Sermon on Isaiah 26; John 5:25-29; Revelation 20:13; 21:2, 9-11, 23-27. Delivered on 26 April 2015 at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church. The sixteenth 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; Isaiah 23; Isaiah 24; and Isaiah 25.
If Isaiah 24
highlights the heaviness of sin and the need for our redemption, the
next three chapters of Isaiah unfold to us the amazing things that
the Resurrection of Jesus makes possible. It's so easy for us to
forget that Easter isn't a day. Easter Sunday is a day, but Easter
is a season; and more than a season, a lifestyle, a truth, a
universe. Two weeks ago, on the second Sunday of Easter, Isaiah 25
showed us the Wedding Supper of the Lamb – the glorious truth that,
because Christ is risen indeed, our union with his risen life will be
perfected in the kingdom of God. The Church is engaged to Christ
now, but because the Lamb lives again, we'll move in together, and
he'll shower us with the fullness of his love forever, and we'll have
everlasting fellowship of grace, and death and sorrow will be distant
memories of the obsolete past.
As we pick
up the prophet's book again on this fourth Sunday of Easter, Isaiah
teaches us about two more significant blessings that the Resurrection
of Jesus brings: resurrection for ourselves, and a life in the holy
city. Isaiah plays with a contrast between two cities: the City of
Chaos we met a couple chapters earlier (Isaiah 24:10), representing
all the nations trapped under sin, versus this new “strong city”
with salvation for its walls and gates wide open (Isaiah 26:1-2).
The second can be introduced as victorious because the first one has
fallen. Revelation does the same thing, contrasting two cities:
“Babylon the Great City” (Revelation 18:21), the empire of
ungodliness doomed to failure, versus a “holy city, the New
Jerusalem” (Revelation 21:2), the final manifestation of “the
camp of the saints and the beloved city” that the devil ultimately
attacks in vain (Revelation 20:9). The harlot-city will be burned up
(Revelation 17:16; 18:9), but the bride-city – a people called out
from the sins of the harlot-city (Revelation 18:4) – will live and
fill the earth forever. Where once the nations drank of the
harlot-city's wrath of wine and “the kings of the earth committed
fornication with her” (Revelation 18:3), the story ends when “the
nations will walk by [the New Jerusalem's] light, and the kings of
the earth will bring their glory into it” (Revelation 21:24).
Sixteen
hundred years ago, the great bishop Augustine wrote a hugely
influential book called The City of God.
Drawing on Isaiah and Revelation, and trying to make sense of the
Visigoth sack of Rome and the decline of the Western Roman Empire –
which had officially adopted Christianity as a state religion –
Augustine describes history as a constant conflict between the City
of Man (or City of the World), on the one hand, and the City of God,
on the other. The City of Man, inspired by Satan and founded by
Cain, is civilization where people invest themselves in worldly cares
and pleasures; the City of God is civilization where people put aside
worldly cares and pleasures for the sake of God's truth. The sack of
Rome isn't the defeat of the City of God, because the Rome wasn't
itself the City of God. Rome may suffer, Rome may fall, but through
it all, we have a strong city.
Like
Augustine long after him, Isaiah is forced to wrestle with the
challenges of the present world. Sure, it's nice to know that
someday, the City of Chaos will fall (Isaiah 25:2). Sure, it's nice
to know that someday, God will lay low the lofty city and bring down
those who dwell in the heights (Isaiah 26:5). But what good is that
now?
How does it give Joe Shmoe of Bethlehem hope to know that his
great-great-grandson might see freedom? What good is all that future
if it stays in the future, beyond the lifespan of anyone listening to
Isaiah wax eloquent? And what good is the victory of the City of God
if it has no practical impact on our lives today? How does it help
us grapple with our suffering, how does it give us reason to live
with wisdom and virtue, how does it kindle the fires of courage in
our chests? How is the Great Feast good news if we aren't around to
taste it? If the victory is delayed so all we
see is the birth of empty wind (Isaiah 26:17-18), how does that
answer the prayers of our present distress (Isaiah 26:16)? If it
makes no difference for our
generation, if we who are living now
get no victory from acknowledging just one God and one Lord, why not
party it up with the City of Man and keep living under other lords
(Isaiah 26:13)? What good is it to die in faith if the promise isn't
for you?
So Isaiah
finds an answer. He sees the truth. If God is faithful, and surely
he is, then God will be faithful not just to the nation as a whole,
but to each generation and each individual who served him. And if
he's faithful to them beyond death, and he's faithful to his purposes
in creation, then, Isaiah exclaims, “Your dead shall live! Their
corpses shall rise! O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those
long dead” (Isaiah 26:19). It isn't true that a lifetime of
faithfulness only gives birth to wind; it gives birth to new life
springing out of death's dust. Even those long dead, for centuries
and centuries, haven't been forgotten from God's purposes. God is
faithful. And the faithfulness of God means life from the dead; it
means resurrection. Those who serve God do not
have all memory of them wiped out (cf. Isaiah 26:14). They'll live
again to see with their own eyes and enjoy in their own bodies the
triumph when God increases and enlarges the nation (Isaiah 26:15).
The patriarchs saw the promises from a distance and greeted them,
desiring a better country, and so “God has prepared a city for
them” (Hebrews 11:13-16).
The ancient
Greeks didn't believe in resurrection. They thought it was a lousy
idea. The Greeks often looked at the body as a prison for the soul,
something holding the soul back from living to its full potential.
They didn't want to believe in resurrection. That's why the Greeks
usually didn't bury bodies whole. They, like Vikings and Hindus and
other cultures, practiced cremation – a symbolic 'burning of the
bridges' to show that the soul was now free of this yucky world of
matter for good. But the Jews were famously different. They didn't
hate the body. They knew that if God created us with bodies, then
God meant for us to be part of the material world. That wasn't a
punishment or a mistake; that was a blessing. The world may be
running down and falling apart, it may be fraying at the seams from
the force of sin, but they had hope that the God who made it was the
God who'd restore it – and them. Mainstream Jews rejected the idea
of death having the last word in its age-old argument with the
goodness of creation.
So the Jews
didn't cremate. They buried bodies intact, putting them in tombs,
saving them as a witness that God isn't done with them and that
they'd live again. It wasn't because they believed that God couldn't
raise a person from ashes as easily as from bones; it's because
burying the bones was a better testimony to their hope of
resurrection. Even in how they treated their dead, they were
determined to make a clear witness to each other and the world,
clinging to the confession of their hope. As Daniel said, those
sleeping in earth's dust will wake up, though not all with the same
outcome: “some to everlasting life, and some to shame and
everlasting contempt”, and “those who are wise shall shine like
the brightness of the sky” (Daniel 12:2-3). Jesus himself said
that, when the appointed time rolls around, he himself will raise all
the dead, and they'll come out of their graves, “those who have
done good, to the resurrection of life; and those who have done evil,
to the resurrection of condemnation” (John 5:29). On that day,
“the sea [will give] up the dead that are in it, Death and Hades
[will give] up the dead that were in them, and all [will be] judged
according to what they had done”, whether living according to faith
or else according to sin (Revelation 20:13).
In a lot of
our hymns, we have a very Greek idea of heaven as our ultimate goal.
And it's partly because the Bible really does talk about the spirits
of believers being in the presence of Jesus once we die. But that
isn't even close to the end of what the Bible sets forth. If it
were, why does the Bible even bother to talk about a “new earth”?
What's the point of it? If our 'going-to-heaven' theology can't see
a place for a new earth in the end, then our beliefs fall too far
short of the Bible. The real biblical hope isn't represented in
terms of 'heaven'; it's described through the grand symbol of the New
Jerusalem, a city and a garden, the perfection of the church into a
new civilization. But where is this civilization? Is it in the
clouds? Is it in another universe? Is it beyond space and time?
What does the Bible actually
say?
John
writes, “I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). An angelic guide, he said again (in case we missed it),
“showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming
down out of heaven
from God” (Revelation 21:10). The point isn't going to heaven; the
point is that what's now stored up in heaven will come here: “Your
kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”
(Matthew 6:10). By the time the Wedding Supper of the Lamb happens,
the Great Feast of Isaiah 25, God's attentions are squarely on the
earth, because the earth will be where God lives: “See, the home of
God is among men, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:3).
The gospel
is not about how to go to heaven. The gospel is about how to live
heavenly life on earth – starting now, but even in the end, the
everlasting age-to-come when the earth finally becomes everything God
ever wanted to make of it. Here's where the resurrected saints will
live – where David will play his harp again, where John the Baptist
will get his head back, where Job will see his Redeemer in the flesh,
where Jeremiah will laugh and smile because his tears and laments are
no more. Here's where the resurrected believers will share the
Wedding Supper of the Lamb with the Lamb himself – here on earth.
Here on
earth is where every City-of-God deed we do will find its fullness.
The earth as such won't be destroyed, tossed into the scrap heap and
replaced; but its old fallen quality will pass away, just as Peter
and John said it would (2 Peter 3:7-13; Revelation 21:1). We have no
license to treat God's handiwork lightly as an inconsequential thing,
as if defiling the earth through careless or cruel stewardship
weren't a sin. Every act of caring love for the earth God made will
be perfected in the new creation. We have no license to hold back
our witness from impacting society. Every stand against oppression
or ungodliness will be honored in the new creation, a building block
in a strong city, made firm as we answer the resolute call of our
God.
When it
comes to this new city, Isaiah describes it as having salvation for
its walls (Isaiah 26:1). In a later oracle, he makes clear that this
has to be “the City of the LORD,
the Zion of the Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 60:14), where “you
shall call your walls 'Salvation' and your gates 'Praise'” (Isaiah 60:18). Without walls, a city is defenseless, which is why the
psalmist prayed, “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; rebuild
the walls of Jerusalem” (Psalm 51:18). This strong city isn't the
ruined Zion of the exile, where “the wall of Jerusalem is broken
down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire” (Nehemiah 1:3).
This is the real City of God, the one that “God establishes
forever” (Psalm 48:8), with the salvation Jesus offers as the sure
promise that “this is God, our God forever and ever” (Psalm 48:14). “With salvation's walls surrounded”, we can trust in
Jesus our LORD forever,
because he is “an everlasting rock” (Isaiah 26:4).
With this
new city, Isaiah says that the gates will be open – so that there
are no boundaries? So that there is no truth? No, “open the
gates, so that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in”
(Isaiah 26:2). But surely that's just an Old Testament idea,
replaced by a New Testament that's only inclusive and only affirming?
After all, when John describes the New Jerusalem, he says that “its
gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there”
(Revelation 21:25). So the gates are always open! But just the
same, John says, “nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who
practices abomination and falsehood, but only those who are written
in the Lamb's book of life” (Revelation 21:27).
It's only
those who have their robes washed clean who get “the right to the
tree of life” and who “may enter the city by the gates”
(Revelation 22:14). And John urges that it's those who hold fast to
the gospel witness of faith, holiness, and love, even through all the
opposition that cultural forces can bring – those are the people
who, passing through the great ordeal, “have washed their robes and
made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). It's
those who overcome whom Jesus promises, “You will be clothed like
them in white robes, and I will not blot your name out of the book of
life” (Revelation 3:5). The opposite are those who remain outside
the city, prevented by the resistance of their own sin from entering
it: “Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and fornicators and
murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices
falsehood” (Revelation 22:15).
We may not
like the sound of that. It may not fit an age where sin-affirming
'tolerance' (falsely so-called) is the buzzword on the streets and
the idol to which law and mass media demand we bow, an idol so
precious as to justify, in the minds of many, forcible coercion
contrary to conscience – and without bowing to it and being marked
as idol-compliant, no one can earn a livelihood, “no one can buy or
sell who does not have the mark” (Revelation 13:17). It's a subtle
thing, one even many in the church deny or dismiss if they aren't
vigilant: “Discipline yourselves, keep alert” (1 Peter 5:8).
It's only those who don't worship the Beast who can “share in the
first resurrection” (Revelation 20:4-6). Bowing to idols isn't
Christ-like love; it's just idolatry, because
love “does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6).
People left
outside the gates may not fit the ideals of an age where one of the
most popular Bible verses even on Christian lips is, “Judge not,
that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1) – true in its context, a
sermon against hypocrisy (Matthew 7:3-5), but often stripped of that context to
justify ignoring the rest of the Bible's picture, like Jesus's other
statement, “Don't judge by appearances, but do judge with right
judgment” (John 7:24), or Paul's affirmation that we have to judge
sin within the church through properly executed church discipline (1 Corinthians 5:12), or Paul's inspired promise that “the saints will
judge the world” (1 Corinthians 6:2). We aren't called to condemn,
but we are called to have open eyes to see whether something accords
with God's wisdom or not. And especially within the visible church
itself, among those who profess to belong to the family of God, we're
told not to extend the right hand of fellowship to those who live
unrepentant lives of immorality, greed, theft, indulgence, hostility,
or idolatry (1 Corinthians 5:11). And yet so often we ask, “Who am
I to judge?” But if we'll even judge angels, how much more are we
equipped to compare actions and attitudes to to the word of God, as
Paul said (1 Corinthians 6:3)? And we serve “God the judge of all”
(Hebrews 12:23), both in the church and outside the church (1 Corinthians 6:13). Pointing to his revealed wisdom on how to live
should be an act of love, if
we carry it out with a loving heart and if
we remember, as G. K. Chesterton once
said, that:
The
one really strong case for Christianity is that even those who
condemn sins have to confess them. It is a good principle for
Pharisees that he who is without sin should cast the first stone.
But it is the good principle for Christians that he who casts the
first stone should declare that he is not without sin. The criminal
may or may not plead guilty. But the judge should always plead
guilty.
Jesus was
hard on the Pharisees, because of all the Jewish groups in his day,
they were the closest to the message he brought. The Sadducees, the
Herodians, the Essenes, the Zealots – they were way off the mark.
The Pharisees said many of the right things, but they had the wrong
heart and, because of that, they didn't follow through with even
their own message: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on the seat
of Moses; therefore, do whatever they teach you, and follow it; but
don't do as they do, for they don't practice what they teach”
(Matthew 23:2-3). When it came to many sins, Jesus was far more
strict than the Pharisees! But he was also gentle with sinners:
“This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them”, the Pharisees
complained (Luke 15:2) – but where they feared he affirmed sinners
in their sins, Jesus said it was just the opposite: “I have come to
call not the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32).
When we call people to repentance, we should remember that we aren't
without sin; we too must plead guilty (1 John 1:8-10). And if a
sinner is finally left outside the gates, he's outside gates that are
permanently open; the only thing preventing him is his own stubborn
devotion to his own sin.
So why does
the resurrection of Jesus matter? It matters because it makes
possible the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. It matters because it
guarantees our resurrection, the affirmation of God's good creation
and the bodies we have within it. God started resurrection-work with
Jesus, and what God starts, God finishes. It matters because it
justifies our courage in the face of those who can kill the body but
can't kill the soul (Matthew 10:28). It matters because it's the
foundation for the New Jerusalem, our hope of a life better than Eden
– not just a garden, but a city, meaning that every good use of our
gifts and graces will be caught up into it and perfected there. We
ourselves, not just our ancestors or our descendants, have this hope
for “a strong city” (Isaiah 26:1).
And it matters now
because how we choose to respond to Jesus now
will shape our very own destiny then.
If
we say we respond to Jesus in faith, is it a living faith or a dead
faith (James 2:26)? If it's a living faith, then it naturally
answers the apostolic message with the “obedience of faith”
(Romans 16:26). Does this mean that we're saved by works? No, we
don't create our own peace: “O LORD,
you will ordain peace for us, for indeed, all that we've done, you've
done for us” (Isaiah 26:12). We're saved
by
grace
– God did it for us – through
faith
– we trust that God did it for us, and we stick by him – and
we're saved for
works,
which reveal the character of the faith we live and the grace at work
within us (Ephesians 2:8-10). The resurrection of Jesus matters.
Are
we living like it matters? Are we standing firm like it matters?
Are we bearing witness to how it matters, how “we have this hope, a
sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:19) – not a
wish, not an idle dream, but a hope sealed by an unbreakable promise
from the God of Truth – and how “in hope we were saved”, and
“if we hope for what we don't see, we wait for it with patience”
(Romans 8:24-25)? The resurrection is true; Christ is risen; the
Lord of Life is alive, and we will see him alive! And in this truth,
we see the big beauty of God's zeal for his people – for us (Isaiah 26:11). So “let us hold fast” in purity of life and in faithful
witness “to the confession of our hope” – the hope of
resurrection, hope even for dwellers in the dust, the hope of a
strong city, the true Zion of which such glorious things are spoken
(Psalm 87:3) – “let us hold fast to the confession of our hope
without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
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