Word of Salvation – Vol. 40 No.46 – December 1995

 

A Mission In Two Directions

 

Sermon by Rev. J. W. Deenick on Isaiah 6:9-13

BoW 486
Law and Assurance of Pardon
BoW 299
Old Testament Scripture: Isaiah 1:1-20
BoW 179
New Testament Scripture: Matthew 13:10-17
BoW 193
Scripture and Text: Isaiah 6:1-13 (Text: Isaiah 6:9-13)
Sermon
Congregational Prayer
BoW 500
Offering
BoW 181
BoW 531

 

Brothers and Sisters in Christ.

Throughout history, preachers have selected their text from the first half of this chapter; yet, few have preached from the second half.  That is somewhat strange because the Lord Jesus showed a special interest in the second half.

Still, from a different point of view, it is not so strange.  The first half of this chapter is surely one of the most inspiring passages of Scripture.  In it, the prophet tells us of the vision he saw; how he was confronted with the holiness, majesty and glory of God and how, notwithstanding that experience, he survived and was called to his prophetic mission.

We cannot go into that now, but Isaiah speaks a great deal about God’s glory, His might, and His holiness.  He is the first of the prophets to speak of the LORD as “the Holy One of Israel”.

Then he tells us further about his calling.  The excuse that, in the sight of God’s holiness, he was totally unworthy to be a prophet, did not stand up.  He was cleansed of the impurity of his lips by the fire of God’s forgiving grace; and so, he had no option but to respond to the LORD’s call, “Whom shall I send?” with a humble “Here I am; send me”.

These words of Isaiah have resounded in the hearts of many people, especially young people.  As they were wondering about their calling in life, and how they should serve the Lord Jesus Christ, they understood that call to come to them also.  They heard these words in their own hearts: “Whom shall I send?” and they responded; “Send me!”  There is no doubt that there have been, and still are, countless missionaries who came to serve the Lord in missions and in evangelism in response to Isaiah 6; and not only in missions, also in the service of Jesus generally.

Yet, if we come to think of it, we may well wonder why that is so.  If we read what kind of a mission it was to which Isaiah was called, we may well ask how anyone might desire to go in that prophet’s footsteps.  And that, we may be sure, is the reason why the second half of this chapter is so much less popular; and why so many missionaries and evangelists have had a very hard time when they were faced with the reality of their calling.

Let us then have a closer look at it, and see how this still applies to Jesus’ church today, and how the church’s mission is still always a mission in two directions.

1)

First, we’d better concentrate on the first half of this prophet’s mission.  He was sent out, first of all, not to save people but in order to harden their hearts.  That was his preliminary calling.

Now, before we say: “O, yes, but that was in the Old Testament”, we better remember that we find it in the New Testament as well.  The Lord Jesus said that He, too, had that twofold mission.  We will have to come back to that a little later.

Now, in order to appreciate this, we have to take note of what it says in the first verse of this chapter, Isaiah saw this vision and received his calling in the year that king Uzziah died.  The LORD’s calling to Isaiah was not time-less; it never is.

Uzziah had been a good king; one of the nation’s best.  He feared God and the LORD blessed him.  He was the king of the Southern kingdom of Judah, while Jeroboam II ruled up North in Samaria.  Both kings were also militarily successful.  They widely extended the nation’s borders.  The two kingdoms together were nearly as large as Israel had been in the days of David and Solomon.

But then Uzziah did a foolish thing.  Being so successful, he became over-confident and autocratic.  He thought that he, too, could do what other kings did, in Egypt for instance.  He set out to combine kingship and priesthood into one office.  He fancied that unless he was both king and priest he would not really be fully in charge; and so he went into the temple to act as a priest and burn incense on the altar set aside for that purpose.

But the LORD God had expressly forbidden that.  In Israel, the office of the ruler and judge was to be kept separate from the priestly ministry.  The LORD had good reasons for establishing that ruling, but we do not have to go into that here.

Now, there was at that time a High Priest in Judah who had the courage to resist the king and warned him against going up to the altar.  But Uzziah went ahead anyway, to his own ruin.  The LORD punished him on the spot.  He became a leper.

This meant that he could no longer carry out his duties as a king.  He had to go into complete isolation and his son, Jotham, ruled in his place.  Like his father, Jotham was a good and God-fearing king, and he, too, was politically and militarily successful; but he did not live long.  He ruled for 15 years only and died while his father, Uzziah, was still alive.

Then Jotham’s son, Ahaz, took over.  He was not a good king, neither religiously nor in any other way.  He was not faithful to the LORD; neglected and defiled the temple.  At one stage he went so far as to sacrifice some of his own sons to Moloch and to close the doors of the temple.  Then finally, after Ahaz had reigned five years, his grandfather, the leper-king Uzziah died.  It was in that year that the prophet, Isaiah, saw his vision and received his peculiar calling.

The LORD said to him, “Go and say to this nation: ‘be for ever hearing, but never understand; be for ever seeing, but never perceive.’  Make the heart of this nation fat, calloused; make their ears dull and shut their eyes; otherwise they might possibly come to see, hear, and understand; and then repent and be healed.”

What a mission!  Isaiah had to do his utmost to hinder the people of Judah and Jerusalem from returning to the LORD their God.  The time for repentance had passed.  The LORD had made up His mind about visiting these people with the judgment they deserved; and Isaiah, as the LORD’s prophet, had to see to it that nothing would keep the LORD from carrying out His intentions.

Now, why was it that the day of repentance had passed?  It was not because of the extreme wickedness of their sins, although these were bad enough.

We do not have to go into the detail and the precise nature of all their idolatrous and wicked practices.  We have read about it in chapter 1.  Although Uzziah and Jotham had been God-fearing kings, the people had never really followed their kings from the heart.  Their religiousness had only been a veneer, a pious pretence; and when Ahaz became king, they were only too happy to follow him in his idolatrous as well as in his immoral ways; and they filled Jerusalem with the despair and the tears of the poor and the innocent.

Yet, as earlier generations had done, at the preaching of the prophets they could have repented and returned to the LORD.  But they refused, and they continued to refuse.  No matter for how long the LORD had stretched out His hands to them and had spoken to them through His servants with friendly words and with hard words, they had taken no notice.  And now the Lord said: it is enough.  The time for repentance has passed.

We have to understand this well.  As far as its content was concerned, Isaiah’s message was not going to be any different from that of earlier prophets.  He would still have to tell them about the LORD’s holiness and great majesty, about the LORD’s faithfulness and mercy; and about His great promises for the future.  He would still have to call them to faithful worship and to a faithful, upright life.  He would still have to warn them about the righteous judgment from which they could not escape if they continued to rebel.  The message would remain precisely the same.  But from now on the result would be different.  The more he preached, the more they would become immune to the Word of God.  They would increasingly harden their hearts.

Now, we cannot say that this was typically an Old Testament phenomenon; that in the New Testament things are different; that in the New Testament mercy triumphs over judgment.  That is a misunderstanding.  In the Old Testament, too, mercy triumphed over judgment.

Nor can we ignore that in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus Himself appeals to precisely this text.  We have been reading about it in Matthew 13.  When most of the Jewish people, together with their leaders, refused to accept Him as a prophet sent from God, the Lord Jesus began to hide Himself from them and He began to speak in parables, with the result that they moved further and further away from Him.  The message did not change.  The message of the parables was exactly the same as what the Lord had been preaching all along.  But the result was now different.  The more they heard it, the more they hardened their hearts against it.

Nor can we deny that we see the same process still going on today; also here in our Australian environment.  In Australia we share with many other nations a Christian heritage.  Until 40 years ago, Australia was still largely a baptised nation.  Even today, nearly 75% of all Australians claim to be Christians and the great majority of the men and women who are prominent in politics, in the media, at the universities, in business, and in the arts are largely baptised people.  As infants they were set aside for the service of Jesus Christ.  There were ministers and priests who prayed over them and blessed them.  Consequently, both in and around the churches of this country, there is this large body of men and women who consider themselves as sharing, to one degree or another, in the Christian tradition.  Yet, we see the same process going on as at the time of Isaiah and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What we see happening is this: that there are a multitude of our fellow men and women who still somehow know about Jesus Christ, still have some knowledge of the law of God, of what sin is and what it means to be forgiven and to forgive, who still (sort of) believe that there may well be a day of judgment and a future thereafter.  Yet, over the last thirty to forty years they have increasingly hardened their hearts against their own beliefs, and continue to do so.  They take less and less notice of the commandments of Jesus.  They gamble more, they have little respect for marital faithfulness, they go to the divorce court and to the abortionist much more easily, they freely misuse the name of Christ in public, and bring the display of all manner of immorality and crime into their lounge rooms and their children’s rooms.  They have also given up on church-going years ago.

And that goes on, notwithstanding the fact that, in cities and country towns, tens of thousands of churches have their services in which the Scriptures are read, in which people pray and sing hymns, old and new.  The gospel is still there, but those who listen become fewer, and those who harden their hearts steadily increase in number.

Mind you, the same is happening in the churches themselves, and not merely on the fringes; also among the clergy and those who claim to be sincere and dedicated.  Hearing the Word of God, or preaching it, is no guarantee against the hardening of a sinful heart.  We cannot ignore the number of preachers and office bearers, of older and younger people, who like Demas (once a dear friend of the apostle Paul) have deserted Christ because they fell in love with a Christ-denying way of life.

What, then, is a faithful church to do, in the face of such falling away and such hardening of the hearts?  There is nothing else the church can do but what the LORD told Isaiah to do, and what our Lord Jesus Himself did; namely to continue presenting the gospel, and representing Jesus Christ, in word and deed.  That will be enormously hard and discouraging.  Those who have made up their mind will only turn away more and more, and in the end they will become increasingly hostile.  But we cannot run away from that.  The prophets encountered it; the Lord Jesus had to suffer it.  As a Christian Church today, we, too, here in this church, will have to take up this cross and follow Jesus.

For how long?  That was Isaiah’s question.  “For how long, O LORD, will I have to do that?”  The answer was not very encouraging.  For as long as it is needed to turn both city and country into ruins.  And even then, if there is one-tenth left, another devastating fire will sweep through the nation.

A de-christianising community will continue to suffer more and more spiritual and moral havoc.  We are reminded here of the words of Jesus: “because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold”.  In the Greek of the New Testament we find here the word “lawlessness”.  When lawlessness increases, when people tum more and more away from the Torah, from the LORD’s teaching, all of life begins to suffer, and the atmosphere in the community becomes cold, hard, and loveless.  Which is precisely what is happening around us in our Western society; and as a consequence we need more and more government regulations to hold things together, to care for the disadvantaged and the handicapped, to protect the old and the very young, to see that women and teenagers are not bashed up, exploited, or sexually abused.  When there is no love left in society, we need whole lists of so-called human rights to safeguard those who cannot protect themselves.

2)

This brings us to our last point, because this was not all that Isaiah had to say.  His mission also had a positive direction.  Not all had hardened their hearts.  There were those who were prepared to listen.  We find it here and we find it all over Isaiah.  There is hope; there is a way out; God is faithful to what he has promised; there will always be a remnant; there will always be renewal and reformation.

In this chapter, we find it expressed in the second half of the last verse.  What happens when there has been a bushfire?  There will always be a stump left.  From a terebinth or an oak there will a stump left; and that stump represents the future; that stump is God’s promise of renewal.  A new branch will grow from it.  A holy and God-fearing generation will stand up.  In nature that may not always be the case but in His kingdom, the LORD will see to it that it will be the case.

In our Australian bush with its gum trees, that may be somewhat different.  Trees ravaged in a bushfire usually remain standing and alive.  Still, here too, a tree burnt down to a stump does not easily come to life again.  The same was true about Judah and Jerusalem.  Only through God’s majestic and wonder-working grace could a new shoot come forth from that dead stump.  But so it did.

This is the other direction of Isaiah’s message.  Even in the darkest circumstances, there is for God’s people a way out.  When everything seems lost, there will be a shoot, a branch, a new tree; one that will never be destroyed.  There will always be a remnant, a new beginning.  God’s promises do not fail.  The seemingly dead stump will be the holy seed from which the kingdom of God will grow and expand and abide forever.

We know how this has been fulfilled in our Lord Jesus Christ.  He was and He is the holy seed.  In Him, the kingdom of God has come to all peoples.  Not all will receive Him, but those who do receive Him, are adopted to be children of God.  And they will not be condemned.  They will inherit eternal life.

Missionaries do not need to despair; nor does the Christian Church.  We do have a word, GOOD NEWS, for the world.  Those who repent will be redeemed by the mercy and justice of God.  And when, in the end, the LORD God will cleanse the whole creation by fire, they too will be cleansed; they will be given white robes and will join the angels.  Then, as Isaiah says in another place, no one will hurt any more or be destroyed on all God’s holy mountain; and the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

Amen.