Higher Hope

Turn with us to Isaiah chapter eleven. Ask our sister

to come and read our sermon text for us as

we jump into.

This Isaiah chapters eleven and twelve. 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 here. But with righteousness he

shall judge the poor and decide with equity from 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. Righteousness shall

be the belt of his waste, and faithfulness the belt

of his loins. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf, and the lion and the fattened calf together,

and the little child shall lead them. The cow and

the bear shall graze their young shall lie down together,

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The

nursing child shall play over the whole of the cobra,

and the weaned child shall put his hand on the

adder's den. 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.

In that day, the root of Jesse, who shall stand

as a signal for the peoples of him, shall the

nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious. In

that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a

second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people,

from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathrus, from Cush, from Elam,

from Chinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of He

will raise a signal for the nations, and will assemble

the banished of Israel and gather the dispersed of Judah

from the four corners of the earth. The jealousy of

Ephrium shall depart, and those who harass Judah shall be

cut off. Ephrium shall not be jealous of Judah, and

Judah shall not harass Ephrium. But they shall swoop down

on the shoulder of the Philistines in the west, and

together they shall plunder the people of the east. They

shall put out their hand against Edom and Moab, and

the Ammonites shall obey them. And the Lord will utterly

destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt, and will

wave his hand over the river with his scorching breath

and strike it into seven channels. And he will lead

people across in sandals, and there will be a highway

from Assyria for the remnant that remains of his people,

as there was for Israel when they came up from

the land of Egypt. You will say in that day,

I will give thanks to you, o Lord, for though

you were angry with me, your anger turned away that

you might comfort me. Behold, God is my salvation. I

will trust and will not be afraid. For the Lord

God is my strength and my song, and he has

become my salvation. With joy. You will draw water from

the wells of salvation, and you will say, in that

day give thanks to the Lord. Call upon his name,

make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his

name is exalted. Sing praises to the Lord, for he

has done gloriously. Let this be made known in all

the earth. Shout and sing for joy, O, inhabitant of Zion.

For great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

This is the word of the Lord.

Amen. I wonder if you've had the experience of being

in an airplane in a thunderstorm. It's happened a couple

of times, I think for me. They're in a jetliner,

dark clouds, the rain is banging against the windows, and

the pilot just says, we're gonna get above this weather

real quick, and he just elevates a bit, and before

long there are no clouds, There is no rain, nothing

but sunshine. It's not that it's not still raining, it's

just that we're above it. We've gained altitude. We're coming

at it from a different higher place. And Isaiah is

speaking to a people who have been devastated and are

being devastated, and he wants to get their perspective up

above the storm. He wants to get their perspective higher,

to fix their hopes, not on merely getting something of

what they've lost back or keeping some of what they

have from being lost, but higher hopes, eternal hopes, and

in some ways the distance between them and us is

pretty vast considering how cushy things are for us right now.

I mean it's pretty cushy. I went to BUCkies this weekend.

I mean we've got it made sort of. I mean,

there isn't anybody here who is of much age that

doesn't realize that no matter how cushy it seems like

we have it, the encroaching devastation will still find you

our failing bodies alone, whether yours or someone you love.

Someone you love goes in for with stomach pains for

the last ten weeks and comes back with a diagnosics

it's pancreatic cancer. Two months and it's your little girl.

Like one of my favorite songwriters said, life is like

glass in a million pieces that won't fit together. And

in the midst of all of it, whether the devastation

is close or seems at a distance, God would have

us lift our vision and fix our hopes on things

beyond the here and now, that our hopes would be

fixed someplace higher. And so we're going to go through

these two chapters Isaiah eleven and twelve, and to track along,

I'm just going to use one sentence in three pieces.

One sentence in three pieces is how we'll go through this.

And the last piece is significantly shorter than the first two,

so you don't have to panic when we get there.

And I say in the third piece we will get

to that music. I promise. Here's the first piece of

the sentence. Fix your hopes on the coming King. Fix

your hopes on the coming king. You see, Isaiah is

making a point to proclaim that there is a king coming.

There's a king coming. In verses one and two of eleven, says,

shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

a branch from his roots, that is, Jesse shall bear fruit,

and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.

And in fact, in the next several lines he uses

the word spirit four times, the word Lord three times,

saying there's a coming king will who will be a

divine king. And the New Testament makes very clear. In fact,

the message of the New Testament is this is Jesus.

This is Jesus, all says as he's preaching to a

gathered group of Jewish people, and acts says, this one,

this one that is of David, from Jesse, God has

given him offspring. This is our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul

is calling back specifically, specifically to Isaiah's proclamation and many

promises like it. This is the one, and the gospel

writers make plain that Jesus is utterly united to the

Father and utterly anointed by the Spirit. It's this guy. Christ,

in other words, is going to be in charge, which,

if you're a Christian should sound a little funny. I mean,

Christ is going to be in charge, like is in

Christ art. I mean when the universe was created and

it was created through him and by him, Christ was

in charge. Christ is in charge, sovereignly, providentially governing all things.

Christ is in charge. Even as Christ became human and

they nailed him to a cross and they lifted him

up into the sky, Jesus said, hey, I'm gonna look

pretty helpless there. I just want you to know no

one is taking my life from me. I am laying

it down. I am in charge on this mission here.

So Christ was in charge. Christ is in charge. But

what Isaiah is getting at is that Christ is going

to be in charge in yet a different way. Christ

will rule with perfect justice. That's what it says Verses

three through five. Kind of put it this way. He

shall not decide by what his eyes see, not judge

by what his eyes sees are, decide disputes by what

his ears here Righteousness, he shall judge the poor. He'll

strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, the

breath of his lips kill the wicked. Righteousness faithfulness will

be the belt of his loins, which is often a

symbol for action, decisive action, like putting on armor, the

gird your self. In other words, there is coming a

day when Christ rules this world in perfect justice, his judgments,

adjudicating society, his word, destroying evil and evil doers, his righteousness,

acting decisively. Christ is coming to rule like a king

in perfect justice. And here's the thing. The Bible is

instructing me to look up to Christ in that way,

in that future and fix my hopes there. And I

don't know how I feel about that. I mean, I

feel a lot of different ways about that, honestly, candidly,

When I'm confronted with that biblical instruction, my heart and

my mind go one hundred different directions. Here are just

a few, like one, This seems pretty fear This seems

like pretty fierce justice from Jesus. Meek and mild, and

the idea of justice later kind of seems like a

way to placate people from demanding justice. Now, I mean,

if if God's judgment is fierce like this, if Christ's

rule of justice is absolute, what does that not motivate

his people to be vindictive like a fierce judge? And

does this not distract us from working for justice? Now?

I've been helped in those kinds of thoughts by a

lot of people, including the late Tim Keller. His book

The Reason for God is a really really great little book. Sorry,

I don't have any to give away like Richard does,

But in this book, Keller quotes a think her named

Miroslav Wolf. He's a Croatian, been through all kinds of

bloody persecution in Croatia, and Wolf puts it this way,

if God were not angry at injustice and deception and

did not make a final end to violence, that God

would not be worthy of worship. The only means of

prohibiting our recourse to wrong violence is to insist that

violence is legitimate when it comes from God. My thesis

is the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance,

and that's going to be unpopular with many, especially in

the West, but it takes the quiet of a suburban

home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence

comes from the belief that God, in God's refusal to

judge in a sun scorched land soaked with the blood

of the innocent, it will invariably die with other pleasant

captivities of the liberal mind. In other words, Mirslav Wolff

is saying, if you don't believe in real justice, ultimately

and truly settling with perfect wisdom all evil and all evildoers,

and settling all of the oppression, then you will descend

into retribution and vengeance, become an evil doer yourself, or

you will descend into utter despair, believing at heart there

is no justice to be had. In other words, the

more familiar you are with this world's injustices, the more

you realize you need the King to come and the Gospel.

The Gospel gives us the theological resources to yes work

for justice now because we want to work out the

character of our God, but also to not descend into

utter despair or vengeful destruction when we stare in the

face the inevitable shortcomings of justice in this world here

and now. This is part of the Gospel. The Christian

good news that we can trust Christ is coming like

a king to rule in perfect justice. It's good news,

but trusting that as good news has to have two parts.

One that Christ's perfect justice will one day strike all

who persist in evil, but also two that Christ's perfect

justice can be satisfied without striking you. Because people who

are at all honest with themselves aren't having too hard

a time glancing at least out of the corner of

their eyes, that their heart is full of guilt as well.

That's why before he comes as king, he comes as

Christ as cross bearer to fill up justice for all

who would trust in him, put their lives in his

hands and hope in him. And now his message is,

set your hopes on me, all your hopes for mercy

and for grace, that your guilt and the justice it

deserves would be satisfied in me. Set your hopes on

me for grace, and set your hopes for justice and

for righteousness to rule. Set them on me. That Christ

himself is going to be in charge in a different way.

This world needs that to happen, whether you've discovered that

or not. And your heart was made to know that

this will happen. Fix your hope on the coming King.

That's the first part of our sentence. Fix your hopes

on the coming King. Let's add to it as we

continue to work through this passage. Fix your heart and

fix your hopes sorry on the coming King, who brings

perfect piece, who brings perfect peace. So not only is

the coming King going to bring perfect justice, he is

going to bring perfect You could even say eerie peace. Yes,

heads popped up when I said eerie, because isn't that

what you read in verses six through nine? Does that

not seem eerie to you? The wolf shall dwell with

the lamb, the lion and the calf together. The lion

shall eat straw like the ox, child shall play over

the whole of the cobra. They shall not hurt or destroy,

For the earth will be full of the knowledge of

the Lord, as the water covers the sea. What is that?

Am I all by myself on this one? I mean,

I can stand up here with a preacher voice and

read this magisterially like anybody else. But this is weird.

I think that Isaiah is giving us a picture of

something that he speaks to and other Biblical writers speak

to elsewhere of a coming time without death and without pain,

when the nature of things has in some ways essentially changed,

not so changed that they're unrecognizable as creation, but the

creation that we know yet without destruction or pain, which

is pretty different. A picture of perfect peace that the

king brings. And again, if you're like me, these things

challenge my imagination, right, I mean, my mind goes straight

to like, how is that supposed to work? Like? Doesn't

this go against how we understand a lot of things

about biology? And you might be expecting me to explain

how God's going to do this? Sorry, but I listen,

those doubts and those questions are quick to arise. Yeah,

and and we're well off to not have our quickest

thoughts be our only thoughts. Like if we're going to

have doubts, honest doubts, then let's honestly doubt them as well.

But we can doubt our doubts if we have honest questions.

We can honestly question our questions. These things don't just

have to like startle us. Sometimes our imaginations need to

be challenged. They can be pretty plain and stuck, right,

Our imaginations tend to be pretty small. Think about it

this way, For Ao for thousands of years. If you

were going if you needed to go from point A

to point B on the globe, and someone suggested that

you fly there, it would challenge imagination. But now I

can fly from Denver to San Antonio and without finishing

the in flight movie, which would also have challenged the

imagination of many people throughout history. And then when I

get in Denver, I can, like before I get to

my meeting, I can FaceTime my family. My point, if

I've lost you, is not that Christ is bringing a

technological innovation. My point is that our imaginations don't do

a very good job of getting over themselves. As Shakespeare

put into the mouth of Hamlet, there is more in

heaven and Earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

There are many things people couldn't imagine how God would accomplish,

and yet He keeps proving our imaginations so utterly small.

So as we have these honest questions, let's also honestly

question them. Let's not think our imaginations are so important.

They're actually quite small. The other thing that Isaiah says

about this perfect piece is that the coming King is

not only bringing this perfect piece, but he is bringing

all of his people from all over the world to

participate in it, and nothing is going to stop him.

Look at that in verses ten through sixteen. In that

day the root of Jesse, which you'll stand as a

signal for the peoples of him, the nations inquire. In

that day the Lord recovers the remnant that remains of

his people, he'll gather to the dispersed from the four

corners of the earth. It says, He's gonna lead his

people as if there's a highway for the remnant that

there was, just like when Israel came up out of Egypt.

I think Isaiah here is being given a vision of

the gathering of what Paul calls in Romans true Israel.

Those as revelations speaks of every tribe and tongue and

nation who will worship the Lamb, who have the faith

of Abraham. They come from the four corners of the earth,

as he says in verse twelve, And nothing can stop them,

because we are being gathered by the King. As it

says twice, the signal will be raised, and it seems

to suggest he himself is the signal, and there will

be no disunity. Verse twelve There'll be no external opposition

that can stop him verse thirteen. There'll be no obstacle

of any kind verse fifteen that will keep the king

from gathering his people into this perfect peace without pain

or death. Awesome?

Is it true? Is it true?

Here's what C. S. Lewis, the famous English atheist turned Christian,

says about this reality, this perfect peace, and this coming king,

this kind of reality. He says, consider your desire for

this reality, this coming reality. What we find generally is

the desires we have correspond to certain realities. We've been

made with a desire for food, and food exists. It

is the corresponding reality to our desire. We've been made

with a desire for sex, and sex exists. It is

the corresponding reality to our desire. And if we are

made with this desire for this reality, and the history

of mankind would show that we are in fact made

with this desire, and yet there's nothing in this world

that corresponds to this desire, then it's reasonable for us

to think that I may be made for more than

justice world. And the more Lewis thought about it, the

more he became convinced, but grudgingly convinced.

It is true.

This is true. And what's more, everything of Scripture has

shown itself true from the beginning. Trusting it will be

life to you. Scripture says of itself, it makes wise

the simple. But my question is, if the coming King

is bringing perfect peace, how do we live now? Because

of that like does not leave you with a kind

of a big like. So what that seems so far away?

Lewis goes on to say this, what this causes us

to do is fix our hopes in the right place. See,

if our hopes aren't fixed here, we really only have

two options. We keep shifting our hope, or we extinguish

our hope. We keep shifting our hope. This is the

one who moves from job to job thinking it's going

to be the thing, from house to house, thinking it's

going to be the thing, from spouse to spouse, all

the while thinking that hope, the thing he hopes for,

the thing he desires, the thing that God has put

into us to desire, is still the next thing away.

The other option is not we shift our hope, but

we extinguish our hope to convince ourselves that the thing

that God has put in us to desire, it's just

not real, and we just put out that light. We

just put out that flame, and we live without it,

only to find at the end of our lives that

we should have been living with it all alone. So

as our careers will inevitably show the futility and the

frustration of work in this world, we don't shift our

hopes just frantically looking for the ex promotion, and we

don't extinguish our hopes and live as one without hope.

We fix our hopes on the one who has called

us to work unto him with all our heart. As

our family life turns out to be not what we

wanted and it won't be, whether through estrangement, conflict, never marrying,

or death finally encroaches as it will into your family,

we don't shift our hopes and abandon them, and we

don't extinguish our hopes and live as if the thing

that God has given us to desire is not to

be had. We fix our hopes on the one who

is gathering for him a family that will never experience

death or pain. It's there to be had. So here's

our sentence. So far, fix your hopes on the coming

King who's bringing perfect peace. And here's the third and

last piece of the sentence. Who's worth the highest praise,

Who's worth the highest praise? This is what Chapter twelve says.

Chapter twelve says, when we see it, we're gonna sing.

Look at verses one through six. You will say, in

that day, I will give thanks to you, Oh Lord

turned away, God is my salvation. I will trust you

will say, in that day, give thanks to the Lord,

make known his deeds. Sing praises to the Lord, shout

and sing for joy. When we see all that God

has done to rescue his people and restore his creation,

praise and thanksgiving will be our unrestrained response. Kind of

reminds me of of in here sometimes when we kind

of get sort of loud. And I don't mean the

sound systems loud, I mean the voices of this congregation

in exuberance. And Isaiah says, when you see what God

has put together, when he finishes his work and he

has brought perfect justice, and he has brought perfect peace,

and he has gathered all of his people to participate

in it, you will worship your faces off just then?

Is that just for later? Certainly it'll be later. Certainly

we won't be able to help ourselves when God brings

about all that he has promised to bring about that

challenges our imaginations now, But doesn't that suggest that we

should praise him now as well. One time my dad

had gotten into an insurmountable financial challenge, really through no

fault of his own. He was in trouble and there

was no imaginable way out, and he prayed and he

journaled a letter to God and he said, God, I

don't know how you're gonna get this out of this.

I don't know how you intend to rescue. But my

hope is in you, and I'm trusting you. But not

only that. When you rescued the people of Israel at

the Red Sea, when they got to the other side,

when they were on the other side of rescue, they

sang and they danced and they shouted for joy. But

when they were on this side of rescue, when they

were on this side of what you would do and

you're acting gloriously, they moaned and they groaned. They were

ready to give up hope. They were ready to fix

their hopes on surrendering to Pharaoh. And I don't want

to be like that. Lord, I'm fixing my hope on you.

I don't know how you're going to bring about what

you're going to bring about, but I want to sing

and praise on this side before I see what you

will do. Like I will sing and praise on that

side when I see what you will do. God did

bring rescue, and he will bring rescue, and he will

bring restoration. We can trust his promises. And as we

trust his promises, as much as the destruction continues to encroach,

and it will. We're only in chapter twelve of Isaiah.

There's more destruction to come, and you're only as old

as you are. There's more destruction to come. And yet

let's sing and praise the Lord on this side, like

we will sing and praise on that side that will

honor the Lord