Isaiah 12. This advent, we’ve been looking to Isaiah 11 and 12 as Isaiah has pointed us for the coming of the Messiah. This morning, we’re looking at Chapter 12, Verses 1 to 2, primarily verse three, just for bridging us for what will take place next week. As we look to the reading of God’s word, if you please join with me in prayer. Father of all mercies in your word, endless glory shine forth. Your word guides our steps. It gives discernment to those who seek you. Grant, we ask that we find new beauties and an ever-increasing light in them this day. You indeed are our divine instructor, our gracious Lord. Be forever near to us. Teach us to love your sacred word and here to view our savior, for it is in his name that we do pray. Amen. Beginning in verse one, You will say in that day, ‘I will give thanks to you, 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. The word of the Lord. I could not worship a God who… You’ve all heard someone say something like this, and maybe you’ve said it yourself. Almost always whatever completes the rest of the sentence is something part for a person that is culturally important. It’s something they find to be very significant, and usually culturally so. Our Cultural Moment, it does not say, I could never worship a God who forgives sinners who betray and have been disloyal to him. We don’t say that. Or I could never worship a God who forgives lower class people in the same way that he forgives me. We don’t say that anymore. Though we’re true of other times and places. Our moment, though, says things like, I could never I could never worship a God who would send anyone to hell. I could never worship a God who demand exclusivity of worship. Now, these are more our current bent. Of course, you live long enough and these will change, but what is current today. God’s anger and wrath towards sin is one of our current religious stumbling blocks. We often make it a caricature, the little angry guy on the inside-out film.
He’s always mad. A cartoon God who’s easily upset. He blows up at every little infraction. But the Bible gives us a very different picture of God. God is slow to anger, so long in suffering that he can at times seem indulgent. The Lord has never been okay with our sin and our rebellion. The problem is, by and large, we are. We say or think to God, get off my back about this. We also then tend to make issues of forgiveness a business transaction. Rather, you pay a cashier, and how you pay God as you say, I’m sorry, and you expect this transaction to take place. Here’s your forgiveness coupon. There’s nothing really relational about it, no reconciliation. But in forgiving our sins, the Lord reestablishes his relationship to us, and we are then to respond in joy and thanksgiving in our repentance. This relationship is restored. God’s people are called then to find delight and joy in him. So much so that there’s even a warning given for failing to do this. In the Book of Deuteronomy 28, it says, Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart.
Joy is an integral part of our faith. We’re going to look at that in greater detail next week. Here, Isaiah 12 is the culmination of the first 11 chapters. Chapters of judgment, God dealing with his rebellious people. Now in chapter 12, coming after chapter 11, which was a pronouncement of something different. A new king is going to come and bring the justice of God through his righteous rule. Now what we see in chapter 12 is that deliverer, that king to come, is actually God himself. He is the one who removes his wrath and establish establishes our trust. Well, looking first in at how this wrath is removed, Isaiah begins. He says, You will say in that day, and Meli is like, Well, what day? Well, so far in that day has been a rather bleak statement of judgment, the day of the Lord. Judgment is coming, but now, Isaiah is using it as a great deliverance through the Messiah. Judgment is not God’s last word. His promises lie beyond it. Judgment is not God’s last word. And Isaiah goes on, I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away that you might comfort me.
How does this happen? How does God’s anger turn to comfort? Well, Isaiah is going to revisit this theme later in Chapter 53. Comfort comes because God bore our judgment. Isaiah 53 says, He was pierced for our transgression. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him. By his wounds, we are healed. Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him, to cause him to suffer. And though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, this suffering Messiah. Isaiah is going to go on in the later chapters to speak of God’s great comfort that comes through the suffering servant. Now, one thing that both Jews and Christians are very aware of from Leviticus 17 is it is the blood that makes atonement. This is brought back into the New Testament, Hebrews 9. There the author says, Without the shedding of blood, there’s no forgiveness, there’s no atonement. We take that for granted. We’ve heard it often enough. But that’s not always easy to understand by others. I was speaking with a Buddhist about my beliefs, and another time I I’m speaking to a Muslim, and interesting, both of them asked me the same question, though, again, miles apart in different places.
Both of them asked me this question, why can’t God just forgive sins by forgiving sins? Why did Jesus have to die for sins? Now, on the surface, that seems like a really good question. People have bumped into me and apologized. It wasn’t like I sit there and say, No, I require a sacrifice rise of atonement to make things right between us. That’s ridiculous. No one would do that. It would seem that if we can do that with one another quite easily, why could not God, who is infinitely greater than us, do the same thing? The question completely falls apart the minute you add something serious to it, though. Someone who gets all tanked up on mess and drives and kills one of my children, I’m not going to say, these things happen. Thanks for just only killing one of them. That’s be absurd. Forgiveness without a price is not forgiveness. And the greater the cost, the greater we know the price is to be. And the coming of Emmanuel, God with us, the coming of the Messiah, the suffering servant, turns God’s anger to comfort because he bears upon himself our sins. I’ll put this in your bulletin that comes from Barry Webb.
He said, Verse 2 celebrates a glorious paradox. The angry God is finally the only source of comfort. In the end, comfort, salvation, can only be found by fleeing into the arms of the righteous God whose wrath we have incurred. How does this take place? By his son taking our sin upon himself and offering his life for ours. He redeems us through his atoning sacrifice. And redemption produces praise. It establishes our trust. This trust is established It’s not only a mental transaction of belief, it is a whole being in body trust. It’s not just simply, In theory, I could trust a parachute to hold me. It’s 30,000 feet, get tossed out the plane, and you’re holding on to dear life trust. It’s every fiber of your being. Isaiah says, I will give thanks to you, O Lord. Behold, God is my salvation. Salvation is God himself. He’s saying, I will trust, I will not be afraid for the Lord God is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. Verse 2 is nearly identical to to Exodus 15: 2. Exodus 15 is the great song of Moses after Pharaoh’s army is destroyed in the Red Sea.
A mighty deliverance of God, the Exodus of God’s people out of Egypt, out of slavery. And they respond with a joyous song of praise. And here, Isaiah is taking that, that historical song as a praise of the Exodus of God’s people from their God’s anger has been turned aside by God himself. And I will joy in my salvation. Redemption produces praise. But you see this response is in what the Lord has done. And there is a response on our part that we have turned towards him. One writer has put it well. He said, Praise and thanks are essential to robust spiritual spiritual life, not because God needs them like some neurotic tyrant, but because we need to give them. Our praise brings into focus just how much we have received from our kind and generous God. We praise the things that we love, and it is in the praising of them that’s a greater enjoyment. We invite other people to share in our joy, in our delight through our very praise. It’s a part of a robust spiritual life. Repentance is the foundation of our joy because it is a turning away from ourselves and a turning away from our sin by turning towards the Lord, his salvation, his joy.
Repentance fuels our hearts with praise. It’s the wood that’s thrown on the fire of our passion for Jesus. Sometimes people ask that question then of why is joy so fleeting for some, so hard to find, so difficult to lay a hold of? We’ll look at that later next week, but in part, it certainly can be because there’s no repentance. There’s no turning towards the Lord’s salvation, so there’s no joy in it. Where here, Isaiah says, I will trust and I will not be afraid for the Lord God is my strength and my song. From beginning to end, this is relational. It’s not a mere business transaction. I put trust I put faith in God’s promises in him. He is my salvation. And that is very good news because relationship is restored. That message is very different from the world’s religions. Entirely different. Christianity stands alone in this message, both currently as well as ancient faiths, ancient religions. Entirely different. The very time period of Isaiah, somewhere, we’ll just make it easy, about 700 BC. Around this time period, the great library of Asher Banable in Nineveh is collecting tens of thousands of religious texts. These were those clay tablets that were written in an Acadian cuneiform.
The British Museum has thousands of these that have been translated. This is a part of one of these prayers. It’s a prayer that you take and recite to placate the gods. This is in part how it reads, May the fury of my lord’s heart be quieted towards me. May the god who is not known be quieted towards me. May the goddess who is not known be quieted towards me. May the god who I know or do not know be quieted towards me. May the god who has become angry with me be quieted towards me. May the Goddess who’s become angry with me be quieted towards me. In ignorance, I have eaten that forbidden of my God. In ignorance, I have set foot on that prohibited by my Goddess. Oh God, whom I know or don’t know, my transgressions are many, great are my sins. ‘ ‘Oh Goddess, whom I know or don’t know, my transgressions are many. ‘ ‘And although I am constantly looking for help, no one takes me by the I utter laments, but no one hears me. Remove my transgressions, and I will sing your praise. That’s a pathetic prayer. What makes this even worse is this is the Lord’s competition.
What God is so angry with his people is their faithlessness. They’re going after other gods. They’re like, This is what you’re going after? Are you kidding me? They don’t know who this God is. It’s an unknown God who does not hear, who does not see, who does not care. The man or the woman recites this prayer, does not know who the offended God is. They don’t know what they’ve done, and they don’t know what to do about it. Just a throw up something. Listen to how the Bible speaks of our God. Genesis 16, So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing. For she said, Truly, here I have seen him who looks for me. From Hagar. Genesis 21, Fear not, for God has heard. Deuteronomy 5, Behold, the Lord our God has shown us his glory and greatness. We have heard his voice in the midst of fire. This day we have seen God speak with man, and man still lives. Or from Joshua, Here’s how you shall know that the living God is among you. Psalm 42, My soul thirst for God, the living God, the true and the living God.
The true and the living God, that is our God. He hears us. He sees us. He’s present with us. He has clearly revealed to us his character, his will. We’re not left in doubt of who he is. We’re not left in doubt about what we’ve done. We’re not left in doubt of how do we make things right. But still that question persist. This God whom we know, doesn’t all this demand for atonement make God bloodthirsty, a warmonger? That’s one of the objections we hear. From a Croatian theologian who experienced the great tragedy of the Balkan Wars in former Yugoslavia, which many of us, that’s been a part of our life. These terrible war atrocities that took place. And this is what he wrote. He says, Is it not a bit too arrogant to presume that our contemporary sensibilities about what is compatible with God’s love are much healthier than those people of God throughout the whole history of Judaism and Christianity? If God were not angry at injustice and deception, did not make a final end of violence, God would not be worthy of our worship. Now, he acknowledged that a belief in divine vengeance will be an unpopular one with many, especially in the West.
Many Christians in the West aren’t going to like to hear this. But he went on. He said, To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone. Actually, this part of what he’s writing came out of a lecture in his home country in a war zone. So his call to imagine this, he’s sitting there with the people who are living this as a reality. Imagine among your listeners are peoples whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burnt and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers Others had their throat slit. Soon you will discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. The quiet of a suburban home for the idea that God will not judge. Because in a scorched land, soaked in the the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect upon many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. Truly an amazing statement for our cultural moment to consider.
How easy it is in the quiet of suburbia to dismiss the type of atrocities that have been to tell someone, just get over it. The reality, though, is you dig below the surface of quiet suburbia, and we, too, see our own hearts. We, too, see the sins that captivate us or the things that we have done or have been done to us as well. Suburbia is not that quiet either. The Bible, it takes all this much further because it both asks and answers the question, how is God’s anger turned away? Meaning, how are our sins taken care of? Atonement. Jesus paying for our sins. It’s spoken of with two similar sounding words, expiation and propitiation. And before you run away with these two large words, just slow down a minute. We’ll define this carefully. They’re $10 words, but they have $100 value. Expiation is the removal of guilt. It is saying the penalty has been paid for. Keep that one, the penalty paid for. The second, propitiation. It appears four times in the New Testament in the ESV translation. Propitiation means an atoning way of removing God’s wrath or judgment of sin. It speaks to reconciliation and forgiveness.
When Jesus atones for our sin, he pays the price, he restores the relationship. That is the cash value. Paid sins, restored relationship. That is the beauty of Christ’s work. And this word propitiation, atonement, restoration of relationship. Romans 3, Paul says that Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. Hebrews 2, Therefore Jesus is made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. Atonement. 1 John 2, Jesus is the propitiation of our sins, not only of ours, but for the sins of the whole world. 1 John 4, In this is love, that not only we have loved God, but he has loved us and sent his son to be a propitiation for our sins. That is really, really good news. The Jesus whom Isaiah points towards is the God who expends his anger on himself. He absorbs the cost of our sins by taking the punishment that we deserve. He pays the price. He restores the relationship. So with that in mind, hear Isaiah again, 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 God is my salvation, I will trust, I will not be afraid. For the Lord God is my strength and my song and become my salvation. With joy, you will draw water from the wells of salvation. Brings it into a whole different light. Now, for those who struggle to forgive others, struggle to accept God’s forgiveness, it could be that you are too fractional and too little by way of reconciliation of relationship. It could be that our pride makes us think we’re better than we are, or our self-loathing puts God’s forgiveness out of our reach. Whatever the case, we struggle then to forgive others if we are not able to embrace what God has done for us. And so when others have wronged us, we’re slow to forgive, we’re quick to anger. May it not be for God’s people, for what we have received. When we have received such gracious mercy from the Lord, our world should be turned upside down. Praise and thanks flows from hearts of gratitude because our hearts are transformed. You see, when we, at Christmas time, especially when we’re here in the city of David is born unto you a savior, Christ the Lord, you have to know what he’s saving you from because it’s nonsensical otherwise.
This idea that Jesus is just a picture of God’s love for us. If you remove the rath, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. If someone comes up and says, I want to show you how much I love you, how much you mean to me? Like, okay. And they grab a jug of gas and they start putting gas in themselves and they light themselves on fire. You’re like, that’s not love. There’s nothing about that that’s Loving. Why would you do that? That’s crazy. If you’re in a burning building and a friend rushes in and tosses you out and the building collapses around them and they die in the inferno, that is love. Love. The context tells you it’s love. Without the context of everything that has gone before Jesus coming into the world doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone dying on a cross have any effect for anybody? Because God in the flesh has come to live out the covenant that we fail. He has taken upon himself the punishment we deserve in order that we would have restored relationship to him. He turns away his wrath and anger and becomes our comfort. That is the message of the Bible.
That is the message of Christianity. That is why it turns the world upside down, and nothing sounds like that. You are not going out there trying to figure out how to please this unknown God with things you’re not really sure of what you’ve done, and you’re not really sure how to fix it. He has come to us, and he has taken care of what we could not do. And so when we read, Born to you this day in the city of David as Christ, the savior, wow. That starts connecting all the dots. And when we see that in our own life, it’s not just merely transactional of your sins have been forgiven. Great, thank you. The relationship has been restored. When this relationship has been restored, we can now restore these relationships. That is the good news of Jesus. That is the message of Christmas that we have. That judgment is not final. Promise looks ahead. The fulfillment of what we have now been given in Jesus changes everything. And that should fill your heart with joy. And again, I’ll say, if that doesn’t move you to joy, you may really want to ask a question to yourself, have I really experienced the forgiveness and the acceptance of Jesus?
Have I known my sins have been washed clean and this relationship to be restored? Because if that is the case, it will move your heart to joy, even in the midst of suffering and difficulties. Brothers and sisters, born to you this day in the city of David is Christ our savior. Let us pray. Father Almighty, we thank you and praise you that you have come into the midst of our darkness, that you have brought to us relief by assuming upon yourself the punishment we deserve in your son, Jesus. And Lord God, we would ask that you would continue to open our eyes to see, open our ears to hear. You are there. You are present with us. Father, we thank you. You are the God, the living God. We bless you this day. We give you all praise, glory, and adoration. And this we do through Christ, our risen Lord. Amen. Amen indeed. Please stand.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.