Word of Salvation – Vol. 36 No. 15 – April 1991

 

Truncated Yet In Bloom

 

Sermon by Rev. A.I. De Graaf on Isaiah 53:8; 10.

Reading: Romans 12; Phil. 2:1-16a

 

Who wants to back a loser?  And in the eyes of the world, Jesus sure looks a loser!  In fact, he looks that also in the first half of our text here in Isaiah today.  Are you sure you want to belong to that kind of leader?  Who wants to follow that kind of leader… or… back that kind of loser?  What future does His movement have?  What future has this Jesus, this crucified flop at age 33, as someone called Him?

Isaiah points at that when he says: ‘Who ever heard of His offspring?’ – in that Old Testament day, that was – think of Abraham – just about the worst that could happen to you: to die without kids: to have no stake in tomorrow: to be truncated here and now: a tree chopped down.  And yet we then read in verse 10: yet it is through HIM that the WILL of God for this whole world – His plan to make the whole universe new again, was carried out.  He who looked a loser was a winner.  And so let us look to Him this morning: and see two things:

            1.  The Sad Spectacle

            2.  The Divine Design.

1.  The Sad Spectacle

Whoever has a good, hard look at Jesus on that Good Friday – must come to the conclusion that in this world things are upside down!  Here is a man who had never done anything but good.  Healed the sick… fed the hungry… raised the dead… encouraged the sad.

NO fellow man in trouble, be he rich or poor, ruler or slave, ever knocked on His door in vain.

But now look what happens: the very nation that benefited so much from His care and goodness, the very people in whose midst He went about bringing joy and relief, are now screaming their throats hoarse crying for his death: AWAY WITH HIM!

No matter what Pilate tries: they are determined to see Him cut off.  Cut off from the land of the living.  He who lived for others as no one else has before or since, is the one Isaiah saw go His way to death as the loneliest man on earth.  No wife and no children to support Him, the truncated tree without future.  In HIM it seems that that terrible verdict of the Preacher has come true: ‘Vanity of vanities, meaningless!  What is the use of all the labour man does under the sun?’

What is the use of all His work?  Never before did that curse of Genesis 3 seem so massive: the earth is cursed for your sake: thorns and thistles it will yield, and after all your sweat and slaving, there will be the grave for you…  dust you are, and to dust you will return…!

Modern man knows this feeling better than his grandfather at the beginning of our century knew it.  Never did we have it so good as in our age, never such affluence and never were we used to such luxuries… and yet: never did the world look darker: never did it seem there was so little future.  We can buy what we want but what good will it do?  Compared to the life of those grandfathers of ours, it seems if we have come into a fairy-tale country instead, when you look especially at our young people, it looks more like a nightmare: What future is there?  What to work for, what to save up for?  Many young people in our age feel so much ‘cut off from the land of the living’ that they throw themselves knowingly into the self-destructive abyss of the drug culture: – vanity of vanities… meaningless!  Yes, but with one big difference: We and our children harvest what we have sowed ourselves.  We helped make the world the hard place it is, and our hands fashioned the idols and pseudo-gods that end up letting people down like money and consumerism and the elusive dream of ‘success’.  If then we find these let you down, whom but ourselves have we to blame?  But He – the Man of Sorrows – the LORD of glory, was stricken not for his own but for His people’s transgression!  He walked the road of our death; He became the sacrifice for our sin; a flop at 33 – lonely and seemingly fruitless.  And it is then that Isaiah comes along with a word that can give us a shiver: It is then he talks about THE WILL OF THE LORD.

2.  The Divine Design

The design…  the plan… the will of God…!

We can talk about that easily, when all things are going smoothly, when the sun shines and the birds tweet in the trees.  ‘Nothing happens without the will of God… Until your child is picked up from the road… dead!  Until you see them carry your husband to the grave… until the doctor tells you that there is no cure.

Then we aren’t so sure anymore.  Did God our Father plan – design – will all this?  Even this last week at one of the catechism classes we wrestled with this problem: When we see what our sin has done in the world, what suffering and what violence, what lives cut off in youth …did God will all that?

I think neither you nor I will ever solve this problem and that we will always be tortured by these questions until we stand shivering on Golgotha and see what Isaiah says here: THERE THE WILL OF GOD WAS DONE.  God who does not want sin and – as Ezekiel says – does not desire the death of the sinner, either, did will, did design, did plan the death of His dear loved Son!

It was His will to crush Him, says Isaiah.  And that ‘crush’ has to be taken literally in all its cruelty: it makes us think of instructions of torture, just as – when it says that GOD made Him sick, you have to think of things like cancer, no cure: no let-off till death.  How can a holy and loving God will things like that?  But before we are floored forever by that question, I want you to notice that in that same verse ten the ‘WILL OF THE LORD’ occurs again: that will of God, that Good Pleasure of the Lord, does not end at the cross, just like so much modern thought stops, ends at the grave, at the doubt and the senselessness of having no future.

That pleasure, that design, that will of God that willed the cross, also willed the Open Grave!  Then we see how that Will of God lays the sceptre of all the universe in the nail-pierced Hands of this Lamb of God, and – as our text says so beautifully: then it is through these hands, the hands of Jesus that were nailed to the cross for us, the hands that healed but were tortured for our sakes then it is through these hands that God wants to bring all things to their wonderful climax.  And then says Isaiah – after Jesus has made Himself a sacrifice for sin, then He will see His offspring after all.  And then we get to the wonderful fact that for 2000 years members have been added daily to the church, for 2000 years people whom Jesus won back for His Father, have been saying: Yes Lord, here I am!

His work was not in vain!

His death was not the end!

Being a Christian means carrying a cross and yet we may say: ‘Lord I love You because You loved me first!’  Christians know that following Jesus is not backing a loser but falling in line at last with the will of God.

‘Your people will be very willing in the Day of your power,’ (sings Ps.110) dressed in the beauty of holy majesty the dew of your young people rises up before you in the new morning…!

That’s not the gloom of those who know the world will end, but the joyful expectation of those who trust that the future belongs to the Lord who was dead and lives for ever.  Offspring for Jesus?  Here they come!  The lonely seed has fallen into the ground and died and now the fields are quiet unto harvest not only here but all over the world, especially in the black continent of Africa and in nations like Indonesia – but even among the young people of Russia, and Poland and East Germany, offspring of the lonely servant of God?  It has come and will still come, till The Day shall dawn and we shall see Him in glory: He who has the youth has the future.  World systems and ideas have come and gone, civilisations have had their hay-day and their may-day…!

But throughout the ages the Son of God, the crucified and risen, beckons old people and young people to make up for their sin, so that they can also have Him as their leader into New Life.  And they have done it, in days of joyful optimism as well as eras of gloomy pessimism.  In joy and despair they have done it: followed Jesus.  People who saw in Him the Will of God worked out, have lost their fear of death.  People who learn to live as they followed The Way.  Then people may laugh at you or refuse to take you seriously but you won’t care anymore.

They may even point at your shortcomings in your Christian life, and yes, they will be there… but you will know of new grace each day and joyfully trust that the Will of God, still today and in spite of yourself… will prosper.  You profess not yourself…  but Him.

You proclaim not the virtues of your Church but His!

You know that He who looked a loser only did so because He shouldered YOUR loss, all of it!  And now He is a winner!  You would rather follow Him even when that means having a hard time… rather than follow the masters and systems of the world whose path ends at the grave.  There is much about the will of God that we do not know.  But one thing we DO know: He wants not the death of the sinner, but that he turn from his evil ways… and will live.  That life is His gift.  Jesus had to be crushed for it.  That life is real: it starts now… and never ends.  Now you have one for whom to live, and one who will guide you through death.  What on earth is there now to fear?

AMEN