Today we're in Isaiah chapter 43, verses one through 13. We've been on along Sojourn and Isaiah, and over the course of our study in that book, we have repeatedly recognized that the dominating historical situation that underlies, motivates, controls, Isaiah's prophecy is that of the Babylonian envoys arriving at King Hezekiah's court in the Kingdom of Judah. The Babylonians arriving is kind of in microcosm, another test of a temptation that Israel and Judah had faced and failed repeatedly throughout their history, that being the test of whether they would trust in idols, foreign gods, and the strength of foreign nations, or whether they would trust in the one true God. And we learned that in Hezekiah's case, he does not trust exclusively in the Lord God, and through Isaiah, a message of judgment is pronounced on those who will come after Hezekiah, despite the appraisal of his ministry we get in kings that he was one of Judah's few good kings. Throughout the prophecy of Isaiah, the dominating threat, which the Babylonian envoys are meant to address, is the threat of a Syria, which is the great global superpower in this age, compared to which Isaiah, Isaiah's home kingdom of Judah is a dot, a blip on the map. And that threat is what compels Israel to search for security in mightier nations and in alliances. What Isaiah does is he recognizes this threat, and in communication with the Lord, he tells the people of Israel and Judah that a Syria is the rod of God's judgment coming upon them for their idolatry and for their faith in other foreign nations and gods. That is the dominating, controlling message of Isaiah, chapter one through roughly 39. The message changes from the throne somewhat in chapter 40 to a message more of hope that after the judgment of a Syria on Israel to exile them to foreign nations across the known world, that God will still love his people and gather them back. God will visit his people in person. And in this exercise of his powers of judgment and salvation, he puts to shame all foreign idols and foreign kings who are the same as the other nations themselves against him, including the king of Assyria who did not consider that he was God's instrument, who did not understand that the Lord was using him for divine purposes. We will meet again another king in chapter 45 who is an instrument of God's control over the world as he is the Lord of all creation to exercise his power again and against him and his people to stand. Today in this passage, in that context of the hope for God's people, despite their guilt and the judgment that they are under, we come to this passage, Isaiah 43, where the Lord addresses his people with peculiar intimacy. He addresses them in the second person and identifies himself in the first person that is I and you in this passage of the time, you can see an extent in all of Isaiah. There are a handful of places where the Lord does this through Isaiah and this is one of them and it draws special attention to these passages because when the Lord addresses his people in this way with intimacy, we must ask what is it that he says when he wants his people to hear him, hear his voice directly as it were. So what does the Lord say when he addresses them this way? He says, do not fear to summarize because the only God who created his people will rescue them from his judgment and is greater than any nation or its gods. Let's attend to the text. I will read it in full. But now, thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Kush and Siba in exchange for you because you are precious in my eyes and honored and I love you. I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not for I am with you. I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, give up and to the south, do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, who my created for my glory, whom I formed and made. Bring out the people who are blind yet have eyes, who are deaf yet have ears. All the nations gather together and the peoples assemble. Who among them can declare this and show us the former things. Let them bring their witnesses to prove them right, and let them hear and say it is true. You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and my servant, whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me, no God was formed nor shall there be any after me. I am the Lord, and besides me, there is no Savior. Eyes are cleared and saved and proclaimed when there was no strange God among you. And you are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and I am God. Also, henceforth, I am He. There is none who can deliver from my hand. I work and who can turn it back. This is how the Lord speaks to His people, to give them hope and to tell them who He is, to simplify, to streamline, to put in more common terms the message that you see on the screen, in which I read before. We might think of it this way. God says, do not fear. Think of what He does and who He is. Let's address verses 1 through 7. Here the command is fear not. The Lord says that two times in this section of just seven verses, and it appears after the opening of this chapter with the phrase, but now. The Lord has a message of a different kind than He had immediately before this. In Isaiah chapter 42, the Lord concluded with an indictment of Israel, who was blind and deaf, who did not understand the works of the Lord or acknowledge Him as God, that trusted in false idols and therefore lost their abilities to perceive, just as the idols were blind and deaf and powerless and without life. Here in Isaiah 43, the Lord promises His people a different message. There is a message of hope, even in the judgment under which Israel falls because of their sin, the Lord has something more to say. He remains His people's God. He remains their Creator. And that is how He identifies Himself at the opening of this passage. He says that He created them. He identifies Himself not only as Creator, but former. Historically, this is undoubtedly true. The Lord formed Israel by choosing Abraham of all the peoples of the earth and promising to give Him a mighty nation and many offspring. And He decisively reiterated that promise and brought it to fulfillment in the subsequent generations of Abraham's line with Isaac and Jacob. Giving them descendants to multiply and become a nation. He preserved them in the famine as He brought them down into Egypt, sending Joseph ahead of them to prepare the way for them. And He preserved them and created them again by bringing them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery and bondage, and into a promised land where He would bless them. This is so relevant in Isaiah because the idols against whom Lord is setting Himself as the true God while they are false are created things, whereas the Lord is the Creator. Relevant to Israel, it is not just that the Lord is the Creator of all things, although that should be enough. He is their Creator, He is their God, the one who originated them as a people to stand in unique relation to Himself. The same holds, not just in Israel's case, but in all of ours, is the Lord not our Maker, is He not the Maker of heaven and earth and of all people? Is He not especially your Maker, Christian, when He gave you new life, a new birth, He made you a new creation when He called you to Himself? So when the Lord addresses you, this is how He addresses you, as the one who made and formed you, who made you not for any purpose, but for a particular purpose, to bring you to Himself. And this is how we should hear the message that He gives us, what does God do first He creates and creates you. The next work of God is in rescue or redemption. He says, Fear not, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine. Again, in history, we understand that the Lord did this preeminently with Israel when He brought them out in the Exodus from Egypt, from their condition of bondage. That story is often cast in terms of redemption and rescue from the oppression that God's people were facing. So Israel knows that they should not fear because God is the one who redeems. He is the one who has redeemed His people with mighty works in the past. There is no doubt of that. But God goes on to elaborate. He doesn't just say, I have redeemed you, He goes to explain, first of all, how. He says, He redeems by His presence with you. He says, when you pass through the waters, I will be with you and in verse 5, Fear not, for I am with you. If we turn again our eyes in the minds, the eyes of our minds, in history, we know that God was with His people when He brought them out of Egypt. The pillars of cloud and flame in the daytime and at night were the visible manifestations of God's presence. And so God says again, when He is promising to His people who are under judgment to bring them out, that He will be with them. And that will be the means of His rescue. Verse 2, those things through which God is meant to bring His people by His presence contains two kinds of threats, water and fire. If you are a homeowner, you know that Isaiah is basically nailing the threats on the head. He is named two of, I think, basically three kinds of threats that your homeowner's insurance probably covers. There is basically water, whether it comes in liquid form or frozen, whether it comes out of the sky or on the ground. Although if it is on the ground and you live in a floodplain like I do, you have to buy flood insurance too. So there you reiterate the danger that water poses or fire or wind are basically the three kinds of dangers of perils that homeowners insurance covers if we were to simplify. So it is fitting then that Isaiah should draw on these two metaphors, which are so tangible to people who live in a flood prone and drought prone area, where they would experience the threats that too much and too little water would pose to them. When they knew how in a dry season the invading army's intention to destroy might lead them to set on fire their crops, their homes, the forests to which they had limited access and bring their entire way of life and their civilization to ruin. With water and fire we can see all that is ordered and peaceable in the world coming to an end and to ruin. And so Isaiah uses this as a fitting illustration, a fitting symbol for the kinds of threats that Assyria was facing, chiefly Assyria, the nation of Assyria, which would threaten fire literally if they could, but which could would certainly bring to ruin their whole civilization and would remove the people of Israel from their homeland. Notice that in this verse the Lord does not promise to completely insulate or to remove the threats, but that He will bring His people through the threats. When you pass through the waters I will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you. Remember that this peril which Israel faces, the nation of Assyria, chiefly, is the rod of God's judgment upon them for their sin. God is promising to be present to bring His people through His own judgment. It is not generic trials or persecutions from the outside without specificity. The Lord is saying, I will bring you through my judgment. This is the promise of redemption. If you are Christian you know that in our case the Lord operates the same way. The Lord came to us in person to be present with us in Jesus in history. Jesus being God was able to face the ultimate expression, the final expression of God's judgment, the enduring curse of death and to come through it on the other side. It is because we are in Jesus and Jesus came to be with us that He can bring us through the fires and the water of God's judgment in death. And so we have hope to see the other side of God's judgment because He is with us. God's presence is how He redeems. God goes on to explain further the extent to which the reach, the scope of His redemption. He says that He will bring His people from the corners of the earth at any distance. He will say to the north and the south to the east and the west for His people to come back. And He will send from afar. He will bring His sons from afar and His daughters from the end of the earth. When the Lord wants to describe not just how He redeems but the extent to which the scope of His redemption, the reach of His mercy, He speaks in global terms. He commands the entirety of the earth, which is under His command and possession, a point He has been jealous to make throughout Isaiah, for the good of His people to bring them back to Him. What this tells us is for the Lord, His mercy is as great as His wrath. If you could not stand outside of God's wrath in your sin, neither can you stand outside of His mercy in His grace. When you are the object of God's love and favor, nothing you do can rescue you as it were from His mercy. No amount of your sin, no repeat of your failures. God's mercy is superior to all of it. The extent of His judgment, God can work back. God can deliver you from. No matter how much you have merited, no matter how terrible His wrath and your sin is. God can redeem you from it and bring you back through it. This is what God says to His people is real. He will bring them back, even as He promises and threatens to scatter them to the ends of the earth, so He will bring them back from the ends of the earth. As He promises to scatter them into all nations, north, south, east and west, so He will bring them back from all directions. And so it is when God redeems in every age. Then God gives a reason for His redemption, the how, the extent, and now a reason. He says that He is the God who will save His people. He identifies Himself in verse 3. I am the Lord, Your God, the Holy One of Israel, Your Savior. God is a Savior. He is a saving God. He is not merely a one-time creator who makes and forms you and is just as happy thereafter and have to have no dealings with you at all. Rather, with His people, God remains intimate. His relation as creator is sustained as He is the one who redeems and saves His people. He identifies Himself this way. That saving, rescuing is something He does habitually. It is who He is. God is God who saves His people. In this relation, you stand to God as the object, the one whom He delights to rescue. He promises in this enduring relation in which you stand to Him that He will love to rescue you, to bring you back, to keep you near Himself for our purposes, to bring you through to the last day. When you will see Him as He is, when you will be present with Him, as has never been before, He will keep you. He promises through all the fire and water, through the dangers of exile, through the threats of foreign nations which are God's means of judgment, He will bring you through to the last day. No matter the discipline you merit or the expressions of it that you face, He will keep you. And so God gives another reason. He is explained it on the part of Himself. He is one who delights to save. He is one who saves. But He also says on the other side that His people are precious to Him. And He spends many words to belabor this point. He says, you are precious in my eyes and honored the object of His love. When God wants to explain this, the value that He places on your person as you are in relation to Him, as He has brought you to Himself, He spares no expense as it were. He says, I give Egypt as your ransom. Kush and Siba in exchange for you. If Isaiah has been leaning on the Exodus to explain God's character, God's nature, God's activity in the past as one who redeems, who rescues, who saves His people, He does so again. Egypt, of course, is recognizable as the land out of which God brought His people in the Exodus. Kush and Siba are other nations in the vicinity of Exodus and may well have been under Pharaoh's direct or indirect control. All three are nations larger and wealthier than the nation of Israel. And yet, God, to whom all things belong, is willing to give up that entire region of the world to bring out a group of a few thousands, a few tens of thousands, perhaps nobody's from bondage and slavery, to give them a land to show His love and favor on them. God's people are worth more to Him than nations. And when God says, not just I give Egypt and Kush and Siba, when He says again, that I give people in return for your life, I give men in return for you, people in exchange for your life, He is saying, just as I did in the Exodus, I will do again. I will give nations on nations to redeem my people, if that is how He chooses to do it, if that is as it were what it takes. The Lord who says, or the Lord of whom the Psalmist says, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the earth and all who dwell in it, the one to whom all the nations are as a drop from the bucket, as Isaiah said in chapter 40, if he considers and understands that the cost of his people is that of nations, each of which are mightier, wealthier, larger of more promise than that of his people, God does not count that a cost too high. All things are His. He is in the unique position not to consider for the slightest fraction of a second, whether or not the exchange He gives for you is worth it, as it were. He is the one who may set His love on you and no matter the cost, it is no cost to Him because He has everything He needs in Himself. He does not consider what His people will give Him in return, rather God's gift in saving you is a free gift, a gift for which He needs no recompense and a gift He makes out of the abundance of Himself. And so when He says that His people are the object of His love in verse 4, this is a love that is all gift. It is not a love in which you must love God in return in order to maintain it. It is not a love that is conditioned on the feelings or payoff that the Lord gets out of you. It is a love that He sets on you freely without any obligation in Himself, without any need in Himself in order to give you life and hope and rescue even from His own judgment. And He explains this love as the love of a parent for His precious sons and daughters. He identifies His people that way as sons and daughters, those called by His name, those intimately joined to Himself, those He identifies with Himself, those He takes from their state of judgment, of worthlessness, and brings them into a standing with Him that makes them identifiable by His name. This sounds an awful lot like those new testament texts that speak of adoption when you've become a son or daughter of the Lord because of the work of Jesus. Here we have the same notion, God's people are His children. God's people have been given a new name, His name, when He calls them by name, that name is His own. So when you belong to God, you do not belong to Him as a mere possession. You belong to Him as a beloved son or daughter. And He is one who will make His glory known in you. He says that He created His sons and daughters for His glory. And as we are reading this text, we learn how does God make His glory known in His children? He rescues them. He redeems them even when they stand under His judgment and condemnation. He saves them by His presence with them, with a universal scope because He is one who saves and because they are precious to Him. And all of this, God's redeeming acts have presupposed that God's people need to be redeemed, that there is something from which to rescue them. And when we understand in the context of the immediately preceding chapter what the need of rescue is, it is the need of rescue from God's judgment. As we said before, the nation of the Syria, God's discipline coming upon His people. And we know that God's people brought that judgment on them by their own works. God had made His covenant with His people and they had broken it by going after other gods. God had given them His law to teach them His ways, how they ought to live in relation to Him and God's people. And they had been blessed and they had spurned that law. They had ignored it. They had viewed it as blind upon line, as a heavy burden, and not a blessing as it was given to be. And He gave them many of His blessings. When He brought the people of Israel into the promised land, He gave them an abundance as He describes it land flowing with milk and honey. And the land has rich in produce. And God's people, when they broke His covenant and for God His law, they spurned His blessings and turned them into curses against the one who gave them. Our deplorable state is the same. It is the consequence of our own actions. When humanity stands under God's judgment, it is not a mere accident of God's arbitrary and unprovoked habit of getting angry. It is because all human beings, though perhaps not in a so particular and special way as the nation of Israel and its history, have received God's covenant, God's promise with them. They have received God's law written on their hearts as the Apostle Paul argues in Romans 1 that Gentiles are law unto themselves. And they have received God's blessings. The rain that comes in its seasons, the sun that rises on the just and on the unjust, we all have received and have broken, forgotten, and misused God's good promise, God's good law, and His many rich blessings. And it is in this condition, this people who have so demonstrated a disregard for and hatred for God, that God comes to them and says, I have redeemed you. We are not the first movers in redemption. God is the one who comes to a people who have wrecked themselves and placed themselves under His judgment and says, I will bring you through it. I will give you someone to call Lord. I will give you someone to bring you through all the manifestations of my wrath so that you may come through the other side and remain and receive my blessings again. So this is what God does, God makes, and God redeems. From this point, the text takes a slightly different term. There is something of a change in direction. Not only is it all for His people's good, all of these works are for God's glory to make Himself known. He is the only God. And the scene that God uses to illustrate this is that of a courtroom. We see on the one side gathering, there are a group of pathetic and useless witnesses, bring out the people who are blind yet have eyes and who are deaf yet have ears. Blind and deaf witnesses is not a good sign for that side's case. On the other side, there are the nations. They gather together, the people's assemble. And so both sides appear to be represented. On the one hand, a group of ill-equipped witnesses has been called. On the other side, there are the nations. This claim of God that He has been making for chapters, that He is the only God, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, is evidently set to be contested in a universal court. All peoples and nations are gathered on the one side and God calls His blind and deaf people as witness for His case on the other. So how will the nations gather their case now that they've assembled? Well, it turns out their ignorance, their poor position to make their argument comes to the fore immediately. When the nations and the peoples assemble, the question, who among them can declare this or tell us the former things? As God has repeatedly indicted idols and those who worship them for being ignorant, for being unable to provide knowledge of the past or the present or explain the events of history, so He does again. And the nations are ignorant. Again, they have become like their idols. In the previous chapter is real worship their idols and they were blind and deaf as a result. Now, the nations like their idols can declare nothing and show nothing. And then again, it's not just their own ignorance, it is also their inability to provide witnesses for their side. The Lord says, let them bring their witnesses to prove them right, let them hear and say, it is true. In this situation, in which, like in Psalm 2, the nations rage and the peoples plot against the Lord and His anointed, they can neither vindicate themselves nor call anyone to their side to vindicate them. They claim they want Israel to believe, they want God's people to trust in idols, in their idols and their kings and their power as manifested in armies and wealth, and yet they cannot demonstrate as they claim that they are the real source of power and goodness and blessing. And they are ignorant and have no one to make up for it. In Isaiah, chapters 13 through 35, the Lord leveled many accusations and threats of judgment against the nations. And so just as their failure in this courtroom scene to vindicate their own claims shows their impotence and their inability to know, their inability to establish what they wish to establish. So it also cannot vindicate them from that on which the Lord threatened judgment, that on which the Lord based his threats, their idolatry, their wickedness. It is proven that it is empty and meaningless claims, their religion is not true religion. God's response has a curious ring when he says, you are my witnesses, my servant whom I have chosen, those to whom he is speaking are surely his people again. And yet what are his people like? In verse 8, they are blind in death. The Lord wants the blind in death to be his witnesses, to be his servant. He is still in their still inept, still unperceiving spiritual condition. He has a calling to which he is calling them. He has a service and a plan for them to fulfill and his acts to redeem them are the opportunity for them to return to the fulfillment of that purpose. And while there is still the chance of seeing and hearing, after all his people do still have eyes and do still have ears, even though they are blind in death, while they still have those faculties, there is the hope that they will use them, that they will recognize God for who he is. After all, when he calls them as his witnesses, he tells us the purpose, that so that you may know, you may know, what about the accusations of the nations? What about all of their claims against God, that he is not really the one true God, that he is not really the source of security against Assyria? What about the nations' accusations against God? No, that is not God's purpose in calling a witness. When God calls a witness, it is not to vindicate himself. It is for their benefit. Quite the opposite of the ordinary case, when the Lord calls his people to be witness here, he calls them so that they may know, so that they may learn something, not so that they may demonstrate something they have already learned. It is the opportunity again to open their eyes and their ears and to see and hear who the Lord is. So if this is what God has called his people to, his people who have been blind in death and whom he has promised to rescue, what should they know? Who is it that God says he is? And it is an answer to that question that the Lord spends the rest of our passage. First, he is eternal. He says, before me, no God was formed. Nor shall there be any after me. And in verse 13, he says, also, henceforth, I am he. The idols were created things. They were made by human craftsmen out of wood or stone or silver or gold. And they came into history at a definite point, and they would be melted down and recast into some other image with the fashions of the time. But the Lord, the true God, has no beginning, has no one to make him or give him form, has no one to make him stand up. He is the one who is forever on his own. Second, God is the Savior. I am the Lord. He says, and besides me, there is no Savior. I declared and saved and proclaimed. There is no other place to look. Besides him, there is no Savior. The idols of the nations, they came into being at a certain time. They do not deserve your trust. They do not have the might to save. The Lord has promised to save. And he demonstrates again and again that he has the might to do it. He is the Savior, to whom his people should look. Third, he is the revealer. He says, I declared and saved and proclaimed when there was no strange God among you. Just as the nations and their idols are blind and deaf and can never explain how the current state of affairs in the world came about and cannot proclaim what happened in the past or predict what will happen in the future, the Lord is the very opposite. He knows the past. He brought about the present and he can see into the future. The Lord is the one who can make that known. He has knowledge and he is willing to share it. He is unlike any ignorant idol or nation. Not only as he eternal, saviour and revealer, he is also the omnipotent God. He says, there is none who can deliver from my hand. I work and who can turn it back? Whether the king of Assyria or Cyrus, who will meet in chapter 45, these mighty kings who command armies beyond number, who can surround a city like Jerusalem with an army more populist than those who live inside, who can sweep away nation after nation and list names like the Rabshaka did for the king of Assyria, of nations and kings they have put to the sword and deported into foreign lands. All of these kings are nothing before the one true omnipotent God. None can deliver from his hand. When he brings judgment on those nations, when he exercises discipline on his people, there is no refuge to take but in him. When he works, no one can turn it back. So finally, in all of this, the Lord is jealous to establish that he is unique. He says, before me, no God was formed nor shall there be any after me. I am the Lord. Besides me, there is no saviour. When I declared it, when there was no strange God among you, I am God. Also, henceforth, I am he. There is none who can deliver. No one can turn back his works. In every one of his characteristics, he is unlike the idols and the nations in which Israel was tempted to trust. He is the one in whom there is security. He is the one who has the force of life in himself. In everything, he is the God without measure, without peer and without limit. He is the God worthy of worship. So what does God's uniqueness have to do with you? Do not fear. The only God is the God who created his people and will rescue them from his judgment. He is a mightier, greater than any nation or its gods. So consider what God has done for you if you are in Christ and consider who that God is. He delights in you. You belong to him. You have no reason to fear. No reason to fear what will happen in this life. And nothing to fear in what will happen in the life to come. This God who works no one can turn back is your God and he has made you his people. Let's pray. Almighty Lord and gracious Father, may all worship be given to you, you who are the only King and Savior. Thank you for making us your people, your worthy ones, not worthy because of ourselves, but you have made us honored in your sight. Thank you for Jesus in whom all this lies, the one who is present with us and will bring us through your judgment to the other side. Thank you Lord, that you are one with whom there is hope. May you receive honor and glory forever as only you deserve. It is in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.
