Advent: Comfort in the Darkness | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

Well, good morning.

Morning.

Come on.

You know I do this every time I come up here.

My name is Matt.

I'm an associate pastor here.

It is a joy to be with you.

This second Sunday of Advent.

Advent is one of my favorite times of year on the church calendar.

It is specifically set aside as a time to reflect.

It's actually very similar to Lent, if you've observed Lent at all.

It's a time of preparation, time to look.

We're invited to look into the darkness.

That doesn't sound inviting, but it's really healthy to do, actually.

Where we look at the world around us into our own hearts, into our lives, and we're reminded why we are waiting.

That there is a light, there's a restoration, there's a salvation, there's a resurrection coming.

And like the last book of the Bible, last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, it ends with this longing, this call, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

This week I was talking with a friend, and they made the comment that we've really been waiting for Jesus a long time.

I don't know if that's ever occurred to you.

And 2,000 years of waiting.

And sometimes, if we're honest, at least in this conversation, my friend wondered out loud uh, is the waiting worth it?

There's so much going on in the world, there's so much going on in our own lives.

Sometimes we grow weary of the waiting.

We go grow weary of what we see in the world, just the tumult and the turmoil, bad leadership, nations not getting along.

Sometimes we grow weary of our own failures, how we let ourselves down, our families, our loved ones, and it's hard to wait, and it's hard to really look full-faced into the darkness.

But I would argue that this is exactly what Advent is for, and it is a gracious and a good invitation.

And it's it's an important question to ask.

It's the question of Advent.

Is the waiting worth it?

I think that's the question behind our passage and what we're gonna dig into today.

What are we waiting for?

And how does it help us?

Not just the day that it is fulfilled, this waiting, but but today.

So let's jump back into our passage.

Let's read verses one and two again.

Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.

Cry to her that her warfare is ended, her iniquity pardoned, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

Our first point is that God comes to and speaks comfort to his people in the midst of distress.

So this message, if you're unfamiliar with the Old Testament or this time of Isaiah, Isaiah was a prophet to the nation of Israel, actually to the southern part of Israel, the nation of Judah, when the nation of Israel split in two.

And this message, this prophecy from the Lord through Isaiah, is coming to God's people in exile.

They had been exiled to the nation of Babylon.

And similar to or echoing the ejection of Adam and Eve from the garden, God's people have been ejected from the promised land, from the city of David, Jerusalem.

The city has been sacked.

The temple of Yahweh has been destroyed.

And this superpower of a nation, Babylon, has come through and taken kind of the cultural elite, those who are educated, away into Babylon as natural resources.

And God's people were wondering.

They were questioning, they were asking, is the Lord still with us?

Back in this time, in this in this day, war and nations, they each had their own God.

And so war was really, it wasn't so much about this strong army against this strong army, it was this God versus that God.

And so when Israel was defeated and brought into exile, it specifically put into question the power of Yahweh, the power of God's people.

And we have whole swaths of the scriptures that came out of this period.

Psalms, the whole, the book of Lamentations, of God's people asking the question, has God left us?

Has he abandoned us?

Have we finally become the straw that broke the camel's back?

Have we sinned so much that he's finally turned his back on us?

Now there are some who find themselves in exile who are there because of their own sin, their own unfaithfulness.

But there are others who find themselves in exile who had remained faithful the whole time.

And so this message from or through Isaiah is a message to sinners and to those who are sinned against who are asking these questions.

And that's really good news because that's us.

Those of us in this room, at the very same time, we find ourselves as sinners, and also those who are sinned against.

And I love this passage.

I love the beauty, the comfort that comes through it.

But it's important for us to remember that the beauty and comfort of this passage is met by the distress and the darkness and the suffering of the people to whom it comes.

And so we need to hear this same message of comfort.

And it comes right out of the gate, right from the very beginning.

It repeats, comfort, comfort.

In Hebrew, they didn't have punctuation, they didn't have bold or underline, so they they just used repetition.

So to use a word twice was to severely emphasize this.

This is the heart of God revealing itself to his people.

Comfort, my heart towards you, is to bring you comfort.

But who?

Who is to be comforted?

Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God.

You see, God knows the hearts of his people, he knows the questions that they are asking, and he speaks a word of identity.

No, I haven't abandoned you.

I haven't forsaken you, and no, you haven't sinned your way out of my love.

You remain my people, and I remain your God.

They are not alone, though they find themselves in a distant country and a foreign land, being oppressed and ruled over by pagans, but God is with them.

And he brings this message of comfort.

But how will it come?

That's that's what the rest of the passage is about.

Let's this brings us to point two.

Nothing will get in the way of God's coming to his people.

Let's look at verses three through five.

A voice cries, In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.

Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain and hill made low.

The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain, and the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

When a king in this day would travel through his kingdom, right, it was a very different context, right?

Some 2,500 or 3,000 years ago, roads weren't really a thing yet, right?

There were trading paths and ways people knew how to get from one way or the other, but it really wasn't until Rome became a powerful nation that permanent roads were really a thing.

And so when a king had to travel, roads had to be made, or current trading paths had to be shorn up.

Maybe a bridge needed to be built, maybe some rocky or uh certain places needed to be cleared.

And so that's what's going on here.

The message is going out.

The king is on the move, the king is coming to you, so let's prepare the way through the wilderness.

But there's something different, there's something unique about the way this king is coming and the way he is being prepared, and that speaks to the uniqueness of this particular king.

If there's a mountain in the way, this king doesn't go around the mountain.

The mountain goes away.

If there's a valley in the way, they don't go away or even through the valley, they fill it in.

If there's a rocky or a rough place, it will be made smooth.

Now these are super natural things, right?

We barely have the technology to go through mountains, let alone to simply destroy them fully.

And yet that's exactly what is happening.

And the Lord is saying through Isaiah to his people, nothing will get in the way.

Nothing will delay me.

I am on my way.

Let's continue in verse six.

A voice says, Cry, and I say, What shall I cry?

All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers and the flower fades when the breath of the Lord breathes, blows on it.

Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord will stand forever.

Point three, God calls us to keep our eyes on Him rather than our circumstances.

Now, as we've already said, God's people have been through the ringer, right?

They have acted in unfaithfulness, and yet they have truly experienced ruin.

Their homes destroyed, their loved ones killed, exiled to a foreign land, the temple of the Lord itself destroyed.

They're wondering, well, maybe Babylon and the Babylonian gods, maybe they were just too much for us.

Too much for our God.

Maybe our circumstances are more than he can handle.

And it's into this context in these questions the Lord speaks this word.

Surely the people are grass.

Doesn't matter if it's King Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, or Cyrus, the king of Persia, these literal superpowers, Egypt to the south.

If you read through these Old Testament passages, you see this is constantly on Israel's heart.

They are anxiety, these other powers in the world.

And God says, these are just grass.

The most powerful nations, the most powerful people in all the world.

They are nothing to me.

And it's not just that they come in one season and out another.

It says, when the breath of the Lord blows upon them, the Lord raises up and the Lord puts down.

And this is exactly what we see in the story as it unfolds in the Old Testament.

Specifically, the Lord speaks about Nebuchadnezzar, right?

If you read the book of Daniel, God spoke to King Nebuchadnezzar, this foreign pagan king, and he said, You are a tool in my hand.

Though you think you are the most powerful human being on earth, and maybe humanly speaking, he was.

But at one point the Lord makes Nebuchadnezzar go crazy, and he lives for weeks in the wilderness eating grass like a beast.

And later, when Persia conquered Babylon, God used King Cyrus of Persia to rebuild his temple.

God is saying to his people that though your circumstances look overwhelming, and humanly speaking, we are enslaved to our circumstances.

We don't often have the power to change our circumstances, though, as 21st century Westerners, we often think that we do.

God says, your circumstances are too much for you, but they are not too much for me.

One of my uh COVID hobbies, I don't know if you guys had COVID hobbies, is mountain biking.

There's me, there's proof.

There's my mountain bike.

It's me out in the woods taking a break.

I like to send pictures to Stacey to let her know I'm still alive.

Um I have a I have a tendency to fall off cliff while I'm mountain biking.

So one of the things I learned, one of the most important things that I continue to practice and try to remember is when you're you know you're going down these awesome mountain biking trails, right?

You're gonna go over big routes and big rocks, and there's obstacles in the way, and sometimes you're on the trail right next, like literally on a cliff.

And early in my mountain biking career, I did fall off a cliff.

It was kind of at a 45-degree angle though, so it was more of a tumbling.

And Stacy came back like 10 minutes later and said, Where did you go?

I said, I went down there.

Um you go where you look.

You go where you're looking.

So if you're on that edge, I learned this as a kid too on a bicycle.

You know, when you're like right on the edge of the sidewalk and you're like, oh no, no, no.

Well, you look right at the edge of the sidewalk.

Well, that's a dumb thing to do because you go where you look.

And so if there's roots in front of you or rocks or something you're afraid of, what you're actually supposed to do is look up, keep your head up, look down the trail, look where you want to go.

And then you trust your bike, you trust your tires, you trust your placement as you've been heading down the trail.

And as soon as I learned this, I said, Oh, this is a sermon illustration.

I've been waiting months to use this sermon illustration, so here it is for you.

Often we, when we get into difficult circumstances, we look, that's all we can see.

We just stare at it and we try to figure out our way to get out of it, and and we can be overwhelmed by it.

And sometimes we go tumbling down a cliff because we are overcome with fear and we make poor choices.

But the scriptures tell us to keep our head up, to keep our eyes up and looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.

Now it won't necessarily make our circumstances better or less painful or easier, but if we keep our eyes on Jesus, if we remember who He is, what His power is, just as God is saying here to Israel, yeah, Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon is a huge earthly power, but compared to me there, nothing.

And the same is true in your life, beloved.

Financially, relationally, vocationally, the struggles that we experience are real and true, and the Lord meets us in that suffering, and yet he says, Look to me, remember me.

All flesh and all circumstances are grass compared to me.

Okay, let's keep going.

Verses 9 through 11.

Go up on the high mountain of Zion, herald of good news, lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news, lift it up, fear not.

Say to the cities of Judah, Behold your God.

Behold, the Lord comes with might in his arm, and his arm rules for him.

Behold, his reward is with him, his recompense before him.

He will tend his flock like a shepherd, he will gather his lambs and his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those who are with young.

Fourth point.

I love the Lord of the Rings, the books, the movies, and everything else.

Uh one of my favorite characters is Aragorn, played by uh Vigo Mortensen.

Uh he is a king, he is a coming king, he is, well, there's lots of Christ figures in the Lord of the Rings, but he is one of them.

Uh, and he is the perfect king.

In battle, he is fierce, and no one can defeat him.

But with those he loves and cares for, he is tender and close and gentle.

And I have a huge man crush on this guy and this actor because of this part.

Um, and uh, I don't mind telling you that.

Um, but this is the picture of the coming king that Isaiah gives us.

Behold, Jerusalem, your king comes.

He comes with righteous might.

His arm will rule for him.

He will come and he will conquer our enemies.

And he did, right?

Jesus, the coming king, came and he defeated sin and death, our mortal and our greatest enemies.

And yet, how is he described?

Like a shepherd, he will tend his flock.

He will gather his lambs and his arms, he will hold them close to his bosom.

I mean, this is intentional love language.

Those who are with young, he will he will deal tenderly with them.

He knows your circumstances, he knows what surrounds you, and he knows how to care for you in those circumstances.

This is our king.

And this is how this promise was fulfilled in the coming of John the Baptist, right?

He said, This prophecy is about me.

I am the one in the wilderness proclaiming, make way in the wilderness, the way of our Lord.

And he pointed to Jesus.

And when Jesus came, he identified himself as the good shepherd.

The one who knows his sheep, calls his sheep, cares for his sheep, not one will be left behind.

Beloved, as we ask this question, ponder the question of what we're waiting for and whether that waiting is worth it, we are called, along with God's people of old, to remember God's faithfulness in generations past.

That these passages would come to glorious fulfillment.

That just as Isaiah says, God's glory would be revealed to all flesh in the coming of Jesus.

Nothing would stand in his way.

He would come in a way that they could never have imagined in the incarnation.

That divinity would take on humanity and save us.

And so as we stand in a dark time, a dark time in the world, a dark time perhaps in our own lives, and we ponder the question, what are we waiting for?

And is it worth it?

God calls us to remember.

To remember his faithfulness again and again, his faithfulness in our own lives, his faithfulness in the past.

And to say, our God, though our circumstances are overwhelming and they are sometimes all we can see, he will be faithful.

And so let us walk like Israel back in this day, knowing that that day will come to fulfillment in Jesus' second Advent.

I love this quote from Fleming Rutledge.

If you've never read her, she has a book on Advent that's outstanding.

She says this the disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterizes life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come.

In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.

That is where we live, beloved.

The tension of the darkness that is and the promise of light to come.

Did you notice in the passage that in the beginning, God's message goes through Isaiah to Jerusalem?

At the end of the passage, God's message goes to Jerusalem, but now Jerusalem is being called to go up on the mountain and to cry.

To shout to the cities of Judah.

Beloved, that is our call.

We who have been comforted, whom God has come to, now we are called to go up on the mountain and to proclaim the hope that we have to our neighbors, to our family members, to our friends, those who are struggling in the darkness and say the light is coming.

Our God is faithful and true.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, we thank you for this incredible promise.

Lord, when we doubt, when we wonder, would you comfort us?

Remind us of our identity as your people and your identity as our Father and our God.

Allow us to wait patiently but expectantly.

And we pray this for this advent and Christmas season in Jesus' name.

Amen.