Isaiah 22
Amen. Turn to Isaiah 22. And as you’re turning there,
be reminded of the fact that in Isaiah so far, we’ve gone
through two rounds of oracles or woes against nations. There
have been about nine nations that have sort of gotten it from
God. Babylon has gotten it twice. Jerusalem, of course, we know
is a rotten nation, a vineyard God planted, but a vineyard of
wild grapes that produce nothing. And remember last week we kind
of jumped ahead and went through 23. We’re going to backtrack
and do tonight, chapter 22, which is a woe against Jerusalem. And
then next week, Lord willing, we will start in chapter 24,
which is maybe a little bit of a new section. So let’s hear
God’s word together. This is Isaiah 22, and it’s the
whole chapter. So it says, the Oracle concerning
the Valley of Vision, and that’s a code for Jerusalem. What do
you mean that you have gone up, all of you, to the housetops,
you who are full of shoutings, tumultuous city, exultant town? Your slain are not slain with
the sword or dead in battle. All your leaders have fled altogether. With the bow they were captured,
or without the bow they were captured. All of you who were
found were captured, though they had fled far away. Therefore
I said, look away from me. Let me weep bitter tears. This is Isaiah speaking. Do not
labor to comfort me concerning the destruction of the daughter
of my people. For the Lord God of hosts has a day of tumult
and trampling and confusion in the valley of vision. a battering
down of walls, and a shouting to the mountains. And Elam bore
the quiver with chariots and horsemen, and Kir uncovered the
shield. Your choicest valleys were full
of chariots, and the horsemen took their stand at gates. He
has taken away the covering of Judah. In that day you looked
to the weapons of the house of the forest, and you saw the breaches
of the city of David were many. You collected the waters of the
lower pool, and you counted the houses of Jerusalem, And you
broke down the houses to fortify the wall. You made a reservoir
between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you
did not look to him who did it or see him who planned it long
ago. In that day, the Lord God of
hosts called for weeping and mourning for baldness and wearing
sackcloth. And behold, joy and gladness,
killing oxen and slaughtering sheep, eating flesh and drinking
wine. Let us eat and drink for tomorrow
we die. The Lord of Hosts has revealed
himself in my ears. Surely this iniquity will not
be atoned for you until you die, says the Lord God of Hosts. Thus
says the Lord God of Hosts, go to the steward, to Shebna, who
is over the household and say to him, what have you to do here
and whom have you here that you have cut out here a tomb for
yourself, you who cut a tomb on the height and carve a dwelling
for yourself in the rock? Behold, the Lord will hurl you
away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold
on you and whirl you around and around and throw you like a ball
into a wide land. There you shall die and there
shall be your glorious chariots. You shame of your master’s house.
I will thrust you from your office and you will be pulled down from
your station. In that day, I will call on my
servant Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. And I will clothe him with your
robe and will bind your sash on him and will commit your authority
to his hand. And he shall be a father to the
inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I
will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He
shall open and none shall shut and he shall shut and none shall
open. And I will fasten him like a
peg in a secure place. and he will become a throne of
honor to his father’s house, and they will hang on him the
whole honor of his father’s house. The offspring and issue every
small vessel from the cups to the flagons. In that day, declares
the Lord of hosts, the peg that was fastened in a secure place
will give way and will be cut down and fall, and the load that
was on it will be cut off. For the Lord has spoken. Amen. Some of y’all probably wonder
what I watch on TV. Lately, it’s a legal show. Those
are of interest to me. And a couple nights ago, there
was a episode where a drunk driver, late in the middle of the night,
hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian obviously was seriously injured
and ultimately died in surgery. And so when the police tracked
down the driver through cameras and license plates and pictures
and all the rest, it turned out the person had diplomatic immunity. It was an 18 year old daughter
of a foreign diplomat. And because we give immunity
to those folks so that we don’t get in trouble on their soil,
they also do not get in trouble on our soil. And so in a rather
interesting twist of the plot, it turns out that the person
with diplomatic immunity was not the one driving, but a witness
saw them switch places. And so the guilty one supposedly
got off scot-free until the extra cameras were looked at. And isn’t
that a picture of sometimes how we think we have immunity? justified by faith. And so we
can send our brains out because God, he can’t punish us. We’re justified in Jesus. We
call that antinomianism, don’t we? We call it being anti-law. Yet God does not give us that
kind of immunity. We are still, held accountable
for our sins, not ultimately, not eternally, but he does chastise
us for our iniquities, our sins, and our wrongdoings. But I think
sometimes the real issue that we have, we’re good Christians,
we don’t fall into antinomianism, but here’s probably what we do
fall into. We hear the scripture, or we hear God speak, and we
say, go get them, God. They deserve that message. When rather, we should probably
see where the finger is pointing and it’s usually pointing directly
at us. Tonight when we were praying
and we were praising and confessing and giving thanks and giving
God his petitions and when we heard the confession of sin,
prayed by one, that should have been prayed by all. If we are
sensitive to the spirit and know what is true about ourselves
and what the scripture says is true of us, And so as we land
on Isaiah 22, we need to remember that though God has spoken to
nine or 10 nations and given them oracles of you’re bad and
you’re going to get it. All those oracles have really
been towards Israel. All of them have been to God’s
chosen ones, his blessed ones who’ve had all the privileges
of the covenant and yet have sold themselves into faithlessness
and into idolatry. And so we need to remember anytime
the scripture speaks hard things about sinners, we need to remember
that that’s us. We like to put ourselves in the
hero seat. Oh, David slung some stones and killed Goliath. David’s
the hero. I’d like to be David. No, you’re always Goliath, right?
And if there’s two wicked People in the story, the joke I’ve always
heard is you’re both of them, right? Only Jesus is ever the
hero. So we ought to let the scripture
speak to us and Israel or Judah, Jerusalem needs to let the scripture
speak because it is their turn to hear God’s word. So let’s
think for a few moments tonight about chapter 22 of Isaiah. It is a direct hit on Jerusalem. And the setting is something
like this. It’s Hezekiah’s reign. It’s around 700, 705, 710, something
like that. Remember, we’re going down to
zero, then Jesus born, and then we’re going to go up to 2024,
soon to be 2025. So this is the late 8th century. It’s 8th century BC, soon to be 7th
century BC. And the Northern tribes have
just been hauled off by the Assyrians. The Assyrians are now surrounding
Jerusalem. They’re outside the city camping. And there was a siege against
Jerusalem that lasted about three years. And so perhaps some of
this is that history. And so the people of God are
receiving a direct hit from God and his judgment and his justice. Israel, remember, from the beginning
of Isaiah, is a rotten nation. God gave them all the best, all
the privileges. Remember, they were the choicest
vines. He got the choicest hill. He dug it up. He tossed away
all the rocks. He planted the vine, gave it everything, and
he built a wall around it. He put in a tower so he could
watch over it. And just as he was building a
vat, so that he could press out the grapes that would come in
harvest, he realized his vine, his vineyard produced nothing.
And that’s his word against Israel that we come to at the beginning
of the book of Isaiah. There are rotten people, a rotten
nation, they’re an unfruitful vine, and they’re just as wicked
as other nations, though God had been good to them. I think
we should be careful as the church of Jesus Christ, not to pat ourselves
on the back and say, you know, we’re the ones, You know, sometimes
we do that, boy, we, you know, we’re reformed, you know, we
worship right, we teach right, we preach right, our doctrine’s
the best. Sometimes we can get that way. And yes, we should
be proud of our heritage, our Reformation heritage, it’s good
and wonderful, but we should take care. Well, Judah and Jerusalem
are under Hezekiah’s reign and they’re surrounded by the Assyrians. When you peek out your window
on the city wall, all you see are big, nasty, hairy, weapon
carrying Assyrians and the people are in mourning. That’s what
it means in the early verses of this chapter. When Isaiah
says, you’re up on the housetops, you’re up on your housetops mourning
because of doom and destruction. It is said that two thirds of
the people of Jerusalem died during this siege. About a hundred
years later, Babylon will come. And in three separate events,
they will either kill or haul away the entirety of Jerusalem
and Judah. And they’ll destroy the temple.
They’ll destroy the city. They’ll break down its walls
and destroy their houses. We know, well, Ezra, Nehemiah
and Crew had to come back and rebuild all that. And it was
a city that lay in ruins. It was a reproach. to the glory
of God, a reproach to the people of God among the nations. But
mourning has come for the Israelites or for the Judites and death
has come. And notice how it says in those
early verses, death is not by sword. Death is not because of
war. Yes, they have an invading army
surrounding them. Death has come from starvation. Death has come from three years
of deprivation. Death has come from disease.
Death has ultimately come because they failed to trust in Almighty
God. And so there is great mourning.
But notice also in those early verses, the leaders have fled. You know, we watched 20 plus
years ago, the fall of Iraq, and we watched it on TV. Somewhere
in the 90s with CNN and with cable news, around the clock,
we began to watch wars live. You remember the Gulf War, the
Persian Gulf War, the campaign to free Kuwait from
the invasion of Iraq. And then we watched the invasion
of Iraq by America after 9-11. We’ve watched the Afghan war.
Of course, we’re watching the Ukrainians and the Israelites
and all the rest now. But you remember the leaders
fled. They got chicken. They realized
when they were beat and so they fled, they hid, they ran. And
where did we find Saddam Hussein? He was in a spider laden hole
under some plywood or something of the sort, all unkempt, undressed,
not in his pomp and in his glory. And so that’s the picture that
Isaiah gives of this mourning and this leaderless and this
death-filled city. The people have fled. Many of
them would flee and they’d get as far as Jericho, you know,
not too many miles away and they’d get caught. They would be sneaking
out with probably their stock certificates and their purse
and their, you know, their family Bible, that kind of thing. But
they would flee and they would get caught. And so the death
and the capture was not from war. It was from, the siege from
starvation, from hunger and from being scared and fleeing. And
then what do they do where the walls are not as thick as they
should be? What do they do where there are
breaches? And it says there are many breaches in the wall of
the city of David. They pick houses and they, they
raise them. They, they drop them to rubble
and they take that rubble and they fill the breaches. This
is, this is a period of desperation. This is the great city of David.
This is the city of God. This is Mount Zion that the Psalms
sing of. We love the city of God. We love
the church. We love the pilgrimages year
by year and feast by feast. We love the city of God. Jesus
loved the city of God so much that he wept over her. And so
the leaders have fled and the breaches are being filled by
tearing down houses and their trust is in the arsenal. Their
trust is in the arsenal of weapons, of shields and swords and bucklers. And it’s referred to in our passage
as the palace of the forest. Remember David, as he built up
the city, Solomon, as he built up the city, they amassed chariots
and they amassed horses. They amassed fighting men. And
do you remember David’s great sin? Satan incited him to take
a census of all the fighting men and God was angry with him. And it’s a good reminder, as
is this whole passage, that we must trust in God. David would
write one day, some trust in chariots, others in horses, but
we trust in the name of the Lord, our God. Well, this city had
thick walls. If you’ve ever visited the holy
city of Jerusalem, there are places where the walls, they’re
not as grand as other cities in the ancient world. But they
were tall, they were thick, and they had a small path or roadway
on them. And if you ever see those sites,
it was amazing that they could move that many stones and build
that great a fortification. It was a hilltop fortress, the
city of God. And so they trusted in their
thick walls, but here’s the real thing that got them in trouble. How does a city make it through
a siege? Well, you store up enough food to make it. You have thick
walls. You have people on the walls
who can shoot arrows. You’ve got thick draw bridges
and gates and those sorts of things, but you gotta have water. And something Hezekiah did as
he began to fear these larger Assyrian assaults on the cities
around them, he said, you know, we need to have a good water
supply. So he took two group of men, they had their axes and
their tools, And they began to hew out a tunnel or a place for
a spring to travel underground through this cave, through this
tunnel and into the city and fill up a pool. Now here’s the
issue. God chose Jerusalem. Here’s the
issue. God chose Jerusalem with no internal
water supply. Here’s the issue. God put his
people in the wilderness and he gave them water from a rock.
And now the people who knew that are living in a city and they
say, you know, God can’t give us water. We’re, we’re, we’re
all holed up inside. There is no natural spring inside
the city. We better do something about it. And this was the pride
of Hezekiah. This was the sin of Hezekiah.
This is the thing that God held against them and said, because
you have been unfaithful, because you have been faith less, there
will be a day of Yahweh. And did you notice, Isaiah weeps
for the day of the Lord. Isaiah weeps in chapter 22, verse
four, he weeps for the judgment, the chastisement that will come
on the people of God. And it’s a good question to ask. Do we weep for the doom and judgment
that is coming? I think sometimes we hear the
message of judgment and say, well, it’s a good thing it didn’t
me. And then we hear the message of doom and gloom and we say,
well, I’m glad my fire insurance policy, that is faith in Jesus,
has all paid up. But do our hearts break for others? Today, when we looked at Thessalonians,
Paul’s prayer was that the Thessalonians would abound and increase in
love for each other, but also for all. We should have compassion
on the nations around us. Compassion that they would hear
the name of Jesus and rest in him alone for salvation. and
be with him in this life and in the life that is to come.
And Hezekiah gives us a great example. He weeps for the judgment
and death of his people. And so we ought not to be insensitive. We ought to look on the death
of the wicked with tears, but we also ought to look on the
hardships of others with empathy. Well, the city is surrounded. The people are dying. The people
on the rooftops are mourning. the leaders are fleeing and it’s
going to get worse. They’re trusting in their arsenal.
They’re trusting in their thick walls. They’re trusting in their
water supply. That’s the whole reference to
the cave and the water between the two, the two walls. Well,
you get a little picture of what’s going on in the whole of the
city in the person of Shebna. Shebna is the king’s man. You might say he’s his right-hand
man. He’s his henchman. He’s his,
you know, his go-to guy, needs something done. I know a guy,
his name’s Shebna. And so Shebna, the king’s man, is a self-serving
politician. And he begins to see the doom
and gloom that is coming. And so what does he do? He goes
out onto the hill and he hews out a tomb for himself. And he says, well, if I’m going
to go down like this, I’ll at least be remembered in glory.
And so before he dies an inglorious death, he’s going to make sure
he has a glorious afterlife in the eyes of others. You know,
we’ve just watched a political week this past week. We watched
one a couple of weeks ago and, you know, we know how it pretty
good. We pretty much know how it goes with politicians. This
is the rather cynical look. Oh, yes, they’re all servants.
They’re all seeking our welfare. That’s how it goes. You get a
little politician job and you keep getting reelected. And you
serve long enough, say 40 years in government, you can become
a millionaire, maybe a billionaire if you’re really good. Now, these
politicians feather their nest. They make sure that if they don’t
get reelected, they at least get on with a big corporation
that they did a favor or two or three. And that’s nothing
new. That’s as old as man and his wicked heart. Well, Shebna
is a self-serving politician who’s feathering his nest. He’s
building his tomb. And the scripture says that God
will toss him out. God will hurl him away, chapter
22, verse 17 says. And who does he put in his spot?
Well, he puts in Eliakim. And of Eliakim, it is said that
he will hold the keys of David. He will be put in like a peg.
He will be a secure king. He’ll be given the seat and the
scepter. He’ll be given the authority and he will be given all the
things that are needed to rule in the line of King David. But
he is guilty of nepotism. He’s guilty of hiring his brothers
and his aunts and his uncles and his cousins and whoever else
can get the job. And so eventually he’s got to
go as well. Well, how are we to think of
all this? How are we to think of God’s
holy city falling on rotten times? How are we to think of God’s
holy city not trusting in the Lord. You’ve got Hezekiah and
his water supply. You’ve got politicians and leaders.
They flee when the going gets tough. You’ve got Shebna who’s
building his own tomb for his own glory. You’ve got Eliakim
and his nepotism. You had David back in the day
with his census. You had Moses dishonoring God
as he tapped the rock in a disobedient way and dishonored God in the
sight of the people. You have Aaron and his golden
calf. And then, because we’re good Christians, we should fill
in the blank with our own sin, our own shortcomings, our own
way of not trusting in God. Well, we need to remember this. God works in mysterious ways. He can spread a table in the
wilderness. He can give water from a rock
and bread from heaven. And you might be thinking to
yourself, Oh, this Hezekiah, he was a slick guy. He must’ve
had a degree in engineering from NC State, because he, you know,
he solved the water supply issue. What a great thing. Well, you
ladies from the Wednesday Confession of Faith Study, well, remember
the last two weeks, we’ve looked at what are good works. And remember
the categories. A good work is from the scripture. It’s not something we make up.
Good works flow out of a changed heart. Good works flow from a
spirit-wrought, spirit-empowered Christian life. Good works are
not something that we are just utterly sincere about. We could
be totally wrong, but sincerity makes up for it all. No, that’s
not the way it is. Remember, the road to hell is
paved with good intentions, right? And so you might be coming to
the defense of Hezekiah and say, oh, he just wanted to get water
for his subjects. But you see the ultimate sin,
the sin was not trusting that God could put water in his city
on top of Mount Zion and he could take care of his people. You know, it’s interesting to
say and to preach and to believe that we trust in Jesus alone
for our salvation because we like to have a little skin in
the game. We like to say, you know, well, I chose God. We like
to say, well, my free will, you know, blah, blah, blah. We like
to say, and on and on we go. But we need to remember stories
like this remind us everything is of God. Water, manna, and
especially salvation. And so in these times in which
we live, we may be surrounded by pagans, we may be surrounded
by corrupt culture and corrupt government, and we don’t need
to resort to faithless and fearful things. You know, you watch enough
TV commercials, and I’m guilty of it. You’re going to order
this vitamin and this pill and this sleep aid and this, but
you’re going to order, you know, the survival stuff. You know,
you’re going to, you’re going to need some solar power. You
know, when the, when the communists come or whatever, however that’s
supposed to go, you’re going to, you know, you need enough ammunition
to take out, you know, a Russian army. You know, you gotta lay
aside enough food. And I remember thinking about
all this during COVID and when everybody’s running on paper
towels and toilet paper. Daily bread still applies, doesn’t
it? It was good for the Israelites.
It was good for the people of God when they learned the Lord’s
prayer, give us this day our daily bread. And yeah, we need
to Be careful, you know, get enough bandage to last you the
month, get enough of your prescriptions when you think maybe computers
are going to go down. There’s wisdom in that. But the
fear part, the fear part, that’s where we fall short of God’s
glory. And so we need to remember that
we have a good God, a providing God. And the most important thing
he’s given is salvation in Jesus. And that is completely completely,
completely received by faith alone. There’s nothing that we
bring except our sin. There’s nothing that we can offer
except our filthy, unrighteous rags and robes. And this is the thing we must
remember from a passage like this. God does not honor your
self-sufficiency. He honors those who completely
and wholly and faithfully put their trust in him. So let’s
look to him now in prayer. Lord, we give you thanks that
all of life, all of spiritual life is from you. It’s in you
that we live, move, and have our being. And yes, you call
us to work and to subdue the earth and to make plans. And
you do call us to be wise, but there are times, in this instance,
with the people of God in Jerusalem, and in our case, with our faith
in Jesus, that we need to wholly lean on Jesus name and put our
trust in no other name, not even the works of our hands, which
you would not accept except for Christ. So hear us and help us
and cause us to have a deep abiding faith in Christ’s mighty name.
Amen.