At the church where I serve, we are spending our time
leading up to Christmas in a sermon series entitled Presence. Last week, we
launched into this series by recognizing that, at the end of the day, Christmas
in our culture is about the presents. Christmas in our culture is driven by the
presents we receive from others and Christmas in our culture is driven by the
presents that we give to others.
We then spent our time together discovering that
Christmas began not so that we could experience presents; Christmas began so
that all of humanity would have the opportunity to experience God’s presence. We
looked at a section of a letter in our Bibles called the book of Isaiah, where we
discovered that God’s presence is so desperately elusive and so desperately
needed because we have a problem. We discovered that just as it was for the
Jewish people of Isaiah’s day, all of humanity has had a huge problem with God
as a result of our selfishness and rebellion. A problem that was universal and
insurmountable; a problem that reveals a desperate need to be rescued from. A
problem so massively large that only God could solve.
And that is what Christmas is all about. Christmas is
about the reality that God’s presence cannot and will not be present with
selfishness and rebellion. Christmas is not about us experiencing presents;
Christmas is all about God providing the opportunity for all of humanity to
experience God’s presence. Christmas is all about the reality that God’s
presence is desperately needed because we have a problem. Christmas is about
God responding to the problem of selfishness and rebellion that created a division
and a void that separated humanity from God. Christmas is about God responding
to the problem of selfishness and rebellion with a promise.
This week, I would like for us to discover the promise
that God made to provide an opportunity for all humanity to experience God’s
presence. We discover God’s promise in another section of the letter that we
looked at least week, that is recorded for us in the Old Testament of the Bible
called the book of Isaiah. However, to fully understand the significance of
God’s promise, we must first understand the context in which God made this
promise.
We discover the context in
which God made the promise of His presence revealed to us in Isaiah chapter 7
and 8, which occurred during the period between 736 and 734 B.C. The nature and
condition of Jewish nation at this time is also recorded for us in another
letter in the Old Testament of the Bible called the book of 2 Kings. At
this time in history, the Jewish nation was a nation that was divided into two
kingdoms; the northern kingdom, which was referred to as Israel and the
southern kingdom, which was referred to as Judah.
Now Judah was led by a King named King Ahaz. And King
Ahaz was one of the most wicked kings that ever led the Jewish people. King Ahaz
embraced the idolatry that had previously consumed the northern kingdom of
Israel. He worshipped the false gods of the gentile nations that God had
commanded the Jewish people to destroy when He delivered them from slavery at
the hands of the nation of Egypt. As part of his idolatrous worship, Ahaz
burned incense to these false gods and even burned his sons in fire as an act
of worship to these false gods.
And it was during this period of time that the
northern kingdom of Israel made an alliance with the nation of Aram, which was located
in modern day Syria, to attack Judah. And as the united armies of Israel and
Aram marched toward Jerusalem, the southern kingdom of Judah had a choice. And
that choice was this; who are we going to trust? Are we going to trust in the
Lord? Or should we trust the nation of Assyria, which was the hated enemy of the
Jewish people.
Now in those days, an alliance with a foreign nation
required adopting that nation’s gods and religious practices. So, an alliance
with the nation of Assyria would require the Jewish people to enter into a
covenant that recognized the Assyrian gods and an admission of their lordship. As
part of this alliance, King Ahaz would even have to redesign the temple altar
in Jerusalem that King Solomon had built so that sacrifices would be able to be
made to the Assyrian gods.
It is in this context that the prophet Isaiah
approaches King Ahaz. As King Ahaz was making preparations for the defense of city
of Jerusalem from attack, the prophet Isaiah approached the king in order to
deliver a message from the Lord. And the Lord’s message to king Ahaz was this:
“Do not fear this army, because their plan will not happen. Do not place your
trust in the Assyrians, place your trust in me. But if you do not trust me, if
you trust the Assyrians, understand this; you surely will not last”.
The prophet Isaiah then put King Ahaz to the test by
inviting him to test God. King Ahaz, responded to Isaiah by proclaiming that he
would not test God. However, the reason King Ahaz refused to test God was not
because he feared God; the reason King Ahaz refused to test God was because King
Ahaz had already made up his mind.
The king had already decided that he would place his
confident trust in Assyria instead of the Lord. King Ahaz responded to the situation
that he faced from the military threat of the northern kingdom of Israel and
the nation of Aram by appealing to and paying the Assyrians a great sum of
money to come to his aid. The Jewish people broke their covenant with the Lord
in order to enter into a covenant with the false gods of the Assyrians.
And it was this decision by King Ahaz that signaled
the beginning of the end for the Jewish people of the southern kingdom. This decision
by King Ahaz proved to be the turning point that led to God’s presence departing
from the Jewish people. It was this turning point that led to what we are going
to read this morning, beginning in Isaiah 8:19:
When they
say to you, "Consult the mediums and the spiritists who whisper and
mutter," should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the law
and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is
because they have no dawn. They will pass through the land hard-pressed and
famished, and it will turn out that when they are hungry, they will be enraged
and curse their king and their God as they face upward. Then they will look to
the earth, and behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be driven away into
darkness.
Here we
see Isaiah reveal for us the reality that instead of seeking the presence of
the one true and living God for guidance and direction, the Jewish people
sought guidance from those who would speak with the dead. Instead of seeking
the presence of the eternal God, the Jewish people sought the presence of the
temporary. And as a result, the Jewish
people were wandering through life separated from the presence of God. The
Jewish people were left to grope along the wall like blind men without the
light of God’s presence to guide them.
Wherever the Jewish people looked, wherever the Jewish
people searched, they only found the emptiness and the darkness that comes from
the lack of God’s presence. And as the Jewish people began to experience the
consequences that came from their selfishness and rebellion, the result was the
inevitable emptiness that comes from the absence of God’s presence.
Maybe you can totally relate to where the Jewish people
were in Isaiah’s day. Maybe you feel a void and emptiness in your life; you
feel that something is missing in your life; something is missing that nothing
has been able to fill. Maybe you have tried to fill the emptiness and void in
your life with position, or pleasure, or possessions, but at the end of the
day, the void, the emptiness is still present.
You see, while darkness can swallow up a light that is
failing, darkness cannot produce or replace that light on its own. Darkness
cannot fill the very void that it creates. And just like the setting sun
results in darkness on the earth, the Jewish people’s selfishness and rebellion
resulted in moral and spiritual darkness setting over their lives. A darkness and
emptiness that could not be replaced, remedied, or filled on its own: a
darkness that can only overcome by something outside of us.
And it
was at this point that God would have been perfectly justified in walking away
forever from the Jewish people and all of humanity. As we talked about last
week, God is just and God
is right. And God, in His justice, will not allow selfishness, rebellion, wrongdoing,
or injustice to go unpunished. For God to allow selfishness, rebellion, wrongdoing,
or injustice to go unpunished would demonstrate that He is unjust. All
of humanity rejected and rebelled against God and God had every right to
exercise His right and just response to that selfishness and rebellion and just
walk away.
But
that is not what God did. Instead of responding by walking away, God responded
with an amazing promise. Instead of promising to walk away from humanity
forever, God made a promise to take a step toward humanity.
Tomorrow,
we will discover this amazing promise…
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