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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, let us pray. Blessed Lord, since you have caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may so hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. Through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever.
Read, mark, learn, and my favorite, inwardly digest them. I don’t know if you have pew Bibles. You may want to take them out, but please don’t eat them. You know, the way the lectionary works is you’ve been given assigned texts for each Sunday along the way, and they try to match up the Old Testament reading with the Gospel reading, and sometimes the epistle fits, sometimes not.
But I don’t know if Pastor Wolf Mueller ever feels this way, but there are times where I’m not satisfied with the reading. Not because I think it’s the wrong one, it’s just not enough. Do you ever expand the readings? You know, where there are times where we just need two more verses here. Then we’ve got it.
Well, imagine that with Isaiah, okay? We have Isaiah 55, 10 to 13 for this morning, and I would like to expand it, beginning at chapter 40. Okay, we won’t actually read all of that, but we do need all of that. And today if we are going to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the word that God has so graciously given to us, we need to see where it fits in context.
And though I would guess some of you are very faithful and devoted readers of Isaiah, most of you may not know the overall sort of global structure of the book. I like to think of it as a book written in three movements. Chapters 1 through 39. That’s movement one. That’s a great movement. You get, of course, all of Advent and Christmas rolled up into there. You get O Come O Come Emmanuel from that section. You get the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son. That’s the first movement.
The second movement, chapters 40 through 55, is a different movement. Isaiah is doing something very intentionally different when he gets to chapter 40. The first 39 chapters are a prophecy of the coming Christ to be sure, but they’re also the reality of the idolatry, the destruction, the persecution, the enemy armies and nations that are all around them.
The first 39 chapters come to this close with the threat of Assyria right on the doorstep, ready to destroy the Northern kingdom. Chapter 40 jumps forward 200 years, not actually on the timeline. Isaiah doesn’t live to be 200 plus years old, but he sees the reality following the destruction of the Assyrians, following the destruction of the Babylonians, and he now takes up a sermon to comfort the people that are going to come 200 years from this point.
It’s incredible. It’s all comfort. If you do have Bibles, you could open up to chapter 40 where this section does begin, and you hear that wonderful preaching, “Comfort, comfort ye my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”
This is the preaching of John the Baptist, preparing the way for the Lord in the wilderness. This is him going out and making every valley high and every hill made low, so that there’s a straight way for our Savior to walk on. It’s all comfort. He knows their sin. He knows they have suffered tremendously as a punishment from the hand of God for all of their idolatry, but he comes to tell them, to plead with them, to beg them, “Believe me, I’m coming back and you’re coming with me.” That’s Isaiah 40 to 55.
56 to the end is the third movement, and it’s all of this hope and looking forward to our Lord’s final coming again, the new heavens, the new earth, and the restoration of all things. Isaiah is a great book. You could perhaps sometime invite me back to do a continuing ed on Isaiah. For us, though, in our extended reading, 40 to 55, we’re going to see how our reading for today fits in.
And our reading for today, it’s wonderful, simple, short, it makes sense, all of us get it, we know what the rain is like, we know what the snow is like. Okay, I think I heard last year was your snowpocalypse where you got one and a half inches? I’m a Michigander and that’s what we call August. Okay, the Israelites really didn’t have that much better of an idea of what snow is. It’s in the Scriptures; they know of it.
There’s snow on the tops of the heights in Lebanon and so forth, but really Jerusalem doesn’t get much snow at all. You go a little further south and never, never recorded, just south of there. So the imagery though nevertheless captivates them. They’ve heard of this thing called snow. I spoke with the lady as I was checking out of my hotel this morning. She’s from Jamaica and she said, “Oh, you’re from Fort Wayne? Have you seen snow?” It was great. She had never seen snow. But she knows that it’s white.
It’s pure. The scriptures use that often, though your sins be as scarlet, nevertheless they will be white as snow. This imagery is in their heads, and as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return without having watered the earth and then giving bread to the eater and providing for all of our needs, he says, “So also is my word. My word will not return to me void. It will not come back empty. It does what I sent it to do and it will not fail.”
That word and that purpose, that intention—in fact, the word is delight— it does what I delight. So the will of God is joy, and he sends his word to bring about that joy. He sends his word to bring about that joy for a people that have been exiled from their homes, removed from their community, had their temple destroyed, their access to God cut off, their hymns silenced, and they’re gone. You can imagine that they were a little reticent to believe any preaching of joy.
You can imagine in such a hostile and foreign land where it seemed as if there was no end in sight and no hope to come, it would be hard to believe a preaching of joy. That’s Isaiah 40 through 55. “Comfort, comfort ye my people.”
Now, I want to very quickly—we’re not going to cover the whole thing—but I do want to look at a couple of places where we see this repeated throughout Isaiah, and one that comes in a very strange way is in chapter 44. In chapter 44, again, he’s pleading for them, “Sing, O heavens. The Lord has done it, shout, O depths of the earth, break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest and every green tree in it.”
That language of calling all of creation to join and in fact perhaps lead the praises of the people is what we get also in our reading today. Instead of the briars, you get this myrtle; instead of the wasteland, you get a fruitful earth. He’s pleading with all of creation.
“Thus says the Lord your Redeemer who formed you from the womb. I am the Lord who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself, who frustrates the signs of the liars and makes fools of diviners, who turns wise men back, who confirms the word of his servant and fulfills the counsel of his messengers, who says to Jerusalem, ‘She shall be inhabited.’ And of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be built, and I will raise up their ruins.’ Who says to the deep, ‘Be dry,’ and I dry up your rivers.”
And then get this, “who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd; he shall fulfill all my purpose.'” King Cyrus, the Persian king, who by an edict in 539—which if you notice at least in your bulletin it says a rough dating of when Isaiah preached this around 680. 539 is when Cyrus offers the edict to allow the Israelites to go back from Babylon to their home, to reconstruct their cities, their homes, and above all their temple.
That’s at least a hundred and fifty years after Isaiah wrote this, and he calls the guy out by name. It’s beautiful. And this Cyrus, this foreign king, is to be his, the Lord’s, shepherd. And he’s the one that he will use, as he says right here, to fulfill all my purpose. Again, to bring about my delight, my joy, the habitation of my city with my people gathered back to me. That’s our Lord’s desire.
One other chapter, 46, he says, “Remember this and stand firm. Call it to mind, all you transgressors. Remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God. There’s none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand and I will accomplish all my purpose. I have spoken. I will bring it to pass. I have purposed. I will do it.'”
Can you hear our Lord pleading, begging, urging you, “Please just believe me”? It’s this; you see his heart coming out after you. “Believe me, I’ll do it.” And you’re left wondering, well how? How are you gonna possibly bring me back? How are you gonna make all things new? How are you gonna restore me and my people back to you?
He says, “I’ve got an idea.” You know this part of Isaiah 40 to 55 very well. It’s the climax of the suffering servant songs. The servants, as it says, “Surely has borne our griefs, carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” This is the answer, and just to make it abundantly clear, at the end of that servant song, Isaiah 53, yet it was the will, again that same word, purpose, pleasure, was the delight of the Lord to crush him, to put him to grief.
“When his soul made an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.” That’s our Good Friday reading, that passage from Isaiah, all of the suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Isaiah is saying, “That’s how I’m gonna do it.” It’s through the death and resurrection of this Lord Jesus Christ that the will of God will be accomplished and you will be delivered and all of us brought back into his kingdom.
This is his great delight. This is His Word. So let us hear His Word. Read, mark, learn, and now in just a moment inwardly digest His Word. For that Word that came down from heaven like the rain and like the snow and does not return void, it does not go back to the Father without having accomplished all of His will, the forgiveness of all of your sins and the restoration of all of you back into the Father’s face and his presence.
To do so, he says here, “Take and eat. Drink of it, all of you. This is my body. This is my blood. This is the Word made flesh for you.” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
