The Servant sent to save the servant

Sermon for Midweek of Lent 1

Isaiah 42:14-25

This past Sunday, we heard how Christ was the true Israel, the true Son of God who came to get it right where the nation of Israel, also called God’s son in Scripture, got it wrong. That ties in beautifully with Isaiah 42. In the first half of Isaiah 42, which we considered on the festival of Jesus’ Baptism, we heard the Lord’s commissioning of His Servant, the Christ, to be a covenant to the people, a light to the Gentiles, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house. In this second half of the chapter before us this evening, we’re given a glimpse of the nation of Israel, also called the Lord’s “servant,” that needed their blind eyes to be opened by the Christ—Israel, the servant of the Lord, who needed to be saved by Christ, the true Servant of the Lord. And remember, while these things are being said originally to Old Testament Israel, you and I and all Christians have been brought into the spiritual Church of Israel by the New Testament in Jesus’ blood, so our God has something to say to us here, too.

¹⁴ “I have held My peace a long time, I have been still and restrained Myself. Now I will cry like a woman in labor, I will pant and gasp at once. ¹⁵ I will lay waste the mountains and hills, And dry up all their vegetation; I will make the rivers coastlands, And I will dry up the pools.

Seventy years was a long time for God to “hold His peace,” to watch His beloved people of Israel sitting in exile in a foreign land. He had “restrained Himself” from stepping in to save them from captivity, because they needed this punishment. And not only they. You and I and the rest of the nations throughout history needed to see what happens to God’s people when those very people turn to false gods, to those who refuse to repent of their sins, to those who live for themselves and reject God’s covenant of peace, as Israel had stubbornly done. So God let the punishment sink in and do its job, to bring them to repentance and to teach all men that judgment is coming, even against those who were once called the people of God. But now, toward the end of the Babylonian captivity, God was ready to deliver His people from their bondage. And He would remove all the obstacles that stood in the way of that deliverance.

But these verses refer to a much greater deliverance, too. Four thousand years was a much longer time for God to “hold His peace,” since the creation of the world, to watch mankind plunge deeper and deeper into sin and rebellion, to watch men die, one after the other after the other, with no savior to make atonement for their sins, to show them just how much God truly desires to deliver us from sin, death, and the devil. But finally it was time for God to step in, to send His Christ into the world, to show us exactly who God is, to suffer and die for the sins of the world, and to send His Gospel out into all the nations of the world.

¹⁶ I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, And crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, And not forsake them.

What is this blindness that God is promising to cure for the people of Israel? It’s obviously not physical blindness, as He makes clear in the next few verses:

¹⁸ “Hear, you deaf; And look, you blind, that you may see. ¹⁹ Who is blind but My servant, Or deaf as My messenger whom I send? Who is blind…as the Lord’s servant? ²⁰ Seeing many things, but you do not observe; Opening the ears, but he does not hear.”

See how God refers here to His people Israel as His “servant,” His “messenger.” They were supposed to be that, but they were blinded by their stubbornness, rebellion, and idolatry. This is a spiritual blindness and deafness that the Lord is promising to heal—the blindness of missing the obvious, that the God of the Bible is the true God, that He is our Creator, that we owe Him our service, our obedience, that He is good and generous, and that His ways are always right. There was much blindness and deafness in Israel, and there is much blindness and deafness in those who call themselves Christians, too. But God sent His Christ into the world, and He has sent the Gospel of Christ out into the world, to bring us into the light of understanding, understanding our need to repent and God’s merciful promise to forgive us through faith in Christ Jesus.

²¹ The Lord is well pleased for His righteousness’ sake; He will exalt the law and make it honorable. ²² But this is a people robbed and plundered; All of them are snared in holes, And they are hidden in prison houses; They are for prey, and no one delivers; For plunder, and no one says, “Restore!”

Again, the Lord is describing His wayward people of Israel: spiritually blind, spiritually deaf, spiritually hidden in prison houses of the devil’s making, even as they were literally being held in captivity in Babylon (though not behind bars). They went from being a great nation to a pathetic people. But how? Why? Isaiah asks them those very questions for them to ponder and consider.

²³ Who among you will give ear to this? Who will listen and hear for the time to come? ²⁴ Who gave Jacob for plunder, and Israel to the robbers? Was it not the Lord, He against whom we have sinned? For they would not walk in His ways, Nor were they obedient to His law. ²⁵ Therefore He has poured on him the fury of His anger And the strength of battle; It has set him on fire all around, Yet he did not know; And it burned him, Yet he did not take it to heart.

Israel was robbed and plundered and turned into a pathetic people by the Lord’s doing. It was His punishment for some, discipline for others, because “they would not walk in His ways,” nor would they repent. God gave them over to punishment after punishment prior to their exile in Babylon, and still they refused to acknowledge that their suffering was the result of their own sins and rebellion. Still they refused to turn back to the Lord in humility, in sorrow over their sins.

What a good reminder this is for Christians! We wonder how the Christian Church fell into the sad state it’s in today, hopelessly fractured, scattered, filled with false doctrine and with every form of hypocrisy, and openly defending sinful practices, as if one could live in willful sin against God and still be a “good Christian.” Yes, the devil and the world have been out to get the Church from the beginning. But we have to acknowledge the failures within the Church, and the resulting suffering that the Lord has allowed to come upon His Church. And I’m not talking about failures to rise up in some political movement or failures to speak out against the sins of society. I’m talking about the failure of Christians to repent of their own sins against God’s commandments. I’m talking about the Church’s failure to practice discipline within the Church, to call on sinners to repent, and to excommunicate the stubbornly impenitent. I’m also talking about the Church’s failure to guard its doctrine carefully, to insist on the pure teaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments, and the failure to love as Jesus called on us to love.

Now, I say these things about the outward, visible Christian Church throughout the world, which is similar in many ways to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, and we should always evaluate to what extent those charges apply to each of us. But God always preserves a remnant of faithful, penitent Christians, just as He did at the time of Isaiah and afterward in Israel. And He uses the words of His prophets and ministers to keep the faithful living in repentance, to give us hope, even as we see how dire things look all around us. In a spiritual sense, the blindness of the whole nation of Israel was never removed. Think of how many people at the time of Jesus remained blind and deaf and unbelieving! But every time the word of God is preached, the Holy Spirit is holding out the light of Jesus, the true Servant of God, so that those who hear may be led to see things clearly, to evaluate their hearts and lives, to repent where they need to repent, and to turn in faith to the Lord Christ, who promises to open our eyes and lead us out of the prison house, who promises grace and mercy and the forgiveness of sins and deliverance from the pathetic state of things in this world, to give us eternal life and lasting peace with Him after this life. May the light of Christ, God’s true Servant, continue to enlighten our hearts and minds! Amen.