Isaiah 1:21-26 - Renewal for the Repentant

Stick our Bibles and go to the book of Isaiah, chapter one.

For those of you that are visiting, there's a Bible in front of you in a pew.

And you can turn to page 601.

601, you'll find it there for you.

And if you don't have a Bible, we just want to make this clear.

If you don't have a Bible and would like to have one, the Bible that's in front of you, won't you just take it home?

And just take it as a gift from us to you.

We'd like you to have it.

So Isaiah chapter one.

You know, we live in a world that's flooded with the river of words.

Researchers tell us that the average human speaks about 7,000 words a day.

And if we can estimate that there's roughly 7 billion people in the world, you do the math, you realize that uttered into the airspace are about 50 trillion words every single day.

The explosion of all of our mass media through the internet and other means.

We find ourselves drowning in words.

And occasionally I go back and I look at my watch history of my YouTube viewing, and I go back and I go, I watched those that many videos this morning.

I don't even remember a single one of them.

Just flooding yourself with words and information.

God doesn't have a podcast.

But he does speak.

And he speaks here in the Word of God, and He's got a lot to say.

We've introduced ourselves to the book of Isaiah, and we find that at the very beginning, God calls heaven and earth into the room and says, Listen, I've got something to say about my people.

Look in verse two.

The significance of the verb tenses is important there.

Listen now, heavens.

Pay attention, now, earth, for God has spoken.

And here we are, thousands of years later, in a country far removed in a language that's different from Isaiah's day.

And it's a message that God wants us to hear now.

Because there are situations in our life and situations in our society that are no different than what Israel and Jerusalem was going through in its day and time.

We as individuals are every bit as sinful as the people that lived there were.

Or we've seen him come alongside Jerusalem at a table of conciliation and saying, let's talk this over.

He's come to them with words of encouragement.

Your sins, though they're red, can be turned to be as white as snow.

And now in verses 21 and into verse 26, God takes up another way of describing the situation.

And he enters into the realm of lament.

Lament's not a common word for us.

It's a verbal expression of sorrow, our pain, our loss, our confusion.

This is a cry with tears over something that's broken.

It's a broken heart looking at a broken situation.

Have you ever done that?

I know I have.

It's a lament.

And these hard-hearted people who are just carrying on callously with their lives might be awakened with a lament.

To hear someone sobbing is an emotional pull to our hearts.

One of the things I did last week was listen to a 911 call of this young girl sobbing over a horrific family situation to the 911 line on the 911 line.

And it just gripped my heart wrenchingly as I listened to the sobs of this young girl begging for help to come immediately to a situation that was so, so desperate and dangerous.

So here we have God through his prophet weeping, sobbing, crying, a lament.

And the people of Israel are going, What's up with Isaiah?

Why is he crying?

He's crying over you, Jerusalem.

Their hearts might not be broken.

But if I can put it in human terms, God's heart is broken.

And he's expressing this sorrow.

And you take a look at verse 21.

It's couched in language that just seems, well, we could just read it and not pay attention to it.

The faithful town, what an adulteress she's become.

There's that force of a woe.

Other translations even put other words in there to try to give us a sense of what we're looking at.

But we're looking at a lament.

And in these first verses, this cry of agony and pain over loss and corruption goes into three different directions.

It cries over Jerusalem and Judah, the people.

It incorporates their possessions, and then it talks about their princes in these verses.

First, the people in verses 21.

The faithful town, what an adulteress she's become.

She was once full of justice, righteousness once dwelt in her.

But now murderers.

And he begins by fondly remembering what they were.

They were the faithful town.

They were once full of justice.

But that past is not the present anymore.

Now they're characterized by adultery and murder.

Jerusalem, the place that was once the place of welcome, of God's justice and righteousness, is now being mourned over because of her adultery.

And we're introduced to what Isaiah will give us many, many times through the rest of the book: this idea of Jerusalem being Lady Zion.

Now, the Semitic languages would use the feminine to describe cities, and so they were often described as her, but the metaphor here goes beyond just linguistic use.

This is a metaphor of God being married to a people as he's given them commitments of his faithfulness.

And in that bonding together, he has also received from them commitments of faithfulness.

And so they were meant to live together as husband and wife in this mutual love and fidelity.

But now Zion has turned her back on her husband.

And she's now sold herself into adultery.

Instead of trusting the living God, she's gone into alliances with the nations around her.

Instead of trusting God alone and worshiping him purely, they've encountered these other gods and have bent the knee to them in worship.

And God mourns.

He laments.

He talks about their possessions in verse 22.

Your silver has become dross to be discarded.

Your beer is diluted with water.

These things that were pure are now degraded, and they've degenerated into wasteless, wasteful, worthless things.

What was once beautiful, valuable silver has now just become worthless waste metal.

What was once the finest brew has now been watered down and is nothing but worth throwing away.

The quality of these things has deteriorated because of the impurities that have diluted them.

And so is Jerusalem.

It's nothing but dissipation and loss because it's been degraded from what it ought to have been and what it once was.

And this is exactly what sin and Satan do to us.

When we follow him and it, we find our lives moving into dissipation, a word that the Bible uses to describe iniquity.

Sin promises so much to us and delivers so little to us.

There's nothing so beautiful, there's nothing so fresh, there's nothing so sweet than the ecstasy of the good.

And there's nothing so bad and boring as evil.

But that's not how our ears are often hearing the message.

Out there is always the idea, energized by Satan himself, that it's the other way around.

That what is good is boring, and what is to be received is intriguing and attractive and charming.

But it's a lie.

Thomas Brooks, a Puritan, wrote a book, Precious Remedies Against Satan Devices.

It's a great book to read if you can find it.

And you can, it's still being published.

And in it, he talks about the devices of Satan to try to persuade us to sin.

And he gives precious remedies to those devices.

And one of the devices that he talks about is that Satan presents the bait and hides the hook.

That's exactly how he puts it.

That he presents the golden cup and hides the poison in the cup.

That he speaks to the soul about the profit that you'll receive by pursuing your pleasures, but hides the soul from the wrath that will come from pursuing your pleasures.

Points us all the way back to the book of Genesis, where Satan speaks about things that are alluring but ruinous.

And his devices haven't changed.

He presents the bait, he presents the sweet, he presents the pleasure, he presents the prophet and hides the hook.

He hides the shame, he hides the wrath, he hides the loss until you're ruined.

And then he drives your soul and grinds it to nothing with the loss and with the shame and with the wrath.

To ruin you.

And they awoke to a fool's paradise.

He promised them honor, he promised them pleasure, promised them profit, he promised them knowledge, and he paid them back with contempt and shame and loss and ruin.

And here the Lord is lamenting that movement to ruin, that sin in the people here have been brought to.

And then he goes on to speak about the princes in verse 23.

Your rulers are rebels, friends of thieves.

They all love graft and chase after bribes.

They do not defend the rights of the fatherless, and the widow's case never comes before them.

What they were there for, righteousness and justice and care has been replaced by murder and corruption and indifference.

It's led them not only to steal, but to be partners with those who steal and to accept bribes, to curry favor from the powerful, to get gifts from them, and in so doing have turned away from the poor, the widows, and the orphans.

In our generation, we have that same sort of awe of those who are in power, or that same awe of gaining power ourselves, or maintaining power if we have it.

And there have been people throughout the ages who have used even good things as a means for their own selfish ends.

They've used a cloak of patriotism or a veneer of Christianity in order to gain a footing by swaying gullible people to be supportive of them.

Or have used those things as means for their own benefit.

In the 1950s, Billy Graham preached in Los Angeles, and a newspaper publisher by the name of Hearst realized that there was something going on over there.

Now, he didn't care what Graham had to say.

He didn't care about the gospel at all.

What he did care about was how many people would read his newspaper.

And when he saw that there were people listening to what Billy Graham had to say, he said to his editorial team, push Graham.

Push Graham.

And so they did.

Not because they cared about the gospel, not about caring about Billy Graham, even for that matter.

What he cared about was how much money he could gain by putting Graham in the paper.

And there are politicians that do the same thing.

They will talk like a Christian, they will act like a patriot, but they really aren't.

They're there for themselves.

And when we move into that realm, we find ourselves degrading justice, degrading righteousness, degrading truth.

And all of it is really just put on the auction block for sale.

And the question is: at what price are you going to sell out for what can be gained there?

And he's bemoaning this deterioration of righteousness and justice in places where it was meant to be upheld and honored, where integrity was important, because people's lives and livelihoods were at stake.

And it was the very place where the worst corruption was happening.

How does God think about this?

He begins with a mourning cry.

And I don't mean AM, I mean mourning over the loss.

This faithful city, this beautiful silver, these righteous princes, they're gone.

They're gone.

Instead of faithfulness, there's infidelity.

Instead of right living, there's murder.

Instead of silver, there's dross.

Instead of pure drink, there's this insipid, watered-down mess.

Instead of rulers who serve with honor and honesty, there's rebels grasping after power.

Instead of advocates of the weak and defenders of the helpless, there's people selling their positions for influence to the highest bidder.

What's amazing about this is God begins there with this emotive language to help us realize how significant this loss matters to him.

But he moves from these words of loss to words of determination.

Take a look at verses twenty-four through twenty six.

Therefore, the Lord God of armies, the mighty one of Israel, declares, Ah, I will get even with my foes.

I will take revenge against my enemies.

And it goes on to talk about things God will do.

You see, in the midst of all of this, God is not going to be silent, and God is not going to be inactive.

And he's not helpless.

He's not talking on one side of the table of conciliation.

He's not the encourager with his arm wrapped around the sunken shoulder.

This is the Lord God Almighty, the mighty one of Israel, talking here.

We have just aroused the wrath of the general.

And he's ready to take on the enemy.

And he's got two determinations.

His first determination is to oppose sin.

And he's going to get active in this warfare and oppose sin.

Now, this must have come as a shock to the people of Jerusalem because, well, they thought themselves to be on the right side of God, and that God was on the right side of them.

He had chosen them, he had promised to bless them.

They had come from Egypt as slaves and are now in their own lands.

They become known as a significant player on the international stage.

They had God's law, they had God's temple, they were in God's city, they were residing on God's land, they had God's commitment as a husband.

Everything was good.

God's got to keep up his side of the bargain.

He's going to take care of us.

And so they had removed from themselves any understanding that God might call them into account for their behavior.

And they got lulled in this false sense of security.

Blinded by their sin, they had this one-sided view of God.

And just like a person who stares into a bright light, and I don't want to for very long, or stares into the sun for the length of time, the next thing you know, all you see is that light everywhere you turn.

And what they've done is they've stared solely into the brightness of God's mercy, time and time and time and time and time again, realizing that God was not just merciful, that every time they looked around in life circumstances, all they saw was mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy.

Look at my sin.

Mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy.

Nothing but mercy.

Until verse 24.

Jerusalem, you are my enemy.

Just think about it.

If God didn't act in justice, how horrible would this world be?

There's screams within us, a call for justice.

It's innate within us, isn't it?

Besides data, I think the first sentence my sons learned was, that's not fair.

Yeah?

And boy, we memorize that one quick.

We say it the rest of our lives.

We cry for justice.

We cry for fairness.

We cry for these sorts of things innately.

What if there never was any fairness?

What if there never was any justice?

What if there never was any retribution of wrongs?

This whole world would be driven to atheism in a mad striving for being on the upper side of everybody's weaknesses.

But when we realize God is a God of justice, we can realize that maybe that justice isn't meted out now, but it will be meted out one day.

Then we can live.

This is the Lord in heaven speaking here.

And he cares about his own justice that's been offended.

And he will get relief against his enemies, and he will avenge himself against his foes.

This God is not changed.

He still searches the hearts.

He still hates hypocrisy.

He still threatens the unrepentant with destruction.

He still brings severe judgment on people for their sin.

He still summons senseless rebels to the settlement of the issue.

There's more to say.

But let that just weigh upon our hearts.

This is not the resolve of some feeble, toothless grandfather who's lost his voice and sees the rebel grandchildren around him and just meekly says, Guys, could you just settle down a little bit?

This is the mighty one of Israel.

He rises up with the banner of warfare against this.

And it is with him, the God of the Bible, not the God of our own sentimental fantasies that we'll have to deal with.

Ask yourself, if you're disregarding him, do you want to meet this God like that?

I certainly don't.

He's described as a consuming fire in another place.

And none of us are going to go into heaven with a spestus suit song.

Not one of us.

But let's keep reading.

Therefore, the Lord God of armies, the mighty one of Israel, declares, I will get even with my foes.

I will take revenge against my enemies.

I will turn my head against you and burn away your draws completely.

I will remove all your impurities.

I what?

I will restore your judges to what they were at first, and your advisors to what they were at the start?

What?

Afterward you'll be called the righteous city?

What?

A faithful town?

What?

Wait wait wait a second here.

Something's changed in the plot line here.

There's a twist in the story here, isn't there?

This removal.

And this is the second thing he's going to do.

Not only does he oppose sin, but he's going to remove sin.

This removal goes deeper than his determinations to turn against his enemies.

There's something else involved here.

There's a purifying process.

There's a restoring process that's part of his opposition to sin and his determination to remove sin.

This is not at all what we might expect.

We would expect him to follow on with words of annihilation and utter destruction, and just sort of taking the metaphor of warfare and just driving it all the way to ultimate victory and the crushing of the rebels.

But his aim is not that here.

His aim is restoration.

And all of us should weep with joy over these words.

Because we all deserve the first part of this, and none of us deserve the last part of this.

Here's a God who speaks now that there are people who are going to find forgiveness, who are going to find cleansing, that are going to find renewal by his determination to oppose their sin.

He's not going to crush them under the weight of his wrath, he's going to crush and heal them under the weight of his grace.

And he predicts the day is going to come when Zion, the faithful city, the unfaithful wife, is going to one day be again the faithful city.

His determination is to renew and to save and to deliver.

And this is where he wants to take us.

You see, that feeling of guilt and shame that God brings upon us is not meant to grind us to dust and leave us there, but to drive us back to the God we've offended with godly sorrow that ushers into repentance, that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation and restoration and cleansing.

It's exactly what Brian was talking about when before we read that passage in Second Corinthians.

Godly sorrow.

What a wonderful full circle this is, right?

Humanity, created by a holy God, to be in utter union with Him.

Where the song we sang before the message, Beulah Land, would be our reality forever.

We'd never talk about longing for it because we would have lived in it forever, has ruinously left and gone down the way of dissipation and degradation by deepening our love for things that are ruinous.

And instead of being left there, God has brought life to light through the glorious good news of Jesus Christ.

And he says, I'm bringing you back, and I'm giving you promises to be with me forever.

Welcome without condemnation.

This is the story.

And here in Isaiah chapter one, we've got these promises of a redemption.

We've got the terms of the promises that talk about repentance and a purging away of iniquity and a restoration of all that is lost, to give us an understanding of what God means to do in us when he redeems us.

You see, his redemption is more than just releasing us of the consequences of our sin.

It means that he wants to cleanse us from all the defilement of our sin as well.

And he wants to restore us to that ultimate idea of what he had made us to be, so that the very fullness of our persons can be expressed to the glory of God within the context of the beauty of holiness, and that we can let our imaginations fly and our hands unfold an activity that will always be to his glory and will always be full of the love and benefit and sharing of the rest of the redeemed, without any loss, without any tiredness, without any regrets, without any shame, without any shadows, to restore us, to grant us a dignity and an honor that he meant the human race to possess when he breathed life into the dust of Adam.

The question that's provoked here.

How?

How is this going to happen?

We've got the promise, but not the pathway.

All we see now is justice stands against the city.

And yet, a prediction of a promise of God to do something different than crush them.

How is this going to happen?

How are we going to be redeemed?

How is this perfect righteousness in God's sight going to be found?

How are we going to be once again made a faithful city?

How?

Written seven centuries before Jesus Christ, this chapter, this book is yearning for a deliverer to come.

Come.

We can't do it.

And the Bible's answer is clear.

Christ alone is how sinners are washed.

Christ alone is how sinners are transformed.

Christ alone is how sinners are redeemed.

Christ alone is how we stand righteous before a holy God.

Listen to the word of God.

It is from Him, from God, that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption, in order that it is written, let him who boast boast in the Lord and not ourselves.

Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling.

This is our hope.

You see, Christ is the perfect sacrifice that actually cleanses our guilt.

It is through Christ that our consciences become pure and made whole again.

In Isaiah 53, which we'll get to later, speaks of this coming, suffering one who was, as he said in verse 5, pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities, punished so that we might have peace and healed by his wounds.

And when Jesus arose, Isaiah 53 became flesh and blood reality.

And it's by him that we're justified.

It's by him that we're redeemed.

In Christ alone our sins, though they're scarlet, shall be as white as snow.

It's in Christ alone that wicked sinners become declared righteous in his sight.

It's by Christ alone that those who repent of their sins are redeemed and justified.

It's by Christ alone that we stop bringing meaningless worship into the presence of God and are filled with the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name, which is true worship.

And it's in Christ alone that we learn to care for each other.

Afterwards, afterwards, you'll be called the faithful city.

How does God see us now?

Cloaked in the righteousness of our Savior.

God's not finished speaking, though.

He's pronounced those descriptions of woe in his lament to the people and possessions and the princes of the city.

He's given his determinations to oppose sin and to remove sin.

But then he continues to speak about a day of decision.

Verse 27.

Zion will be redeemed by justice, those who repent by righteousness.

At the same time, both rebels and sinners will be broken, and those who abandon the Lord will perish.

Indeed, they will be ashamed of the sacred trees you desired, and you will be embarrassed because of the garden shrines you've chosen, and you will become like an oak whose leaves are withered and like a garden without water.

The strong one will become tender and his work a spark.

Both will burn together with no one to extinguish the flame.

Yes, he put a surprising twist in the plot line.

But let us not forget the first sight of that.

Without repentance, there's nothing left but ruin.

With repentance, there are promises of restoration.

And God doesn't redeem us by casually sweeping aside all of our wrongs.

God Himself paid the price demanded by his own justice and righteousness.

Christ was wounded for our transgressions.

He was bruised for our iniquities.

The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed.

There is the reality of God crying out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

As he was hung on a cross, and the scripture saying, Cursed is everyone who's hung on a tree.

He became a curse for us.

He that knew no sin became sin for us.

This is a reality that God took upon himself our ruinous punishment.

He doesn't just casually sweep it aside.

He is the just one and the justifier of the ungodly.

He doesn't become unjust by delivering us.

He satisfies his justice in himself through the death of Christ.

This is not God's leniency just letting us go.

Ah, I just I got more to do today.

Get out of here.

No, it's not that.

Each and every one of us has been bought by the blood of Christ, who are delivered from sin.

Every one of us have a high price tag that God put upon each and every one of us, the death of his own son for your life.

But that good news is only available to those who repent.

Part of the gift of life means going through the hard movement of repentance.

There's no justification for continuation in rebellion here.

Those who persist in rebellion, God wants this to be capped clear, crystal clear.

Will continue.

If you continue on in that, you will be destroyed.

There's no way around repentance.

You either repent and are delivered, no matter how painful that repentance is, or you continue on in disobedience and your ruin will be far greater than any cost demanded in your repentance.

And so this warning at the very end calls us to a decision.

It calls us to take heed to the words and to welcome the hope that's found there.

To put ourselves in that place, and not just think that this might be good for someone else to hear.

To realize that we too are at a place of decision.

Am I going to persist in disobedience or am I going to submit to the mighty one of Israel, the Lord God, when he demands I bend the knee to him?

Will I continue to hold stiff against him and bear whatever consequences may come?

Or will I face the reality that I need a deliverance from the King of Heaven?

This is the call.

This is the call that Isaiah started with when he opened up these oracles, these words of prophecy to the people.

See, God spoke to them then, and God's speaking to us now.

Because the heart condition is no different.

Our languages are different, our time frames different, our technology is different, our situations are different, but our hearts aren't.

And we need to hear it.

Hear the warning, hear the welcome.

Run from the ruin.

That's all I can tell you.

Run to the one who will ruin you if you don't come back.

Run to him.

Run to him.

And when you run to him, you'll find his arms open wider than you could ever imagine.

With welcome and release and forgiveness and acceptance and restoration and renewal and honor and transformation.

Run to him.

Let's pray.

Oh Father.

Fifty trillion words spoken every day, added on top of one another, could never measure the significance of one sentence out of this.

I will remove all your impurities.

I will restore your judges to what they were at first, your advisors to what they were at the start.

Afterward, you will be called the righteous city, a faithful town.

There's nothing more important for us to hear than that.

There's not a thing that will be said today, tomorrow, for the rest of human life, apart from this good news.

That you're a God that promises life to the repentant and restoration to the broken and acceptance to those who have forsaken you.

Father, help us to hear it.

We pray.

Give us the ears that we need to listen.

Give us the transformation of heart that comes in your work of grace.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.