Sermon on Isaiah 24; Matthew 27:45-51; Psalm 46. Delivered on 22 March 2015 at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church. The fourteenth installment of a sermon series on the Book of Isaiah; see also sermons on Isaiah 1; Isaiah 2; Isaiah 3-4; Isaiah 5; Isaiah 6; Isaiah 7-8a; Isaiah 8b-9; Isaiah 10-12; Isaiah 13-14, 21; Isaiah 15-18; Isaiah 19-20; Isaiah 22; and Isaiah 23.
Who here likes to watch
movies? I do, though more at home than in theaters. I think most
people probably have a favorite kind of movie, maybe a few favorites,
a genre that just fascinates them. One of my favorites is
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film. These movies present some kind of
catastrophe that envelopes the whole landscape, or maybe even the
entire earth. Apocalyptic movies focus more on the devastating
events themselves; post-apocalyptic movies jump into the forlorn and
desolate world left behind. They confront us with the darker
elements of our nature, and a lot of these movies set up a scenario
where we're ultimately at fault for how things have gone so terribly
wrong.
In some movies, the human
race – regionally or globally – is nearly wiped out by a disease
that we either released into the general public through carelessness
or shortsightedness, like in 28 Days Later,
or even created deliberately, like in 12 Monkeys
or Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
In other movies, it's our refusal to be good stewards of the earth
that leads to disaster, like in The Day After Tomorrow.
In still others, it's our willingness to engulf the earth in a
global nuclear war that brings catastrophe, like in The
Book of Eli, which may be best
at portraying the utter devastation we hold in our hands as well as
the hope that God's precious word brings even in a wasteland.
On
the heels of condemning all the wayward nations from Babylon to Tyre,
and even Jerusalem itself (Isaiah 13-23), Isaiah's lethal verbal artistry reaches a
fever-pitch here in chapter 24. What we have here is sort of an
apocalyptic film storyboard. But the way Isaiah draws it, it's human
sin itself
– not just carelessness, not just malice, not just bad stewardship,
not just war, but sin in its very essence – that the earth can no
longer bear. What Isaiah describes is a picture of radical
desolation. “The earth is completely laid waste”, he says
(Isaiah 24:3), and “a curse consumes the earth” so that “few
people are left” (Isaiah 24:6). The earth is “thoroughly shaken”
(Isaiah 24:19), and it “reels like a drunkard” (Isaiah 24:20). It's a mess!
It's a catastrophe! It's the end of the world as we know it, and no
one is feeling fine.
Set
in the middle of this reeling, staggering, swaying earth is the “City
of Chaos” (Isaiah 24:10). Just like what John does in Revelation by
summing up all pagan powers and trends into “Babylon the Great”,
that's what Isaiah does here. He blends them together in one
composite set to show that every human empire, every human nation,
every human institution, every tribe and every tongue and every
culture, every element of worldliness, has plenty of skin in the
game, because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”
(Romans 3:23). Babylonians have sinned and fall short of the glory
of God. Moabites, Edomites, Philistines have sinned and fall short
of the glory of God. Egyptians and Assyrians have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God. Tyre has sinned and falls short of the
glory of God. Even Jerusalem has sinned and falls short of the glory
of God. America has sinned and falls short of the glory of God, and
so does each and every one of us.
We
hear that word – 'sin' – and we don't grasp how heavy it is.
It's such a little word, and we're used to it. It's a nice,
familiar, 'religious' word. But it should be a heavy word, a
horrifying word! How about, “Each of us is completely lost”?
How about, “Each of us fights tooth and nail to escape the arms of
God's holy love”? How about, “Each of us is stubbornly wicked”?
How about, “Each of us is chained down and enslaved by darkness”?
How about, “Each of us is stuck in the mire and stewing in the
filth of our uncleanness”? That's what it means: we are all party
to Sin and its evil kingdom. All of us are accessories to Sin and
all it does. With every individual act of sin, every choice to
disobey God and spurn the reason we were made, we ratify, endorse,
and sustain Adam's rebellion and all its consequences.
That's
not to say we're worthless. It takes a bright glory to become so
dark when it goes wrong. A fallen butterfly – that's not so bad.
But a fallen bearer of God's image? A royal priest gone totally
awry? No wonder the earth shakes! No wonder the earth reels like a
drunkard and sways like a flimsy hut! Who can survive it? Who has
the strength? Who has the stability? Who can shed and strip off
their sin and flee out of the City of Chaos before the mountains fall
and the rivers flood and the earth dissolves in fire and ashes?
Isaiah's
picture is a very dark one, because it forces us to confront how dark
human sin really is and how dreadful its consequences are. The
apparent harmony between sin and fun is a mirage that can only trick
us because the judgment of God is held back, stored up until “the
day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed”
(Romans 2:5). In the light of God's righteousness, the intoxication
of sin is nothing but bitterness (Isaiah 24:9), the noise of sin
loses its melody and grows fearfully silent (Isaiah 24:8), and “the
gladness of the earth is banished” (Isaiah 24:10). The City of
Chaos seemed like a happy place, a fast-paced place – but “the
City of Chaos is broken down; every house is shut up so that no one
can enter” (Isaiah 24:10). If God isn't “in the midst of the
city”, it can't stand secure (Psalm 46:5). And so, Isaiah
promises, the City of Chaos won't.
During
this season of Lent, we've listened attentively to Isaiah's Oracles
Against the Nations (Isaiah 13-23) and the challenges they bring. Babylon, the
cultural force of ungodliness and the pridefulness of human works,
called us to self-examination and the question, “Are we vigilant
watchmen and winsome witnesses?” Moab, the heretical half-church,
called us to test our teachings against the pure truth of the gospel.
Damascus-loving Ephraim, the divided church, summoned us to ask, “Do
we actually treat each other as brothers and sisters in the family of
God? If our music style or service time or sermon length became an
idol, would we serve it or dethrone it?” Egypt called us to lift
our hopes above fleshly yearnings for revenge and to instead dare to
pray both
for our persecuted fellow-believers and
for their persecutors, for the blessing of knowing Christ to turn
their hearts to peace. Wayward Jerusalem urged us to look outward
toward our mission and to hold fast to Christ's gospel of both
holiness and
love – not opening what he's shut, not shutting what he's opened.
And Tyre asks us, “Does our earning, our saving, our giving, our
spending, serve the kingdom of God first? Do our financial habits
bear witness to Jesus Christ? Do they look like something empowered
by the Spirit of God?” Heavy questions. Important questions. As
Lent winds down, they stick with us.
It's
all a lot to deal with! It's a lot to live up to! On our own, we
can't do it. Like a New Year's resolution, we fall short of the
glory of God in every case. None
of us measure up in ourselves.
Lent is a time when we have to discipline ourselves and take stock
and stare unflinchingly at the hopelessness of our own corrupt hearts
and souls. Our sin is a heavy thing – heavy enough to snap our
spines, break our resolve, and weigh down our worlds 'til they crash
through the floor of creation into the unending and unforgiving
abyss. We struggle to fight it, we struggle to resist, but
ultimately we have to despair of ever doing it under our own power.
Under our own power, the struggle is in vain. We can't bear up the
heavens and the earth. Our shoulders aren't strong enough.
What
we need is an Atlas. I don't mean the book of maps. In Greek
mythology, there was a Titan named Atlas, one of the enemies of the
gods of Olympus. As punishment after they defeated the Titans in
war, the gods cursed Atlas with a burdensome job: to stand at the
west end of the earth and hold up the sky on his shoulders, using
only his own strength to keep heaven and earth from crashing
together. So in ancient Greek statues, Atlas is shown with the
celestial sphere on his shoulders; in time, we started sculpting him
holding up the earth and keeping it firmly in place. Atlas has
shoulders up to the task. But Atlas is just a myth. Atlas can't
really hold our world together. And with all our coping mechanisms,
all our worry and care, all our graceless rituals, all our decent
citizenship and family ties, all our mighty achievements and good
deeds, all our climbing the corporate ladder and ruthless
self-promotion and questing to leave a legacy, still neither can we.
Because “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
Yet
the bad news of Isaiah 24 isn't meant to be God's last word. No,
wrath is not the end; grace
is the end. If we think Lent is only a season about ourselves and
our self-improvement, we've completely missed the point! Lent is not
about us and what we can or should do on our own strength. Lent is
about Jesus, and he
is God's Word, the Word to end all words. “One day when sin was as
black as could be”, Jesus stepped down from heaven's glory to our
cold and trembling and sin-shaken earth. He lived, he fasted forty
days in the desert, he taught and worked wonders and preached the
kingdom of God – and then “when the days drew near for him to be
taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51).
He
knew what was coming. He was journeying to the cross. He knew the
pain, the shame, the mockery and abuse and death awaiting him. Step
by step, Jesus made his way to that dark hour when he'd stretch out
his arms in crucifixion. He sweated and bled and prayed as he faced
up to it in Gethsemane – not because he feared the pain, not
because he feared the shame, not because he feared death. No,
because he dreaded the cup of the wrath of the LORD,
the cup that makes the nations drunk with their own sin (Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15; Revelation 16:19). That's why he prayed,
“Remove this cup from me” (Mark 14:36). But he also prayed, “Not
my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
At Golgotha, when the nails transfixed the incarnate God's flesh to
gnarled earthly wood outside the gates of the City of Chaos, Jesus
stepped into Isaiah 24 for us. There on that tree, he weathered the
woes that would have shaken us to bits. There on that tree, he
suffered, not for any guilt of his own, but for our guilt, our
wickedness, our corruption, our rebellion (cf. Isaiah 24:6). There
on that tree, he accepted the wages of our sin. Our sin is
death-dealing; our sin is a millstone around our necks; our sin is
world-collapsing – but Jesus stretched forth his arms and bore the
world on his shoulders and held it up beneath “almighty vengeance …
that must have sunk a world to hell”. Atlas is a myth, but Jesus
is the truth! And because Jesus is our true Atlas, bearing the
weight of all our earth-sinking sin, “we will not fear, though the
earth should change … though the mountains tremble with its tumult”
(Psalm 46:2-3).
During the present season of Lent, as we carry forward in
discipleship, let's remember that we don't have to carry the world on
our sinful, imperfect, mortally frail shoulders. If our world is
handed over to Jesus in faith, he bears it on his shoulders, and we
find refuge in the Rock of Ages, cleft for us on the cross, from
every earthquake and every storm. With our world on his shoulders,
this “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in
trouble” (Psalm 46:1). The earth may reel and sway and tremble and
fall, but this Rock does not quake. If “he alone is [our] rock and
[our] salvation”, then we “shall never be shaken” (Psalm 62:2).
That's the truth set before us. We don't have to live in horror; we
don't have to live in a wasteland. We weren't meant to live in
ourselves; we were meant to live in Christ. But Lent is a journey.
We aren't at Good Friday just yet! So day by day, may we walk with
Jesus, even to the end – and beyond it.
See,
we know what shines on the other side of Good Friday, when the Isaiah
24 wrath is swallowed up in the Son's victory and “a kingdom that
cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:28) rules from the Babylonian and
Assyrian east all the way to the Tyrian and Egyptian west: “They
lift up their voices, they sing for joy; they shout from the west
over the majesty of the LORD.
Therefore in the east give glory to the LORD;
in the coastlands of the sea glorify the name of the LORD,
the God of Israel. From the ends of the earth we hear songs of
praise, of glory to the Righteous One” (Isaiah 24:14-16).
And
although for now “the treacherous betray; with treachery the
treacherous betray”, as Judas did, we don't have to “pine away”
in the face of coming judgment (Isaiah 24:17), because our LORD
Jesus does
reign and “manifest his glory” (Isaiah 24:23). But for now, Lent
is a journey to the cross. The fickle mobs of the City of Chaos
stand before us, reminding us of what could have been. And the cross
that made a dark Friday dark and also good remains before us: “Let
us also lay aside every weight and sin that clings so closely, and
let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking
to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of
the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its
shame” (Hebrews 12:1-2). Look to Jesus, who bore the back-breaking
burden of sin for us, enduring it for the sake of the joy that's
coming. “O come, let us sing to the LORD;
let us make a joyful noise to the Rock of our Salvation!” (Psalm 95:1).
No comments:
Post a Comment