The Lord our Redeemer

This is a sermon based on Isaiah 44:21-28 preached at the evening service on 22nd July 2007.

Tonight I’d like to begin with a story. It’s called “The Boy Who Lost His Boat”.

Tom carried his new boat to the edge of the river. He carefully placed it in the water and slowly let out the string. Tom sat in the warm sunshine, admiring the little boat that he had built. Suddenly a strong current caught the boat. Tom tried to pull it back to the riverbank, but the string snapped and the boat sailed further and further away from Tom, until he couldn’t keep up with it and it vanished out of sight. He’d lost it.

Tom walked along the riverbank looking for his boat until it was getting dark. And then he had to go home without his precious toy.

A few days later, on the way home from school, Tom spotted a boat just like his in a charity shop window. When he got closer, he could see -- sure enough -- it didn’t just look like his, it was his!

He hurried in to speak to the shop manager. "Mister, that's my boat in your window! I made it!" he said.

"Sorry, son, but someone else brought it in this morning. If you want it, you'll have to buy it back. You can have it for a pound."

Tom ran home and counted all his money. He just had the price, but it was all he had. When he reached the shop, he rushed to the counter. "Here's the money for my boat." As he left the shop, Tom clutched the boat tightly under his arm. "Now you're twice mine,” he said. “You're mine because I made you and now you're mine again because I bought you."

That’s what our redemption by God is like. He is our Creator, and in that sense we are his already. But as sinners, we are like the boat swept away by the river, taken away from God’s presence. Then in his grace, God seeks us out again and pays the highest price he could –the sacrifice of his own dear Son on the cross – to buy us back and make us his again.

Our passage in Isaiah chapter 44 is all about redemption. It’s all about God delivering and saving his people.

In fact there are three different threads or aspects of redemption that run through this passage and I want us to look at each on in turn. No doubt you all got the three “Rs” at school. Well, this passage contains it’s own three “Rs”. For the purposes of alliteration, we might call them restoration, rescue and re-creation.

Restoration concerns God delivering his people from captivity in Babylon and bringing them back to Jerusalem and the land of Israel. It is what we might term a national or political deliverance and I think it symbolises what for us is God’s protection of our nation, and God’s providence that ensures that normal life was we know it goes on.

Rescue lies at very heart of the passage and the Christian gospel and concerns God’s salvation of his people from sin. This is the very core of God’s redemption, this dealing with the problem of sin and bringing us, who are by nature enemies of God, into a relationship of friendship with him.

Re-creation looks forward beyond the redemption and salvation of God’s people to the re-making of the whole of creation - the heavens and the earth and everything in them at the end of time, undoing the effects of evil and removing evil from the universe for all eternity – and bring the whole created universe under the headship of Jesus Christ.

There are elements of all three levels of redemption in this passage. The order in which Isaiah presents them to us is different from the way I’ve analysed what he is saying, so in effect we’ll look at the passage back to front a bit since Isaiah focuses on the restoration of the people of Israel and their deliverance from captivity in verses 25 to 28, on the rescue of God’s people from their sins in verses 21 and 22, and on the re-creation of the universe in verses 23 and 24.

So looking first at restoration, we can see in verses 25 to 28 that these verses contain a remarkable prophecy of promise to the people held in captivity in Babylon. Just how remarkable you think this prophecy is depends on whether you take a conservative or liberal line in biblical scholarship. You see, while conservative scholars – and the church generally for the past two thousand years – accepts that Isaiah wrote the whole of this prophecy and that is dates from about 200 years before the Jews went into captivity, liberal scholars deny this can be true because of how precise and how true Isaiah’s prophecy is. They would argue that this section of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah and dates from the time of the exile in Babylon, or even after it! – and not from 200 years before. If the liberals are right, there’s not much remarkable in what Isaiah says. It would be like me “prophesying” now that Germany would invade Poland in 1939, pretending that my prophecy was written before 1700. Some prophet I’d be. You might call me a fraud, and you wouldn’t be far wrong.

But if the conservative view is correct – and I believe it is – then it is a remarkable prophecy, and shows the supernatural, divine origin of the Scriptures. For Isaiah prophesied two centuries before the exile to Babylon even happened how it would end, in great detail. For instance, notice that not only is Israel’s restoration to their homeland and to the capital city, Jerusalem, predicted, but even the very name of the person who would bring this about, the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, is mentioned, by name in verse 28, hundreds of years before Cyrus was born!

Of course, the liberals will say, this proves this passage was written long after the real Isaiah died. But that is no more than unbelief dressed up as scholarship. There’s no reason why God, who knows the future with absolute certainty, could not reveal to Isaiah the very name of the future pagan emperor who would have such a hand in the freeing of the people of Israel from their Babylonian captivity and their restoration to Jerusalem.

One thing we do know for certain is that Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Cyrus and the restoration of Israel is accurate. We read about what happened during the reign of Cyrus in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23:

“Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: "Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, 'The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up.'”

God calls Cyrus his shepherd in verse 28. Notice in passing that God can use people who are not his people to do his work. Here he will use a pagan emperor called Cyrus. He can just as well use a worldly monarch like King Henry VIII to bring about the reformation of his church in England, or even an evil tyrant like Joseph Stalin, to help the Allies defeat Nazi Germany and rid the world of Hitler’s barbarism. God is not restricted to using the godly to achieve godly ends. He can use the wicked to serve his purposes, even when they don’t think that’s what they’re doing!

The question is of what relevance are these things to us here today. We know that God could prophecy the future because he knows what will happen in the future. That’s one thing. We also know that he can use anyone to work out his purposes and achieve his ends – even when those who bring it about don’t realise they are doing it and even if what they want is completely at odds with God’s character and commandments. But is there anything else here for us to learn? I think there is and it’s this: there is an aspect of God’s protection and deliverance of his people that concerns their physical well-being, and survival and success of the nations and societies where they live.

If God had wanted to he could have given his people the spirit of repentance and given them the gift of saving faith, and restored them to the living covenant relationship he always wanted with them, while leaving them to live in Babylon. But he didn’t. He didn’t just save the people from their sins, he didn’t just make them believers, he looked after them by bringing them home to their own land and their own capital city.

Of course the people’s leaving captivity and coming home is symbolic of their returning to God in faith, but as well as that, there’s an element of God looking after all his people’s needs, not just their spiritual needs. Just as the deliverance from Egypt was both a spiritual event and a national, political event, so the return from Babylon is both a spiritual event and a national restoration.

Under the New Covenant, God’s people are no longer to be found in only one nation – the church of Christ is composed of every nationality and race. But there’s still a sense in which God looks after the nations where his people reside. God still looks after nations where he is honoured and his word respected. Historically that can be shown to be true. It is no accident that Great Britain rose from being an insignificant island on the fringes of Europe to being the greatest colonial power the world has ever seen. It is no accident that the nation where the Reformation flourished and God was honoured in both church and state was blessed and protected against all its enemies, and given the responsibility of taking the gospel to the four corners of the earth.

God is interested in his people’s welfare. Period. Not just their spiritual welfare – but their health, their peace, their prosperity, their physical survival and that of future generations of believers who are more likely than not to be the children of other believers and churchgoers.

The second of our three “Rs” in this passage is “Rescue”. Although God is interested in the temporal affairs of his people, it is their spiritual well-being from which all other blessings flow and it is God’s salvation of his people from their sins that lies at the very heart of the entire Bible’s message of good news. And this rescue that God has carried out for this people is what is mentioned in verse 22 of our passage, where God himself says:

“I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you.”

There are three things to notice in this verse 22 that spells out the gospel for us. That’s why I want to look at this verse in more detail than the others.

The first thing this verse teaches is that there is a problem that God had to sort for us. And the problem is our transgressions and our sins. The problem is that human beings do not treat God as we should, and instead we break his laws and try to live our lives without reference to the God who gave us life in the first place. Instead of loving God and our neighbour and seeking to live lives that please God, by nature human beings are full of pride and selfishness. We prefer to please ourselves rather than God, and the Bible calls this sin. This problem of sin breaks the relationship that God designed us to have with him, because he is a good and holy God whose very character cannot tolerate evil. And it’s a big problem with the way the universe is. The Bible says that sin must be punished and the punishment, or wages of sin, is death, eternal death in hell.

The second thing this verse tells us is that God has sorted out the problem. It is not something that we can sort out for ourselves. “I have blotted out your transgressions...I have redeemed you,” God says. “I have done it, not you.” And the Bible is very clear about this throughout the Old Testament as here, and throughout the New Testament, both in the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.

Look at Jesus’ teaching in John’s Gospel. In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” So according to Jesus, the only way for people to come to God, the only way to be saved, is to come to God through Jesus. Jesus is the only Saviour as Acts 4:12 also teaches. But back in John 6:44 Jesus had also taught: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” Isn’t that a remarkable two-way relationship that Jesus identifies? No one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws him, gives him the will and faith to come. And no one can come to God except through coming to Jesus Christ in faith. Jesus makes it absolutely clear that salvation is the work of God, and accomplished by the will of God and not by the will of man. And Jesus makes that point many times in his teaching. In John 3 he teaches that no one can see the kingdom of God unless is born again. But he also teaches that those who are born again – those who are children of God – are born not of the will of man, but by God’s will, through the Holy Spirit.

The third thing this wonderful verse 22 teaches is how God accomplishes his people’s salvation. He describes it as being like when a cloud comes over and blocks out the sun, or when a mist descends, hiding the world from view. This summer we should have no trouble understanding the picture Isaiah paints of thick clouds blocking out the sun so that you wouldn’t even know it was there. That, according to this verse, is what God does with our sins and transgressions. He takes them away. He hides them from view. And it’s not our view he hides them from. He hides our sins from his own view. And that’s a tremendously significant thing.

In Habakkuk 1:13, the prophet prays to the LORD, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil.” So for such a God to live in a relationship of friendship with sinners, their sins must be taken away and hidden from his view. We could not have a relationship with a holy God if he could still see our sins. They need to be blotted out and this is precisely what God promises he will do in this verse in Isaiah.

We know now the way God accomplished this. It is through the death of his Son on the cross. I could read dozens of verses to show this. But I’ll just read one. The first is what John the Baptist said when he saw Jesus approaching him on the day after his baptism: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” he said. (John 1:29). The sacrificial lamb who removes, who takes away, who hides from view, the sin of the world.

On the cross, Jesus took away our sins, hiding them forever from God’s view, and in place of our sins, he gives us, he transfers to our account, his righteous standing before God, so that when God looks upon Christian believers, he cannot see our sins, but instead he sees Christ’s righteousness and accepts us as holy and worthy to enter into heaven because of the righteousness we possess through Christ. That is the gospel of grace that Jesus and Paul and Peter and John taught and that Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets saw in shadowy outline. But they saw it nonetheless. Even Isaiah could write of the Messiah in Isaiah 53:5-6: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

It is through Christ’s blood that God blots out our trangressions and sins. It is through giving up his own Son as a sacrifice for sin that God redeems us.

The great American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, wrote about this wonderful gospel in these words:

“The redeemed are dependent of God for all. All that we have-- wisdom, the pardon of sin, deliverance, acceptance in God's favour, grace, holiness, true comfort and happiness, eternal life and glory--we have from God by a Mediator; and this Mediator is God. God not only gives us the Mediator, and accepts His mediation, and of His power and grace bestows the things purchased by the Mediator, but He is the Mediator. Our blessings are what we have by purchase; and the purchase is made of God; the blessings are purchased of Him; and not only so, but God is the purchaser. Yes, God is both the purchaser and the price; for Christ, who is God, purchased these blessings by offering Himself as the price of our salvation.”

The hymn writer Toplady sums it up in fewer words like this:

“The terrors of law and of God
with me can have nothing to do;
my Saviour’s obedience and blood
hide all my trangressions from view.”

And John Wesley translated a great German hymn like this:

“Jesus, Your blood and righteousness
my beauty are, my glorious dress;
midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
with joy shall I lift up my head.

Bold shall I stand in that great day,
for who aught to my charge shall lay?
Fully absolved through these I am,
from sin and fear, from guilt and shame.”

Now although our salvation in Christ is absolutely fundamental to everything else in our lives and lies at the very centre of the Bible’s message, though it will be our song throughout the ages, the Bible actually teaches that our salvation from sin and our entry to heaven is not the entirety of God’s good news. Our salvation is the centrepiece of a bigger picture. And so we come to the third of three “Rs” – re-creation.

The gospel is not just about us reaching heaven, being snatched from destruction in hell. It certainly is about that, but that’s not all the gospel is. Hard though it is to comprehend, the Bible’s message is even better and bigger than that. Eternity will be much more than being incorporeal spirits living in heaven. No the Bible teaches that in eternity we will be people with resurrection bodies, inhabiting a new heaven and a new earth, in an eternity where all of creation will be remade, repaired and restored by God.

This is what comes through in verse 23 of our passage in Isaiah chapter 44: “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.”

Now it might appear that Isaiah is simply being poetic here and saying that even the natural world should celebrate because the LORD is going to save his people. But I think it’s not just poetic licence here. The Bible teaches that God’s plan of salvation is not just to save for himself a people to be his and to live with him forever. Certainly that's part of it. But the plan is also to make a new heaven and a new earth – to renew and restore the whole of creation – to undo the fall and for eternity to be spent in a heaven and earth made perfect by God just as the old universe was made imperfect by man’s sin. This saving of the entire creation is why the mountains and trees should sing – because God’s eternal purpose for the whole of creation is gradually being realised. The heart of it is the salvation of his people, but the end of it is the salvation, the healing and making whole, every part of creation.

God’s big picture is summed up in Colossians 1:19-20:

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [that’s Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

And in Ephesians 1:10-11, Paul says that God’s purpose through Christ is “to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.”

In Romans 8:19-21, Paul writes what could almost be a commentary on verse 23 of our passage. Paul writes: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Do you see what Paul is saying here? It really is fantastic! He’s saying that through the salvation of God’s people, the curse that came upon the whole of creation as a result of mankind’s fall into sin will be lifted, and through the salvation of God’s people, the whole world – the very mountains and forests and birds and animals – will all be saved and brought to glory. And in the new heavens and new earth, all of creation will dwell in peace and concord again, as if the fall had never happened. It’s as if creation itself knows that the salvation of God’s people will be the key to the salvation of all the other parts of creation. Now they wait for it. One the day that this salvation comes to creation, the very mountains and trees will praise God!

No wonder then that Isaiah breaks forth in a joyful exultation for all of creation to praise and thank God for redeeming Israel in verse 22.

Hopefully we’ve come to see something of greatness of God’s redemption too. A redemption and salvation that looks after the everyday, temporal needs of his people, a redemption that takes away his people’s sin, ends the enmity between God and sinners and restores that covenant bond of friendship with them, and a redemption that has as its ultimate end the salvation of the whole of creation under Christ Jesus – who made all things and for whom they were made.

I began this sermon with a story about a boy and his boat to show something of the nature of God’s redeeming love for his people. I’d like to finish with another story. A true story this time.

There was once a gathering of friends at an English country estate. The garden party nearly turned to tragedy when one of the family children fell into a river that ran through the estate. The gardener heard the boy’s cries for help, dived in, and rescued the drowning child. The boy’s name was Winston Churchill.

His grateful parents asked the gardener what they could do to reward him. The man was a Scot and reluctant to speak. He hesitated, then finally said, "I wish my son could go to the college someday and become a doctor."

"We'll see to it," Churchill's parents promised.

Years later, while Winston Churchill was Prime Minister during the Second World War, he was stricken with pneumonia. The country's best physician was summoned. His name was Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered and developed penicillin. He was the gardener’s son who had indeed gone to college and become a doctor. Of course Churchill recovered from his illness and the rest is history.

Churchill wrote of this later: "Rarely has one man owed his life twice to the same person."

In the sense that Churchill meant it, he was right of course – the gardener saved him from the river and in a sense saved him again by choosing for his son to grow up to be a doctor, of all the rewards he could have asked for. What a remarkable train of events that is. But for all of us who are God’s people, it’s not a rare event at all. Far from it being rare, it is actually true for all of us without exception, for we all owe our lives twice to the one person – to the LORD God, our creator and our Redeemer. Our heavenly Father gave us life once through deciding to create us, and he gave us life again when he chose that his Son should grow up to be our Saviour.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)