The Lord will send a savior, and The Savior

Sermon for Midweek of Trinity 1

Isaiah 48:12-22

Chapter 48 of Isaiah is the 9^th and final chapter in this first set of 9 chapters in Isaiah 40-66. Remember there are three units of 9 chapters each in these 27 chapters. Last week, in the first half of Isaiah 48, we contemplated the Lord’s harsh rebuke of impenitent, idolatrous Israel, of those who were Israelites in name only, and we took a warning from it for ourselves. But the second half of the chapter has a much different tone, with pure comfort for the penitent and a reference to the coming Christ, a fitting way to end this 9-chapter unit.

 “Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called! I am he; I am the first, and I am the last. My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I call to them, they stand forth together. God speaks to those whom He has called. He called the people of Israel through their forefather Israel. In a similar way, He has called Christians through the Christ. And He reminds us all who He is: the First and the Last, who was there before mankind ever came to be and who will still be standing when all those who scoff at Him return to dust. He is the only true God, the Creator of all things, who speaks to the stars in the vastness of space, and they do His bidding. This is the God who speaks to you in the Scriptures, who issues commands, who makes promises, who calls you to repent, to believe, and to obey.

Assemble, all of you, and listen! Who among them has declared these things? The LORD loves him; he shall perform his purpose on Babylon, and his arm shall be against the Chaldeans. Once more, the Lord calls on Israel to listen carefully to what He has been prophesying over and over in these chapters: that He would send a hero, a savior named Cyrus to rescue them from their future captivity in Babylon, and that Cyrus would be successful against the Chaldeans, another name for the Babylonians.

I, even I, have spoken and called him; I have brought him, and he will prosper in his way. Draw near to me, hear this: from the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there. And now the Lord GOD has sent me, and his Spirit. The pronouns are a little challenging in this section, but if you work through it, it makes sense. I, that is, the Lord, have spoken and called him, that is, Cyrus. But then the Lord says, “From the beginning I have not spoken in secret.” Those are the very words Jesus quoted when He was speaking to the Sanhedrin on Maundy Thursday. “From the time it came to be I have been there.” That sounds much like what the apostle John writes about Jesus, “In the beginning was the Word.” And finally, the clearly Trinitarian words, “And now the Lord God has sent Me, and His Spirit.” Clearly this is the Person of the Son of God speaking, not just a savior, like Cyrus, but THE Savior promised to fallen mankind. And since the Spirit, together with the Father, has sent the Son of God, the Spirit is rightly called “God,” together with the Father and the Son, because only God can send God into the world.

So, tucked into this closing chapter of the first unit of Isaiah’s prophecy, there is a reference to the greater salvation that God will accomplish for Israel and for all men, the sending of His Son into the world to be the true Hero, the true Savior.

Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the LORD your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go. Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea; your offspring would have been like the sand, and your descendants like its grains; their name would never be cut off or destroyed from before me.” Most translations treat these verses as (what we call in grammar) a contrary to fact conditional, “If only you had listened, then you would have prospered. But you didn’t, so you didn’t.” But the context suggests a better translation. “If only you will listen, then you will benefit! Then your peace will be like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Then your offspring will be like the sand. Then your descendants will never be cut off or destroyed from before Me.” Because God did prosper the people of Israel who listened to His words through the prophet Isaiah. He did bring them back to their homeland, and increase their numbers, and preserved them for another 500 years, until the Christ came. Now, at that point, following their rejection of Christ, at that point the words of Isaiah do become a contrary to fact conditional. If only you had paid attention, Isarel—if only you had believed in Christ Jesus—then you would have prospered. But you didn’t, so you didn’t.

But now Isaiah is speaking to the captives in Babylon: Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea, declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it out to the end of the earth; say, “The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob!” They did not thirst when he led them through the deserts; he made water flow for them from the rock; he split the rock and the water gushed out. He talks about their redemption from Babylon like their redemption from Egypt a thousand years earlier, because, in both cases, they had to cross a desert to get to the Promised Land. But in both cases, the Lord rescued them from their captivity and provided for them along the way.

As He promises in the New Testament, as He pictures for us in the book of Revelation, the Lord will do the same thing for His Holy Christian Church that languishes now in captivity to the figurative Babylon, to the world powers and to the antichristian forces within the false Church, that oppress the true Church in so many ways. It’s almost as if we’re living in a desert now, not just the deserts of New Mexico, but in a Christian Church that has largely been deserted, abandoned, with scarce resources and very little influence in the world. But soon the Lord will come and rescue His people and cause us to prosper in the heavenly Promised Land, if only we’ll keep listening to His Word and believing His promises!

Isaiah concludes these 9 chapters with the same sentence with which he concludes the next set of 9 chapters: “There is no peace,” says the LORD, “for the wicked.” We need to remember that. Our world needs to hear that. The God of heaven denounces as wicked many of the things that this world celebrates, including the celebration of perversion going on right now in what they call “pride month.” There is no peace for the wicked, only God’s wrath and anger and eternal punishment. As long as a person remains in wickedness, that is, as long as a person refuses to repent of his wickedness, and turn away from it, he will never have peace with God. So God’s message to the wicked is not, “Peace! Do whatever seems right to you!” No, it’s, “Repent while there’s still time! And know the peace of Christ Jesus, who suffered at the hands of the wicked, so that the wicked might turn in humility and faith to the One who has made atonement for their sins.” Because, while there is no peace the wicked who remain in their wickedness, there is perfect, eternal peace for all the wicked who repent and believe in Jesus, which, in the sight of God, brings them out of the ranks of the wicked and into the ranks of the righteous. Amen.