How many of you have had the experience of praying to God and it seems like God is not listening or not answering your prayer? All of us, I would suspect. Sadly, I’ve seen that take people out of the faith. God didn’t answer their prayers so they either turned their back on God or concluded that there was no God at all. Their disappointment and anger are understandable at a basic level. Their prayers may be asking God to change some unbearable situation or is a plea for help or to be cured of some disease. Their unanswered prayers may have been for someone else, someone they loved very dearly.
Ted Turner, the founder of CNN and TBN, was very religious growing up and wanted to be a missionary when he got old enough. When Ted was fifteen, his 12-year-old sister, Mary Jane, became very ill with systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease in which the immune system attacks the body’s tissue. She was racked with pain and constantly vomiting, and her screams filled the house. Ted regularly came home after school and held her hand, trying to comfort her. He prayed fervently for her recovery; she prayed to die. She finally died after years of misery. Ted lost his faith. “I was taught that God was love and God was powerful,” he says, “and I couldn’t understand how someone so innocent should be made or allowed to suffer so” (www.exminister.org/ted-turner.html).
Imagine being born into servitude and deprivation. You work for your harsh masters and overlords from sun-up to sun down until you literally drop dead of exhaustion, poor health, old age … or a combination of all three. You pray to God your whole life and … nothing. This was the plight for 10 generations of Hebrew slaves in the land of Egypt … whole generations crying out to God to deliver them … and when He does, He sends an 80-year-old fugitive with a speech impediment. Safe to say, it probably wasn’t the way that they expected God to answer their prayers, amen?
God answered His people prayers then and He answered their prayers during one of the darkest periods of their history … again, a time of terrible tragedy, a time of exile and servitude to the Babylonians. Unlike their time in Egypt, which lasted for 400 years, their captivity only lasted for 70 years. Those who had been led off into captivity would never return to Israel. Those who were born in captivity would return to what was left of their once great nation. The Babylonians had reduced Jerusalem to a pile of rubble and that is basically what the Jewish survivors of the diaspora or exile found when they got home. There were no city walls … no Temple … no central or organized government … no obvious leadership … no justice. Violence and poverty were rampant. And it is in this moment of deep, dark despair … where the people’s faith is being tested and challenged and they are right at the point of either clinging to God or abandoning God … that the Prophet Isaiah choose to speak of hope.
Please take your “Owner’s Manual” and turn to chapter 59 in the Book of Isaiah. The entire chapter is broken into four sections. The first section begins by addressing the charge that God is either ignoring their prayers or is incapable of answer them. “See, the LORD’s hand is not too short to save, nor His ear too dull to hear” (Isaiah 59:1). In verses 2 through 8, Isaiah shifts the blame from God to the people themselves. “Rather, YOUR iniquities” …. not God’s shortcomings … “have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, you tongue mutters wickedness. No one brings suit justly, no one goes to law honestly” (Isaiah 50:2-4). Remember, Jerusalem had been reduced to rubble and the land had become a violent and lawless place.
When Israel confesses its sins … when they admit their transgressions before God in verses 9 through 15 … God makes them a promise. He puts on the “Armor of God” … the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation. He wraps Himself in garments of vengeance and fury … and comes to Zion “like a pent-up stream that the wind of the LORD drives on” (Isaiah 59:19) to redeem and restore them … and He keeps His word.
We’re no different today, are we? When life isn’t working … when we’re disappointed or suffering in some way … when our comfort and ease are interrupted … who do we tend to blame for our situation? We blame God. We bring Him into court and we make Him stand before the bench and we question His faithfulness, we question His goodness, we question His wisdom, we question His love. “Where are You, God? Aren’t You supposed to be listening for my prayers? I’ve been praying and praying … nothing. What gives, God? Are You so far away that You can’t hear my prayers or are You just ignoring them?”
When this happens, our doubts begin to erode our faith, and when our faith begins to erode, so does our hope. Why would you turn to God if you question His wisdom? Why would you turn to God if you questioned His goodness? Why would you turn to God if you question His faithfulness, His righteousness? When this happens, it is not God who is far away, it is not God who is turning His back on us but us moving away from God and turning our backs on Him, like Ted Turner, like the Israelites had done.
At the very beginning of chapter 59, God gives us hope. No matter how far we move from God, His arms are long enough to reach us and His ears are able to hear us. Our love, He points out, is what the real problem is … what’s really standing between Him and us. “Rather,” says God, “YOUR iniquities have been barriers between you and your God” (Isaiah 59:2; emphasis mine). We haven’t been speaking to God’s back, He’s been speaking to ours. We are the ones whose faith doesn’t reach, whose faith has grown dull and weary.
God’s judgment in verses 3 through 8 is painful … but it is given in love. He points out the things that have become a barrier between Him and us. If there is a problem … if we’re feeling some sort of disconnect … we need to know what it is if we’re going to fix it, amen? God points them out for our sake. God points them out because He knows that fixing those problems will fix our broken relationship with Him and will draw us closer to the Source … with a capital “S” … of our hope and our strength. In His love for us, however, He does more than just point out the problems that stand between us Him. He doesn’t just point out our sins and then watch and wait for us to fix them. What He does is put on His armor and He helps us to remove the obstacles. We can’t and we won’t ask God or let God help us if we don’t know what the obstacles are or, as Ted Turner or the Israelites have been doing, believe that God is blind, insensitive, or indifferent to our problems. Why would we turn to God if we believe that He is the source of our problems or doesn’t care about our problems or our suffering, amen? You can see how subtle and corrosive our lack of faith can be, amen? It eats away at our relationship with God and can eventually lead to hopelessness.
When one of our relationships goes south, who do we tend to automatically blame? The other person, of course! Right? “I” certainly had nothing do with the break-up, right? All my problems are happening to me, right? There’s no way that I brought any of this on myself or that I could be the source of most of my problems, am I right? Am I the only one who has this problem? I don’t think so. We do this because the truth is often pretty hard to take … that, in fact, I had something to do with the mess that I’ve gotten myself into or am the source of my own suffering. As the saying goes, when I point at you [point … then turn my hand so they can see my other fingers] three fingers are pointing back at me.
Now, clearly, not all my problems are my fault. I live in a fallen, broken world full of fallen, broken people. There are disasters like the condo collapse in Florida. There is disease, horrible diseases like the one that killed Ted Turner’s sister. We grow older. Our bodies begin to fail us … no matter how healthy we eat or how well we take care of ourselves, amen? Life happens, as the saying goes … but if you try to live life without God … or you believe that you live life in the hands of an angry or indifferent God … if you don’t want to have anything to do with God because you believe that God doesn’t want to have anything to do with you …the universe, my friends, becomes a very big, scary, lonely, hopeless place, amen?
You know what the best thing is about blaming God for all my problems? He’s usually silent. He usually doesn’t show up to defend Himself … and I get to play the “victim card.” I mean, if all my problems or most of my problems are the result of God picking on me, what chance do I have against the All-Power, All-Mighty God of the Universe? As a victim of God and life, I absolve myself of any responsibility and I have given myself permission to drive everyone around me, including God, crazy with my pathetic whining. The downside is that I have convinced myself that I am helpless and therefore absolutely hopeless … and that’s a pretty awful way to live, amen?
The Hebrew people were without hope when Moses appeared … and they whined and grumbled all the way to the Promised Land … alternating between blaming Moses and blaming God for their troubles. The Israelites were without hope when they lived as captives in Babylon. The Bible says that they returned to Israel singing and praising God until they got to Jerusalem and saw the extent of the challenges that they faced and were overwhelmed … and then, like all of us … began pointing fingers and placing blame … including blaming God … accusing Him of being distant and indifferent to their plight.
Here’s the beautiful part. You ready for this? The returning Babylonian captives accuse God of having short arms and dull ears but when He does answer their prayers, it’s not at all what they expected … just as Moses seemed like the least likely savior God could have possibly sent, amen? I’m not sure what they expected … maybe for God to send them silver and gold or an army of architects and city planners to rebuild their city … or raise up righteous civic leaders out the rubble. Instead, God points out that it is they who have hidden their face from Him. It is they who have deaf ears. It is they who have turned a blind eye to the violence, the lawlessness, the corruption that has been going on all around them … some even “running to evil” … who have spoken lies, muttered wickedness, and are part of creating a society or an environment where Justice and Righteousness stand at a distance and Truth stumbles in the public square … and no one knows peace.
It’s a painful moment for the people of Israel. It is a painful moment for all of us when God holds up the mirror and we see what we’ve become, when we see the truth of ourselves, and we realize just how lost and far from God we have gotten. “Therefore justice is far from us, and righteous does not reach us” … 180 degrees from verse 1, where they accuse God of being far too far from them. “We grope like the blind along a wall … we stumble at noon as in the twilight” (Isaiah 59:10). They stumble at noon, the brightest time of the day when the sun is directly overhead and yet they growl like bears and moan like doves as they pray for light to pierce their gloom and darkness. “Our transgressions indeed are with us, and we know our iniquities: transgressing, and denying the LORD and turning away from following our God, talking oppression and revolt, conceiving lying words and uttering them from the heart” (Isaiah 59:12-13).
A very painful moment … yes! And a very beautiful moment too! You see, the doorway to hope is … hopelessness. I know, I know … that sounds weird … illogical … but hear me out.
The irony of their confession is they are seeing themselves more clearly at this moment than they had for a very long time. They are no longer living in darkness. They are no longer groping along the wall. God has pierced their darkness and opened their eyes to the painful truth … that the problem lies not with God but with them … which then leads to hope. If God is the problem … if life is the problem … then there is nothing we can do and we are truly hopeless. But when we reach that point … when we clearly see that the problem lies with us and not God, guess what? We can then turn to God, realizing that He was always ready to put on His armor and come to our rescue.
Unfortunately, we usually have to exhaust all our options. Like the returning Israelites, we put our trust in institutions … like the courts, the government, science, academia … and only turn to God when these institutions made up of broken, fallen people fail us … as they did the Israelites. Only then do we, we like them, finally turn to God and realize that He is our only hope. It’s so sad, isn’t it, that so many of us will turn to God only as a last resort, only when we have exhausted every other option?
In some way, God does the same thing. He waits to see how we will respond. He gives us a chance to learn from our mistakes … to figure out where we have gone wrong … to see the errors of our ways … so that we can step up and do the right thing. “The LORD saw it” … the situation that the Israelites were in … that “truth was lacking … and it displeased Him that there was no justice” (Isaiah 59:15). He was displeased because of the situation or the conditions that they were living in and He was displeased that they had let it get so bad. He “was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so His own arm brought Him victory” (Isaiah 59:16) … victory over a battle that didn’t need to be fought if everyone were just and honest … “and His righteousness upheld Him” (Isaiah 59:16) … just as His righteousness will uphold us and gives us the wisdom and strength to do the right thing.
Let’s be honest here. We don’t usually have to pray and ask God what the right thing to do is, do we? We usually know, am I right? The Israelites knew that telling the truth is better than telling lies. They knew that the law was meant to bring about justice and not be manipulated and used for personal gain at the expense of their neighbors and fellow citizens. They knew that it was sin to “run to evil” or to “shed innocent blood” (Isaiah 59:7). Does anyone here NOT know that the things that God was accusing them of was wrong? They weren’t as blind to the truth or righteousness as they claimed to be … and neither are we. The problem is that we want to do our own thing and then get upset when things go horrible awry … and then we cry and beg for God to come fix it … and He does … but not always in the way or ways that we expect, however.
Hopelessness is the doorway to hope. Unable to rescue themselves from the hopeless situation that they had inherited and made worse, God put on His breastplate of righteousness, His helmet of salvation, girded Himself for battle and He swept through the region from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea like a river busting through a dam and repaid the wrath of His adversaries and requital to His enemies according to their deeds (Isaiah 59:17-18).
At the end of the Old Testament, the LORD once again fell silent for 400 years. For 400 years the children of Israel prayed for a Savior, a Redeemer, a Deliver … and God answered their prayers … only this time, He own arm … Jesus Christ … the “true light” … came into our gloom like the noon day sun. Instead of wearing garments of vengeance and wrapping Himself in a mantle of fury, He clothed Himself with flesh and wrapped Himself with the Spirit of the Sovereign Lord to proclaim good news to the poor … to bind up the brokenhearted … to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners … to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God … to comfort all who mourn … and provide for those who grieve in Zion … to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes … the oil of joy instead of mourning … and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair (Isaiah 61:1-3). And out of the ashes of our despair, He came to give us hope.
Now look at verses 18 and 19 again. God is promising them that He is going to punish wrong. He is promising them that He is going to deal with the evil that plagues this world. His promise should bring you terror. His promise should make you afraid. God is very clear. Sin is serious … sin is evil … sin is disastrous … sin is lethal … and because of that, God, who is a moral and righteous God, takes sin seriously … very seriously. God did not look down on the sinful behavior of the Israelites and then tell them: “Hey, look, what you’re doing is okay. It’s okay for you to sin. It’s okay for you to transgress. It’s okay for you to practice iniquity and injustice … so long as you’re happy” … which they clearly were not, amen? Remember, they were praying for God to take away all of the corruption, all of the destruction, all of the pain and suffering that resulted from their sin. They wanted Him to change their circumstances, their situation, but they weren’t looking for Him to change them. And the same could be said about us, amen? We pray for God to change our circumstances, to change our situation, but how often do we pray for Him to change us? Ahh … think about that on your way home.
God’s anger towards sin and His promise to deal with the sin in our lives should be a cause for serious concern … but His promises to deal with the sin in our lives should also bring us comfort and should also bring us hope as well. You see, verse 16, which says that His own arm will bring Him victory and verse 20, which says that He will come to Zion as a Redeemer … notice that “Redeemer” is capitalized … is speaking, in my opinion, about His Son, Jesus, who is the arm of God, His Redeemer with a capital “R” in the flesh, come to redeem His world.
You see, in the 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the world lived in the messiness between “already” and “not yet.” They had already been redeemed from Egypt. They had already received the Law, they already had the words of the prophets, they already had the glory of the LORD living in their midst … but they had “not yet” met and experienced the Messiah. They were living in the messiness of “not yet,” holding on to hope.
That is the Christmas story … the story of “Hope” … “Hope” incarnate … descending from Heaven and living and breathing in our messy, sinful, world. But like our spiritual ancestors, we still live in the messiness between “already” and “not yet.” It seemed like our hope died on the cross but hopeless is the doorway to hope. On the cross, we received both the holy justice of God and the amazing grace of God. On the cross, Jesus took on our sins and satisfied God’s desire for justice. Christ died on the cross so God’s redemption would come “like a pent-up stream that the wind of the Lord” … the Holy Spirit … “drives on” … even to this day.
We live in the messiness between “He has come” and “He will come again,” amen? And when He comes again, we will no longer need hope because the sin and the messiness of this world will be gone. We will no longer place our hope in government, or science, or academia. We will no longer live in a world where we or the people and things that we put our hope in will fail us over and over and over again … which begs the question of why we still keep putting our hope and faith in to these institution and these people and these processes that are utterly unable to curtail or clean up the mess that we keep making of the world, amen?
God’s righteous anger and His holy justice is the hope of the universe. God’s anger with sin and God’s commitment to justice means that He will not rest until sin is defeated forever. He will not relent and He will not quit until very molecule of sin is removed from every cell of heart of every one of His children. As frightening as God’s righteous anger and His desire for justice may be, it is the greatest hope and the greatest comfort that we have, amen? There will come a time when sin will be no more … violence will be no more … evil will be no more … sickness will be no more … suffering will be no more … injustice will be no more … darkness will be no more … war and bloodshed will be no more.
Hopelessness is the doorway to hope and Christ is our doorway to eternal hope. The promise of hope in the future is our hope in the present, amen? But not just any hope … it is hope that comes from the covenant that He made with us … that His Spirit is upon us and the words of His promise … the words that He put in our mouths and in our hearts … will never come out of our mouths or the mouths of our children or our children’s children. In other words, you can put your trust, your faith, and your hope in the promises of God because they will never vanish or disappear. Why put your hope in the things of this world which are here today and gone tomorrow? Put your trust and hope in Someone who is eternal and whose words and promises and love are eternal, amen?
