Isaiah 44:6-20; Revelation 22
And then turn to the scriptures
to Isaiah 44. Tonight we have six through 20,
which is a little section on idolatry, the foolishness of
it. Isaiah 44, 6 to 20. So remember
the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, God was hollering at, yelling
at all the nations, including Israel and Judah. And now we
get to the redemptive side and they’re having their mind, the
threat of Assyria, but also the future threat of Babylon. The
Assyrian threat will disappear, but Couple decades, several decades
later, the Babylonians will come, tear them down. And so this is
a good reminder for Israel, also for us, when the going gets tough,
trust in Yahweh. Don’t make idols, don’t trust
idols, don’t trust in your stuff, your checkbook, that kind of
thing. But for them, they needed to keep their eye on God, even
though life around them was full of difficulty. All right, so
Isaiah 44, beginning at six. Thus says the Lord, the King
of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts. I am the first
and the last. Besides me, there is no God who
is like me. Let him proclaim it. Let him
declare it and set it before me. Since I appointed an ancient
people, let them declare what has come and what will happen.
Fear not, nor be afraid. Have I not told you from of old
and declared it? And you are my witnesses. Is
there a God beside me? There is no rock, I know not
any. All who fashion idols are nothing,
and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses
neither see nor know that they may be put to shame. Who fashions
a god or cast an idol that is profitable for nothing? Behold,
all his companions shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are
only human. Let them all assemble, let them
stand forth. They shall be terrified, they
shall be put to shame together. The ironsmith takes a cutting
tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it with hammers and
works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry and his strength
fails. He drinks no water and is faint. The carpenter stretches
a line. He marks it out with a pencil.
He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes
it into the figure of a man with the beauty of a man to dwell
in a house. He cuts down cedars or he chooses a cypress tree
or an oak tree and lets it grow strong among the trees of the
forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it
becomes fuel for a man. He takes a part of it and warms
himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread.
Also, he makes a god and worships it. He makes it an idol and falls
down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire,
over the half he eats meat. He roasted and is satisfied.
Also, he warms himself and says, aha, I am warm, I have seen the
fire. And the rest of it he makes into
a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. He prays
to it and says, deliver me for you are my god. They know not,
nor do they discern, for He has shut their eyes so they cannot
see, and their hearts so that they cannot understand. No one
considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, half of
it I burned in the fire. I also baked bread on its coals. I roasted meat and have eaten.
And shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall
down before a block of wood? He feeds on ashes. A deluded
heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or
say, is there not a lie in my right hand? Amen, God’s great
gracious word. So last week, catching up Monday
morning on the news of the weekend, I saw a picture of Bill Belichick,
the now UNC coach. Good luck with that. Former coach
of the New England Patriots, did they win six Super Bowls,
maybe? I think he won two other Super Bowls with another team
as their something coordinator. But at last week’s gathering,
he had to remind everybody that there is no one greater than
he. And so he wore eight Super Bowl rings. Pretty bold, I would say. Just
so everybody would remember, I am he. I am the one who has
won the most Super Bowls. That’s sort of in a much bigger
way, greater way, what God is doing tonight. He’s showing you
all his bling. He’s showing you all his crowns,
all his scepters. He’s reminding you in creation.
He’s reminding you in providence. He’s reminding you in where your
heart goes, that you need him and you need no other. He is
the only one. He is the one and only who can
rightly boast, rightly proclaim, rightly be called upon and trusted
in. Here’s the problem. Here’s the
issue. Our hearts are bent on sin. Our hearts are bent on idols.
Our deluded heart thinks that handmade things or maybe balances
in our bank accounts or maybe a position or a thought or a
philosophy, we think that they can compare to Yahweh. And so
as humans, we sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, I think John Calvin
was the one that said that the human heart is a perpetual idle
factory. We replace God with things. We
replace God with ideas. And as believers, that can happen.
Yes, we still have sin. We still have the flesh. We are
forgetful. This is the case with Israel.
They’ve forgotten God who has done so much for them as a nation.
And so the trap is to answer ultimate questions. with non-ultimate
things. You know, you hear people’s beliefs.
Well, I like to think that, or I feel deep in my heart that,
and then we begin to spew out some crazy belief. You hear it in the church, important
theological truths held for centuries. Crystal clear in the Bible, get
put away. You know, the church today is
trying to have a foot in both worlds. and play the gender game,
play the sexual identity game, play the, you know, this cultural
compromise game and that one as well. And what we end up doing
is submitting God to our finite minds. We make God submit to
us and our judgments when it should be the other way around.
And this passage shows us how ridiculous That is, it shows
us the foolishness of idols, the folly of fashioning other
gods. You’ll notice the kind of the
thick dripping satire. You have to chop down a tree.
You have to heat your house. And then you have to take a piece
of the wood that you did not use to heat up your food or heat
up your house. And then you have to form it and fashion it into
an idol. And then dumb things of all dumb
things. Can we say that? you got to bow
down and say, you are my God. Okay. That’s how foolish this
is. But what’s worse? What’s worse
is this piece of wood we’ve made, or this philosophy we’ve come
up with. It cannot ever serve you or save
you. Remember as soon as Israel got
out of Egypt and Moses went up on the mountain, what did, what
did the Israelites do? They fashioned. a golden calf,
they bowed down and worshiped and said, this is our God who
just brought us out of Egypt. What a foolish act that was. Remember Moses came down, he
broke the 10 commandments, he shattered the tablets. Aaron,
what have you done? Well, we had some gold and it
fell in the fire and out popped this thing. Sounds like a two
year old. Maybe a three-year-old because
you got to be able to talk a little bit more, but it just sounds very juvenile,
doesn’t it? But beware lest your heart be like that. That is the
challenge. That is the warning. Well, a
couple of things to think of. Verses six through eight tell
us about who God is. If you look at six and seven
and eight and look at all the capital letter words, Got this point is simply, I am. I am is a good representation
of God. Remember Moses at the burning
bush, who shall I say sent me to you Pharaoh? I am, that’s
Yahweh. How does I am identify himself
in these verses? Well, he’s the majestic God. He’s in control. And he titles
himself King of Israel. He titles himself Redeemer. He
titles himself Yahweh of Hosts. He says, I’m Alpha and Omega.
I’m first and last. And then he’s going to call himself
The Rock. in verse 8. This majestic God
who is in control is the King of Israel. He is the Lord. They
are the servants. Kind of got a covenant relationship
there. You’ve got the Redeemer. So the
covenant keeper comes and redeems the covenant breakers. They get
into sin and foolishness and folly. They get into trouble.
And so they need Redeemers. They had one in Moses. They had
one in the judges. or they had several in the judges
and they had them in Saul, David, Solomon, and all the Kings. But
God, especially through his son, the Lord Jesus is the great redeemer.
And so the covenant keeping God never lets his people completely
go. He saves a remnant. He redeems
them. We’re bought at a price and the scripture tells us. And
then Yahweh of host. He’s the God of everything. He’s
the God of everything that is made. Then the first and last,
the Alpha and Omega, you know, the beginning, the end, the A
to Z and everything in between. So what is God saying here? He’s
saying, I am, and there is no God besides me. I am God. Nothing else is God. And we like can, we can say it,
we can elevate it, we can worship it. We can, we can do all kinds
of things, but that does not make it so. And so you get a
picture in these first three verses, six, seven, and eight
of some titles that God gives himself. These titles mean something
and God is showing himself to be the great God. Then you get
a challenge to the other gods in verses seven and eight at
the kids’ school, the boys, Some of the boys have been lifting
weights. So they’re walking around, strutting
their stuff. Well, some of the adults challenged
them to an arm wrestling contest recently, and we won. It was
quite gratifying. But you’ve seen the arm wrestling
contest. You’ve seen the strongman challenges. Step up and arm wrestle
the big guy. See if you can wrestle down the
strongman. Show me what you’ve got. And
that’s in a sense what God is saying here to the other gods.
Step up. Let’s see what you can do. Show
me what you’ve got. Can you form and fashion a nation
like I have done? He asked. Can you name a people
from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Can you fashion them, protect
them, be their covenant God? Can you care for them in famines
and wars and rescue and redeem them from the mightiest king
on the face of the earth? And perhaps that question you
could stretch it back to creation when there was nothing God spoke
and there was something and he took the chaos and he formed
it and he fashioned it. He took the emptiness and he
filled it. Can other gods do that? Well, there’s a neat little
book I have on my shelf called Parallels of Ancient Near Eastern
Literature. I think that’s what it’s called.
And you can read in it creation accounts from other ancient Near
Eastern nations. And it’s sort of like Big Bang,
basically. They’ll say something did something
and out popped everything. That’s the only other way to
do it other than the eternal God speaking in something. In
fact, everything comes into existence, but you can read creation stories.
You can read flood stories. Isn’t that interesting? And you’ll,
you’ll read liberal commentaries on the old Testament. Oh, the
old Testament, Moses was just copying other nations. No, I
think the other nations ripped off God. Uh, but you read these
other creation stories and flood stories and they are laughable. It’s ridiculous how they think
things came to be, and it’s ridiculous how they think things get rescued
and redeemed. And so when God issues the challenge,
you know, step up, wrestle me, arm wrestle me, come on, strong
man challenge. You know, what are you, chicken?
What are you afraid? Oh, wait, you can’t hear. Oh,
wait, you can’t see. Oh, wait, you’re made of wood
or hay and stubble. And so the question is sort of
put to Israel. Why are you terrified? The question
could be asked of us. Why are we terrified? You know,
we see the saber rattling in the world. Maybe we go through
a couple of years of a bad presidential regime. Things begin to fall
apart. And what do we do? We wring our
hands and, okay, that’s okay. We should pray and we should
ask God to deliver us, which we did. But what’s ultimately revealed,
sometimes we’re trusting a little too much in the stock market.
We’re trusting a little too much in our side of politics. We’re
trusting a bit too much in what man can do and the world can
completely fall apart. And what can God do? He can still
be covenant Lord. He can still be king and Yahweh
of host and first and last and redeemer and king of Israel.
He can still, well, I’m not saying he can still be all that. He
is still that it’s just, we forget. And so Israel is terrified. They’re shaking with fright.
And what’s God saying? There is no God beside me. And he ends,
I think it’s verse eight. Yeah, verse 8, he says, So think
for just a sec, what have you seen God do? Personally, or you’ve
read it in the Bible? Well, you’ve seen the cross,
you’ve seen the Red Sea, you’ve seen the sun stand still, you’ve
seen Fill in the blank with all the wonderful redemptive acts
of God, and there is no God like Him, so why are we afraid? Think
of the Assyrian army, what was that, 144,000? And Sennacherib,
right, the nasty Assyrian king, and what did God do? He sent
one angel, and what did one angel do? Took care of business. There is no God like Him. And
there’s one more title that pops up. It’s the title, Rock. Is
there a God beside me? The end of verse eight says,
there is no rock. I know not any. And so our God, our Yahweh is
unique. He’s unchanging. He is our support,
our strength. And we can count on him. Think of David for a minute.
King David gets anointed with oil. Remember all his brothers?
Not any of them. So it’s David. He gets anointed.
Saul hears of it. He’s not happy about it. And
what does Saul do for, I don’t know, it’s quite a while. He
tries to kill David. You know, he’s hurling spears
at him. David and Jonathan have to, you know, tell each other
goodbye. They have to hide in caves. And, you know, there’s
the couple of times where Saul comes in the cave, you know,
David and his guys are way in the back and they peek out. Oh,
it’s Saul. He’s, he’d come in to, you know, do his thing. And
what is, what did they say to David? He’s yours. You could
get him. So David goes and cuts off a
little piece of his robe. And David repents, not supposed
to touch the Lord’s anointed, but you get to Psalm 18. Psalm
18 is a song where David proclaims, God is my rock. And so Saul’s
been chasing after David for quite a while. And David says
a bunch of things. It’s a great Psalm to read. But
Psalm 18, you know, I’m getting chased by Saul. My life is falling
apart. He talks about how, you know,
the world is doing this. The, my heart is doing this.
It’s, it’s big shaking, lots of shaking in his own life and
in his, his little part of the world. And he calls on the name
of God. And there’s this great redemptive
act. The earth reels and the earth rocks and God delivers
him. And he proclaims, there is no
God like you. There is no rock. beside you. And so he is saved by God. He is saved by the rock. Is that
something we have in our mind and heart? That’s David’s God,
also our God. And so in the pantheon of manmade,
handmade gods, we need to remember there is one above all, and he’s
the God of the showdowns. He defeated all Israel’s gods.
He defeated the Baals, and he’ll defeat our materialism, maybe
our too much love for sports, our too much love for education,
our too much love for whatever else it is that we grab after
in the American dream. So there’s David’s God. How about foolish idolaters?
That’s the stretch of, I believe it’s verses 9 through 20, the
folly of idolatry. Y’all know what satire is, right?
You read the Babylon Bee? Take stuff that’s out there,
make fun of it. You know, satire is great. This
is a chapter that really pokes at the people who hold the idols.
It’s almost like a YouTube video, how to make an idol and bow down
to it. I mean, it’s just that dumb, that ridiculous, right?
How to make an idol. Or it could be, you know, you
get suckered into watching YouTube. It could be making something
out of nothing versus taking something, the one who made out
of nothing and making something for yourself, right? It’s just
that ridiculous. There’s God, the creator, and
then there’s us. We’re the makers. We can’t create
as much as we like to use that word. We’re makers, not creators.
Uh, so in this chapter, in the section nine to 20, there’s a
metal worker and there’s a carpenter and, and you, you get a description
of how to, how to make an idol. There’s the metal worker. He
gets his coals hot. you know, you ever been to Williamsburg
or old Salem or one of these old towns and you know, the,
the guys in there pumping his bellows and banging his hammer
and you know, he’s, he’s, he’s getting the iron hot. He’s beating
it with his arm. The strength of his power is
what the scripture tells us in this passage. Uh, he’s metalworking. Just think of that. He’s metalworking.
The other guy’s woodworking. They have to take something God
already made and they have to make something with it. And so
the metal worker has to heat up his forge. He has to use the
strength of his arm to bang his hammer. And it says, what did
it say? He gets hungry. You know, he’s working by the
fire. He gets thirsty. He gets weak.
He gets weary. Um, he said, well, God had to
rest on the seventh day. No, God rested so that we would,
God doesn’t get tired. God is an all powerful, almighty
God. But the carpenter, he’s got to
grow a tree. He’s got to cut a tree. And with half the tree
that he cuts, he’s got to heat up the house. And with that half
of the tree, he’s also got to heat up his oven so he can eat.
And then what does he do with the other half? He takes the
piece of cedar, the piece of cypress, and he forms and fashion
something. And so while he’s eating his
porridge or whatever it is he’s eating from the fire, he bows
down and says, this is my God. This is just totally unreasonable,
isn’t it? It’s absurd. Just this past week,
the kids that I teach logic to at Bradford, we learned about
reductio ad absurdum, taking somebody else’s argument and
proving its absurdity. And so we call it reductio ad
absurdum. We put a B on the end. you know,
make the Latin English there reductio ad absurdum. And that’s
what this is. It’s just dumb, right? You take
something God made and you make something with it and then you
worship it. Well, there’s idols all around us. And if Paul came
to our day and age, just like he did at Athens, he would be
troubled to the core, wouldn’t he? With all the idols. Someone
once said some years back that the household idol or the household
god of the modern day is the television. Look at Americans,
we’re enamored with sports. Look at Americans, we’re enamored
with chasing the American dream, whether it’s money or education.
And what does the Bible say? These things are confusion. These
things do not profit, but we take great pleasure in them.
We can’t do without them. And it leads us to think about
Christ. We need to think about Jesus. What does the scripture
say about the second person of the Trinity? It says Philippians,
where Paul is encouraging the Philippian church to serve each
other. He says, have this mind among yourself, which is yours
in Christ Jesus. who, though he was in the form
of God, did not account equality with God, a thing to be grasped. But he emptied himself by taking
to himself the form of a servant. He was born in the likeness of
a man and being found in human form, he humbled himself and
became obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. And there’s a result to him.
Remember back in all our covenant studies, there’s a result to
Jesus coming on the divine mission to seek and save the lost. And
what is the result for him? And we get the blessing of it.
Therefore, God has highly exalted him and he’s bestowed on him
the name, that’s Yahweh, that is above every name. So that
at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, every tongue, confess
in heaven and in earth that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of
God the Father. That’s it. If you name any other
name, if you bow your knee to any other God, if you call upon
any other, you are an idolater. You are not worshiping the living
true God. But what’s the problem? Well, verse 18 tells us exactly
the problem. 44, 18 says, bottom of this page, they know
not, nor do they discern for God has shut their eyes so that
they cannot see and their hearts so that they cannot understand. Doesn’t Paul speak of this in
Romans one, uh, earth and creation screams, there is a God what’s
in our hearts. The eternity, the law of God
is written on our hearts, but what do we do? We hide ourselves
from it. Uh, the little girl in the back today, Eleanor, She
comes into church this morning and she hides in her daddy’s
shoulder, but she’s still smiling because she knows, guess what?
We can still see her. But we do that, don’t we? It’s
kind of like a cat. You know, we think if we hide
our face and we can’t see them, guess what? They can’t see us,
but it’s not. So is it. God has made himself plain and
we can deny God, deny God. We can hide our face from him
and we can cover our eyes. But unless the spirit opens our
hearts, to tremble at God’s threatenings, embrace his promise, and yield
to his commands, we’ll form and fashion idols. We’ll bow down
to them. We’ll do these ridiculous, foolish things. So, have your
eyes been opened? Has God melted your heart so
that you turn from idols to serve the living God? That’s the question
for us this evening. Pray with me. Lord, thank you
for the the lesson and the foolishness
of the folly of idols. Lord, may our fingers more and
more be pried off of the things that we hold dear. May we prize
Jesus more and more. Lord, there’s lots of stuff we
love. They are our first loves. And we remember Jesus’ words
to one of the seven churches. We need to remember our first
love and repent. and recover the things that are
important. So make that so in each of our
lives tonight, we pray in Christ’s great name, amen.