God’s Word to the World January-February Sermon Series Kenwood Baptist Church Pastor David Palmer January 17, 2021

TEXT: Isaiah 1:1-18

We continue this morning by listening attentively to Israel's prophets. These are the men and women who proclaim God's Word to the world. A prophet is someone who stands in the counsel of God. We tend to think of prophets as men and women who foresee events and who predict the future, but 70% of the prophetic word in the Bible is God's Word, addressed to the contemporary moment. It is God speaking to us in real time, concerning the issues that we face now. It is pointing us to God's future but revealing God's view of the present. The prophets speak with an intensity that we need. It wakens us up from our slumber. The prophets speak with a holy confrontation that draws us back to the covenant and away from idolatry. The prophets point us away from self, toward the Lord.

This morning we look to the greatest of Israel's prophets, the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah's ministry lasted over 50 years, surviving the reign of four different kings: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. He prophesied publicly and served for over five decades. He saw political leaders rise and fall, while the Word of God continued. He saw nations rise and fall. He saw sin well up in society and people humble in repentance in response. Isaiah's word was challenging in his own day, and it is challenging in ours. Isaiah's prophecies fueled the hearts and expectations of God's people, and it is no coincidence that Isaiah is the prophet quoted the most in the New Testament. Isaiah’s prophesies reflect the life and ministry of a real figure.

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God's Word takes place in real time. In 2018 Biblical Archaeology Review featured a lead story of a clay seal impression called a bulla. A bulla is the seal impression made when someone presses their carved signet seal in order to seal a document. Hundreds of these bullae have been found in archaeological excavations. But the one in 2018 was astonishing, because this bulla has three registers. The top register, which can barely be seen, is the image of a doe, which is a symbol of blessing on other bullae that we have. The middle register is thrilling, because it says in clear Paleo Hebrew script: Yesha-yahu, the Hebrew name of Isaiah. The final register at the bottom indicates the title of the owner of the seal and his role in society, and it says “Yesha yahu nvy” – Isaiah, the prophet. What is astonishing about this seal impression is that if you look very closely on the left edge of this seal, you can even make out the thumbprint of the owner.

God's Word is real. Isaiah was real. He spoke to kings and to his whole society. This was discovered not in a back room. It was discovered in a scientifically run excavation near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was conducted by a scholar, Dr. Eilat Mazar, a very gifted woman, who leads excavations near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This bulla was discovered just ten feet away from where Mazar's team had discovered, just three years earlier, an intact bulla with the inscription “of King Hezekiah of Judah.” The prophet Isaiah and King Hezekiah are two men that we read about in the book of Isaiah in the Bible, and their fingerprints are found just ten feet away from each other.

The Bible is rooted in reality. I never tire of making this point because our faith is built upon events that actually happened, upon people who really lived, on a God who exists, on a God who loves the truth so much that He will tell us the truth. Sometimes, when it first arrives, the truth is painful. And yet the truth, even though it may initially be painful, always has the intention to set us free. We hear the word of Isaiah this morning, and it begins with an indictment. It is a comprehensive and all-embracing indictment of us. We need Isaiah's first 39 chapters to persuade us of our sinfulness. As we will see, God's Word, God's truth, does not leave us there. I want desperately for you to agree with the Lord that we’re a sinful people. If

Page 2 of 11 you don't agree with that, then you are not in a position to receive the Lord's comfort. You're not in a position for the gospel to make any sense to you at all.

Let's follow Isaiah in this opening statement of the collection of his prophetic oracles. These 66 chapters represent the best of Isaiah's preaching over 50 years. We begin in Isaiah 1:2: “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the LORD has spoken.” I love this about God's Word and about Isaiah's ministry: Isaiah does not address just us. Notice the audience of God's Word. The audience is the cosmos. God is the Lord of heaven and earth, and there is nothing that happens on the earth that is outside His attention. He sees everything; He knows everything. Isaiah begins by summoning the heavens and the earth. He addresses the visible universe and those who dwell therein. He addresses the courts of heaven and all who dwell on the earth. The God of the Bible is not a tribal deity. He is Lord of all, and He speaks a prophetic indictment. In the second half of Isaiah 1:2, the Lord pleads like a grieved father: "Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against Me.” Some of you as parents know this anguish of a child whom you have lovingly raised and spent tens of thousands of dollars, not just in diapers, not just in baby food, but also in tuition, cars, insurance, food for decades. You raise this child, and all of a sudden he just turns his back on you, as though you've done nothing. Some of you know this well. The Lord speaks with this parental image: “They have rebelled against Me. They have turned away from Me.” We are like unthinking animals, people who do not know. In Isaiah 1:3, Isaiah says: “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know, My people do not understand." The ESV says “crib,” but the term used in Hebrew is “manger.” This is the Old Testament manger – the donkey knows its manger. It knows where to go to find food, and yet we have forgotten.

Isaiah 1:4 is an absolutely devastating indictment of us. It's a verse that we can't pass over too quickly, but it stacks up, phrase upon phrase, to describe what we look like to a holy God – a sinful nation: “Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the LORD, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged.” We are a sinful nation. There is sin on the right; there is sin on the left; there is sin in all political parties. There is sin in the entertainment world; there is sin in the business world. There is sin in higher education; there is sin in the public schools. There is sin in the administration; there is

Page 3 of 11 sin in the teaching unions. There is sin in the classroom and in the hallways. We are a sinful nation of people, Isaiah says, laden with guilt. The ESV uses the term “iniquity,” which is a Latinism in English. The Hebrew image, though, is of a people who are heavily laden with guilt. Sin happens, and then we feel guilty about it, and it weighs on us. We suffer the consequence of misdeeds, not being able to sleep well and being troubled in our conscience, lest we harden our hearts.

We are the offspring of evildoers. Many of us are ready to accuse our parents or grandparents for why we act the way we do. Generational sin is real. We are children, Isaiah says, who deal corruptly. We are not fair in our dealings. We bend the rules, thinking they don't really apply to us. We charge more than should be charged. We use our knowledge for insider trading. We seek rules to increase our profits at the expense of shortchanging those who work for us. We wreck the land. We wreck communities. Isaiah says we have abandoned and forsaken the Lord. We have disdained and treated irreverently the Holy One of Israel, taking God on our lips and dragging Jesus into a cause He has nothing to do with.

In the last line of Isaiah 1:4, we read, “They are utterly estranged.” It's a translator’s challenge how to render this last line. The Hebrew text says that we are a people who have literally turned our backs to God. That's just the opening verse. Do you agree? Can you agree with the Lord that this is us? It's hard to do that, isn’t it? We start to say, “Wait, wait, what about this?” And the Lord continues in Isaiah 1:5: “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.” We are like diseased people. Our heads are sick. We are confused. I can't tell you the number of times recently that I've heard lines I had never heard before – that we just can't really know this or that. We are confused, and our hearts are faint. We are weary. We are like injured people, who have been mugged in a back alley. In Isaiah 1:6, we read: “From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds; they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil.” We are beaten up from all sides, and our wounds go untreated. We are a sinful nation. We are a sick people. We are bloodied, battered and beaten, in need of emergency care. We are living in a devastated land. Isaiah says your country is desolate, cities burned with fire. The daughter of Zion, Jerusalem, is left like a booth in the vineyard, like a besieged city. Faithfulness seems like a minority position.

Isaiah lived during very real tumultuous political events. This is not just a theoretical conversation for him. He saw God's judgment come down on the northern kingdom in 722 BC and devastate the ten northern tribes and take them into exile. He lived through the experience

Page 4 of 11 of watching the Assyrians come and devastate the land and leave only Jerusalem, which the Annals of Sennacherib described as locking up Hezekiah like a bird in a cage. Sennacherib’s Annals are at the Oriental Institute in Chicago and are one of the most important biblical artifacts in the United States.

Isaiah experienced this. He saw this. He saw the cost of our rebellion. It’s not just for “after”; it's real in this life. He says if the Lord had not mercifully left us with just a few survivors, we would have been like Sodom and Gomorrah. For those familiar with the Bible, this image of Sodom and Gomorrah is an image of total destruction. It was God's grace and mercy to leave a remnant. In Isaiah 1:10, Isaiah addresses those who are left: “Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” That is offensive, isn’t it? This would not have struck the eighth-century hearers as a catchy slogan for a growing church. This is hard truth, trying to get our attention. We are a people turning our backs to God, and, if you're like me, at this point in the sermon, you’re thinking, “Yeah, it's really bad out there. Yeah, you know, there's so much sin out there.” But then the Lord turns to us in a very focused way and calls out the sin of religious folks like us. The Lord says, “I’m not taking any delight in your gatherings.” In Isaiah 1:11-14, we read: "What to Me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before Me, who has required of you this trampling of My courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts My soul hates; they have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them.” There is great sin inside the community of faith, as well. Though we should be different and are called to be different, oftentimes the conduct of Christian and non-Christian is indistinguishable to the world. It is so painful when Christians act like non-Christians or when Christian leaders act like non-Christian leaders. It's painful. In Isaiah 1:15, the Lord says: “When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” This judgment makes us angry, initially upset. It strikes us as offensive. It doesn't seem nice. We formulate a response. We start to move forward our explanatory circumstances. And yet, if we let the prophetic Word do its work and cut into us, the right response to God is humility, contrition and repentance. In Isaiah 1:16-17, the Lord urges: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before My

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eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause.” We need to learn to do good. We need to seek justice. We need to fix oppression, and we need to bring justice to the fatherless and to plead the widow’s cause. We need to care for people in the womb and those born and living on the margins. We need to care for those near the end of life, who are extremely vulnerable. And if we are really honest, we are now asking a different question: How do we do that? We stop making excuses, and we ask God honestly in humility, “Oh Lord, how can such a change be brought about?”

When in doubt, when you are struggling to understand the Bible, the best advice I can give you is to keep reading. Keep reading, because Isaiah 1:1-17 is the opening statement, and then we see the climax of this passage in Isaiah 1:18. The Lord says: "Come now, let us reason together.” This is not an easy passage to translate. If you look at other English versions, you'll see translators wrestling to convey this opening. For the grammar lovers among us, it is a hortatory subjunctive. If that doesn't mean anything to you, forgot about it. It's an urge to action, using the words “let us” or “let’s.” The NRSV Bible says, “Let us argue it out together.” The NIV says, “Let us settle the matter.” The ESV says, “Let us reason together.” This is the divine plural that we see in Genesis 1 when God says, “Let us make mankind in our image.” This is God speaking with the royal “we,” so that God would act in such a way to solve this problem of evil.

Sometimes I hear people wrestling with evil in the world, and we should wrestle with it out there and in here. Whenever you seriously start asking that question, you are on the fast track to becoming a Christian. The number one objection to Christian faith is: Why doesn’t God do something about the evil in the world or the evil within me? The good news of the Scriptures is that the God of the Bible, the Holy One of Israel actually does. He's the only One who can and the only One who does.

I would render this phrase as: “Let us resolve the matter.” This is God speaking to Himself. He's not inviting you to do your part, and He will do His part. He is telling us that He will act. How can we get out of this situation? The Lord says in Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” How does that happen? How does my sin, red like scarlet, red like crimson, become white as snow? I have four “Cs” for you:

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Number one: The first “C” is contrition. Contrition for sin is that tightening of the chest, that tightening of the stomach, that tightening of the heart that says, “Oh, I am sorry for that.” It's a real, right regret. Contrition is when your insides say, “Oh, how did I do that? I am so sorry.” I love to hear people say they're sorry – I really do. I love it. As a pastor, I love it. You can mix it up and say, “I apologize.” You can say, “I'm so sorry.” You can say, “I really regret that.” You can just say, “Woe is me.” That's contrition.

That's what Isaiah saw when he saw the Lord. In Isaiah 6:1-3, we read: “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above Him stood the seraphim. . . And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!’” When he saw the greatness and the glory of God, the first thing he realized was his lack of greatness and glory. In Isaiah 6:5, he said: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" “Woe is me.” This is not “Whoa” in awe; this is contrition. “I am undone. I am unholy and unrighteous. I am a man of unclean lips. I don’t always speak the truth. I say what's wrong. I make a judgment that's incorrect, and I live among people of unclean lips.” Contrition for sin is the first “C.” It’s the first step out of the darkness, and it's to concede that I am sinful, that we are sinful. It doesn't really matter to God whether the sin is embezzling millions of dollars or stealing a carrot. It doesn't really matter, because all sin is abhorrent to a Holy God, and we feel contrition.

Number two: The second “C” is a coal from the altar. It is God's response to our contrition when we say, “I'm sorry, Lord. Woe is me.” The God who is worshiped in glory sends one of the seraphim, who takes a coal from the altar and flies in this vision, straight to Isaiah, who is fearing the impending judgment of God. God sends one of these breathtaking angelic creatures to touch Isaiah with the coal from the altar and say to him: “Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” In Isaiah 6:6, we read: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for." This is divine reckoning – sin is removed and taken away. It is atoned for at the altar: contrition for sin, a coal from the altar.

Number three: The third “C” is a commission for the world. Oftentimes in the Christian life, I find that we take the gospel to mean, “I'm sorry for my sins; I find forgiveness in Christ.” And

Page 7 of 11 that's the end. In the Bible that's the beginning: contrition for sin, then a coal from the altar re-positions us and commissions us as God's people in the world, to our society, to our families and to our friends. After Isaiah receives forgiveness, the Lord asks the heavenly court in Isaiah 6:8: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?" Trembling, as a forgiven sinner, Isaiah says: "Here I am! Send me." He says, “I’m available.” Are you available? Are you available to be a control rod when the family system is over-heating? Are you available to speak a word of truth in a moment when things are heating up? Are you available to take the blow and lower the violence without retaliating? “Here I am. Send me.” Contrition for sin, a coal from the altar touching our lips, and a commission: “Speak for Me. Speak My Word.”

Number four: The fourth “C” for us this morning, leading us out of darkness, out of sin, is the coming, the coming of the Messiah. When the Lord said, “Let's settle this, let's resolve this issue of the separation between you and Me, the sin of the world, the problem of evil,” we move from contrition, the coal at the altar, and the commission to speak for God, to the coming of the Messiah. Isaiah’s prophecies are filled with the coming of a Savior. In Isaiah 11:1-4, we read: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. And His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what His eyes see, or decide disputes by what His ears hear, but with righteousness He shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips He shall kill the wicked.” God will lead in such a way that violence is destroyed. In Isaiah 11:9-10, we read: “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” This coming Messiah, the Son of David, will stand as a signal for all peoples, and they will rally to Him. In Isaiah 35:3-6, we read: “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.’ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and

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the tongue of the mute sing for joy.” Israel's idolatry will be taken away. And when we become lifeless through those things, all of a sudden we’re made alive through the agency of this coming Savior. In Isaiah 40:1-3, we read: “Comfort, comfort My people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins. A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”

Isaiah speaks of the coming Messiah in Isaiah 53, perhaps the greatest chapter in the Old Testament: A coming Savior, a coming One whose arrival will astonish the kings of the earth with a vision of power, real power. The Servant of the Lord comes to reveal God to us. He draws us, not by His physical beauty or form. Indeed, He is a man of sorrows, despised and rejected. And yet, as Isaiah sees Him, he sees the glory of the saving mission of Jesus Christ 700 years before the cross. In Isaiah 53:4-5, we read: “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.” All of us are like sheep going astray, and yet the Lord lays on Him, the Lamb of God, the iniquity of us all. If this doesn't humble us, I don't know what would. It is the will of the Lord to crush Him. He is assigned a grave with the rich, and yet He rises from the dead and makes many to be accounted righteous.

Contrition for sin (a real repentance), a coal from the altar (atonement for sin), a commission to speak God's Word in the world, and the coming of the Messiah – that's God's solution. That's God's solution for your sin, for mine, for the sin of our world, and for the sin of Isaiah's world. When we turn to the New Testament, we follow the ministry of our Lord Jesus, helping us see that this coming One is He. In Luke 4, Jesus triumphed over the devil in the wilderness and then came to Nazareth. He went to church that weekend. He came into the service, and they gave Him the scroll and invited Him to read the Scripture that day to proclaim liberty to the captives, to recover sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. All eyes were fixed upon Him, as he closed the scroll and said, "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

His public ministry, His miracles, prompted John the Baptist from his prison cell to ask the question through his disciples, “Are You the Coming One, or should we look for another?” We read Jesus’ answer in Matthew 11:4-5:

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"Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” Quoting Isaiah 35, “Jesus is the coming Savior who gives light to those in darkness, who heals the blind so that we can see,” as John Newton famously wrote in his hymn, “Amazing Grace.” He said: “I was blind. I thought that trading human beings and selling them for money was just business.” We don't see our sin as sin, unless we see the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ. And when you see yourself as you are, when David Palmer sees himself as he is, then I say, “Lord, forgive me.”

The four “Cs” give us: contrition for sin, coal from the altar, commission to speak for God and to recognize the coming Savior. On the night in which He was betrayed, Jesus gathered His disciples and interpreted for them the meaning of His imminent crucifixion. He told them in Matthew 28:20: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many." In Matthew 26:28, Jesus offers bread and wine to His disciples and tells them: “This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” This language of the “many” alludes clearly to Isaiah 53:11: “Out of the anguish of His soul He shall see and be satisfied; by His knowledge shall the righteous One, My Servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and He shall bear their iniquities.” We are standing near the Holy of Holies here. Jesus identifies Himself at the beginning of His ministry, in the interpretation of His miracles, and at the moment prior to His crucifixion as this coming Messiah. When the Lord says, “Let's settle the matter,” He provides a solution. How is it, dear friends, that our sins, though they be as scarlet, can become white as snow? Let’s be crystal clear about this. Let's be more sure of this than anything else. How does that happen? It happens through contrition, a coal from the altar, God's saving action, through the commission to then speak His Word of the coming Savior to the world, though it be unpopular, and though it may prove costly.

Isaiah's own ministry ended when he fled and sought refuge in a tree from a king who hated his preaching. The king ordered the tree to be cut in half, and Isaiah died in this way – sawn in two. He was faithful to his commission to point us to a coming Messiah, Lord of all nations, ending in righteousness. Jesus took the sin of the world upon His shoulders and offered His life as a

Page 10 of 11 ransom for you and for me and all who would believe the One, by whose stripes our sin-sick souls are healed. This is the Holy of Holies of our faith. God spoke this to Isaiah and pointed us straight to Jesus.

We have the great privilege now of celebrating and remembering. We are going to prepare our hearts to remember what Jesus told His disciples on the night in which He was betrayed. When He took bread, He broke it in their presence and said,” This is My body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.” Later in the meal, He took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” We are going to approach the Holy One with contrition, and we will sing together this great missionary hymn, “Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty,” inspired by Isaiah's vision in Isaiah 6 and written in India by an English missionary. As we sing, I want to invite you into this space, a space of real contrition, humility, and confession. Let’s worship Him, and I'll guide us to partake together. Let us pray.

Lord God Almighty. The seraphim never cease singing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.” Lord, You are righteous in all Your ways, and though Your truth hurts, Lord, the only thing it really hurts is our pride. Hallelujah! for death blows to human pride. Hallelujah! for the compassion of a God, who would just tell us the truth – that we’re in trouble and in need of forgiveness. Hallelujah! to a God, who identifies our problem but then offers a solution, one that we could not offer or summon. Lord, we come before You in need of forgiveness, as a people, as individuals, as fathers and as mothers, as brothers and as sisters, as friends and as colleagues, as students and as teachers, as workers and as bosses. Lord, we are sorry for anything we've said and done and anything we’ve left unsaid and undone. We seek Your forgiveness.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

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