The Righteous One

Good morning, church.

A reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 53, whilst holding Isaiah.

Isaiah 53 · chapter mention

Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned, every one, to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.

By oppression of judgment he was taken away from here.

And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?

And they made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him.

He has put him to grief.

When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days, the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.

By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

So, yeah, if you'd like to take your kids out to the uh to meet in the lobby, and then Megan's gonna be Megan and some volunteers are gonna be taking them to the park to play for the sermon.

Um the uh that was wonderful singing, wasn't it?

Yeah, I thought so too.

Uh our kids location has been uh complicated because of renovations in the building.

We don't own this building, we rent here.

Um and the owners of the building are converting the east half of the building into a Montessori school.

And we had this wonderful plan where we would move around the building while renovations happened.

Um, but uh Denver Permitting had other plans.

And uh I just want to say, uh Megan, our kids director, um she's done such a wonderful job of uh just it all of these challenges and and difficulties have really just kind of funneled down to her.

Um and she's just been uh gracious and caring and so thoughtful for how she wants to care for all of our kids.

Um uh so yeah, I just wanted to say that she's done a wonderful job.

Um so next time you see her say, wow, great job.

This has been complicated.

You're doing well.

We we've decided that we're going to be renting a portable classroom uh for the duration of the winter.

Um and uh yeah, we'll be getting that early January-ish.

It's not officially rented, and Krista's giving me that look like this isn't certain yet, but now she's giving me two thumbs up, so yeah, it's happening.

All right.

Um, so portable classroom, we all have that to look forward to.

Christmas keeps on giving.

Um this is our final servant song, so let's move into it.

And let's pray.

Holy Father, we praise you for the children in our church.

We thank you for the the sign of your continued grace towards our congregation that they are, the hope of the future of your uh the proclamation and honor and glory of your name.

We thank you for those disciples uh to be made, Lord.

We praise you.

Let us be reminded that that you came in the form of a child, and we remember that this season, that you were born of a woman and took on our same form.

Lord, you became a man, dwelt among us, that we might be completely identified with you, and that you might take on our sin, that you might meet all of the requirements of the law on our behalf, even the punishment that we deserved and the righteousness which we did not fulfill.

Lord, you fulfilled both for us, so that we might rest in your righteousness and receive a perfect communion with you.

Lord, there's no better news.

We pray that our hearts would be prepared to receive that this morning.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Isaiah 53, I mean, this final servant song, this is probably the most clear explanation of the gospel that is, Jesus Christ takes on our sin so that we might be completely freed from the punishment of our sin, facing no punishment because of our sin, because he paid the price for it, and then gives to us his righteousness.

This might be in Scripture the clearest explanation of that.

It takes place prophetically in Isaiah, hundreds and hundreds of years before the events take place.

It is described to us.

Here is perhaps the clearest gospel.

And it can be hard to see.

Even when you're looking right at it, the truth of the gospel can be hard to see.

You know, when the world becomes more and more opaque, which I think it is now, where it's more difficult to discern what's true, what's a matter of fact, what's just political conversation, then we become more prone to write our own stories.

And so we're probably in like a conspiracy theory golden age, which is kind of those worst things.

And a conspiracy theory golden age is okay, there's a lot of data, and we all uh have this data, but we're offering these different interpretations for what's happening.

And the way that a conspiracy theory works is you have the say everybody you have to work off of data that everybody can see, and then you paint a background story and say, this background story is what's really happening.

So here's some data.

We haven't been to the moon in a while.

We only went, you know, half a dozen times to the moon.

Stanley Kubrick, this is the best director of all time, in 2001, a space odyssey, still looks better than any of the Disney Star Wars movies.

So these are all facts, which we all have.

And there's 100% agreement on all these facts.

We haven't been to the moon for a while, it has been a while.

Stanley Kubrick is the best director of all time, of course.

2001 Space Odyssey looks better than the Disney Star Wars movies, and in The Shining, the little boy who says Red Rum wears a shirt uh with a Saturn V rocket on it.

Now, with all of this data, I think we can see clearly that the story behind this is Stanley Kubrick directed the footage of the moon landing on a sound stage.

Okay, so that's the shape of a conspiracy theory.

We have all the same data, and then you weave this story behind it.

And does the story fit the data?

I mean, yeah, it does.

It does fit the data.

But also, another story that fits the data is we went to the moon, and at the same time, Stanley Kubrick was an excellent director.

Those two things can be true at once.

Uh, you can have an excellent director at the same time that you go to the moon, and it doesn't create some sort of cosmic contradiction.

Here's the great conspiracy of Christianity.

We look out, we see all of the data of the world, the pain and the suffering that is endured in life.

And the great conspiratorial proclamation of Christianity is that for those who believe in Jesus, all that happens in the world, is the highest power in existence conspiring for your highest good.

This is the news of our faith.

This is the background conspiracy that we say is always operating in the lives of those who are Christians.

That the highest power in existence, more powerful than NASA.

NASA's not that powerful, that was supposed to be.

I mean, you know, but I don't know.

Maybe they are.

But it NASA doesn't show up as like an enemy in movies like it did in the Spielberg days with like ET.

Nobody's like, oh, it's NASA.

I've gotten off track.

The highest power in existence is conspiring for your highest good.

This is the fundamental thread which holds all of life together.

Now that is hard to believe, isn't it?

Because life is challenging.

And it is full of difficulty and pain and suffering.

So how can that conspiracy possibly be true?

How can it be true that the highest power in existence is conspiring for your highest good through all of the experiences of your life?

Well, in Christ, we see that that is the good news.

So we're going to look at this conspiracy this morning and we're going to see why it is so difficult to see.

If the highest power were conspiring for our highest good, you'd think that you'd just be like on a run of winds constantly.

But that's not what it looks like.

In order to see it, we need something more than just a clear look at the data of our lives.

You know, you couldn't map out the highs and the lows of your life and say, oh yes, here's this trajectory, which proves that the highest good is seeking my highest power.

And if you would look at my PowerPoint, and then I'd stand on like a uh scissor lift and rise up, and you would see the trend line keep going, and we'd all say, that's actually a convenient truth.

Do something like that.

We can't do that with the data.

It has to be revealed to us.

It has to be uncovered in a divine way so that we might have eyes to see it.

So let's look this morning at its hiddenness.

And then we'll see what it means when it is revealed.

This passage begins with the arm of the Lord, a discussion of the arm of the Lord.

Isaiah 53, the first verse, it says, Who has believed what he has heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

Isaiah is saying, Is there anybody who has believed what we're saying?

Is there anyone to whom the arm of the Lord has been revealed?

No, it's the arm of the Lord.

This is an expression throughout Isaiah and throughout the scriptures to describe the saving power of God.

It is the arm of the Lord which was stretched out against Pharaoh and brought the ten plagues upon Egypt, which caused the Pharaoh to chase the Israelites out of their land.

It is the arm of the Lord which was stretched out so that the Red Sea would part, so that the Israelites could walk safely through, and then it would wash down again, washing away their enemies and oppressors forever.

The arm of the Lord is the might of God, the saving power that He has for His people.

So Isaiah is asking, does anyone believe it?

Can anyone see it?

Would anyone believe what we describe to be the arm of the Lord?

Does anybody actually think that the highest power in existence, who is God, is mighty to save us?

Does anybody actually think that the greatest power in the world is actually working for the highest good of his people?

Or do they think that he is distant and absent or incompetent or unable to save?

Well, let's look at what the arm of the Lord looks like.

Isaiah 53, 2.

The arm of the Lord, for he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.

The first strange thing about the arm of the Lord, the God, our God's power to save, is that it's a he.

When I would describe the arm of the Lord, the power of God stretched out to part the Red Sea, I would think I'm just describing God's power.

I'm not describing a person, a he.

And yet the power of God to save is also a he and is before God.

He is God, is God's power, and at the same time is before God.

And he grew up like a young plant.

That's the way humans grow.

He has a lineage, like a root out of dry ground.

This is an expression for describing he comes from a bad lineage.

You know, that guy, he comes from bad stock.

We don't really speak like that about each other.

He comes from a bad lineage, like a root out of out of dry ground.

You know, if you were to see it come up, it would look like just like a like a sucker on a healthy tree or something.

You'd whack it off.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him.

There's nothing particularly attractive about him, him, the arm of the Lord.

He does not look like a knight in shining armor.

You know, when Gandalf rides down into Helm's Deep and there's that beautiful moment with the light and everything.

It's not like that.

He's not even particularly attractive.

You know, when someone's attractive, that means they capture your attention.

They they, you know, uh moving through a crowd and then your attention focuses on somebody.

He would just continue moving in the crowd.

He would not capture your attention.

There's no beauty or majesty that you should desire him.

To look at him would not evoke any sense of being drawn towards him.

Who has believed what we have told them?

Who has seen the arm of the Lord?

Well, don't you see how easy it would be to miss him?

But he was not just hidden in his ordinariness.

No, he was buried far beneath something that was just ordinary.

Verse three.

He was despised and rejected by men.

A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

It is not just that he disappeared into ordinariness, like a CIA agent dressed like a gray suit.

He was not just hidden in in the the typical.

He was buried beneath the ordinary, pushed to the margins, despised.

One whom you would not not only did he not attract your face, you would turn your face away from him.

If you saw him on a street corner, you would pull up your car so that the windshield pillar would block his face.

Because you would look at him and you would say, look at the collection of failures.

Look, he is a man of sorrows.

He is a life poorly lived.

That is what he would be in our estimation.

He's not someone that we would look up to.

He is someone that we would look down on.

Who has seen the arm of the Lord?

The arm of the Lord.

This one whom we would look down on.

Oh, so he's not much to look at.

Maybe this is just one of those don't judge a book by its cover things.

You know, that's the lesson that we're being taught here.

Ugly duckling type of situation.

Which is more of a don't judge a book too early thing.

I don't really understand the lesson of that book, actually, now that I think about it.

But maybe when you saw him act, maybe that was something to behold.

He wasn't much to look at.

Oh, but he's got a lovely singing voice, you know, something like that.

No, he looked like a failure in his actions.

53.8, by oppression and judgment, he was taken away, and for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.

What does it look like?

By oppression and judgment.

That is what his life looks like it was covered in.

Oppression and judgment.

Oppression, that means he doesn't have the strength to rise above those who are taking advantage of him.

He is not more powerful, it seems, than the ones who are persecuting him.

He must simply bear that persecution.

And judgment.

What does that mean?

That means it looks like he deserves it.

He is too weak to rise above his oppressors.

And then in our estimation, when we saw him under that oppression, we said, this is right judgment, and it looks like he deserves it.

That is the arm of the Lord, the stretched out arm which pried from Pharaoh's hands his people, the stretched out arm which raised up the seas and gave bread from heaven, the power of God to save.

What does he look like?

Oppression and judgment.

He is cast out, we would say, from the land of the living.

Now, being cast out, this expression is loaded because being cast out of the land is the initial punishment for sin, and it is the pattern of our experience of the consequences of sin throughout Scripture.

Adam and Eve sin, and they are cast out from the garden, and the flaming sword guards it to this day.

It is the sin of the Israelites which causes them to be cast out of the promised land and sent into exile where they mourn and long for the home that they had once experienced.

But this is the pattern of being cast out is drawn on here to describe his death.

What does his death look like?

It looks like the proper punishment for a sinful, sorrowful life.

It looks like the proper response, something that he deserved and had coming.

He is cast out of the land of the living.

That is our estimation.

And then in verse 9, they made his grave with the wicked, with a rich man in his death.

And then the strangeness.

Peeks through.

He had done no violence.

There was no deceit in his mouth.

Look at the hiddenness of the arm of the Lord.

It is not just that he was hidden in the ordinary.

It is not just that he was pushed out to the margins of society.

It is that he was cast out of the land of the living.

A pitiful, ignorable, sorrowful life which ends in a death that seems justly deserved.

Now I want this tension to build in your mind.

That is the arm of the Lord.

That is the power of God to save his people.

Now, how can that be?

What type of story is being told here?

Where that is the arm of the Lord?

Who has believed what he has heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

Do you see why he starts with that question?

The arm of the Lord, despised and rejected.

Well, in order to understand the pattern of what's taking place, of how it could be possible that this description of this despicable and despised man could be the same as the arm of the Lord.

In order to get that, we need to look at the middle verses, which I skipped over of this passage.

In the middle verses of this passage, they draw this sharp distinction between we and he, between us, the readers, and him, the one who is called the arm of the Lord.

And in seeing that distinction, we're able to understand how the man of sorrows, the suffering servant, could be the arm of the Lord, the power of God to save.

Isaiah 53, 4.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

I want you to hear he put it in a category, and then we put it in a category.

That's what this whole passage is about, this distinction.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.

Here is the strange mystery.

How do you account for his sorrows?

How do you account for his griefs?

And then the insight of Isaiah is that those griefs are ours.

They are not his.

That strickenness is ours.

They do not belong to him.

And yet we looked at him being stricken, and we said, he is smitten by God.

He is stricken.

Do you remember Job's friends?

Job loses his family and his land and his uh he experiences this absolute exile.

And then his friends come and they sit next to him.

And Job had done nothing wrong.

And his friends come and sit next to him, and for like 30 chapters, I don't know how they experienced it.

But for 30 chapters, they just say, This was your fault.

But it wasn't.

We are Job's friends in this story.

We are the ones who looked upon Jesus and we said, Look at how stricken you are.

That's what you deserve.

You're not like us, the ones who aren't smitten by God.

You deserve the punishment that you have coming.

But we did not know.

Those griefs that he bore were ours.

The sorrows that he bore belonged to us.

Verse 5, he was, but we esteemed him stricken.

That's what we thought.

But the reality is, he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

How can the arm of the Lord, God's power to save, be this dejected, sorrowful, cast-out man who looks like he only experiences the judgment of God?

How can those be the same thing?

Well, because his piercing was for our transgressions.

His crushing was for our iniquities.

The chastisement.

That is, the one standing by and saying, You deserve this.

That chastisement that he experienced, it was for our peace.

The wounds become our healing.

Here's the pattern.

Verse six.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way.

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

Look at the we and the he.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray.

This is the pattern.

This is the picture of what we all have in common.

The position that all of humanity finds itself in.

And this position is that we have all gone astray from the Lord.

We have all turned to our own way.

None of us have treated God as God.

None of us have seen him as righteous and worthy of honor and praise.

Instead, we have turned in on ourselves.

And the thing that keeps us bound together is our own self-obsession.

That we turn in on ourselves away from God.

This is what we all have.

And that is what it, that is the way that we stand before God.

Stand before Him, deserving of judgment, deserving of being cast out, deserving of punishment.

This is who we are and what we deserve.

This is our position before God.

And this is the greatest problem in all of existence.

The greatest problem in all of existence is the brokenness in our relationship to God, such that we do not treat him as God and we turn from him into our own sin.

Look out at all of the evil in the world, and it flows from that fountain.

Our turning from God and turning in on ourselves, our exchanging the glory of God for glories of our own designs.

This is the heart of all the issues in the world.

And I know you've heard that before.

And I know that that it may not have the resonance because look, we've we've read enough, we've experienced enough strangeness in Christianity, where you've seen enough of the pain of folks that have grown up in the church and walk around with these consciences that are constantly plagued by guilt.

And then you see your other friends who are not involved in the church, and they walk around with consciences that seem utterly free.

So how could you possibly claim that the central problem in existence is your broken relationship between God because of your sin?

But there's a claim beneath this that you do understand.

And that is that you live in a world made up of relationships.

And that the most fundamental aspect of your life are the relationships that you are a part of.

That is the essence of the quality of your life.

Do you think that is a mere accident of biology?

Or do you think that in recognizing that, perhaps, you're recognizing that the world and the way that you are a human in the world is determined by how you are relating to the world?

You are a relational being.

That is because the foundation of existence is a related foundation.

And so doesn't it make sense with that thing that you know intuitively, the world is a relational world.

My experience in it is a relational experience.

Then do you not see that the breaking, the denial of that most important relationship would flow out to contaminate everything?

I've said this before, but it can be a brutal challenge to have a rift between one friend.

Now consider the despair of a rift between you and your Maker.

Consider a heart that is meant to rise to the glories of the heavens and can't, because it knows if it rises there, it will meet a frown that will say, You have denied me, you deserve punishment.

That is the we in the midst of this unthinkable problem.

Now, what is our hope?

What is the hope of someone in a situation like that?

Our hope is that perhaps the judge himself would save us.

Our hope lies in the one that we've offended.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way.

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

You picture a flock of sheep.

One sheep gets called out, and the sheep goes silently.

It does not know that it will be sacrificed.

But because of the sacrifice of that one sheep, all of the others go free.

You picture a champion warrior like David.

And he goes forth to Goliath, and the deal is if Goliath dies, all of the Israelites are free.

David kills Goliath, and all of Israel shares in his victory.

Here's our hope.

The punishment that you deserve from God has been born.

It has been taken in the body of Jesus Christ.

All of your iniquities, all of your iniquities, all of your sins, all of those things which plague your conscience, all of them, all of them were placed on this man.

Those wounds which he received are ours.

The chastisement that he received belongs to us.

And by his wounds we are healed.

This is the conspiracy.

Behind all of that data on top, there was this other story happening.

The other story was the arm of the Lord was mighty to save, because he would bear the justice of God on our behalf so that we might receive his mercy.

It is this grand conspiracy of an unthinkable love.

It may seem strange to bring to the point of the matter a conflict between justice and mercy.

But it is not strange when you consider that the fundamental aspect of our existence is our relatedness to God.

And what is it that breaks down a relationship?

Think of this.

Sure, one way to restore a relationship.

I mean we could think of it negatively.

One way to restore a relationship with a con artist is to just lay down your moral compass and say, okay, I'll just be friends with you.

And our friendship will work because I'll just eliminate my sense of justice.

And then what happens is when you became friends with them, to become friends with them, you destroyed who you are.

And you'll know that in your heart.

That in your friendship with them, you've destroyed who you are.

So what type of friendship is that really?

You've made yourself such that there's nothing really there.

There is no person here internally that's worth being friends with.

Now consider God's calling us towards our highest good is Him calling us towards relationship with Him.

He is the highest good.

And we had broken our relationship with Him.

Do we say, yes, our relationship can be restored, but God lay down your justice.

Imagine if He had.

There would be no God there anymore for us to be in relationship with.

He would have made Himself vanish into us somehow.

He would have made humanity the center of the world.

Well, that's our sin.

That is the experience of our punishment.

Is that us each turning to his own way.

It's a form of hell.

But then is there no hope for mercy?

That the relationship might be restored.

Well, here is what God has done.

He has placed the just requirements of the law onto his sacrifice.

And he has counted that as our sacrifice.

And he has given us that sacrifice's righteousness.

And he has counted that as our righteousness.

So that in him we stand absolutely free before our God.

This is the grand conspiracy.

This is the hope of Christmas.

That we have been reconciled to God because of the greatness of his love towards us.

Are there any questions today?

No further questions.

I preached like half the verses.

It can be hard to receive the freeness of the gospel.

I think it it m it might take the whole of the Christian life to be able to internalize this reality.

But I want you to understand.

I want your your curiosity to be provoked.

It's as free as it sounds.

Come to him.

Be forgiven.

Come to him.

Be washed.

The depth of his love towards you is unthinkable.

He freely gives it.

Freely gives it.

So that when you stand before the Lord, and he says, Why is it that I should not lay down my judgment upon you?

We might say, the reason is Christ alone.

I stand in his righteousness.

I stand forgiven by him.

We might say, because the arm of the Lord is mighty to save.

And the arm of the Lord was strong enough to rescue me.

It looked like weakness.

If you were to look at it, but it was my salvation.

This is the message of Christ.

Part of what we remember, or one way that we try and remember and celebrate this news, the freeness, is we come to a free table.

And when we come to this table, we physically participate because remember, these are real wounds.

This is not like metaphorical wounds, which is good news because you're not a metaphorical person.

You're a real person.

You can touch things and think things, look at stuff, smell things.

It's very exciting to be a person.

That is the type of thing that needed to be saved.

Your sins are not metaphorical sins.

You don't sin in concept.

Your sins have names and dates, times where they take place and times where they weren't taking place, actions attached to them.

You know, human things.

Those are the type of sins that needed to be punished, that we might be freed.

You're not coming to a metaphorical grace.

This is not a concept of grace.

It is the thing itself.

You're not coming to a metaphorical love from a father.

This is not some nice psychological trick or some hack to solve the pains of existence.

You're coming to a real love from your God, expressed in time and space when he did not withhold his own son so that you might be saved.

You're coming to a table to celebrate and remember this real love from a real Savior.

He wasn't much to look at.

Here's the arm of the Lord.

Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Come to the table.

Celebrate your Savior.

Christian, you're free.

It is finished.

He did it.

Come celebrate.

Did I already pray?

Did I pray?

Lord, thank you for this meal.

We pray, Lord, let us see your gospel.

Let us see the freedom of the grace, the depth of your love.

Let our hearts be open to this.

Let us see the reconciliation that you offer for us.

Let us come to you with this new confidence.

Would I pray for that?

Would he be concerned with that?

He did not withhold his own son.

Yes, he will hear your prayers.

He did not withhold his own son.

Yes, he is concerned with what concerns you.

He did not withhold his own son.

Would you doubt the depth of his love towards you?

He did not withhold his own son.

Do you think that he has some secret agenda against you?

No, the conspiracy is for your highest good.

Lord, how can our broken, crippled hearts, we are like we we are like a battered spouse?

Lord, teach us to receive your love.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.