You will need some background and interpretation in order for you to appreciate the Scripture I’m working from today. Let me first set the stage of history, and then, as we read through, I’ll try to show you the shape of what is being said.
The time in which this reading from the 41st chapter of Isaiah is set is around 541 B.C. On the world scene, only a half-century before, a world power known as Babylon had conquered the little nation of Judah and had decimated Jerusalem, taking most of its people into exile.
Judah went through at that time a spiritual crisis as well as a political and military crisis. Not only had the nation lost its leaders, not only had the people lost their independence and their identity; but Judah wondered if God also was lost. Had not God promised an everlasting covenant? Had not God promised that Jerusalem would never be destroyed? Had not God promised a bushel basket full of things that now seemed to be lost?
You see, in times of personal crisis and of national crisis, faith often falters. People facing the worst think there is no God, and that even if there is, He is useless.
And so Judah, in the middle of the sixth century before Christ, was a demoralized nation.
But two things happened to change the picture. Two personalities came on the scene to make a difference. One of them was a warrior king, and the other a prophet.
One of these men is Cyrus, king first of a little place called Anshan, then lord of Media, a little later conqueror of Lydia, and at last victor over Babylon. Cyrus, the creator of the Persian Empire, marched with enormous speed across the Middle East, creating fear wherever he turned. He even put the strangle hold on mighty Babylon.
The other personality to be reckoned within this changing world of 25 centuries ago is one whose name we do not actually know. The Bible scholars call him Deutero-Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah is a fancy way of saying the second Isaiah. He is the prophet whose writings are contained in chapters 40 through 55 of what we call the book of Isaiah. But we do know that this prophet, whatever his name was, is not Isaiah himself; he prophesied later than the original Isaiah. And so, for want of anything better to call him, we name him Deutero-Isaiah.
Deutero-Isaiah is important because he becomes an interpreter of Judah’s problems. He speaks to the exiles and interprets for them what is going on. In fact, Deutero-Isaiah, more than any other prophet, seems to see into the heart of God and God’ s desire to redeem His people. And so as we come to this chapter of his book, Deutero-Isaiah is interpreting for frightened hearts the meaning of this conquering hero called Cyrus. Here in this passage and several others like it these two dominant personalities come together, Deutero-Isaiah the prophet interpreting Cyrus the warrior king.
Let’s look at the text:
First, the prophet Deutero-Isaiah asks you to imagine all the nations of the world gathered in front of the judgment seat of God. In the light of the victories of Cyrus of Persia, whom he calls a victor from the east, just who do they think is responsible? Who has caused this sudden tremendous interruption in the balance of power? That’s the key question.
Isaiah 41: 1-4a
Who has done this? Who has brought about the victories of Cyrus? The question is answered promptly, but in an astonishing way:
Isaiah 41: 4b It’s an astounding claim. The Lord says that he is behind the success of Cyrus! Somehow we are to believe that the holy God of Israel has empowered this pagan princeling in his success! That’s pretty hard to swallow!
"I, the Lord, am first, and will be with the last.” The first and the last; the Alpha and the Omega. God seems to be involved with evil.
Now the prophet asks you to eavesdrop on all these nations. What are they going to do’? They’ve got a problem on their hands. This Cyrus fellow is out for blood, and he is succeeding. What are we going to do? Deutero-Isaiah imagines the nations trying to encourage one another and to work harder than ever before on building their idols … notice, their idols.
Isaiah 41:5-7
In other words, folks, we have a problem and his name is Cyrus of Persia. What are we going to do? We will fall back on the things we’ve made with our hands. We will improve our idol-making and see if that won’t work! Let’s make more gods and make them better. Whistling in the dark.
So now Deutero-Isaiah speaks to God’s people. Now he turns to those who are the chosen of God but are in exile, waiting and hoping against hope that they will be free. These are words which drive us past conflict, past war; they drive us past all the military strategies and point us to the God who is lord of history:
Isaiah 41:8-13. "You are my servant, my chosen … do not fear, I will help you"
The fabric of the world’s history was about to be changed, and changed rapidly. Men and women would go to bed one night in one world, and wake up the next morning to find that world in flames and a new one emerging, although its shape was by no means clear.
The one thing those who looked deeply had to know was that they could never go back to the way things were. War was changing it all. The shape, the map of the world, was being redrawn, all because of the wasteful warfare waged by willful warriors from the east.
It is a Sunday morning, the seventh of December, 1941. Striding across the face of Europe there has been a conqueror before whose armor and armies several nations have fallen. It looks as though Hitler is about to make Britain his next and most significant conquest.
Across the eastern world spreads another menace, the imperialism calling itself the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the imperialism of a Japan needing petroleum, hungry for natural resources, struggling for food. China was falling, Indochina and the East Indies had gone; and now, on this calm Sabbath morning, the silence of Pearl Harbor was forever destroyed by scores of planes bombing the American fleet and its arsenals.
Some of you can remember. Some of you are old enough to recall where you were and what you were doing when you heard. At least one of you has told me of being in worship at another Baptist church in southeast Washington. Near the close of the service, word came. A congregation was driven to its knees. I feel confident that many others fell to their knees as well. A day that will live in infamy, a day in which thousands lost their lives and which ushered this nation into a great war taking millions of lives and uncounted costs in money and misery.
Great God, why? Why? Did you ask that question then? And do you not ask it now?
I turn again to Deutero-Isaiah’s answers. I turn to them not just as an exercise in history, talking about what happened 25 centuries ago nor what happened a half-century ago. I turn to these as a word of God for today, for 1991.
The sun rose over the mountains of Persia in 541 B.C. and displayed a whole new frightening and uncertain world scarred by war. The sun rose over Diamond Head in 1941 A. D., and displayed the torture and the torment of a world plunging into the storms of war. And, my friends, the sun rises over the horizon today, in 1991, and gives us a glimpse at a world in which enormous changes are coming. We are summoned to be a part of yet another new world. Where is God in all of this’? And what is God’s promise?
I
First, remember that a God of love, though He desires the death of no one, will be involved in the outcome of war. He will use war as a wakeup call for His people. A God of love may seem to be contradicted and defeated in a warlike world. But He is first and last, and He uses war for His purposes.
The atrocities and the pain of the Second World War defy description. If even with my poor powers to describe I were to repeat a mere one-thousandth of all that happened, we would go home sick to our stomachs. Anyone who peers into the waters of Pearl Harbor and views the ghostly outline of the USS Arizona, the grave of more than 1100 sailors; anyone who can call the names of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau and Treblinka and can see the trenches filled with Jewish bodies; and indeed anyone who has ever seen the pictures drawn by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki …anyone, I say, who knows anything of these events must surely have wondered where God could have been.
Said the playwright, speaking what a lot of us are afraid to say out loud, but we do feel it, "If God is God, He is not good; if. God is good, He is not God." It is natural, in such a time, to wonder if there is a God, and if so, if He is just useless.
But wonderfully, mysteriously, the prophet of twenty-five centuries ago insists that God is involved. God is involved. God uses the horror of war. "Who has roused a victor from the east …delivering up nations to him? …Who has performed and done this? …I, the Lord, am first, and will be with the last." "I the Lord am first, and will be with the last.” I was there when you began and I will be there at the outcome.
I know that this is a difficult concept to grasp. It is not easy to think this way. But I have to believe that the changes which are occurring even today are not accidents. They are not without meaning. I have to believe that in ways neither you nor I are wise enough to understand, our God has been at work in wars both hot and cold to bring about His purpose.
A God of love, though He desires the death of no one, will be involved in the outcome of war and will use war as a wakeup call for His people.
II
But, next, God’s prophet shows us that men and nations, in times of stress, always make the mistake of falling back on their idols. When we get into trouble, we choose to rely on false gods. We trust in the protections we can make with our hands.
With biting sarcasm, Deutero-Isaiah ridicules the idol-makers. “The artisan encourages the goldsmith, and the one who smoothes with the hammer encourages the one who strikes the anvil, saying of the soldering, ’It is good’; and they fasten it with nails so that it cannot be moved.” The picture is of people who think that they can make things that will protect them against the powers of destruction. The things they make are idols; they are false gods.
After Pearl Harbor we as a nation said that we would never be caught unprepared again. Well and good. But then what happened after the war? We got scared and stayed scared. And we began to make things to protect ourselves. We built bomb shelters, we stored up civil defense supplies, we stockpiled nuclear warheads, we dug missiles into silos, we debated how to deploy star wars.
We even permitted a United States senator to look for Communists in every nook and cranny, in every classroom and pulpit. We made a whole lot of idols. What expenses we went to as a nation in order to secure the peace! We made friends with every cheap and repressive dictator we could find, just because he was anti-communist. And instead of healing unrest with the weapons of compassion, because we were afraid, we armed the oppressors with millions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons and, as an afterthought, sent a pittance in food and medical supplies.
We speak of the 7th of December as a day of infamy and treachery, and so it was. But I tell you that in the years which followed, there were many more such days, less spectacular but nonetheless treacherous. We thought we had built things, things that couldn’t be moved, to take care of ourselves. And a God of judgment, who is first and last, who is involved in men and nations, that God we ignored.
In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble when I think that God is just.”
Men and nations, in times of stress, always make the mistake of falling back on their idols.
III
But now hear the good news. Hear the word of the Lord for us and for our time.
This great prophet, the second Isaiah, sings out: we must not fear, we must not falter, we must not fail, for God is with us. God upholds us. And we must, no matter how bleak the times, keep on keeping on, in faithfulness. Why? Because God is with us and has a task for us.
"You, my servant … whom I have chosen … you whom I took from the ends of the earth … I have chosen you and not cast you off; do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you,
I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand."
The world has been changed dramatically since Pearl Harbor. But this past year has been the most dramatic. Old barriers have come down. Everywhere there is a breath of fresh air. And yet there are dangers, too. The breakdown of the Soviet Union might mean not just one evil empire with whom we have to deal, but some fifteen powder kegs set to explode.
The temptation will be to rely on diplomacy. The temptation will be to do things in the old strong-arm ways. The temptation will be to forget God’s way of compassion. Suppose, just suppose, that we were to feed the millions of Russia this winter; suppose we were to use the resources that God has given us to share, brother-to-brother and sister-to-sister. Suppose we were to set aside our fears and feed the hungry. Would that not tell the world that we have finally learned that God is with us and that we trust Him to uphold us?
I speak of unprecedented opportunities. I want to put in a plea for the foreign missions enterprise right here. I want to encourage us to regain our interest in missions.
I just wonder how the course of history might have been changed if Christians had taken seriously the call to missions and had been more thorough in our missionary efforts in Japan? Yes, I know that it is a difficult culture to penetrate; and yes, I know that the Christian faith had been present in Germany and the other Axis powers for a very long time, and that they still became aggressors. But I cannot help but feel that if there had been a stronger and more authentic Christian faith in those countries, the ugly specter of militarism might have been stopped. I cannot help but feel that things might have been very, very different.
What I am saying? I’m saying that I do not trust in armaments to win the peace; I do not trust in diplomacy to keep the peace; I do not believe that mere politics as usual will create a peaceful world. Peace has to begin in the human heart; peace has to come from men and women who have been touched by Christ.
I trust no arms, I trust no treaties, I trust no politicians for peace. I trust only in a God who is with us, a God who is Emmanuel. I trust only and finally in the one who is the Lord, first and last, Alpha and Omega, lord of history. And if He is promising to be with us, if he is promising victory, then I believe that in working and giving and going for missions we will do more than all the arms and all the treaties and all the perestroikas ever devised.
"You I have chosen … do not fear, I will help you", says the Lord.
And let me come closer to home. I believe that in this Advent 1991 we have been given, in our own neighborhoods, an unprecedented opportunity to claim this promise of God. We as God’s chosen people have been handed this moment as one in which we can claim the presence of God, with us.
You see, we are still living on a war footing. We are still in a war zone. Several people have used the phrase "war zone" lately. They are not talking about Pearl Harbor or about the Normandy beachhead. They are talking about Washington and Silver Spring; they are talking about Takoma and Brightwood and Petworth, our neighborhoods. They are speaking of drug dealers and drive-by shootings and witness assassinations.
Our temptation is to ask where God is, not seeing that He is trying to wake us up; and then our temptation is to get a gun and put bars on the windows and either stay in the house or start looking for a home in some suburban dreamland. In other words, our temptation is to make an idol.
But God says, "You … I have chosen …I have called you … do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be afraid, for I am your God." And if we will seize the opportunity to fight this crime thing with evangelism, with ministry, with attention to our youth and care for the children, with sacrificial love for this community, then God says, "I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand."
We must not fear; we must not falter; we must not fail. We must just keep on keeping on being church, being Christian, being faithful. We must keep on keeping on, as God does, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Onega. We must know who we are and what we are called to be doing. Above all, we must remember in this Advent season that the Lord Christ came to this earth, to this war zone, to give His life a ransom for many. We must never, never lose sight that He is Emmanuel, God with us. "I the Lord am first, and will be with you at the last."
And if there is pain today; if there are hardships; if it seems to cost us an awful lot to witness and to give and to work and to serve, then remember that this Christ promises a new heaven and a new earth. “ … and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more …It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end."
"And His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. And of the increase of His government and of peace … and of peace … there shall be no end."
Keeping on keeping on.
