Pastor Tim Patoka
Advent With Isaiah 2019 Midweek Advent Services A Holy Highway: God’s Kingdom Comes With Joy Isaiah 35:1-10 1) God’s Coming Brings Us Joy 2) We Joyfully Come To God’s Heavenly Kingdom
I’ve spend a lot of time on the highway. Growing up, my extended family lived at least a 16 hour car drive away which we drove almost every summer. These long distances haven’t gotten any shorter. My wife’s and my immediate families are spread out across Nebraska, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Virginia. And we’ve driven to all those places in the last five years. As one of your pastors at our Grace multi-site church, I travel between our four sites often enough. Whenever I make all these trips, my first option for travel is the highway. As I reflect on how much the highway has been and will continue to be a part of my life, I’ve realized how useful it is when going a long distance. Highways provide convenience by allowing you to quickly go where you want and without too many turns. They provide ease with clearly marked exits and consistent cell phone reception. They provide safety with pavement that’s graded to withstand normal weather patterns and top priority when clean-up crews need to get out. Like many Americans, I too have come to greatly rely on and appreciate highways. America is relatively unique in how much we rely on and appreciate highways due to its car culture. People have always appreciated them wherever and whenever highways have been around. That was the case with the prophet Isaiah. In his day, most roads were little more than well-worn footpaths. Traveling was fraught with weather delays and danger from bandits and wild animals. But in the few places where highways were, cities flourished and people gathered. As we continue our midweek worship series “Advent with Isaiah”, we see how he uses a holy highway to poetically illustrate the joy we have with God’s coming. Not only will we look at Isaiah’s highway, but we’ll take in what’s happening around the highway and who’s on it to learn that God’s coming brings us joy and, therefore, we joyfully come to God’s eternal kingdom. 1) God’s Coming Brings Us Joy One of the things that makes Isaiah’s words both memorable and challenging for us is because he writes in a poetic manner. It has figurative language, geographical comparisons, and a non-linear train of thought. What Isaiah says here isn’t new to the Bible. Rather he’s using the vocabulary of his day to illustrate our already-known joy at God’s coming. This chief theme is found in the middle of his first section where he writes, “Look! Your God will come with vengeance. With God’s own retribution, he will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:4) There’s a lot of things happening to show us how joyful God’s coming will be on 1
Pastor Tim Patoka
Advent With Isaiah 2019 Midweek Advent Services the Last Day. There is joy in nature. The wasteland of the Arabah, the inhospitable desert to the southwest of Jerusalem, is transformed into a glorious oasis. It would have the fame of Lebanon’s fine forests, the majesty of Carmel’s mighty mountains, and the excellence of Sharon’s fertile farm and pasturelands. Water would not only be the new normal, but it would give rise to water-thirsty plants like grass, reeds, and rushes. God’s coming is also marked with joy in mankind. Weak hands will be strengthened. Shaky knees will be steadied. Fearful hearts will be put to ease when God comes. Those who are suffering from sin’s physical effects will be healed so they can see, hear, leap, and speak like before. Not only that, but those who are redeemed and ransomed by the Lord will be traveling on a holy highway in the midst of this all. Even though we live 2,500+ years after Isaiah and in a far different place, we get the point he’s trying to make. When God comes, specifically on the Last Day, there will be joy. Now that doesn’t sound too surprising. But did you catch how Isaiah describes God’s coming? “Look! Your God will come with vengeance. With God’s own retribution, he will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:4) God’s coming is going to be associated with vengeance and retribution. These don’t necessarily bring us joy. If anything, it makes us have weak hands, shaky knees, and a fearful heart. We naturally fear God’s coming because we know that he can certainly wield that vengeance and retribution against us poor sinners. As such, we naturally want to distance ourselves from God so we don’t fall victim to his power. I’ve seen how this self-distancing can show itself when I follow up with our friends and members of Grace who haven’t been around in a while. For some of them, it’s because of a particular sin that they’ve distanced themselves from God. They don’t want to hear what God has to say or they feel too guilty to come before him. And so they do not have joy when they consider God’s power. But it’s not just inactive worshipers who can be afraid of God’s power. It’s also those who regularly come to his house of worship. There’s a reason why we regularly hear about God’s gift of forgiveness in a worship service here at Grace. That’s because we need to hear it and receive it again and again. We all have sins that make us deserving of God’s vengeance and retribution. Sins of our youth that are forgiven yet still weigh on our consciences. Recent sins that we can’t believe we fell for yet again or understand why we did them when we know better. And because we know God’s hatred for these wrongs we have done, God’s coming in vengeance and retribution likewise does not naturally bring us joy. But did you catch why God is coming with this vengeance and power? Why we can have joy at his coming? As Isaiah said, “Look! Your God will come with vengeance. With God’s own retribution, he will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:4) God’s purpose in coming is not to punish us with his power. But to save us with his power. There are lots of different ways to describe 2
Pastor Tim Patoka
Advent With Isaiah 2019 Midweek Advent Services God’s saving work. The way that Isaiah uses is how he describes those who are walking on this holy highway, “the redeemed will walk there…those ransomed by the Lord.” (Isaiah 35:9-10) Redeem and ransom essentially mean the same thing. Luther’s Catechism defines “ransom” like this: “to free people from captivity by paying a price.” Most of Isaiah’s verses are poetically describing the joy we’ll have when God comes on the Last Day. But when it comes to this part about redeeming and ransoming, we already have this joy because of God’s 1st coming. If you remember when John the Baptist was in prison and second-guessing if Jesus was truly the Messiah, he sent some friends to ask Jesus for the truth. Jesus in turn replied to them, “Go, tell John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.” (Luke 7:22) Jesus was pointing John’s friends to some of the miracle healings that Isaiah said would be with God’s coming. In Jesus’ first coming, we see him use his almighty power to save us. He lived as we cannot to pay the price we could never pay; he offered his perfect life on the cross as payment for our sins. Jesus has paid our ransom price and, in so doing, redeemed us from the curse of the law and the sting of death. He has freed us from our captivity in Satan’s sinful kingdom and ushered into God’s joyful kingdom. As such, we have joy now because God the Son came in power to save us. And when he comes again in power, he will bring vengeance and retribution against every opposing force so as to free we redeemed and ransomed of the Lord from this sinful world. 2) We Joyfully Come To God’s Heavenly Kingdom It’s not just us who are gathered there today who have this joy. It’s for everyone who has faith in this promise of redemption since they are walking on the holy highway that Isaiah talks about. Luther’s Catechism has a two-part definition for holy that reads as follows, “First: pure or sinless. Second: set apart for the holy God.” This highway and its travelers are indeed pure and sinless because the ones who are walking on it are God’s redeemed, those who have no sins counted against them. As God’s redeemed children, we are set apart for him from this unbelieving world. And as we travel on this holy highway, we joyfully receive God’s blessings. We are right with him now because of what Christ has already done. We have all that God promises to us through the cross as long as we believe that. In addition, our eyes are drawn to where this highway leads. As Isaiah’s words tell us, “They will enter Zion with a joyful shout, and everlasting joy will crown their heads. Happiness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.” (Isaiah 35:10) Zion is the hill that Jerusalem was built on and was often used to refer to the place where God dwells. As we read how Isaiah describes Zion in these verses, it becomes clear that Zion is poetically referring to the place where God dwells for 3
Pastor Tim Patoka
Advent With Isaiah 2019 Midweek Advent Services eternity in heaven. It is heaven that the redeemed will enter to experience everlasting joy and happiness. And it will never be diminished because sorrow and sighing will flee away forever. Heaven is where the holy highway ultimately leads. But it can be hard to patiently wait until we come to God’s heavenly kingdom. Using the highway illustration, sometimes we can get distracted by what’s happening off the highway. I’ve learned that when I’m driving for a long time I get easily distracted by billboards advertising impossible claims or by features in the landscape. I want to get off the highway so I can see them for myself. As we travel on the holy highway to God’s heavenly kingdom, what sinful distractions off the highway might tempt us to lose our way to heaven? Sometimes we get can tired when traveling on the highway. We think, “I’ve gone a good distance and I have more ahead of me. So what’s wrong with exiting the highway and taking a break? It’ll still be there when I get back.” Might both young and longtime Christians think this? Might young Christians have a false sense of security because we think we have plenty of time ahead of us to get serious about God? Might long-time Christians get complacent with God’s blessings, take them for granted, and not treasure them as we should? Whenever we are tempted to veer off this holy highway, we run the risk of giving up the holy status and heavenly destination we have as God’s redeemed children. Rather than be tempted to exit the holy highway, let us instead fix our eyes on what is to come. Do you remember why Isaiah said that people were to strengthen their weak hands, steady their shaky knees, and calm their fearful hearts? It was because of God’s future coming. As he told them, “Be strong. Do not be afraid. Look! Your God will come with vengeance. With God’s own retribution, he will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:4) When Isaiah wrote these words around 700 B.C., neither Christ’s 1st or 2nd comings had happened. Yet they could right then rejoice in God’s blessings because they were surely going to happen. We are blessed to live after Christ’s 1st coming. We can see how God fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies about our Savior. We have seen how Jesus used his power to free us from Satan’s sinful kingdom by paying our ransom price with his sacrificial death. We know that we are blessed to be walking on this holy highway that leads to heaven. Yet we still live in a sinful world that is full of distractions and forces that want us on another path. So how do we remain on this holy highway? We come to God and his Word. Continue to make time in your ever-changing schedules for your Lord. Listen to what he tells you in his Word and take it to heart so that you strengthen your faith in these wonderful blessings. Rejoice in the blessings you now have and patiently wait for the ones that God says will be yours. And throughout it all, live a life of joy. God has come to you so that you can joyfully be on the holy highway. And you are joyfully coming to his heavenly kingdom with a promised eternity of even better blessings. Amen.
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