Isaiah 34-35
The Way of Holiness
A Reckoning Is 34
Restoration vs. 1-
Highway of Holiness vs.
Intro:
Pray for our families: Matt & Mike, Jeri, Robbie & Cara, & Eric & Marina Moore
80's music
The final countdown by Europe
Read Isaiah 34:1-4
Transition:
Isaiah leads us now to the point of personal decision.
He has been showing us God and ourselves with new clarity.
What has Isaiah told us about God? God is our most loyal ally in the struggle of life.
He has made promises to us. He has proven himself already. He deserves to be trusted.
What has Isaiah told us about ourselves? We barely trust God.
God is faithful, but we are guarded. We need to make up our minds.
Are we going to live by faith in God or by faith in ourselves?
Will God save us, or do we have to save ourselves?
God defends us against our ultimate enemy, our own moral guilt.
God treats us in a way that has nothing to do with what we deserve
True salvation is simply God entering into our lives with his grace in Christ to meet all our needs.
And Isaiah has been urging us to treat God as a faithful Savior, so that we look like people who have actually been saved from something.
Then our faith will be convincing.
Chapter 34 shows us what will become of everyone who buys into this world,
Chapter 35 shows us what will become of everyone who banks everything on the promised salvation of God.
Isaiah lifts his eyes from his own times in the eighth century b.c. to see how things will finally end up
The end is coming and the outcome is black and white
The salvation you prefer now, whether earthly or heavenly, is shaping who you are and which direction you will go forever.
You need to understand that Hell or Heaven will be, in one sense, the eternal extension of the deepest, truest you that you become in this life.
So here is the most important question of your existence: What are you becoming?
Whatever you are becoming reveals where you are going
If you are savoring by faith a salvation and fullness from God, you are already on your way to what Isaiah calls Zion in chapter 35.
But if you choose not to live by faith in this world, Isaiah 34 is showing you your future.
A Reckoning Is 34
vs. 1-7 On the People
There is a reckoning coming, a final judgment on the world
A reckoning is a persons calculated judgment to settle matters and make things right
You get the picture of a sheriff with a cowboy hat on taking on the bad guys
In this reckoning God will deal, once and for all, with sin and rebellion
Isaiah now moves us toward closure.
Assyria fades from view, and the prophet addresses the whole world (34:1).
God is going to bring judgment on the world
Many don’t like to hear that, they just want to hear about love
It is not abusive to tell people about the judgment of God. God wants everyone to know.
Francis Schaeffer used to say that if he had one hour to explain the gospel to someone, he would spend the first fifty minutes on the bad news of judgment and then the last ten minutes on the good news of salvation, because without the context of judgment we don’t appreciate or even understand salvation.
We fear the wrong things. We fear looking bad in the eyes of people.
But God actually cares enough about people to tell them about his coming judgment
Ezek 33:11 God says, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?”.
This is for all nations
He has devoted for destruction all of those who haven’t turned to them
Vs. 5 The one nation he does mention is, surprisingly, Edom. Why?
Because Edom typifies the whole world
Edom tried to block the salvation that God was bringing into the world.
Edom, then, is the antithesis to God’s pilgrim people.
The ethos of the Edomite culture is the spirit of the whole world, a spirit that finds its salvation in the resources of this temporal, physical order.
We have to get past Edom to be saved by God.
Vs. 2-8 God will use Four Resources in judgment
First, on that great and final day, the wrath of God will explode upon the world like the bursting of a dam
Vs. 2 For the Lord is enraged against all the nations
God is patient with human evil, more patient than we would be. He is giving everyone a chance.
But his patience will have an end, because he is also just, more just than we are, more just than we wish he would be.
Secondly, Vs. 6 the sword of God will descend from Heaven.
And how can we run from that?
This is always the picture we get of the Lord’s judgment
Jesus sitting on that White horse with his Sword drawn
Thirdly, there will be a final sacrifice.
Vs. 6 For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah
All the moral guilt not paid for by the sacrifice of Christ will be paid for by the guilty themselves
Fourthly, all this terrible finality has actually been scheduled on the calendar of this human history
Vs. 8 For the Lord has a day of vengeance
Judgment without a date is just a warning
God wants all of us to know that there is a final date that is already set
God will not leave things hanging forever. He will vindicate the faith of everyone who trusts him
You can choose not to live by faith in God, but you cannot choose to evade the consequences
“The good life” will turn into an eternally barren desert—that is where God-neglect takes us.
But if you will put your trust in God, your desert will be transformed into a garden.
That is what the grace of God can do (Isaiah 35).
Each one of us is moving in one of these two directions, either into judgment or into salvation.
What God wants is to save you.
God’s Plan of Restoration vs. 1-7
vs. 1-2 Land Restored
The eschatological message of divine judgment in the previous chapter is contrasted with new promises about God’s appearance on earth.
He will marvelously transform the dry earth into fertile ground and the weak and blind into a holy and redeemed people
God will start by restoring the land
This was true in the immediate term, when Judah was restored after the invasion of the Assyrians was turned back.
It is true in the longer term, when modern day Israel has turned the wilderness and the wasteland into productive farms, and truly has made the desert . . . blossom as the rose.
It will be true in the ultimate fulfillment of this prophecy, when God restores the ecology of the world after the end of the great tribulation and the battle of Armageddon (Isaiah 11:6-9).
God starts his renewing work of grace in the desert of our real lives.
A dreary desert is what we are. But God is able to give lush growth and life and joyful song.
Joy pervades chapter 35, because salvation is not just when we stop being bad; salvation is when we delight in God’s glory and majesty.
We should help one another to seek him, to go hard after him, to live as confident people because of his promises
vs. 3-4 The Weak Strengthened
Encouragement is one of the most important ways God spreads his goodness in our direction And he wants us to encourage one another to look for new blessing from God
Heb 12:12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed
God’s great goodness is what puts the thrill into life.
There is more for us in Christ than we have yet apprehended—always
The coming judgment would be enough to make the hands of anyone weak, and knees of anyone feeble.
But in light of the glorious restoration God will bring from that time, it is no time to have weak hands or feeble knees! Get strong and get going!
We use our hands to work with; those with weak hands are not working for the LORD as they should. We use our knees both to progress with and to pray with. Those with feeble knees are not progressing with the LORD and praying as they should.
In our present trials, we need the strong hope of the LORD to overcome our fearful hearts.
Our fearful hearts are not hoped by a vain, vague optimism; they are helped by the assured confidence that He will come and save.
Following Christ, we are never at a dead end, but always at a threshold.
Isaiah is calling us to create that atmosphere of expectancy,
vs. 5-7 Abundance
John 7:38-39 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ ” 39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
Jesus said He would bring this kind of beautiful provision in the lives of His people:
There is no reason for a Christian to endure a “dry time,” not when the miraculous power of Jesus Christ to provide is present.
The word translated parched ground actually means mirage, air reflection, an atmospheric phenomenon frequently seen in Eastern deserts which is caused by the reflection of the hot rays of the sun . . .
It is his professional business to make spiritual cripples into world-beaters. And his motivating power is joy.
We should never give up, no matter what we or others have done.
“The way of man is to make the inhabited uninhabitable; the way of God is to take the barren and make it abundant.”
The Highway of Holiness vs. 8-10
The ESV reads, “they shall obtain gladness and joy.”
But the NIV may be closer to Isaiah’s intent with “gladness and joy will overtake them
Isaiah is saying that, on the one hand, intense joy will come over us.
On the other hand, all our sadness will hightail it forever.
Some people are content with the self-importance and pettiness and materialism of this present evil age.
They fill their bellies, their bank accounts, and their egos with the salvations of this world.
They will go on forever discovering how empty such fullness really is.
There are others whose hearts yearn for something more. They long for God’s salvation.
And they will receive it, not because they deserve it but because Jesus lived and died for them.
And though the pursuit of their joy in Christ may cost them everything here in this world, they don’t mind.
They gladly leave it behind and press on toward a joy that can never end.
Closing:
