Sermon on Isaiah 2 (specifically, Isaiah 2:1-5, 12-22); Revelation 6:15-17. Delivered 12 October 2014 at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church. The second installment of a sermon series on the Book of Isaiah.
When God taught us through the first chapter of Isaiah's beautiful “Fifth Gospel” last month, we saw a strong warning – for Judah and for us today – against a “divided, compartmentalized heart” that tries to “let our Monday-through-Saturday lives come unhinged from our Sunday worship”. Judah was mired in sin – all mankind is mired in sin – and the only hope is true atonement and true repentance, for “through Jesus, God fought our red sins with his red blood, to make us white as snow, white as wool, pure from all stain – the color of holiness”. We remember that:
Whenever
we forget our gracious God, whenever we rest on all our Sunday works
to cover our faithless weeks, whenever we trample God's courts,
whenever we ignore what is right and do what is wrong, whenever we
stain our holy unity with the dark red dye of sin, there is and
remains hope in Jesus. […] And this same grace of God lays claim
to all our days and all our hours, to all our opinions and all our
relationships, to all our tasks and all our words. This grace lays
claim to all these, to all of each of us, for a purpose:
to make them all,
from all of us, reflections of the holiness and love of God.
That
prophecy gives way to a new oracle, a portrait of the nations finally
being eagerly drawn toward God's kingdom. What we have in the second
chapter of Isaiah is not merely some far-off utopia, a scene of
things after Christ's return. No, its perfection may await that
long-desired day, but the world of Isaiah 2 lies before us. We don't
have to wait
for “the last days”, for we know that “in these last days God
has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:2). And what can we say of
the true Mount Zion? Is it only a future reality? Hebrews 12:22
says, “You have
come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem”. What is this great mountain that looms so large in
Isaiah's view?
Remember
the dream that the prophet Daniel will interpret for Nebuchadnezzar:
the great worldly powers are a statue of declining value – gold,
silver, bronze, iron, and clay – but there comes “a rock cut out,
but not by human hands”, which “struck the statue” and so
“became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:34-35). This rock, says Daniel, becomes a mountain because “in
the times of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom
that will never be destroyed”, which “will crush all those
kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever”
(Daniel 2:44) – and as Christ, the great Rock, himself said during
the days of his earthly ministry, “the kingdom of God has come upon
you” (Matthew 12:28). The Mountain is Christ, expanding his
kingdom throughout the whole earth: he is the true Mount Zion, the
highest of mountains, exalted above all the hills of our petty idols
and vain desires.
Jesus
Christ, then, is the mountain of the LORD's
temple – and is himself the cornerstone of that temple, in union
with his people. As Paul says, “What agreement is there between
the temple of God and idols? For we
are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16). Paul asks,
“Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's
Spirit dwells in your midst?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). But it is only
in Jesus Christ that “the whole building is joined together and
rises to become a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:21). Peter
also testifies that, along with the great living Stone who is Christ,
we “like living stones are being built into a temple of the Spirit”
(1 Peter 2:5).
When
Isaiah foresees a grand mountain of the LORD's
temple, then, what he sees in the days of the New Covenant is Christ
and his kingdom crowned with the church as a holy temple. And “the
law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD
from Jerusalem” – that is, in our own day, the message of the
gospel will go forth from us,
or through us from its heavenly source, and into all the world. That
is our calling: to “disciple all
nations”, which happens when we go, and when we baptize them into the
pure faith in the Triune God, and when we teach them the whole of Christ's
doctrine and practice (Matthew 28:19-20).
What
is the effect of the gospel spreading through all the earth? What
does it look like when it gets brought to fruition? God himself will
“judge between the nations”, and with God as the Judge to
adjudicate all disputes, what need will there be for war? So “they
shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning
hooks” – swords and spears, the weapons of warfare and good for
nothing other than death and destruction, will be permanently useless
– and thus “nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore”. That
is a world that can be achieved only by the gospel-message from the
heavenly Zion. That
is a world that can be achieved by the kingdom of God. And as we
watch our world falling apart in warfare all around us, that
is a world I want to live in.
The
gospel is not a message of war – save in the endless warfare of the
Savior against sin itself – for “our struggle is not against
flesh and blood”, but rather is against “the powers of this dark
world and the spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12). The
gospel is a message of peace, though it may bring a sword in this
rebellious world – a sword, not against unbelievers, but wielded by
them against us (Matthew 10:34). And in our day more than ever, that
sword is all too sharp and all too active.
We
live now in a world where the self-proclaimed caliphate of the
Islamic State brutally persecutes Christians and many others
throughout portions of the Middle East under its control. We live
now in a world where the constant strife between Israel and Palestine
claims civilian lives on both sides. We live now in a world where
Boko Haram still holds countless Nigerian schoolgirls hostage. And
who can forget the Syrian civil war, and the ethnic violence in South
Sudan, and continuing war in eastern Ukraine, and in places even our
twenty-four-hour news cycle hasn't taught us. Nor is it limited to
foreign shores: our own soil is stained with blood, brutality,
oppression, bitterness, resentment, envy, hatred, discord. Our whole
world is sucked into an endless cycle of violence begetting violence,
wrath spawning wrath. This is nothing new: the rock in the hand of
Cain has filled the earth for far too long. But the Rock of our
Salvation came to exhaust all the wrath of evil, so as to fill the
earth with a peaceable kingdom – and the blood of Jesus “speaks a
better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24), crying not for
vengeance but for peace through justice and love.
That
is the message we're called to proclaim: the gospel of peace, going
forth from us, the LORD's
temple – not founded upon our own strength or wisdom, but solely
and securely upon Christ our Sure Foundation. But just as in
Isaiah's day, the hope for Israel and Judah was only through a
painful scourging of the wickedness from their midst – salvation
always comes through judgment. Salvation for the Hebrews came only
by the ten plagues upon Egypt. Salvation from false prophets and
outward idolatries came only by the pains of exile and return.
Salvation from sin and the idolatries of the heart comes only by the
death penalty: by the nailing of the sinful character of Adam in us
to the cross, not in our own person, but in the person of Jesus
Christ, the Last Adam, whose divine and sinless life made way for him
to have God judge our
sin in his
death: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in
him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The old Adam died in the Last Adam's death, that new people in us
might live through his risen life.
And
ultimately, the salvation of the world will require the judgment of
all that is sinful within it. Either that sin is done away with in
Christ's cross, or it remains to be addressed in the judgment that is
to come. There is indeed a day in store when all that is exalted
will be humbled, and all human pride will be brought low, and the
idols will all disappear, revealing their worthlessness. What we
have here is no different than what Mary sang in her beautiful
Magnificat, the song of how Christ's birth changes the world: God
“has performed mighty deeds with his arm; / he has scattered those
who are proud in their inmost thoughts. // He has brought down rulers
from their thrones / but has lifted up the humble. // He has filled
the hungry with good things / but has sent the rich away empty”
(Luke 1:51-53).
God
will reverse the fortunes that we have claimed. What we've claimed
for ourselves, we will have to give up; what we've been content to
leave in the hands of God, that he will distribute freely. The day
is coming! Maranatha!
When the LORD
rises to shake the earth, the self-exalted have good reason to wish
to hide and to throw their idols by the wayside. But no earthly
mountain, no earth-bound rock, can shield anyone from the omnipotent
justice of God – no more than any idol can. There is only one
Rock, only one Mountain that offers a true Refuge – because only
one Rock, only one Mountain, has already borne all the wrath of God
and been raised up to tower over all the hills that shall surely be
brought low. Only in Christ is there hope of salvation – and that
is the message that goes forth from God's temple to all the nations.
The
gospel out of Zion calls forth with a challenge. Will we humble
ourselves, and let God exalt us in Christ in his due time? Or will
we exalt ourselves, and resist vainly that day when God humbles us
against our will? Will we choose gospel humility, or will we cast
our lot with the vile idols in their promised humiliation? Jesus
Christ chose humility: though he existed rightfully in all the divine
glory, being the eternal Word of God, he emptied himself to take on
the indignity of a human servant, and he obeyed his Father's will
even in humbling himself all the way to the “slaves' punishment”:
a painful, shameful, naked death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).
Paul
advises us, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”
(Philippians 2:5). Let us not exalt ourselves, let us not boast like
the idols of human pride and status, but let us humble ourselves –
for just as “God exalted him to the highest place” and made
public that Christ bears the name of God himself (Philippians 2:9),
so through the humility of faith “God raised us up with Christ and
seated us with him” (Ephesians 2:6).
We
here, living in humble faith, are God's temple, a shining city on a
hill – more than a hill, but the highest of mountains, Christ the
King. His kingdom is the mountain of the temple of the LORD,
to which all nations must be drawn for the wisdom of God's design for
human life. But how will they learn, if no one tells them? How can
the nations be taught peace – not just mere détente,
not just an unsteady truce, but the real peace of holy love – if
the instruction of the gospel fails to go forth from Zion? The
message will go nowhere unless this temple sends forth heralds of
good news!
Are
we here at Pequea EC founded securely upon this mountain and no
other? Are we shining as a temple, bright and unmistakable? Do we
beat our swords into plowshares? Does the word of the LORD
go forth from us into the world that needs so desperately to hear it
– not just distant lands, but here in the towns and countryside all
around us? Have we tossed all idols aside to the moles and bats?
Have we humbled ourselves, forsaken our worldly ambitions, and set
our minds on things above, where our life is hid with Christ in God
(Colossians 3:2)? Do we in word and in deed, in thought and in
attitude, proclaim the exaltation of one and only
one name – the name of Jesus Christ?
Christ
in us, the peace of the Spirit, is the one and only hope of the
world. That good news is not easy to hear and obey. It threatens
all idols and the self-assured dignity of human pride. Every high
and lofty thing naturally resists this truth in one way or another:
spiritual strongholds, governments, political parties, big business,
corporate media, the ivory tower, the social elite, sometimes even
the church itself. But all the high and lofty things – “all the
towering mountains and all the high hills” – will be brought low,
and “the LORD
alone will be exalted in that day”.
Only
our God will stand tall, while all the debris of failed earthly
aspirations and crushed worldly boasts settles into holes and joins
the rest of the guano where all idols belong. Jesus Christ is LORD,
crowned with many crowns, and he alone will be exalted! In all our
living, in all our working, in all our resting, in all our preaching,
in all our teaching, in all our believing, in all our suffering, in
all our rejoicing, in all our hoping, in all our loving, may Christ
the LORD
alone
be exalted!
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