Isaiah 44:21-23
Let’s hear God’s word together.
Isaiah 44, 21 to 23. God’s word says, remember these
things, pointing back to idolatry. Remember these things, O Jacob
and Israel, for you are my servant. I formed you. You are my servant,
O Israel. You will not be forgotten by
me. I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud. I have blotted
out your sins like a mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed
you. Sing, O heavens, for the Lord
has done it. Shout, O depths of the earth.
Break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it,
for the Lord has redeemed Jacob and will be glorified in Israel. Amen, God’s word. I don’t know
if y’all are students of words or not. If you read the Bible,
I suppose you should be. Maybe if you listen to literature,
read literature, listen to things, perhaps you’re a word person,
but words have meanings. They have meanings that were
originally intended when they were used. They have meanings
that come to be over time. Sometimes the same word can be
used in a couple different ways. Sometimes context helps us. Sometimes
maybe a simple explanation along the way helps us. You’ve probably
heard etymologies, you know, the study of the use of words
over time. This is one of the great crimes
of preaching and Bible studies. You know, you’ll hear a Bible
word brought up and This is what is meant by it. And usually it’s,
well, the mistake is that they give the modern meaning and not
the way, you know, it was written by Moses or Paul or said by Jesus,
that sort of thing. So you’ve got to be careful with
words. You’ve got to read them in their
context. You’ve got to understand the meaning that is meant. That’s
something we hear often in public debate. You can hear two people
debating two different ideas and using the same word two different
ways. So sometimes you’ll be listening to a debate, an argument,
maybe on a news show, they’ll say, what do you mean by that
word? Because that’s important, right? If you don’t understand
what they mean by the word, they can just be throwing the word
out there and that’s that. Some of y’all will be in the
Christianity and liberalism class on Sunday morning. That was one
of the classic slight of hands by the liberals. They would sort
of shift the usage of the word, a little slight of hand, and
that’s how they slip some stuff in. But good Christians are smarter
than that. They look up words, they understand
words. All this to say there are lots of Bible words we ought
to know. I think it was seven or eight
years ago, the men’s lunch group went through, I think it was
18 words every Christian ought to know. I believe it was by
J.I. Packer. Words like redemption, salvation, propitiation, good,
strong biblical words we often don’t know the meaning of and
ought to know the meaning of, so we zipped through that book.
In our passage tonight, you’ve got worship words, you’ve got
salvation words, you’ve got sin words, and you’ve got what we
might call redemptive or redemptive history words. Uh, think of the
passage, uh, in, in light of these words tonight, there’ll
be a bunch more along the way, but these big ones, remember,
uh, relationship, redemption and return. Those are the big
ones. Uh, first, remember, uh, the
first commandment tells us, uh, remember, uh, remember, I’m the
Lord, your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You
shall have. No other gods before me. And so, verse 21, remember
these things, O Jacob, remember these things, O Israel, remember
these things, my servant. What are these things? Is it
the stuff below that he formed you, that he won’t forget you? No, it’s the things past. It’s
all the idol stuff we looked at. The foolishness of idols.
In your hands, you hold a lie. An idol is a lie. It’s no good.
Can’t do anything for you. You made it. The firewood that
you use to heat up the coals or the firewood that you cut
in half to cook on and bake your bread on and then use the rest
to fashion an idol showed kind of the ridiculousness of it.
So remember, the idols are no good. God alone is God, the living
God. We think of the shorter catechism
on the commandment. We are to know God as the true
and living God. We are to acknowledge God as
the only God. And then we are to believe in
him, we’re to have faith in him. And so when the passage tells
us, remember these things, it’s simply this, remember idols bad.
You can remember that. Remember, idol’s bad. God, good,
Yahweh, the best. There is none like him. And so,
the remember word. Now, think back to the different
showdowns God had with idols. There was the showdown with the
Baals. Remember Elijah and the Baals?
You know, you put your sacrifice, we’ll put our sacrifice. They
dug a trench around it, filled it with water. The bales were
calling on their God. Remember Elijah’s taunt, where’s
your God? Maybe he’s in the restroom. And
then what did God do? His fire came down from heaven.
It licked up the water, licked up the sacrifice, licked up the
wood, the whole works. The Baals lost and Yahweh won. Or how about Dagon? Remember
when the Philistines stole the Ark and they took it into Dagon’s
temple? Every morning they came in to
bring Dagon his breakfast. And where did they find Dagon?
He was on his face, bowing down to the Ark of the Covenant. They’d
sit him back up. Kind of humorous, isn’t it? They’d sit him back
up. You know, maybe they got some string or some rope or something
to hold him. Next morning they bring him his breakfast. Where
was he? Back down on his face. And so,
and so it went finally, uh, they realized we better get rid of
this arc thing because it brought them tumors, brought them pain. Uh, and then there’s the great
10 plagues that God brought in Egypt, a showdown with Pharaoh
and his gods. And of course we know Yahweh
one, he rescued and redeemed his people. Um, took them out
across the sea on dry land over into the wilderness where he
fed them for 40 years, bread from heaven, water from the rock,
and so on. So we have every good reason
experientially and maybe in our brains, the knowledge, but also
the experience to remember Idol’s bad, Yahweh, Jesus, very, very
good. Remember these things, old Jacob.
Remember these things, old Israel. Remember these things, my servant.
So remember, don’t forget. Gotta work at thinking on these
things, work at remembering them. I think it was Andre this morning
when he was making coffee. He always has a little nugget
for me first thing on Sunday morning when I see him. And he
said, oh, Brian, we forget. He said, we are so faithless.
And he said, we need to be here to have that put back into our
minds and hearts. And that’s very true. We quickly
forget. The next thing, a little R word, is relationship. Remember
these things, Jacob. Remember these things, Israel.
Remember these things, my servant. You’re my servant. I formed you.
You are my servant. How many times does he call him
Jacob, Israel? Bunch in the passage comes down again in verse 23.
So Jacob, Israel, my servant, Israel, I formed you, you are
mine. A couple passages ago, called
you by name, those sorts of things. So relationship, our relationship
with God is important. Think of God’s relationship with
Israel. It says in Deuteronomy 7, I didn’t choose you because
you were the greatest of nations. I chose you because you were
the least. I set my affection on you, not because you are lovable,
but because I simply wanted to love you. You know, a lot of
people, speaking of words, they don’t like the words in the Bible
where God is sovereign and God does the saving. And what’s one
of the big words they don’t like? Starts with a P, predestination.
They don’t like the choosing word, but it’s all over the Bible,
is it? So they say, well, yeah, the
choosing word is in the Bible, but what it means is God looks
down the corridor of time, right? And he sees so-and-so is just
gonna be a really swell person. They haven’t read about depravity,
have they? Original sin. So-and-so’s gonna be a swell
servant, a swell person, and so God, on the basis of their
swellness, What does he do? He foresees their swellness,
and he chooses them because of their swellness. Is that not
just wrong-headed all around? That you have no swellness for
one thing, and if you had any swellness, it wouldn’t be good
enough for God to say, oh boy. God chooses the unlovable, the
unlovely. He chooses the one that needs
to be redeemed, and in some cases, he chooses the most pitiful.
I don’t know how it is in y’all’s families, but in one side of
my family, We were always the good kids.
And then there was the bad grandkids. The bad grandkids got everything,
right? Bailed out of jail, whatever.
We just behaved, and the grandparents loved us, but they didn’t do
stuff for us. And then, of course, all these years later, you’re
the good grandkids. Y’all got everything. Actually,
we’re the good grandkids, and we got nothing. But isn’t that the
way it is? It’s always the most needy that
get. Right? Isn’t that how it is?
They get bailed out. You know, another time, another way. God didn’t choose us because
of, oh, how grand you are, how good of a grandkid you’ll be.
He chose us because we were needy, we were messy, we needed redemption.
And He gets glory in that redemption. So anytime you think, I’m so
glad God chose me, remember it’s because He simply wanted to love
you. That’s it. That’s the only reason. He simply wanted to love you.
And that’s the sheer madness of grace, isn’t it? That’s the
sheer wonder of grace. And so there’s this relationship.
We are the people of old that God set his affection upon. Chose
us because we are the least of the nations. We just read Acts
chapter seven about Stephen’s speech. What a grand speech on redemptive history. Isn’t that, wasn’t that, I mean,
that was Genesis minus the beginning and it kind of went all the way
to the end, didn’t it? Yeah. Even eased into Exodus,
a couple of chapters. What a great summary. And you
learned a new fact, a couple of facts along the way, didn’t
you? About the life of Moses. And did you catch how it was
being pointed out that he tried to redeem Israel 40 years too
early? Did y’all catch that? Don’t, you don’t, you don’t do
the work of redemption until God sends you. You do it in his
strength, not yours. But there’s this relationship.
Think of the Old Testament prophet whose children were named my
people, and what was the other kid’s name? Not my people. And when God redeems us, we who
were not his people, because he was angry with us, we become
my people. And then you jump on over to
Peter’s writings. I love how Peter takes Old Testament
names and titles and attributes for Israel, and he just smacks
them right onto Christians. And so take that, dispensationalists,
right? God calls his people one and
the same. You are a holy people. Right? You are a chosen nation. You
are a royal priesthood. You are a people for God’s possession. Yes, that was Abraham and that
was Isaac and that was Jacob, but that’s also the Gentiles
who’ve been grafted in, who by faith are the offspring of Abraham. And so Israel is to remember
idols bad. They’re to consider the relationship
that we have with God. But also redemption and that’s
the third thing to think of what is what is redemption you get
a coupon in the mail? Y’all get those things in the
mail talk of the town You flip through there and say I don’t
go there. I don’t go there not going there bad experience there
And you flip through them and you end up tossing them in the
recycle bucket because they’re just hardly any good ones But
the other day There was one for Culver’s y’all been there yet
It’s a good burger. So I kept that one, hadn’t used
it yet. But what do you do when you take the coupon into Culver’s?
You redeem it, right? You turn it in, you redeem it
for the thing promised. And redemption is often in the
Bible like a slave thing. Remember Hosea, Gomer, how did
Hosea get a wife? He bought her off the slave auction
block. He bought her at a price and
she was now his. And that’s a big word, a big
idea, a big theme in the scripture. God redeems us. He buys us at
a price, the price of his own son, our savior, the Lord Jesus.
And what does he redeem us from? That’s where the sin word comes
in. Two sin words, transgressions and sins. Rebellion. God has a standard and we don’t
rise to it. We don’t meet it. You know the
thing, like heroines, you got to be this tall to ride. If you
don’t measure up, guess what? You don’t ride. They can’t sit
you on a phone book on the merry-go-round or the whirly round because you’ll
fall out, right? And then you’ll be in the news
and they’ll have a lawsuit. So you must be this tall to ride.
So many a sad face, been turned away. because they didn’t measure
up. But what about transgression?
It’s crossing a boundary. Remember in grade school, the
school bully draws a line in the dirt, step across this line. And he’s daring you, right? Step
across this line and I’ll punch you in the mouth, something like
that. So we cross a boundary. We see a fence. God says, don’t
cross, don’t transgress. And so we do. So redemption,
God says, I blotted it out. It gives two images, clouds and
mist. Think of all the storms we’ve
had lately, all the cold weather we’ve had. And we get this picture. We get this picture of God in
the heavens, right? You read the Psalms and his Lordship
over creation, you know, he sends the rain, he sends the snow.
He’s got a storehouse of it in heaven and it drops down when
he’s ready for it. But you get this picture in verse
22, I blotted out your transgressions like a cloud, I blotted out your
sins like a mist that God is blowing his divine breath, you
know, and the mist disappears, the thick cloud disappears. And
where does it go? He remembers our sin no more. There’s a neat song out. Listen to it at least once a
week because it’s so helpful. Our sins, they are many. and
his mercy is more. And there’s great lines in that
song about what God does with our sins, what God does with
our transgressions. And of course, we know that the
picture of the scapegoat on the day of atonement, the priest
would put his heads on the scapegoat and he would impute or credit
the sins of Israel for the whole year onto that scapegoat, send
the goat out into the wilderness. And that scapegoat, the great
scapegoat, Christ, our sins imputed to him at the cross. and his
righteousness imputed to us by faith. How does God blot out
sins? He doesn’t lift up the rug and sweep it under. No, they
actually get fully and finally paid for. It’s a legal transaction,
but God blots them out. So that’s the redemption word. Kind of a reminder of the kinsman
redeemer. What did Ruth need? She needed
a kinsman redeemer to redeem her, to take over her life. And that’s what Boaz was. That’s
what Christ is for us. And then the last word, return,
in verse 22, God says, after, remember, idol’s bad. After he
says things about their relationship, Jacob, Israel, servant, I formed
you, my nation, all that. And after redemption, I blotted
out your sins. He says, return to me. That’s a big Old Testament
word. Where do you need to return from?
Well, you need to come from the far country where you’ve taken
your inheritance and you have squandered it in riotous living.
And where you’ve come to the end of yourself and you say,
I can’t do it myself. I can’t do it on my own. I need
a father who will love me and at least let me live in his house
as a hired hand. And so return to me for I have
redeemed you. You always know that Israel,
when they hear that, I have redeemed you word, their mind is going
back to the Exodus. Uh, and their mind is presently
on the Exodus from Babylon. They’ll get hauled off into Babylon,
but returned some of the exiles back to, but then the great Exodus,
remember, When Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration, he’s
up there with Moses. He’s up there with Elijah. And
what does it say they’re talking about? Not sports, not pop culture. They’re talking about Jesus’
upcoming exodus or his upcoming departure, where he grants us
the great exodus from sin and death and darkness. And so our
call is to return to the God who says, remember, idols bad,
Return to the God who says, I’ve redeemed you. Return to the God
who has made a relationship with us. Come back, for God has opened
the way. Now, why does God save a people?
Why doesn’t he just leave sinners dead in their sins and trespasses?
Why doesn’t he just say, I’ll be glorified in the damnation
of sinners? He could have done that. He probably
should have done it, but that’s not what he did. He said, I’ll
be glorified in the saving of sinners as well by my glorious
grace. You read through the book of
Revelation and every time a song breaks out in heaven, it’s about
redemption. It’s about God’s relationship
with his sinner people who he saved by the blood of the lamb.
And so they sing songs of the lamb. They sing worthy is the
lamb. They sing songs about the work of redemption, things into
which angels long to look. Remember when Jesus was on his
way into the city of Jerusalem and the disciples put the cloaks
on the donkey. He’s riding into town. They laid
their cloaks on the road. They’re waving the palm branches.
And what, what did the people do? They sing Hosanna to the
son of David. They welcomed their Davidic messianic
King into the city. And, you know, it’s a small crowd.
It’s not very many. And what did the leaders say?
You need to hush. You need to quit praising this
guy. And what does Jesus say? If they don’t praise me, the
rocks will cry out. And so we have a little picture
here in verse 23 of the redemption of creation, giving praise to
God. Now, some of y’all remember a
couple of weeks back, a couple of months back, we had a guest
preacher, my New Testament teacher. And I remember he said one time,
and it baffled everybody till we thought about it. He said,
Jesus died for trees. And oh no, he didn’t. He died for people only. But
then you go read Romans eight. What does all creation do? They
groan. Why do they groan? Because they’re
under the curse. They’re under the fall of Adam and Eve. And
what do they eagerly wait for? They eagerly wait for our redemption
because when Jesus comes and raises us up, he’s also going
to make a new heavens and a new earth. How is that possible? by the blood of Jesus, by the
cosmic redemption that will be brought about by Jesus Christ.
And so, yes, we are made in God’s image and we uniquely are redeemed
and saved to sing. But here creation, sing O heavens,
shout O depths of the earth, break forth into singing O mountains,
O forest, every tree in it. So why does creation sing? because the Lord has redeemed
Jacob. Why does creation sing? Because the Lord is glorified
in Israel. This little section has echoes
in Psalms 96 and 97, 98. I think this morning we had Psalm
96, our call to worship. One thing to remember is we should
praise God, but there’s gonna be a whole cosmic praising when
God’s glorious redemption. All right, so words matter. Worship
words, sing, worship words, shout, worship words like break forth
into singing. Words matter like redemption
and transgression and blotting out and, you know, the puffing
away of our sins like a mist or like a thick cloud. Relationships
matter, and remembering matters. And so, all important words,
don’t forget them. Ponder them, think on them. Live
out of these good things, let’s do pray. Lord, we ask your help
and blessing as we go into the week. Help us not to forget what
we’ve heard. May we spend some time tonight
taking heart at the things that have been revealed to us. about
ourselves, our sin, about our need of grace and redemption,
and about the provision that’s come to us in Christ. We do look
for the day when you will be glorified in the whole earth
and we will be glorified in Christ. And so see us through to that
day, we pray in Christ’s great name, amen.