Isaiah 4:2-6
Amen. Turn in your copy of God’s
word. Turn to the book of Isaiah chapter four. We’ll be reading
verses two through six, and hopefully you remember everything you’ve
heard from Isaiah so far, but just by way of introduction as
you make your way there, remember we’ve heard a lot of doom and
gloom in Isaiah. And one of the great blessings
God does in the literature of the Old Testament is when he
speaks doom and gloom, he always turns right around and speaks
to the remnant of his people and says, but for my righteous,
there will be a hope and there will be a future. And so we want
to look tonight at the things that God promises shall be or
will be and the things that we shall have as God promises to
protect his people. So our reading tonight from Revelation
21 and the early part of 22, I think ought to well up in you
as we read these couple of verses from Isaiah. Also, when we sang
Psalm 72 earlier, those portions of it, it spoke about how the
mountains of God, the mountain of God will be a very fruitful
mountain. It’ll be a mountain not of stone
you know, dead wintry trees, but it’ll be a stone, a mountain
that has lots of fruitful and glorious flowers and vines and
things on it. So give your attention now to
God’s word, Isaiah four and verses two through six. In that day,
the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious. And
the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors
of Israel. And he who is left in Zion and
remains in Jerusalem will be called holy. Everyone who has
been recorded for life in Jerusalem, when the Lord shall have washed
away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains
of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a
spirit of burning. Then the Lord will create over
the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies, a cloud
by day and a smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night. For
over all the glory, there will be a canopy. There will be a
booth for shade by day from the heat and for refuge and a shelter
from the storm and the rain. Amen. The word of the living
God. I think I have two introductions for you. The first one is just
an observation. And the observation is this,
how wonderful it is when we read the Bible and when we sing the
Bible and we study the Bible and we talk about it. And you
think of that in the Sunday school hour or maybe a past midweek
Bible study or in the morning service. And then you come back
to the evening service or maybe in what you’ve been reading or
listening to. It’s amazing to see how God uses those things
and they sort of fit, they sort of mesh. When I was first out
of seminary and in ministry down in the Charlotte area, I was
the assistant pastor, so I didn’t preach very much. But we have
the same practice that we do here. The preacher is the cook,
right? He has to cut up all the vegetables,
chop them and put them in the pot, make something good. And
that includes picking the hymns and the things for the service
of worship. And I had a lady, Dot, who always
used to come to me and say, what an amazing thing. That matched
Sunday school. That matched what I was reading
in my morning and evening with Spurgeon, those sorts of things.
And it’s wonderful to see how God works. And I think one of
the blessings we have as we are a people of the book and we stick
to the Bible is we see how all its sum and parts fit together
so beautifully. It’s a wonderful thing. I was
noting in my mind when we read the Heidelberg Catechism on the
Sabbath, how it spoke about Christian education. which is what we talked
about in Sunday school today. I don’t know if some of you caught
that, but I did. Um, so it’s just amazing to think. Um, the second thing that I think
we ought to be in wonder or amazement about is when we live in the
times that we do live in, and these are strange times where
I believe we are seeing the temporal or short term judgments of God,
uh, and the testing of the righteous, uh, the scary and uneasy times
that we’re living in. I think it’s wonderful to see
how the word of God, uh, 700 years before Christ here in Isaiah
speaks directly to our contemporary issues of today. Um, if we were,
if we were to, uh, catalog or list all of the scary and thing,
scary things that make us uneasy in this life, uh, the election
year, the economy, um, what’s being taught in our public and
higher education systems and just on and on we could go. We
could be like Eeyore and say it’s raining and the sky is falling
and someone took our tail and all the rest. I think those sorts
of situations, the scenarios we find ourselves in motivate
us to trust in God. They drive us to be found faithful
And I believe importantly, they push us to be a repentant people
because we see what God can do in a storm. We see what God can
do in a tempest. We are people of the book. And
so we know what he can do in a worldwide flood. We’re people
of the book. And so we see what happens when
he brings judgment on the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah
or on Nadab and Abihu or on various ones or cities in the scripture
that did not listen to his word and obey him. So how do we handle
the darkness? How do we handle the gloom? How
do we live with the doom that is around us? And it is due the
righteous wrath and anger of God, isn’t it? Because he is
a just God and The people of the world have done disgraceful
things. And if you zero in on what we’ve been thinking about
from the book of Isaiah, last week, the daughters of Zion were
in pretty big trouble. Excuse me just a second. I have
a tickle in the throat and that won’t do. I’ll preach longer
if I don’t get rid of it. But you remember the description
of the disgraceful actions of the women of Zion and this long
section of scripture really between chapter two and four that we’ve
been looking at was a description of how horrible things had gotten
in Jerusalem. The pride, the wealth, the injustice,
the oppression, I mean, on and on it went. And so now we’re
on the backside of it in chapter four, verses two through six.
And we see that in the midst of all that darkness, doom and
gloom, God is providing pictures of hope. He’s providing pictures
of beauty. He’s providing pictures of redemption
and he’s providing pictures of provision. And this is not just,
hey, we got a new TV or hey, we got a new car and we put it
on Facebook so everybody knows we got a new car. This is spiritual
provision. This is eternal hope. This is
blood shed of Jesus redemption that gives us access to God.
These are, These are pictures of hope, beauty, redemption,
and provision that are quite amazing. And so, yes, Christians
may live in dark times for a little while, but God is always going
to give us bright hope. And as we are in God’s house
on God’s day with God’s people. I think we should remember that
one of the reasons God gives us Sundays is yes, it’s for gathering
for worship. It’s for the Christian schools
that we mentioned from the Heidelberg Catechism tonight. Yes, it’s
for meeting with God’s people and offering up our prayers and
praises and all that. But it’s also as the Puritans
were fond of saying, it’s a day that’s a foretaste of heaven. I heard a pastor in the last
10 years or so say this to a congregation. If you’re bored in worship, you’re
going to be really bored in heaven. Worship is a glimpse of what
glory will be like. And so on Sunday, we get to think
about heaven. We get a taste of heaven. And
our passage begins with a little phrase in that day. We’ve already
had the end that day phrase of what God will do to the women
who were all dressed up and their finery and their jewelry and
their pride. He remember said they would be bald. Uh, they
would lose all their jewelry. They would, they would, uh, lose
the ability to be married and have children. There would be
the death of most of the men. And so there would be one man
for every seven women. And so there was no hope of marriage
or children or provision. But God here speaks of a more
positive and bright day. He says, in that day, there are
things that shall be, there are things that will be, and there
are things that you shall have. And he speaks of a fruitful day. city. He speaks of a holy people. He speaks of the cleansing that
comes when God refines, refines us by his spirit and by his fire.
And then he also speaks of his wonderful presence. So in all
that darkness, all that woe and doom and gloom that we’ve been
speaking of so far in the book of Isaiah, God gives us a picture
of an outbreak of grace. He says that our names are written
in heaven. It’s maybe sort of an echo of
Psalm 87 when God says about Rahab and Cush and Tyre and the
names of the people who gather at Mount Zion in Jerusalem, their
names are written there. But he also speaks about a remnant
of people. He speaks about survivors. Remember our study of Ezra and
Haggai and Nehemiah, those who left Babylon and returned to
rebuild Jerusalem and Judah. and to rebuild the temple and
to get its cultic practices and sacrifices back in business. They were called the remnant.
They were called the survivors. They were those God rescued and
redeemed. And you remember maybe from your
study of the earlier portions of the historical books of the
Bible, when Elijah, cries out to God and says, you know, just,
just, just do me in. I’m the only one who hasn’t bailed
the need of bail. And God says, no, there’s 7,000.
And maybe we lose hope in this world and say, where are the
Christians? You know, we hear the statistics,
churches emptying, churches are emptying out by the droves. God
always has his people. He always has his invisible church.
And yes, they’re made visible on earth as they worship God,
as they gather and all the rest. but we should never lose heart.
Oh, the church is small. Oh, the church is in trouble. You know, we’re gonna lose, you
know, where’s the young people, where’s the families, all that.
We need to remember God has a people. And when they show up, we minister
to them. And what a wonderful thing that
is. But God is also gonna speak to the daughters of Jerusalem.
He just spoke harshly with them. Now he’s gonna say, there will
be survivors among the daughters of Jerusalem. So there’s three
really big pictures that are given, I think, in this passage.
And the first one is one of fertility, not having baby fertility, but
you find it in verse two. It says, in that day, the branch
of the Lord shall be glorious or beautiful and glorious. And
the fruit of the land shall be the pride and the honor of the
survivors of Israel. Do you remember when Israel had
come out of Egypt and they were out in Sinai and you know, God
was saying, you’re going to go into the promised land and you’re
going to inherit cities. You did not build houses. You
didn’t raise, you’re going to live in a drink water from cisterns.
You didn’t dig. You’re going to eat grapes from
vineyards. You did not plant or tend or
cultivate, and you’re going to eat olives from trees. You’ve
not raised. And remember the covenant promises,
grapes and grandkids. So Moses, Joshua and and the
leader say, you know, we probably ought to send somebody into the
promised land kind of see what it’s like scope it out. So 12
spies go. Is that right? 12 or 10, 12. Yeah. Get my numbers
mixed up. And only two came back saying we can, we can do this.
The other 10 were whining. Those people there are big and
hairy and mean and scary. We’re not going into the promised
land. But do you remember what the, the, they came back with?
They came back with this big stick over their shoulders. And
what was it filled with? It was filled with the fruit
of the land. Yeah. It was such a wonderful
and beautiful thing. And that’s the picture God is
giving us again here. When God means to rescue and
redeem and bless his people, he gives them bounty. He gives them beauty. He gives
them fruit. We’ve been thinking on Sundays
about the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And one of the great blessings
we have as being Christians filled with the spirit and growing in
grace is we can bear that fruit. We’ll look in a couple of weeks
when we get to chapter five about how Israel was a vine planted
and God went to harvest the grapes and there were none. Well, there
were, they were wild and useless. They were going to make sour
wine, but God, by his grace through Christ, through the Holy spirit,
he works that fruit in us. There’s a fertility, a fruitfulness
that comes by the power and grace of almighty God. Now there’s
a second way you can think of this fertility. Uh, Most of the
time when you read like in verse two, in that day, the branch
of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious. You don’t think
about grapes. You think about Messiah. Now
I’m not going to get into all the arguments and reasons and
the grammar and the this and the that. I think here it’s speaking
of the fertility of the land, the fertility of the place where
God’s people dwell. There’s a bazillion other places,
if that’s a number, where the branch of the Lord is speaking
of the Messiah. Remember how over and over in the book of
Isaiah, it says that there will be a stump or out of the stump
of the root of Jesse, there will come a shoot and how you cut
a tree down and you, you know, you got it cut down and you spent
all your money. so you can’t eat out for a couple
weeks, and you say, well, I should probably get the stump grinded,
but that’s going to cost more money, so you leave it. And maybe you
put a little pine straw over it, hoping that maybe it just
won’t do anything. And spring comes, and what comes out of
the stump? A shoot. And it’s the worst with those
cursed trees that never should have been bred. Is it the Bradford
pear? Yeah. Those things are only good
for a snowstorm or windstorm. But I had one of those one time,
got it all cut down nice and neat, and then shoot, shoot,
shoot, just kept coming out. That’s the other word picture
that comes to mind when we read the branch of the Lord. We’ll
deal with that a bunch as we make our way through Isaiah.
But sometimes it does mean the branch of the Messiah, the shoot
of David. But go back to this idea of fertility
for just a moment and look. At the end of verse two, he said
in the first part, the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful
and glorious. The fruit of the land, get this,
shall be the pride and the honor of the survivors of Israel. Do
you remember last week when we looked at chapter three and God
said, I’m going to break your pride. I’m going to punish your
pride because remember what their pride was in. Their pride was
in their appearance. Their pride was in their wealth.
Their pride was in their kings and their horses and their chariots
and their riches and their wealth. And it was in the works of their
hands. Now he’s going to say their pride is in the glory and
beauty of the habitat or the place where God has caused them
to dwell. I can’t help but think about the pride we take in our
church. You know, we’ll call for a work day and say, Hey,
you know, come out and scrub some, scrub some dust and windows
and scrub some glass and I’m getting all my verbs mixed up
here with what you do when you’re cleaning something. But anyway,
we wash things and scrub things and dust things and we vacuum
and deep clean and all the rest. And then what it takes to keep
up a building, our tithes and our offerings. And in a sense,
that’s what we think. We take pride in the place where
God dwells in our midst. We take pride in the place of
glory and beauty where God meets with his people. And that’s a
first picture we ought to understand here, one of fertility. The second
is one of cleansing. And this is a really important
one. It’s wonderful to have a beautiful place where we live and serve
God. That’s a neat thing. And spring
is coming. How wonderful. But I think even more important,
we ought to think about the only reason we have a relationship
with God. And that is because of his cleansing work. Verses
three and four tell us what he’s going to do. He who is left in
Zion, Those who remain in Jerusalem, those who aren’t hauled off into
captivity and judgment, they will be called holy. Everyone
who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, when the Lord shall
have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, remember
last week how rough he was about the daughters of Zion, and cleanse
the bloodstains of Jerusalem. Remember they were murderers
and oppressors and stealers and thieves. He’ll cleanse the bloodstains
of Jerusalem from its midst. Two ways. One is by spirit of
judgment. He’s going to say, I see what
you’ve done and it’s wrong. And then by a spirit of burning,
how do you purify something? You, you burn it. You know, you
get a, um, piece of wood in you. What do you call that? A splinter,
get a splinter in you and you’re going to get a needle, you know, and
dig it out. Um, you don’t just get a needle and stick it in
you. You know, you rub it with some alcohol or as my mother
used to do, she would, burn it with a match. Yeah, get it hot.
I think I would have preferred the alcohol, but it’s too late
for that. She also cleaned my ears out
with a bobby pin. Never figured that one out either. But this
idea of cleansing, how much did we see last week of God’s description
of his people? They were filthy. They were not
holy. They were nasty. As we say in
the South, they needed to be washed. They needed to be cleansed.
And that’s exactly what God promises here. When the Lord shall have
washed away the filth of those who will be called holy, those
who will be recorded for life in Jerusalem. If you’re in the
church by faith in Jesus, And your name is written in heavens.
God washes, he cleanses. And he does it in a way that
gets you clean, keeps you clean, and you are forever clean. And
that’s because there’s a fountain filled with blood, right? And
whoever bathes in that fountain filled with blood will be cleansed.
Or we exchange our filthy rags for Jesus’ clean and righteous
robes. That great exchange is a forever
exchange. And though we live life still,
with remaining sin and corruption, and we do daily break God’s law
and thoughtward indeed, he still sees us as righteous. He still
sees us as Jesus has declared us to be perfectly obedient,
perfectly righteous, sins forgiven. The spirit of judgment has declared
what we are, but the spirit of burning has made us clean. And
thanks be to God that that spirit of burning fell on Jesus. Why
was Jesus so anxious in the garden of Gethsemane? Because on the
morrow, he would drink the cup to the dregs of God’s wrath and
curse do us for sin. It wasn’t the nails he worried
about or the beatings or the floggings or the crown. It wasn’t
the taunting that he worried about. It was the unmitigated
wrath of God poured out on him for our sins. And so what can
wash away our sins? It’s nothing but the blood of
Jesus. And so there’s a picture here
of fertility. There’s a picture of cleansing. There’s also a
picture of the presence of God. And as we get to the presence
of God, we really come near to what we read earlier in Revelation
chapter 21 and 22. If you read verses five and six,
I want you to, or as we read it, I want you to notice the
word create. It’s right there at the beginning
of verse five. This is an important word. Then the Lord will create
over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies,
a cloud by day and smoke in the shining of a flaming fire by
night. For over all the glory, there
will be a canopy. There will be a booth for shade
by day from the heat and a refuge, for a refuge and a shelter from
the storm and the rain. The word create is used pretty
sparingly in the scriptures, but it’s used here. And what
does that tell you? Especially as you add it to the
activity of God to cleanse us and the activity of God to make
fertile the place where we live, God is going to make a special
way for us to be in his presence, to be in his shade, to be his
bride under the canopy. Remember we say, and we sing
from time to time, his banner over me is love. God brings us
into this created protective zone, you might say, when we’re
little kids and we’re out playing tag. and you’re it, you’re not
it. Well, I’m on base, you can’t
get me. There’s a picture here of that
in a sense where we can say as God’s children, it doesn’t matter
what goes on in the world. It doesn’t matter how nasty this
world gets, how rough around the edges and rotten in the core
it gets. It doesn’t matter what happens
on the political stage. It doesn’t matter what happens
in this year’s election. God has a shield and a shelter
over his people. And he reissues the picture of
the Exodus. He’s going to be present with
us in the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. We’ll sing of that in a few moments
when we get to our closing hymn, Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.
We’ll sing of that pillar of fire, that cloud by day. But
it’s wonderful. I think to be God’s people and
to have this provision and this protection and this beauty and
this cleansing and this fertility. And it’s a picture of the ideal
Eden that Satan will not spoil, that Satan will not come and
cause us to be banished from. The book of Hebrews says that
Christ died once and for all. He shed his blood for the remission
of our sins to cleanse us, to make us fruitful, and to bring
his presence into our lives. And it’s by the blood of Jesus,
we have confidence to enter the most holy place, the place where
God is. That’s how we came today into
God’s house. That’s how we entered into his
presence with prayer. And so we come into the holy
places of God by the blood of Jesus, who has opened up the
new and living way. And we can go through the curtain
into that most holy place because he sacrificed his own flesh for
us. We have a great high priest who
has done this. And so we are encouraged and
we have access. So we should draw an eye from
a true heart and a full faith because we have been sprinkled
clean by the blood of Jesus Christ. And one of the things that we
will enter sort of a now aspect. We get some down payments on
the blessings of God’s presence and his cleansing and the fertility
of life in God. But we also have the long look
of the new heavens and the new earth. And that picture we read
of in Revelation 21 and 22, where we’ll come under the banner of
God’s love. We are a bride who had been made
wedding ready by the ministry of the church. And we are the
people, the remnant, the rescued ones. Our names are written in
heaven. And so it’s appropriate that we go and we meet our groom
and we hear our name called as we sing when the roll is called
up yonder. And we go as the spotless bride
into the presence of the radiant sun. And we go into his light
and forever we glory in the lamb. That’s the little picture or
maybe the big picture we get here in these few verses. of
Isaiah chapter four. What a great blessing it is that
in the midst of darkness, doom and gloom, we have this bright
hope of great light. And it’s through Jesus that we
can receive these gifts. So let’s look to him now in prayer. Lord, we thank you that over
and over and over and over in the scriptures, you speak of
hard things and difficult things and things we deserve because
of our sin. But you also speak of wonderful and bright things,
things we don’t deserve, but things you have provided for
us richly in Christ. And what a day of rejoicing it
will be in that eternal day when we bask in your presence and
we forever look into the many kindnesses of your grace that
you have bestowed upon us, sinners and enemies, now made friends
through the blood of Jesus. Help us to think and ponder on
these things and to live out of them for your glory and for
the good of others. We pray in Christ’s name, amen.