Isaiah 523-15 | "Gospel Feet"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Take your Bible.

Do you have one?

Your device and open it to the Old Testament prophet Isaiah.

If you are our guest this morning, we want to welcome you.

We have been considering the gospel according to Isaiah.

And I want to pick up where we left off on that last Sunday.

I want to do that by directing our thinking first to the book of Exodus.

So while you're turning to Isaiah, I'm going to talk about Exodus 34.

I once heard someone call Exodus 34 the riddle of the Bible.

The riddle of the Bible.

Exodus 34 takes place in the context of God recording, inscribing on stone for the second time, the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountain.

And it says in Exodus 34 that God is exactly what Nick just prayed, that he is merciful, that he is gracious, that he is slow to anger, that he abounds in steadfast, faithful love.

And he even keeps that faithfulness, it says, by forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

It's an amazing passage of scripture that just paints a beautiful, comforting, accepting image of our God.

And that's an image that permeates most of Western society today.

And it's a belief that has its foundation in Scripture.

A God who is merciful, who is gracious and kind and loving and forgiving, is inviting, isn't it?

It brings comfort and peace to us.

But the riddle is formed when we include the following part of that sentence, because that's just the first half of the sentence.

The second half of the sentence, after describing a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and forgiving sin, it says, but who will by no means clear the guilty.

Visiting the iniquities of the fathers on the children and on the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

It's the riddle of the Bible.

Our world struggles with this riddle in various ways.

Some struggle with justice and mercy.

So if mercy is given, some feel that justice is overlooked.

If justice is meted out in a given situation, mercy and grace could be supposed to be forgotten.

And if for some reason we are slow to be angry in a given situation, some think that justice might be delayed.

And if justice is rightly administered, some might struggle with forgiveness being granted.

And then we all have different backgrounds, right?

We all have different perceptions, we have different convictions, we have different access to information.

So we can expect a variety of comprehension and perceptions and convictions about all of those things amongst each of us.

But the riddle of the Bible is based in a single being.

God is one, Deuteronomy 6 tells us.

God is said to be always merciful, always gracious.

God is always loving.

He is perfectly just.

No, God has not forgotten them, but that's the sense that they have.

See, Israel struggled to see that God can be merciful and gracious and loving and forgiving and perfectly just at the same time while judging sin.

Now we don't have time, unfortunately, this morning to answer all the questions that come from this riddle.

But what I want to do is to show us how God solves the riddle.

To see God's answer to the riddle, we need to begin a little bit further back in Isaiah and chapter 43.

God is not willing to share his place with anyone.

We see this in chapter 43 of Isaiah, verse 10, where God says, Before me no God was ever formed, nor shall there ever be after me.

So if there is some other God of any kind, it is no God at all, because God says, I'm the only one.

I, I am Yahweh, I am the living one, and besides me there is no Savior.

I declared, I saved, I proclaimed.

That's what God says.

He says, It's me and me alone.

That's where we start.

And then you move down a little bit further to chapter 43, verse 22.

And God says, Yet you did not call upon me.

Now wait a minute.

If he is God alone and there is no one else, that means people ought to respond to him, right?

Yeah, no, and that's not exactly the way things worked out.

God says, You didn't you didn't call upon me, O Jacob.

In fact, you've been wary of me.

Weary.

You've not brought me sheep for burnt offerings or honored me with your sacrifices.

I've not burdened you with offerings or wearied you with frankincense.

You've not bought me sweet cane with money or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices, but you have burdened me with your sins, and you have wearied me with your iniquities.

Ouch.

See, all all along, Israel is saying, God, we have to kind of hold you at arm's length because we're wary of you, we're afraid of you because you might judge us, you might do bad things to us, you might bring judgment upon us.

And God says, Hey, wait a minute.

I've put up with your burdens for a long, long time.

What do we do about that?

What do we do about that?

God said, This is who I am.

And Israel said, Yeah, no thanks.

No thanks.

And so the people lived in a way that just wore out God's patience until his justice had to be satisfied.

So then we read in chapter 43 of Isaiah, verse 25, this statement by God where he says, I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my sake.

And I will not remember your sins.

What grace.

Remember what we just read.

You've burdened me, you've weighed me down.

Yet I am the one who blots out your sins and remembers your transgressions no more.

What mercy.

What forgiveness.

God takes responsibility for sin of human beings on himself.

But wait.

What about God's justice?

What about God demanding just and right payment for sin?

Well, that comes in the next three verses where God says, Listen, we're gonna deal with this.

Put me in remembrance, let us argue together, set forth your case that you may be proved right.

So we're we're in a law case now, and God says, you defend yourself.

The end is you don't have a defense because your first father sinned and your mediators transgressed against me.

Therefore, God says, I will profane the princes of the sanctuary and deliver Jacob to utter destruction and Israel to reviling.

Utter destruction?

But what about blotting out transgressions?

What about mercy and grace in the midst of this destruction?

Do you feel that tension?

I hope you do.

Somehow God would judge Israel for not listening, for not hearing, and not obeying his voice.

At the same time, he offers some comfort in his coming and his glory.

But the last time that God came in glory at Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus, reminded in Deuteronomy, the people were scared to death of his voice.

They didn't want to listen to him again.

They didn't want to hear his voice.

They didn't want to be reminded of his presence.

So how is the coming of God comforting?

How is it that the coming of God to earth is good news?

Because as far as we know, Emmanuel, God with us, could be God coming in judgment and justice rather than mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

Let's try to answer some of these questions.

I hope that you can feel a little bit of what Israel and maybe Isaiah felt by now.

We have this tension between God's attributes that feels a little bit difficult to reconcile.

And sin is the problem.

Sin is this problem that makes this hard to put together, but God said that he would take care of sin for his own sake.

But how can he still be just if sin is forgiven?

And where are God's mercy and grace and love in all of this?

Well, we find some answers in Isaiah 52.

Thank you for being patient with me to get to this passage.

Isaiah 52.

The last time we were together, we pointed out that when Israel was released from her captivity by the Babylonians, many of them could no longer understand Hebrew, their native language.

They had transitioned to speaking Aramaic and even Greek.

And so Hebrew scholars began translating the Bible into Greek so that more Jewish people could understand it and read it.

When Isaiah was translated into Greek, the word gospel or good news was used in four passages of Isaiah.

The first was Isaiah 40 that we looked at last time.

And the second time it's used is here in Isaiah 52.

Let's begin in verse 3.

It says, Thus says Yahweh, You were sold for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money.

For thus says the Lord Yahweh, my people went down at first to Egypt to sojourn there, and then the Assyrians oppressed them for nothing.

Now therefore, what have I here?

declares Yahweh, seeing that my people are taken away for nothing.

Their rulers wail, declares Yahweh, and continually all the day my name is despised.

Therefore, my people shall know my name.

Therefore, in that day they shall know that it is I who speak.

Here am I.

So here we have both justice and mercy and grace combined together.

God says, it's not right that my people were oppressed for no cost, for nothing, for no reason.

There's also no good explanation for why my name is despised.

So I'm going to come.

I'm going to fix this.

I'm going to be present with my people.

God points to the time of Israel's slavery in Egypt, and most recently in Isaiah's history, the Assyrian destruction of the northern tribes of Israel, to illustrate his point.

He says, listen, the Egyptians and the Assyrians didn't pay God anything to invade Israel and take them away.

Similarly, God's people would be redeemed again, he says, but this time not with money.

A price would be paid to redeem God's people, but it would not be silver or gold.

In fact, in verse 5, God says his name is despised all day long.

Presumably, when God says my name is despised, presumably he's referring to his own people.

They couldn't make sense of the divine riddle.

If God is judging us, then where is his mercy and grace?

If God is disciplining us, if he's so harsh with us, then where is his faithful love and forgiveness?

Isn't that like us?

We experience the hard things of living in a sin-cursed world, and we our natural inclination is to tend to distrust and to question.

Instead of relying on God's unchanging, faithful nature.

Therefore, God says, My people are going to know my name.

How are they going to know God's name?

How are they going to know Him?

He says, Therefore, in that day, they're going to know that it's me who's speaking.

Here I am.

There's the presence of God in his speaking to us.

God speaks.

And God is present.

Will we see when God speaks?

Will we see when God is present, a merciful, loving, gracious, forgiving God, or a just God who judges sin?

Well, we already know from our reading in verse 3 that his presence is a redeeming presence, right?

You shall be redeemed without money.

God calls this good news.

How beautiful, verse 7 upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who announces good news of happiness, who proclaims salvation, who says, to Zion, your God reigns.

The voice of your watchman, they lift up their voices and they sing together for joy.

Why?

Because eye to eye they see the return of Yahweh to Zion.

Here he is, he's speaking.

God's presence is here.

What are we going to see?

Judgment?

Justice?

Or mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

And that little word or in the middle is important because we see those as not going together.

In our way of thinking, God has to be one or the other because we can't be the same at the same time.

What are we going to see?

Well, to grasp this picture, we need to go back in our imaginations to a time that we've never experienced.

We need to take our minds and our imaginations back before the eras of instant communication.

We need to go back before computers, before telephones, before telegraph.

And even before using pigeons to communicate.

Here we have cross-country runners being sent out to carry news to other communities.

A city would have a wall around the city, and they would have watchmen stationed on the walls, on the lookout for runners, cross-country runners coming with news.

Runners were often known very well, known by their gait, and so they could be distinguished from far away.

So in hard times and times of war and times of judgment and discipline for sin, runners that brought good news were said to have beautiful feet.

Why were their feet beautiful?

Because they brought good news.

They brought gospel instead of bad news.

They published peace rather than war.

They brought news of happiness rather than sorrow and destruction.

They published salvation, deliverance, rescue from their enemies, and most importantly, the information that they brought declared, our God reigns.

Runners who bring that kind of news bring the gospel.

They bring good news, and therefore they have beautiful feet.

This is wartime language, which God's people would have understood.

Because the Assyrians had already destroyed the territory to the north.

The Babylonians were on the march to Judah in the south.

The gospel of God's deliverance was indeed good news.

That was gospel.

So it makes perfect sense why their watchmen in verse 8 would sing for joy at the return of Yahweh to Zion, because God's presence meant rescue.

The reality of God reigning meant for them deliverance.

It meant salvation.

But God wasn't merely speaking about deliverance from national enemies.

He wasn't speaking merely about deliverance from the newest invader.

The gospel news is not just about Babylon, it's about the whole world, verse 10.

Yahweh has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.

Well, of course they would.

If God rescues Israel from the most powerful war machine on the planet, how could the world not see the salvation of God?

Oh, but that's not exactly what God was pointing to.

The truth of God's reign is good news because it means that He is powerful.

He is in charge, He rules, and that is demonstrated through His rescue, through His deliverance, through His salvation.

And it's easy for us to translate that to our physical world and the painful circumstances that we encounter daily.

But what we often fail to remember is that our greatest enemy is not a foreign invader.

Our greatest enemy is not the newest form of a virus.

Our greatest enemy is not political change.

Our greatest enemy is not loss of employment or rising inflation.

Our greatest enemy is God.

Wait.

Didn't didn't we read that he is merciful and gracious and loving and faithful and forgiving?

But remember our riddle.

God will by no means clear the guilty.

Flip back to chapter 51.

Isaiah 51, beginning in verse 17, it says, Wake yourself, wake yourself.

Every preacher says that on Sunday morning.

Wake yourself, wake yourself, stand up, O Jerusalem.

You who have drunk from the hand of Yahweh the cup of his wrath, who have drunk to the dregs, the bowl, the cup of staggering.

There's no one to guide her.

Among all the sons she is born, there's none to take her by the hand.

Among all the sons that she's brought up, these two things have happened to you.

Who will console you?

Destruction and devastation, famine and sword, who's going to comfort you?

Your sons have fainted, they lie at the head of every street like an antelope in a net.

They are full of the wrath of Yahweh, the rebuke of your God.

Therefore hear this, you who are afflicted, who are drunk, but not with wine.

Thus says the Lord, Yahweh, your God, who pleads the cause of his people.

Behold, I have taken from your hand the cup of staggering, the bowl of my wrath you shall drink no more, and I will put it into the hand of your tormentors who have said to you, bow down that we may pass over.

Notice especially at the end of verse 20.

They are full of the wrath of Yahweh, the rebuke of your God.

Israel's greatest enemy was not Assyria or Babylon.

It was God.

It was God.

The truth that God reigns is a frightening truth for sinful people.

He is just and he will by no means clear the guilty.

Israel, somewhere around 600 BC, was guilty of not listening, hearing, and obeying.

So how is it then that God can be just by righteously judging sin and yet still show mercy, grace, and forgiveness by redeeming his people?

The answer to that riddle is found in the gospel announced by runners with beautiful feet.

Because the runners on the watchman, I'm sorry, the watchmen on the walls, sing for joy because the good news brought by the runners is that their reigning king, God Himself, is coming.

And he's coming to redeem.

He's bringing comfort and peace through salvation.

But wait, God doesn't stop speaking.

The runners have more to say about the good news.

Behold, verse 13, my servant shall act wisely, he shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted.

Well, that's strange.

It seems a bit of an abrupt change because we go from speaking about the salvation of our God and God leading us out and God referring back to the Exodus time, being the rear guard of his people, and now he's talking about some servant who's going to be acting wisely and being high and lifted up.

That sounds like descriptions of God.

If God reigns, everyone's going to know him.

That sounds like an exalted position of some kind.

But there's even more clarity here, and it would have been astonishing for an Israelite in Isaiah's time.

Because if you know Isaiah, you probably hear an echo of some kind.

That phrase, high and lifted up, is found only one other time in your Bible, and it's found in Isaiah chapter 6, in the very first verse, where Isaiah says, In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

And I saw him high and lifted up, seated on a throne.

This servant is the God whom Isaiah saw reigning from the throne of heaven.

This servant is the God who would come to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.

But let's keep going.

Verse 14, as many as were astonished at you.

At who?

The servant.

Many were astonished at the servant.

Why?

Because his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of the children of mankind, so shall he sprinkle many nations.

Kings shall shut their mouths because of him.

For that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard, they understand.

The middle to the end of verse 15 here tells us that there is new news here.

You confused yet?

Yeah, it takes some working out.

Because we've got all kinds of things going on here.

We've got God as Emmanuel with his people.

We've got the servant who is God high and lifted up, and yet people don't recognize him because he's so disfigured.

What you would expect when God comes is not what people actually end up seeing.

And somehow that coming of God in the form of a disfigured servant would correlate to God being high and lifted up.

And that in some way answers the riddle of how God can be just and merciful.

How he can be just and gracious, just and loving, just and forgiving.

It shows us that God forgives sin for his own sake.

Isaiah 53, then, begins with the voice of Israel, looking back, as it were, on the event of this servant being high and lifted up, disfigured, marred.

Says that they didn't recognize God's servant because, well, he was pretty average.

By all appearances, he looked normal when he was growing up.

The normal person.

It was hard to gravitate to him because he was despised and rejected.

No one looked up to him.

He was like a slave.

No one thought well of him.

Let's not forget the context here.

This is still in the section, beginning in verse 3 of chapter 52, where God tells Israel how he would redeem them without money.

It's where God tells his people the good news of his presence with them.

It's where God said, I'm coming.

And my coming is good news.

That's the context.

God says, I'm coming and I'm coming to redeem you.

I'm coming to redeem you, not without money, but God's coming to redeem is astonishing and unexpected.

Because how could God, high and lifted up, be like a slave?

How could the ruler of the universe be like a disfigured servant?

How could God reigning in his glory be despised and rejected?

See, there's more riddles, aren't there?

But God answers the riddle for us in the middle of chapter 53.

Verse 6 says that all we like sheep have gone astray.

All we like sheep have gone astray, each one of us to his own way.

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Men in the booth, my clicker's not working to advance here.

If you could fix that for me, I'd appreciate it.

When you think of verse three, verse six, I'm sorry, everything, everything begins to make sense.

This slave, servant language begins to make sense because it's the slave in ancient times that carries the burden.

He carries the load, but strangely, this slave who is identified with Yahweh high and lifted up carries the burden of my sin.

How can that be?

God said that the soul that sins shall die.

We don't owe a debt for somebody else's sin, so how can this servant carry my sin?

Look at verse 10.

Yet it was the will of Yahweh to crush him.

He's put him to grief.

His soul, the soul of the servant, makes an offering for guilt, and he shall bear our iniquities.

Here is the answer to the riddle of the Bible.

How can God be perfectly just, requiring absolute justice for the offense of sin, and mercifully, graciously, lovingly forgive that sin for his own sake?

My friends, the only way that that can be true in one being is if somehow God can fulfill his own promise from Isaiah 43, 25.

I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake.

And I will not remember your sins.

And how does God do that?

According to Isaiah, God does that with the gospel brought by runners with beautiful feet.

Yahweh is the reigning one who promised to come.

And he promised to redeem by bringing salvation.

And he promised to be high and lifted up in a way that the world could see him.

God himself as an offering of atonement for sin.

Therefore, God can be merciful to you, gracious, loving to you, forgiving your sin, and be wholly just, because God Himself bore your sin.

But that is only true for you if in his coming his offering for your sin was paid when he was high and lifted up.

It's only true if it's appropriated to your life.

That's why Jesus would say that the Son of Man must be lifted up on a cross so that whoever believes in him might have eternal life.

My friends, that is the gospel according to Isaiah.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus.

It is beyond our comprehension that you would take it upon yourself, as the letter to church at Philippi says, to come to this earth to take on human form and to die.

That you, the Holy One, the Holy, Holy, Holy One that Isaiah saw lifted up, would determine to rescue people and to be just and forgiving.

Beyond us.

Thank you for giving your people some hope in this.

Hope of your love and your grace and your mercy found in Jesus Christ.

Thank you for teaching this from Isaiah, the prophet.

Lord, as we now begin to direct our hearts and minds to remembering your death, burial, and resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Father.

Appropriate this truth to our hearts.

Help us to understand that the greatness of our salvation, when we stand under your wrath for sin, that you would be gracious to us, that you, the one that is outside of time, that you, the one who made all things and sustains all things, would take on flesh to dwell among us, to be our Emmanuel, to redeem us.

That indeed is good news, and we give you praise for it.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

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