The Day of Yahweh

Isaiah 2:6-22

Please turn in your copy of the
scriptures to Isaiah 2. Tonight we’ll look at verses
6 through 22. And as you’re making your way
there, remember Isaiah is a really big book. It’s a huge book and
there’s all kinds of things and themes and stuff that we’ll, we’ll see over
and over again. The day of the Lord, which we
will look at tonight is something that will come up a pretty good
bit in the book of Isaiah. And, um, and so, uh, pay attention
as we read, um, about the terror of the Lord and the splendor
of his majesty. I believe it’s, um, uh, kind
of a refrain that picks up, uh, about three times in our passage.
So let’s give our attention now to God’s holy word. When it says,
for you have rejected your people, it’s speaking of Yahweh. So Isaiah two, beginning at verse
six, for you have rejected your people, the house of Jacob, because
they are full of things from the East and a fortune tellers
like the Philistines. And they strike hands with the
children of foreigners. Their land is filled with silver
and gold and there is no end to their treasures. Their land
is filled with horses and there is no end to their chariots. Their land is filled with idols.
They bow down to the work of their hands and to what their
own fingers have made. So man is humbled and each one
is brought low. Do not forgive them. Enter into
the rock and hide in the dust. from before the terror of the
Lord, and from the splendor of his majesty. The haughty looks
of man shall be brought low, and the lofty pride of man shall
be humbled, and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day.
For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and
lofty, against all that is lifted up, and it shall be brought low,
against all the cedars of Lebanon, lofty and lifted up, and against
all the oaks of Bashan, and against all the lofty mountains, and
against all the uplifted hills, and against every high tower,
and against every fortified wall, against all the ships of Tarshish,
and against all the beautiful craft. And the haughtiness of
man shall be humbled, and the lofty pride of men shall be brought
low. And the Lord alone will be exalted
in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass
away. And the people shall enter the
caves of the rocks and of the holes of the ground from before
the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of his majesty when
he rises to terrify the earth. In that day, mankind will cast
away their idols of silver and their idols of gold, which they
made for themselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats,
to enter the caverns of the rocks and the cliffs of the cliffs.
From before the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of
his majesty, when he rises to terrify the earth, stop regarding
man and whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he. Amen. The word of the living
God. I think you can easily look around
the world and maybe even look around your own priorities and
you can see that we like big things. We like tall things. We like lots of things. We like
military. We like political parties. We like banks and earnings and
insurance policies. We like our gods and we love
our own self-reliance. That’s sadly true of many Christians,
but it’s very true of the world we live in. In fact, if you want
to see what people love, if you want to see what people build,
if you want to see what people bank on and trust in, look at
what they fight the hardest. to protect and to defend and
to build. We see it every day in the news.
We protect ourselves from our crooked business dealings. We
protect ourselves for our shady political dealings. We protect
ourselves when we hold a position or a seat of high power, whether
it’s in the government or the higher education institutions. We love big things, tall things,
lots of things, and we love powerful things because we believe that
they can serve us, that they can help us, they can defend
us, they can take good care of us. And in the end, what God
says of these things is you can rely on them, but one day I will
wipe them all gone. One day I will send them all
away. And so God says to his children
who are living this way, he says to his people of the old covenant
who are reaching out and pulling in all kinds of things into their
system of beliefs and worldview. He says, no, he says, don’t. He says, it is sin against me. I think of, David’s great sin. Older David was incited by Satan
to take a census of his army. And he took a census, I believe,
of his fighting men. And so David could go to sleep
at night knowing, I’ve got 600 men or whatever it was, 600,000
men who can carry the sword. I’ve got this many chariots.
I’ve got this many horses. I’ve got this many bullets and
cannons aircraft carriers and they’re positioned here and there.
And he could sleep at night, at least in his sinful heart,
because he believed that these things could save him and protect
him. We may do the same. We may go to sleep at night.
And the last thing we look at is to see what our brokerage
account is doing. We may go to sleep at night and we do a reckoning
in our head of our accounts and our precious things. Well, these
are things that God says do not do. Psalm 20 says, some trust
in chariots, some trust in horses, but our trust is in the name
of Yahweh. And notice how this passage of
scripture ends in verse 22. It’s a clear, In our passage tonight, I want
to look at a couple swaths or passes through it. It’s written in poetic form and
as you read it and you go through it, you get all these themes
and ideas and I wanna go through each theme as a whole and each
idea as a whole and not zigzag and verse six says this and verse
six B says that and that would be difficult for both me and
especially you. So I want us to think first about
the house of Jacob. I wanna think about God’s people,
God’s people. Old Covenant people living in
Jerusalem, living in Judea, living and worshiping in the temple
and living for God among all the nations of the earth who
don’t worship God. Remember, if you fast forward,
when Jesus came into the temple, he turned over the tables. He
threw out the money changers. He got rid of their stock in
their little store that was full of wares for the temple worshipers. And he called them a den of thieves.
And he saw in them that they had turned religion into moneymaking. They had turned religion into
a game. They had turned walking for him, walking with him and
living for him. They had turned it into something
very crass. And the thing our passage tells
us of our own hearts. And yes, it tells us of an era
during Isaiah’s day in specific, but it tells us of the hearts
of the people in the church. It tells us of the hearts for
sure of the wicked, but we love our dens of iniquity. We love
our things, our stuff. And they had stuff and lots of
it. In this passage, he speaks often of silver. He speaks often
of gold and treasures and horses and chariots. He speaks of idols. He speaks of what the New Testament
refers to as mammon. He speaks about alliances with
other nations. He speaks of ships that can carry
lots of stuff for us to buy and to fill up in our houses. He
speaks of the Oaks, of Bashan, the tall cedars of Lebanon and
the high places where other gods are worshiped, the mountains,
the hills. And he speaks of our walls and our towers, the things
that we think protect us, the things that we think bring meaning
into our lives and the things that give us security, all this
false security. And this is the house of Jacob.
This is the people of God. These are the ones who have the
covenant. They have Abraham. They have the story of Exodus.
They have the law. They have the writings. They
have the prophets. They have many wonderful blessings. We
have Jesus Christ. We have the whole scripture,
the Old and the New Testaments, both. We live in a pretty rich
era where we can not only get a good translation of the Bible,
people didn’t have that before 500 years ago, 600 perhaps with
the printing press, but we’ve got our own copies of God’s word.
They’re wonderful. They’re faithful. We even have
study notes and commentaries and computers that can look up
things and apps on our iPads and our iPhones and our other
digital devices. And yet with all of this to our
advantage, we build up for ourselves idols. We build up for ourselves
things that give us security. And God calls this, if you notice
several times in this passage, he calls it pride. And he doesn’t
just say, Oh, you prideful people. It’s lofty pride. We’ve worked at it. We’ve built
it up. We call it by names. And you
know, sometimes we, you know, we’re talking about the church
during Sunday school. And sometimes we can be the holy
huddle and say, you know, we, we do it really well. Everybody
else, not so much, but we do it really well. And what would
we say if God came in and said, you know, you people are full
of lofty pride, not just regular pride, the lofty kind, right? Extra large, extra, extra large
King size pride. Uh, but also he uses the word
arrogance and, and what a, What an indictment on the house of
Israel. What an indictment on the house
of Jacob. What an indictment on the church. You know, you
read the seven letters to the seven churches in the book of
Revelation and Jesus isn’t very nice. He doesn’t hold back, but
what’s his hope? That we’ll hear and that we’ll
repent and that we’ll turn to our first loves. We’ll give away
our second and third and earthly loves, but we’ll come back to
our first loves. And I tell you, I’m very encouraged. I’m hearing,
on Sunday mornings in Sunday school that this place, this
worship, our love for the scripture, our love for each other is really
a first love for us. And that’s a really good and
wonderful spot to be in because God will deal with, he will reject
pride and arrogance and haughtiness. He will put an end to it. Now he issued a warning in the
book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is the second giving
of the law. It’s when the first generation
died in the wilderness, uh, cause they grumbled and complained
and disbelieved God. So the second generation, their children after
40 years went on into the promised land. And so he gets them together
with Moses before Moses dies and he gives them the law for
the second time. That’s what Deuteronomy literally
means. Second law. And in Deuteronomy
chapter 17, He says to Israel, you know, you’re going to get
in the promised land and you’re going to want a king. You’re
going to look around at all the other nations and say, Oh, they
have a king. We want a king. Now, God was their sufficient
king. He could rule them quite well.
He could defend them quite well. He could provide for them quite
well. And he had done so. But he says, you know, you’re
going to go in that promised land and you’re going to want a king. And of course they
do. And what do they do? They go
for the looks. Saul, who was not a man after God’s own heart.
He was a man after his own heart. You know, he always looked in
the mirror. He always thought of his own, his own abilities
and skills. And he became an angry and vindictive
and murderous king. And what a terrible end he had. But then God goes to Jesse’s
house and he looks at boy number one and boy number two and boy
number three. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Don’t you have any more? Well, we’ve got the run of the
litter and he’s out in the field, but you don’t want to look at him.
And that’s what God says he wants to see. I want to see the little
guy because I think I want to see what’s in his heart. And
I think I’ll like it. And so Samuel anointed that one,
the king. We look at the outside, God looks
at the inside. But in Deuteronomy chapter 17,
when God warned about the king, he says, and if you get a king,
he’s going to want a bunch of horses. And if you get a king,
he’s going to want a bunch of chariots and guess where he’s
going to have to go shopping. The horse and chariot store is
down in Egypt. And going to Egypt and getting
stuff from them is not good when Yahweh is sufficient. And so
we need to think as the house of Jacob is the God of Israel
about the warnings not to be yoked to this present world,
not to be yoked to the religions or the mixing of religions or
the confusing of our own religion that we see so prevalently today. Deuteronomy 17 warned, don’t
do it. And it wasn’t just about horses
and chariots. It was your king will want wives. And boy, how
Solomon fulfilled that one. And they’ll want silver and they’ll
want gold. But what God said of the king
is he should live in humility for me. And he should have a
copy of the law and he should read it. He should know it. He
should tell others about it. And he should make sure Israel,
because he’s their king, is living by it and ruled by it. And if you do, your king will
fear God and the nation will subsequently fear God. So how
does Israel or how does the church get into the condition it does?
Well, we, we, we marry the American dream with the gospel or we marry
the Philistine dream with the old covenant. And you can see
in a little bit here, if you look at the poetry of the passage,
God is poking fun at them. The Philistines were, they just
weren’t sophisticated people. I mean, they were what we would
call, you know, knuckle dragon mouth breathers, right? I mean,
and he says, Hey, you, your worship in the Philistine gods, they
aren’t much, right? That’s, that’s low class. That’s
low culture in a sense, but that’s what we go after. That’s what
we run after. And it is insufficient to save. It is insufficient for
us to put our trust in them. And so we, we look at the condition
of the house of Jacob and we next then look at how God rejects. his people. He rejects the house
of Jacob for their behavior. If you look at the very beginning
of the passage, it says, you have rejected your people. You
have, you have rejected them. You’ve left them in their folly.
You’ve, you’ve let them really, in a sense, fall in love with
their enemies. You know, if you read history and you understand
history, you understand that history repeats itself. And we
look at about the time of Isaiah’s ministry, the rise of Rome, but
not too long after the life of Jesus, maybe a couple hundred
years, Rome fell. And Rome fell because they couldn’t
control their sexual appetites. They couldn’t control their financial
appetites. They couldn’t control the things
in society that led to an unraveling. And yes, we can hear warnings,
don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this, don’t repeat the
mistakes of history. But when we don’t like the cure, we’ll
never be redeemed, but we’ll fall headlong into our sins,
headlong into our idolatry, we’ll fall headlong into the vices
that we so love. And God says, okay, Romans chapter
one and two, right? He leaves us. in our folly. He leaves us in our sins. And
you know, as good parents, as many of you or all of you, or
some of you were, you, you, you’d be the decider of that award. If, if you don’t let your kids
suffer a little and make their mistakes, they’ll, they’ll never
work through them. And God is a good father says
to the house of Jacob, I’m going to let you lie fallow. I am not
going to nurture. I’m not going to reap. Uh, you
know, he says, when we get to Isaiah chapter six, Isaiah, you’re
going to preach to people that can’t hear. You’re going to preach
to people that can’t see. You’re going to preach to people
that are dull of heart and they won’t know or care a word about
what you’re saying. And so God rejects or leaves
fallow or leaves in folly. Uh, and, and, We become enemies
of ourself. We become self destructive as
God leaves us in our sins. And isn’t it true that the church
is in the same danger today? Isn’t it true that we ourselves
in our own personal lives, Our own Christian Walt can find ourselves
in this very same condition as the people of God. And so this
is a good chance to take stock and not say, well, that was Isaiah
speaking. Then that was Isaiah speaking
to those people. This has nothing to do with me.
Oh, I think a good dose of the word of God and a good drenching
of the Holy spirit would show us very quickly. Wouldn’t it?
The day of Yahweh, if it came upon us, would be rather scary. And that’s the third thing we
want to think about from this passage. What is the day of Yahweh?
What does this mean? Should I worry about it? If you
look at a list of all the times and places where the day of the
Lord, the day of Yahweh is listed, it’s a lot of times in the prophetic
books of the Bible. And so the day of Yahweh could
be soon. It could be, you know, it could be a local disaster.
It could be Babylon coming in and occupying and destroying.
It could be the Assyrians coming in and hauling off the Israelites
and repatriating with the Samaritans and other. nations. Um, it could be when the temple
is destroyed and at 80 70 and it could also be the second coming
of Jesus when the, all those horses and bowls and judgments
come pieces taken from the earth. And Jesus comes and makes judgment.
All the people that killed him, every eye will see him, right?
So the day of Yahweh can be a short time away, a long time away.
It can be this event or that event. And ultimately it is at
the last day, the second coming, when God will make all things
right. But the day of Yahweh is simply
this. It is the day when the high and
exalted one brings everything down low. He takes what is uncertain
and shakable and he shakes it and destroys it. And he shows
that it’s not worth living for or living by or living in. He’s against those who lift themselves
up with pride and arrogance. He brings it low. And I love
the word reckoning. That’s a good Southern word,
isn’t it? We reckon something. We reckon
we’ll go to the store, right? I reckon that’s about a foot
or two. That’s not real exact. But reckoning is also a mathematical
term. You accountants know what reckoning is. A reckoning is
a reconciling of the accounts, right? And that’s in a sense
the way we should think of the day of the Lord. It’s a reckoning
where God will say, this is my standard. This is how you measure
up to it or don’t. And then this is what I promise
the curses or the blessings according to the way you have lived. And
he says in this reckoning, when he brings low all those who are
high and lifted up in their own self opinion, he says the work
of their hands will pass away. Now I get great comfort from
this. You know, I love, I love our
country. I love where we live. I hate where it’s, what it’s
become. And I don’t have trust or faith
or hope in many of the systems of the world we live in today,
the country we live in. I think a lot of it has fallen
apart because our morals have fallen apart. And I don’t know
what you can trust. I don’t know what you can believe
in. I don’t know if we’ll get the, you know, you plug this
in, you’ll get that result. Who knows? But it’s not where
my faith lies. And if you’ve read history, as
I have, we know things about Rome and why it fell and probably
why America will fall. But we’ve also read in church
history, we’ve read in the scriptures, we even read in Revelation 6
tonight, lots of people have been hurt and killed during times
of injustice, during times of persecution, during times of
government upheaval. And it’s over and over in human
history that institutions get big. They get mean and they come
after God’s people. And the only thing you can hope
in is not the next election cycle. The only thing you can hope in
is not the banking system or your retirement account or whatever
those things might be, the justice system. The only thing you can
hope in is that Jesus comes back and he wins. Jesus comes back
and he makes all things right and new. And you may be one of
those souls that was under the altar we read of, In chapter
six of Revelation, and you may be crying out, Oh Lord, how long
till you avenge my death? That could be you. And it’d be
okay, wouldn’t it? Because you’d be in the arms
of the Lord Jesus. Jesus says, don’t fear those
who can take away the body, but fear the one who can cast the
soul into hell. But God says, and it ought to
bring us great, great comfort. When we think of, well, so-and-so’s
guilty of insider trading, or at least we’re pretty sure of
it, well, that money’s going to do them no good in hell, right? Or we think so-and-so cheated
and they got their seat of power or their scepter of authority.
Well, they’re going to be on committees in hell, aren’t they?
It’s sort of a joke. But doesn’t that bring you comfort?
The judgment of God ought to lead us to a couple of things.
One is be glad we’re in Jesus. Second thing, tell others about
Jesus and hope they’ll come to Jesus and be found hidden in
him. So instead of the rocks falling on them, Jesus hides
them in the cleft of his wing, his shadow of safety. But the
third thing is it ought to bring us comfort. The next election
is not going to make all things right. The next election is not
going to make all things new, but only the day of the Lord
can bring the reckoning that is needed. And notice the actions
of those who see the splendor of Yahweh, the terror of Yahweh. They cry out for the mountains
to hide them and even fall on them. But notice they toss their
man-made things into the cave and they toss it in with the
bats And they toss it in with the moles. And I don’t know about
y’all. I don’t like the moles. You know, I put the stuff around
the house. If they have their holes, I stick my garden hose in there
and I play a little caddy shack or something and try to put a
little dynamite down there. We want to get rid of moles.
But we’re going to give them our household idols. We’re going
to toss our silver and our gold where they live. Bats are worse. They’re just gross. I have these
Halloween movies in my head where if you get bitten by a bat, you’ll
get some wicked disease and die. We don’t think too much of bats
and moles, and they’re going to toss the things they trusted
in, the things they accumulated into the caves and they’re going
to themselves run for the hills. They’re going to hide under the
rocks. I think of old Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, however he said
his name, Hussein, depending on which Bush said it. Do you
remember his palaces? Gold, opulent. We had a friend
who was a chef in the army and when they were camped out in
Iraq, they lived in one of his palaces. She got to cook in his
kitchen for the army. And they had gold toilet seats.
I mean, opulent places. And where did we find old Saddam
Hussein? He was in a little hidey hole with spiders, unshaven,
unkempt. The man who lived in these palaces,
who had built all these lofty things, his day of reckoning
came. Perhaps it was a day of the Lord
for him in some way. And he was found hiding. No silver with him, no gold with
him, no riches that he had built. And that’s a picture, isn’t it?
that we should remember there’s no safety in stuff. God knows
how to turn the tables, and he can turn the tables on our big
institutions, our tall and lofty things that we love. And so it
leads us to think about Yahweh for just a moment. Yahweh, the
God who is, the living God, the true God, the one full of terror
and splendor, it says three times in our passage. He alone is,
to be exalted. He alone is the one who has the
right and even the need to be exalted. He is the one who can
rise up against his enemies and he can terrify them. And they
who have brought themselves up, he can take low. That’s why Paul
could confidently say, vengeance is mine, says the Lord. He tells
us don’t repay for evil for evil. You’re terrible at vengeance,
he sort of says, right? Don’t you be in the vengeance
business, let God do it. He’s really good at it. And the last thing we should
think of, if we fast forward through the book of Isaiah, we’re
gonna come to the servant songs. We’re gonna come to chapter 42,
chapter 53 and a couple other places where the servant of the
Lord is mentioned. And we know the servant of the
Lord is Jesus. And in Isaiah 52, 53, it speaks
of Jesus not being much to look at. He wasn’t a lofty dude, right? He probably didn’t wear the skinny
jeans and have the moose in his hair and get his teeth whitened. Jesus was a rough and tumble
kind of guy. Same as Paul, same as Moses. but he was God’s man. He is God’s man. And the passage
of Isaiah says that the people would despise and they would
reject him. He would be a man of sorrows
and he would be acquainted with grief, but he would bear in his
body. He would suffer in his body our
sins of pride and arrogance and loftiness and trusting and wealth
and doing all the things we do just like the pagans do to build
ourselves up. and to make ourselves great and
even to trust. Maybe we sleep with our checkbook
under the pillow. I mean, not really, but might as well. And,
and the, the thing we ought to remember is that the last day
we don’t want to be found in a hidey hole. We don’t want to
be found under a mountain. We don’t want to be found in
the cleft of the rock. We want to be found under the shadow
of the saving and salvation wings of Jesus. And that only comes
by putting our faith in him, leaving all behind, rejecting
it all, forsaking it all, dying to all, and even living a life
of cross-bearing and self-denial, we come and we live under the
healing wings, the saving wings, the cleft of the rock that is
Jesus. And at that last day, yes, it
will be terrifying. I hope I’m not alive then. I
hope I’m gone and in heaven when that day comes. You know, some
people say, well, I’d like not to die and just get beamed up,
you know, with the people at the last day. I don’t know if
I really want to be alive then. Cause it’s going to be a scary
one. But if you are be found in Jesus
and you’ll be just fine. Let’s do pray together. Lord,
we thank you that we don’t have to hide in holes. We don’t have
to trust in riches, but we can put our trust in your name, the
name of the most high. And so cause us to desire more
and more to rest in you. We pray in Jesus, Holy and mighty
name. Amen.