Isaiah 27 - A Gathered Harvest

I turn with me, if you will, to Isaiah, chapter 27,.

Isaiah 27 · chapter mention

Isaiah, chapter 27.

Isaiah 27 · chapter mention

One of the things I love about singing is the ability, in song, to express complex issues and theology, not with close argument, but with striking images and figures of speech.

Our Christian songs and hymns are rich with imagery, draw on nature.

We draw on biblical stories, we make up spiritual metaphors that evoke deep emotion within us as it connects to the truth of God's word.

Just think of some of the things that we sing.

This is my father's world, and we reach into the universe and also to the grass on the ground to think about how God is everywhere.

This is my father's world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and around me rings the music of the spheres.

And then he goes to the grass.

In the rustling grass I hear him pass, he speaks to me everywhere.

Songs about pilgrimage and journey, amazing grace, through many dangers, toils and snares I've already come or a destination.

Sing me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues.

Above Praise the mount.

I'm fixed upon it, Mount of God's unchanging love.

And then there's songs about cleansing and life-giving.

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunge beneath the flood lose all their guilty stains.

And then a song that I used to sing a lot when I was a new believer I'll fly away.

Some glad morning, when this life is o'er, I'll fly away.

These are all examples of how Christian songs and hymns use poetic language and vivid imagery to inspire within us faith and hope and love as we reflect upon God's word.

Well, we're in a section of Isaiah that began in chapter 24, that focuses on song, that focuses on song, in which singing is the chief expression of our spiritual lives.

We started in chapter 24, chapter 25, in a glorious song about the resurrection, chapter 26, also about the defeat of death and the resurrection, and now, in chapter 27, we're continuing to sing an expansive song of glorious victory of God for his people.

When we come into chapter 27, we'll see some similarities between it and chapter 26.

Like chapter 26, this is, as I said, a hymn focusing on what God will do for his people.

But there's a little bit of a difference.

When we looked at the song of chapter 26, it moved from the future to the present, from the future to the present, with songs that we'll sing and the implications that it has for us very clearly expressed throughout the chapter.

In chapter 27, we don't have those exhortations.

What we have is an effluence of song about the future and the victory, and so the application which there is is going to be a little more muted in what we should do, but is expansive in what we should feel and how we should rejoice and bask in the light of God's glorious victory.

Sometimes it's good just to sit and listen and receive a message of victory without thinking about what I need to do tomorrow or today.

So, as we go through this chapter, there are three things I want us to bask in, and the first is the destruction of death.

The destruction of death.

Now, when we looked at chapter 26 last week, we saw that God gives us hope that on the final day he's going to exert his mighty power and give us a victory over life where death reigns.

You can see that in verse 19 of chapter 26.

Your dead will live, their bodies will rise.

So wake and sing, you who dwell in the dust, for you will be covered with the morning dew and the earth will bring out the departed saints spirits.

What a wonderful remark.

That is right.

Imagine walking up to a graveyard and saying to it those of you who lie in the dust, you will live.

Your bodies will rise, awake and sing.

People would see us and think we're crazy, but it's going to be true.

How do we know?

Because Christ himself rose from the dead.

Yesterday I attended the memorial service for James Samuel's.

I really felt the force of death.

Yesterday morning, tears were abundant.

The memorial service for James Samuel's father was filled with a lot of weeping.

There were tears over the realization that death is still here and it's still a part of our existence.

There were tears that sort of reflected upon his father's failing health as he succumbed to aging, and his body and even in his mind.

There were tears over all the shared words and actions of love that are no longer going to be heard or felt now that James's father has passed away.

There were tears over shared experiences which are no longer going to happen, where they're only now captured by what's going to be an increasingly faded memory.

I was also heartened during that time to hear the clear testimony of James's father's love for Jesus Christ and how he had dedicated himself to the gospel, and I loved Ian his grandson's testimony about his grandfather's faith in Christ and wanted to make sure everybody who was in that room understood what his grandfather loved, and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It was wonderful, and so I was encouraged, to see the family, even though they were weeping, to be rejoicing in hope and mingle together these extreme emotions as we come into chapter 27,.

We come into chapter 27 and it presents to us in our present, where there is truly still weeping, a message about a future, a future that is grand and glorious and affects the whole cosmos.

As we enter into this passage, we'll understand that God is doing something.

He is bringing death to death, but he's not only destroying death, he's also destroying the one behind death.

As we'll see in a moment, there's something bigger that he's accomplishing here, not just the effect of sin, but the force behind sin is going to destroy.

One day.

He's going to defeat that force, the devil.

He's going to bring an end of all of Satan's deceptions and temptations and crippling accusations.

As chapter 25 said, there'll be no death one day, but in chapter 27, there's no power behind death.

That is now destroyed.

The language is figurative and it might feel a little awkward for us for just a moment, but the figures of speech would have been familiar to people in Isaiah's day, they would have easily taken on board the deep imagery here and understood its meaning quite readily.

Take a look at verse 1, chapter 27.

On that day the Lord with his relentless, large, strong sword will bring judgment on Leviathan the fleeing serpent, leviathan the twisting serpent.

He will slay the monster that is in the sea.

It's an image that seems a little awkward to us.

The closest thing that we might get to that image is maybe watching the Lord of the Rings right and in their journey coming up against Balrog right.

Who's this fiery, demonic figure?

Who's holding this whip that's swinging around and whipping things?

That seems large, too large to overcome.

What is the worst thing you can imagine?

What is the thing that you can conjure up in your mind that would bring you to the very edges of your imagination in trying to bring up a horrific image.

For me, having been in the military and having been a part of the Cold War, an imagery of a nuclear holocaust comes to mind, in which nations are obliterating nations in this mass conflagration, in which millions and moments are cast into eternity and civilization is left in rubble, only to be followed by a dystopian society.

That's kind of where my mind goes.

What's the very worst thing that you could imagine.

In Isaiah's day, one of the most terrifying images that they could have conjured would have been people getting into a boat and casting off into this reckless sea, and then all of the dangers of the wind and the waves and the storm, surpassed by what lurked underneath.

What is in that murky depth?

Could it be a multi-headed monster that is about to come washing up out of the waters and to swallow them whole?

That would have been the kind of image they would have thought about.

That was about as bad as it got.

So Isaiah uses this imagery in the chaos of the sea, in the darkness of the ocean, in the uncharted depths of the waters and what beasties lie beneath, and he uses this imagery to talk about God's victory.

To talk about God's victory.

And Isaiah shows God holding a blood-stained sword and standing over the headless monster, a Leviathan chopped down with the swing of his arm.

Now we don't know a whole lot about Leviathan.

There are references in several places in Scripture.

There's references in the book of Psalms, and when you read the Psalms like Psalm 74, it talks about Leviathan as a multi-headed beast Psalm 74, 13.

You divided the sea with your strength.

You smashed the heads of the sea monsters in the water.

You crushed the heads of the sea monsters in the water.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan.

In Job, chapter 41, job is being spoken to by God and God asks him if he can control powerful things on earth, and he uses Leviathan as an example of that.

Job 41 · chapter mention

Can you pull in Leviathan with a hook or tie his tongue down with a rope?

Can you put a cord through his nose and pierce his jaw with a hook?

Will he beg for mercy and listen to you?

And listen to you.

Imagine Job's kind of going?

Absolutely not.

God continues lay a hand on him and you'll remember the battle and not repeat it.

Any hope of capturing him proves false.

Does not a person collapse at the very sight of him?

That's how horrific the imagery was.

And God reminds Job on earth there's nothing like Leviathan, which is made without fear.

He beholds every high thing.

He's the king over all the children of pride.

There's nothing stronger than that.

And God uses the weakness of mankind against this formidable force of Leviathan as a touch point for the unfathomable knowledge and actions and power of God.

He says to Job no one is ferocious enough to rouse Leviathan.

Well, who then can stand against me.

Well, no wonder then, right after that rebuke, job says I give I'm neither smart enough, knowledgeable enough or righteous enough to question God, enough or righteous enough to question God.

Here, in Isaiah, chapter 27, leviathan is described as a fleeing serpent, as a twisting serpent, and he's called the monster that is in the sea, or, as other translations put it, the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27 · chapter mention

Translations put it the dragon that is in the sea.

And here he refers to Leviathan as this fleeing, twisting serpent, which evokes in us, if we know our Bible, memories of Genesis, chapter 3, referring to the creature that tempted Adam and Eve to their destruction by questioning God's goodness and God's justice.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

There Adam and Eve listened to the voice of a serpent as it questioned God, and they rolled the words of that serpent around in their minds and they began to imagine a life that would be better without God, and so they decided to disobey God.

They decided to go against his prohibition not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and, among a million and one yeses, they decided to say yes to the one no that God gave them.

They looked for a world where they could determine what was lovely and they could determine what was best for them, without God's advice and without God's leadership and without having to submit to it.

And behind it all, behind the serpent and in the voice, was this supernatural diabolical force, the devil, satan, the adversary, the tempter, the slanderer, the liar from the beginning.

And the imagery of the serpent in Genesis 3, picked up here in Isaiah, chapter 27, is also laid out for us in the book of Revelation where it connects the thread and it gives us a portrait of Satan or the devil, in Revelation 12.9.

Isaiah 27 · chapter mention

So the great dragon was thrown out, the ancient serpent who is called the devil, and Satan, the one who deceives the whole world.

He was thrown to earth and his angels with him.

By giving heed to the seductive statements of the serpent, adam and Eve plunged the whole universe, people and creation into a fallen, futile and failed state where death and disobedience and chaos reign.

Isaiah 27 takes up that imagery.

It takes up that imagery of death and disobedience and chaos and sticks it into a sea monster.

But then there is over this sea monster, that is a force beyond the power of humanity.

Is God standing there over the lifeless, headless body of this beast as he swings his sword and cuts it down in a moment.

What is this?

What is this imagery?

It's a description of everything that is mighty, this unassailable force that wreaks havoc, this chaos, this destruction, this death is put to death.

Not only is death dead, but the one who holds the power of death is dead.

That's how dead death is.

That's how dead disobedience is.

It's gone.

The writer of Hebrews says that Jesus shared in flesh and blood so that, through his death, he might destroy the one who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free all those who, all their life, were in slavery, held in bondage by the fear of death.

Through Christ's sacrifice and his resurrection, he stood with this mighty crimson sword over death itself and over Satan.

All powers, seen and unseen, all rulers earthly and otherworldly, seen and unseen, all rulers earthly and otherworldly, all those things that oppose God and his people are now hacked to death by God himself.

This is the image, this is the victory, this is Leviathan gone, and only Yahweh, the mighty Lord, with his great and strong sword, is able to overcome this power.

This is our God.

Not only is the image here of the destruction of death and the one who holds the power of death.

It's also a picture of divine delight as instantly the image moves a different direction In verse 2.

On that day, sing about a desirable vineyard Boy.

It's a really quick movement away from a battlefield to a glorious hills of Napa Valley, for instance.

But here's a song to sing about a delightful vineyard.

It follows hard on this destruction of Satan and his downfall and again it's repeated in that day.

We've heard a lot of that phrase in the past few weeks, but here it is again, introducing that glorious fulfillment of God's plan by way of his activity.

And now a song is sung again, a song about a pleasant vineyard.

As we've been going through Isaiah, this might sound familiar to you because we looked at a passage that talked about a song about a vineyard in Isaiah chapter 5.

Isaiah 5 · chapter mention

David Parker was the one who took this passage and in Isaiah chapter 5, that song was not a song of delight and cheerful music.

Isaiah 5 · chapter mention

It was a mourning lament.

It was a song that was sad.

In Isaiah chapter 5, it was a song crying over the people of Israel and their failures and their disobedience and the destruction that would come upon them by way of judgment.

Isaiah 5 · chapter mention

But here is a positive song full of hope for the vineyard that stands in extreme and sharp contrast to that in chapter 5.

And it's meant to be a contrast because it flows similarly.

Because it flows similarly In chapter five and in chapter 27,.

There are songs that talk about God's care of the vineyard.

There are songs about his attention to it, tending to it, and there are identification markers of Jacob and Israel in chapter 25 and chapter 27.

This is the same vineyard but a completely different song.

In chapter 5 and verses 5 and 6, god was angry with the vineyard, but in chapter 27, there's no anger.

God is not angry with them because there's nothing in the vineyard to provoke his displeasure.

In chapter 5, the harvest was ruined.

In chapter 27, the harvest is abundant.

In chapter 5, there are thorns and briars that need to be burnt.

In chapter 27, there's no thorns or briars, even existing.

In chapter 5, god stops the rain on the bad vines.

In chapter 27, he freely waters the vineyard.

In chapter 5, the fruit to the vineyard is sour, unpleasant to the taste, while in chapter 27, the vineyard produces good fruit and it flourishes around the world and everybody gets to eat of it Everybody, everybody.

Instead of bitterness and bloodshed in the old vineyard in this new vineyard is protection and peace and abundance.

Where does all of this come from?

It comes from God.

Take a look at verse 3.

I am the Lord who watches over it, to water it regularly so that no one disturbs it.

I watch over it night and day.

I am not angry.

God's activity to this vineyard is one of watching over it repeatedly, watering it.

It shows his devotion, it shows his attention, it shows his care, it shows his ownership, it shows his sovereignty as he makes every effort to ensure this vineyard success.

And that success comes forward.

Where other vineyards have failed, this one succeeds.

God's people.

Instead of being the vineyard of chapter 5, are now the vineyard of chapter 27.

Being the vineyard of chapter 5 are now the vineyard of chapter 27.

They're a valued vineyard with God watching over it.

They're a verdant vineyard full of plenty.

They're a victorious vineyard flourishing all over the earth.

It's a vineyard without thorns.

It's a vineyard without briars.

It's a vineyard with images of full, plentiful fruit.

It's full of vigor, no impediments, no opposition, nothing to hold back the fruitfulness of the harvest.

What is this?

It elicits from us the garden of where there's no thorns and no weeds and no mitigation of potential, where everything is brought to the very fullness of what it was designed for.

That's the image and here it is of God looking over this vineyard with all of his care, with all of his attention, with all of his nurture, with all of his love and with all of his acceptance.

His vineyard, his people.

This captures for us this ultimate restoration of creation, where sin is eradicated and the original design of people and creation in Eden is fully realized.

This is the glimpse of the future.

In this imagery, life restored, eden regained Harmony once again, where nature and humanity coexist in perfect balance, where we live in perfect harmony with God and one another and with the things that we walk upon and meet in the created world.

Imagine that for you an environment untouched by conflict and destruction.

Imagine a place where the forest thrives, where the river runs crystal clear, where every living creature flourishes without fear, where every human life is embodying simplicity and joy, where all of us are connected, sharing in this abundance without greed or competition.

Think about it Everything that we do bringing us to the fullness of joy, fullness of harmony and the fullness of connection before God himself who takes pleasure in its all.

This is that image.

This is that vineyard that receives God's everlasting care.

You might say, well, that's just too wonderful a picture for me.

I'm a person full of danger and trouble and hardship and conflict.

I live among people that make me sad and sadly, I make them sad too.

I'm more like a thorn than a fruitful vine.

I'm more like a briar than I am a vineyard of plenty.

There's hope for us who are thorny people.

There's hope for us who are briars rather than vines.

Take a look at verse four and five.

How complete is this beautiful creation.

God says I'm not angry.

If only there were thorns and briars for me to battle, I would trample them and burn them to the ground.

You're like oh well, that's not hope, pastor.

Well, it's what we deserve.

Thorns and briars really don't belong in God's beautiful creation, which means none of us belong in God's beautiful creation.

But take a look at verse 5.

Let it take hold of my strength.

Let it make peace with me.

Make peace with me.

God repeats the phrase because he wants it to sink in.

How are you ever going to possibly be in that beautiful place of the future?

By making peace with God.

That's how it's, not by working to be a fruitful vine and trying to change your own nature.

Mr and Mrs Thorne, it's not by ignoring how prickly you are and saying well, I'm no different than everybody else.

You don't enter into the beautiful vision of the future without this making peace with God.

But here's God making the appeal to you Make peace with me, come to me as you are, but come to me with a desire to be something different than you are, and I will include you.

I will include you in the vine and I will include you.

I will include you in the vine, I will include you in the picture of the future.

This promise is to everybody.

It's a promise not just to the natural vine, the people of Israel.

It's the promise to the thorns and the briars and the bristles, to the thorns and the briars and the bristles.

You see, the hope is found in coming to Christ, to coming to the Lord.

You know the one you've ignored, the one you've disobeyed, the one you've shunned, the one you don't want to listen to.

Come to him.

Come to him and seek to be at peace with him.

When I was 21 years old, this was bubbling up in my heart and the only thing that I could think of that was most important to me at that moment, which was a new thought to me, was that somehow I needed to be right with God.

I didn't know what that looked like.

I asked somebody and I said what do I do?

And I thought maybe I needed to do something.

Maybe it meant joining a church, maybe it meant I don't know what it meant, but I felt like I needed to do something.

And he said pray and ask God to save you.

Well, that seemed really counterintuitive and scary actually, because I'd never prayed before.

But he pointed me to the scriptures that said that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved, for the same God who is rich over all, both Jew and Gentile, for whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

And he said believe on Jesus Christ.

But what did that mean?

It meant relinquishing any trust that I had in my goodness, relinquishing any trust I had in any of my activities, as if those might be good enough to obtain favor from God.

Let go of that, repent of your sin, those things that you loved.

Turn away from them as you come to God, let go of yourself and let God set the priorities of your life.

And it meant receiving Christ as my Savior.

And in a moment those things happened, and in a moment come flooding in or rejoicing in my heart, and I stood up and I looked out the window and all of a sudden the sky looked bluer than it ever had before and the grass looked greener than it ever had before.

And the thought came into my head Doug, you're going to heaven when you die.

That that is what it meant for me to be at peace with God, and it's what every person understands when they come to peace with God.

Having therefore been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord, jesus Christ, and we have obtained access through him, by faith, into this grace in which we stand and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

How does this entrance come?

Not by anything we do, not by anything we hold on to, or not by any excuse we make.

We're brought into this beautiful picture because it's God who loves, who cares, who waters, who takes pleasure, who is not angry.

The third picture is found in the last two verses, verses 12 and 13, where, on that day, shows up again and again.

On that day, the Lord will thresh grain from the Euphrates River as far as the wadi of Egypt, and you Israelites will be gathered one by one On that day, a great ram's horn will be blown.

Those lost in the land of Assyria will come, as well as those dispersed in the land of Egypt, and they will worship the Lord at Jerusalem, on the holy mountain.

We've seen the destruction of death and we've saw the picture of divine delight.

And now we have a determined destiny.

And now we have a determined destiny.

In their sin, the people of Israel, both the northern tribes and the southern tribes, were scattered around the known world.

In their disobedience, the northern tribes ten of them were captured by Assyria, and, as Assyria would do, they dispersed them throughout their kingdom in small little pockets so that they could not be strong enough to rise up any resistance against the empire, and they ceded the land with conquered people from other areas, so confused by language and culture.

There was no way the population could amass any strength.

In 2 Kings 17, verse 6, we hear that the people of Israel never returned from those dispersed places.

2 Kings 17:6

In Jeremiah's day, a group of other people sought refuge in Egypt and Cush, and they remained there in small little clusters under the failing arm of Pharaoh.

A smattering of weak and poor people remained in the land, and as Assyria began to seed the land with conquered people, they began to intermingle and intermarry with them and they became known as the Samaritans.

And then the people of Judah were captive to Babylon.

Babylon soon fell.

It fell to the Persians, but a lot of people didn't return.

The majority of the folks stayed there.

Only a minority of people returned to the land of promise.

So here is people scattered everywhere, god's people taken out into the lands of the Assyrians, the lands of the Babylonians, the lands of the Egyptians, intermingling with people so confusing you can't rally a cry to them to bring them together.

You couldn't get an alert on your smartphone that just told everybody something's happening Until an angel blew a trumpet.

And here's that picture of this glorious day when God will pull from the Euphrates and he'll pull from the wadi of Egypt and he will gather his people together and there will be this blast of a ram's horn blown and all those lost in those places will come together.

The dispersed will reunite.

And where does he summon them?

He summons them to the very place of worship to the holy city and Mount Zion itself, and the rest of their life will be filled with what looks like a day of jubilant celebration in the presence of God.

Their unity is not based upon their nationality, it's not based upon their political interest.

They are unified in a common worship of God.

They return to Zion and, as other places talk, they returned with the nations to this place.

The kingdom will be like an endless feast on a holy day of worship, as the people rejoice and feast in the presence of the Lord, in the presence of the Lord.

It's no wonder, then, that Paul, when he spoke to the Thessalonians and when he spoke to the Corinthians, he talked about a time when the trumpet will sound and all of God's people will be gathered into the presence of God, the trumpet fulfilled as the angel speaks, and all of God's people hear and come into God's presence.

This is why we read the book of Hebrews in chapter 12, because that reality is already here and that reality will be known even better then.

Instead, you've come to Mount Zion.

You're already positionally there.

You've come to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the myriad of angels, a festive gathering.

The party's already started.

To the assembly of the firstborn, whose names have been written in heaven, to a judge who is the God of all, to the spirits of righteous people made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, to the sprinkled blood, which says better things than the blood of Abel, which says better things in the blood of Abel.

This is Isaiah's song, a song of victory.

The death of death and the one who holds the power of it, the delightful vine and the regathered people.

The kingdom of Israel longed for and the people of all nations have yearned for.

As we've dreamt up and conjured in our minds ideas of beauty and wonder and harmony, it's a reality in God's word.

What does this teach us?

Well, let's just think about it for a moment.

This passage teaches us that presently we are in a world that's fallen and we don't wrestle against flesh and blood.

We wrestle against principalities and powers in the heavenly places, that there are things that energize the present forces of destruction and there are spiritual forces that reinforce the fear of death in our soul than that wonder of what's beyond when our eyes shut for the last time.

And so it must evoke from us a recognition of just how weak we are.

We can't stand up against Balrog.

We can't stand up against the Leviathan.

We can't stand up against Satan.

We can't even stand up against death, which is just the effect.

We can't stand up against Satan.

We can't even stand up against death, which is just the effect.

We can't stand up against any of it.

What we need is a formidable force of God himself swinging the sword to cut the heads off of those enemies.

And so this passage teaches us to be prayerful, but to be humble, but also to be hopeful.

Hopeful even when the kingdom seems like it's never coming.

Hopeful when it seems like all the things that we do as humans just don't affect anything positive.

The day's going to come when God will affect everything positive.

The day is going to come when God will affect everything positive.

It reminds us that the work is not ours, the timing is not ours, the victory is not ours and the praise is not ours, it's God's.

And this song teaches us to sing as we continue to traverse through enemy territory.

Think about that for a moment.

What would be the most despicable, rage-inducing activity?

To hear the taunts of your enemy.

That's why, when you go to a soccer game in England, you've got oppositional teams singing oh, we're going to beat you.

You're like no, we're going to beat you.

I'm not going to repeat the lyrics.

Some of them just can't be repeated, repeated here.

Imagine walking through the enemy territory and singing, taunting death and taunting the devil, not because we're powerful, but because we have a victory we're anticipating.

Imagine singing a song like Nearer my God to thee.

Listen to its lyrics.

Even though it be a cross, that raises me still.

All my song still shall be nearer my God to thee, though like a wanderer.

The sun gone down, darkness over me, my rest a stone.

Yet in my dreams I'll be.

Nearer my God to thee.

There let the way appear, steps unto heaven, all that thou sendest me in mercy, given angels beckon me.

Nearer my God to thee.

Then, with my waking thoughts, bright with thy praise, out of my stormy griefs, bethel, I raise, so by my woes to be nearer my God to thee.

Or if, on joyful wing cleaving the sky, sun and moon and stars forgot.

And then one more verse added later Nearer my God to thee, nearer, perfectly blessed age after age, to be nearer my God to thee, nearer my God to thee.

In the middle of enemy territory we're saying it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

I'm going to be nearer to God and I'm going to be in the place where the ages will roll from one to another, without any calendar, and I'll always be near to him.

So, whether you're eight or 80 or 95, like George, we can sing in the middle of enemy territory.

We can sing like we were teaching Elias a few weeks ago.

My God is so great, so big and so strong.

Right, he's so mighty.

There's nothing my God cannot do.

And yes, I messed up the lyrics just now, teaching him to sing and one day to possess a song in the middle of enemy territory.

Because one day, as believers, all of us will sing and there won't be any enemies around.

And one day we'll sing, on the last day of days, this beautiful song.

I'm telling you a mystery will not all sleep, but will all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, and the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible and we will be changed.

For this corruptible body must put on incorruptible and must be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body clothed with immortality.

And when this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility and this mortal body clothed with immortality, then will be the saying that is written will take place Isaiah 25.

Death has been swallowed up in victory.

Where death is your victory, where death is your sting, leviathan's dead.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for the glorious song, a glorious song that we can sing today, a song that we can sing when all trouble still continues around us and even still resides within us, because it's a song not dependent on our ability, but yours, and we're grateful that you're the mighty God who has come to save thorns and briars and to make them a fruitful vineyard.

Lord to you be the praise, to you be the glory, to you be the honor, to you be the majesty, forever and ever.

Amen.