my people. In other words he’s not allowing the hardship to get rid of you, but to get closer to you. How does that comfort come to people? “Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call out to her.” It comes through human communication, through speech, through a message shared. A message spoken to the heart, not the head. Spoken to the emotional center, the inner person, the soul. And who does this message of comfort come to? To Jerusalem. The city where people who should have known better had repeatedly and often rejected God’s Word. The city where God because of the
people’s rebellion would allow the nation of Babylon to pillage and destroy and exile. To the one who will endure extreme suffering, there is a word of comfort. God was speaking this word in advance of the suffering so that when it came, they would remember and find hope. What’s the message? “Tell her that her warfare really is over. Her guilt is fully paid for. Yes, she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” The war is over. What great news that is. Some of you have lived through such an experience. A situation in which people are trying to kill you, and you need to defend your life by trying to kill them in some way, that situation is over. A situation in which people are trying to violently take away what is yours, or trying to inflict whatever damage they can on you and your people, that situation is over. But I have a question, what war was God talking about? How could he tell a people who would fight a war against Babylon, the war is over? How can we apply these words even though wars are being fought and will be fought in our world? What war is he talking about? Now, physical nation against nation soldier against soldier war is terrible, I don’t want to make light of it. But those wars do end, they don’t last forever. There are other wars that are actually more dangerous and damaging long term to our souls. There’s a kind of war which can take place spiritually between God and people, in which people treat God as an enemy. We’ve all fought against God in that way. Our sinful rebellion, our hostility against his Word. That war with God spills into a war with yourself. A war in which you beat yourself up, you do things that another part of you doesn’t want to do. Then there’s wars between individuals. Think of a messy divorce, a rejected family member. A hostile co-worker. All these relational and spiritual wars are terrible, deadly, damaging. And God says that all of these wars can be over. You don’t need to war with God, he invites you to call him friend. You don’t need to be at war with yourself. God invites you to view yourself as redeemed. You don’t need to battle other people. God invites you to apply friendship to them as he has to you. All of these kinds of wars can be proclaimed to be over. Now, how could this be? How could the worst and most difficult and damaging war be declared to be over? Why is this the case? Let’s start with your war with God. To end your war with God, will it take a peaceful courtroom where you and God can draw up conditions of peace and get him to compromise with you? No, that’s not how it works. Instead it’s in the bloody battlefield of humans warring against God where Jesus came to create peace. Your sin, and my sin ripped him to shreds in a way that no soldier in any battle has ever experienced before or since. For Jesus it was not just the terror of human enemies who tortured and killed him. On the cross, Jesus was paid out not double, not triple, but billions upon billions the wages of the sins of every human who has existed on this planet. By his wounds we have peace with God. Jesus did not go where his enemy was weakest, but right into the teeth of his enemy’ stronghold. He allowed sin to do its worst to him, human death is the greatest weapon sin has, and
not only physical death, but spiritual death, and the eternal weight of the death in relation to God the Father that comes with, all was experienced by Jesus. But then, in the most complete and total victory move in any war, Jesus simply came back to life. Just imagine the resurrection of Jesus from the perspective of satan and sin and death. We have done our worst to the final representative of human kind, we have inflicted our deadliest sting and have accomplished everything we’re capable of, the human son of God has died in a way that was expressive of a fracture in the unity between him and God the Father. Job well done. But then, he just rose again, and death can no longer touch him. That’s the astounding victory that Jesus gives. That’s the incredible source of comfort he is able to communicate and give to people in any trouble they find themselves in. The promise of the Savior to come was what could give Jerusalem comfort even when Babylon would come. The promise of a Savior who has come is what can give you comfort even if your worst nightmares happen. When your treasured relationships come crashing down, either death, or relationship gone sour, or divorce or hatred comes and severs that connection once so important, you have reason for comfort, Jesus has not severed his connection to you. And you can apply the peace you have with God to yourself, to other people around you. When your well laid plans for employment and financial stability come crashing down because of a virus response, or your ability to just be social and spend time in the presence of other real live human beings, when that is taken and you feel the isolation, the loneliness, the longing for connection; even then Jesus gives you comfort. You can breath and see that he even makes the rough places smooth, and the valleys he fills in. He finds his way into your life, and makes you a highway where he can travel freely. Not in the absence of the hard times, but through them, he makes you into a highway for him. It says, in the wilderness, prepare a way for the Lord. Why the wilderness? Often it’s in the wilderness that you see and recognize your need for food and water even more than usual. Your pride and self reliance get broken down. So if you find yourself in a type of wilderness right now, you can hear right where you are the invitation to prepare a way for the Lord. How do we prepare a way for the Lord? John the Baptist said, “Repent.” As much as anything that means, have an attitude that says, “Lord, I need you to make me what I cannot make myself, your friend again. I need you to do in me what I cannot do by myself, change the way I relate to God. Prepare my heart and soul as a path where the Lord can travel freely. For this to happen, you and I need God to construct a level highway out of a wasteland. Where my heart is proud, bring in the levelers and dig it down, crush it, get rid of it. If I try to get rid of my pride myself, I’m like a person with a spoon trying to dig into the hard Arizona soil. It won’t work. God needs to come with the heavy machinery of his holiness and goodness and grace, and level our pride, our self reliance.
He also needs to lift me up where I am low and despairing. For the part of me that sees my sin and grows worried that God will never want me, or that I’m absolutely useless and tarnished beyond repair. For those places where God’s Word is not allowed to have its way because there are too many craters of sinful patterns and attitudes and behaviors, we need God to fill in those holes with his hope and his new spirit which produces a holiness inside us. The glory of the Lord was revealed in Jesus, it was revealed through Isaiah as a promise to come, it’s revealed to you and I in the New Testament as a promise fulfilled. Right now the glory of God is alive and available, and even in the future to be brought to greater fulfilment and realization. So how can you and I experience more of that comfort, more of that glory, more of God’s solutions for our every problem? It really takes an attitude of honest humility. An attitude that admits, “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like a wildflower in the countryside. Grass withers, flowers fade, when the breath of the Lord blows on them. All people are grass. Grass withers, flowers fade, but the Word of our God endures forever.” We can actually find comfort in admitting, our beauty is temporary. The good we can manufacture on our own is so short lived. We will fade, we will wither, our lives cannot overcome death on our own. The breath of the Lord’s judgment on human sin will blow on us. Because he has said, when you eat of it you will surely die. The sentence of God blows on us because we all have sinned, and we have no answer. But God’s Word does. His Word endures beyond death. That eternal word which includes not only this word of judgment, but also a word of life and hope and optimism. A word that says, you will endure forever. You will shine like stars. Forget flowers in the field, you in Christ are given a beauty that will never fade, you will receive in Christ a resurrected body that will run and not grow weary, there will be no more sickness or crying or fear or death, because Jesus will cause the old order of things to pass away, and a new kind of human life will be his gift to all connected to him. Because God has done this, you are invited to get up on the highest mountain you know of, on the highest platform that allows you to speak to the most possible people in your circle of influence, and share this good news. Lift up your voice with strength God has made you strong again. He gives you a message to share of hope that is not just well wishes, but is well founded on the most reliable foundation, Jesus himself. Don’t be afraid, don’t be driven around by fear. Tell people, God is available to you. He’s here. Not far away. He’s yours by grace through faith, you don’t have to wait til you’ve hit his requirements, and performed up to his standards enough, right now he is here for any who will simply believe that he is here, he is powerful, and he is good. And all the good he has already done in the past is only a preview of even greater things to come. Every solution for problems that haven’t even happened yet is just a preview of the greatest
solution to the greatest problem that will ever come on the human race: the return of Jesus. His coming will be a problem for any who cling to their way of life; but he has provided a solution for that problem already. And when he comes it will be the solution to end all solutions, the doing away of problems eternally. He will come in strength, his arm ruling for him. He will come as a rewarder as well as a punisher. And the reward he brings is not some pile of gold or stack of cash. He is the reward. Life with Jesus is the reward. Many will enjoy it. For eternity Jesus will treat his people like a shepherd treats his lambs. Look at the tenderness. He gathers the lambs in his arms. Lifts them in his lap. He loves this. He gently leads the nursing mothers. He loves to be a gentle shepherd. He delights to deal with you in a friendly way. A shepherd doesn’t crush a lamb, or whip a nursing mother, not a good shepherd. He deals with them in a friendly way. So Jesus desires to do with you. So, final application: how about being gentle with yourself? How about being gentle with other people? How about looking to God in a gentle way. The war is over, so act like it. How many times do you view a day as a battle to be fought. That’s one way of looking at it, and I know the bible talks about: fight the good fight, Paul to Timothy. But there’s also this; the real and most dangerous war is over. May I suggest that you might do well to listen to Isaiah more than you listen to some well meaning people talk about fighting the good fight of faith. What if the fight is simply this: a fight to stay close to Jesus, and when you do, there is no other battle, the war has already been won. You don’t have to face one more single day as a fight, as a struggle, as a time to be overcome by crushing despair or over-puffed up pride in your fighting ability. The war is over. How foolish would it be if a soldier had been called off the battlefield and told, the war is over, you can go home now, how foolish if he insisted, I’m going to stay here and keep fighting. The war’s over. If you go looking for a fight, you might find one. If you walk down the street and see a person and view them as a threat and pull out a gun on them, they may feel inclined to respond with a fight, but you brought it. Why not instead go into a day with an attitude that says: Jesus is a gentle shepherd with me. I’m going to apply some gentleness to myself. If I don’t have the solution to a problem, that’s ok. I wasn’t supposed to have all the solutions. Jesus does. So I can stop making so many demands of myself. Yes we all have room for growth, but it should be lamb to sheep growth. It doesn’t happen in a day. So don’t be harsh with yourself. You have Jesus’ permission to be gentle. And when you look at others, you don’t need to treat them as enemies to be defended against and strategized against. There may be some occasions that call for that, some people who you need to set up boundaries with. But it’s probably not a good default to constantly be viewing people as the enemy. People who don’t do exactly what I want, people who vote differently than me, who have different opinions about how to respond to a virus. You don’t need to go to war against them. The
war is over. Your differences with any single person breathing in this world should not supersede what you have in common, Jesus died for you and for them so that the dividing wall of hostility could be brought down. The war is over. So be as innocent as doves even if you also are as wise as serpents. All of this is true because the war is over with you and God. He does not view you as a wolf predator to be destroyed and removed. He views you as a lamb to be carried in his arms, right next to his heart. That’s where he wants you. Stop baring your teeth whenever God comes near. He may meet you in the wilderness, let him pick you up and carry you. You may meet him in a valley that needs to be filled in. Let him fill your valleys with the love of Christ. You may meet him on a hill of pride that needs to be leveled. Let him do his work. See how life with him is a stroll on a pleasant level path. Be at peace with God. He solves all your problems, past, future, and present. Amen.