Emmanuel Baptist Church of Nipawin Sermons

Pursue pleasure, and end up with nothing. Pursue the giver of pleasure, and you end up with a life that matters and an eternal hope that can't be stolen from you.

If life is pointless, then what's the point of knowing a lot?

Jesus is not an extra on a nice little life. Without Jesus, there is no nice little life. There is only misty meaninglessness.

What are some practical ways we can share the good news with those who need to hear it?

Whose job is it to tell others about Jesus?

Sharing the gospel can feel really hard. Why? And why should we still do it anyways?

Passage: Isaiah 27:1-13 | Message By: Damian Neudorf | Series: Lord of the Nations

How do we wait well? By knowing who we are, what we really want, and what time it is. Isaiah 26 helps us on all counts.

Passage: Isaiah 25:1-12 | Message By: Tim Fehr | Series: Lord of the Nations

Passage: Isaiah 24:1-23 | Message By: Dylan Hamata | Series: Lord of the NationsHave you ever wondered what it was like emotionally for those who lived through World War II as it came to its conclusion? Some of you may know what it was like but most of us probably only have an idea. I imagine it was different depending on whether or not one identified themselves with the winning Allied or losing Axis powers.

Those who found themselves on the losing side likely had their heads hanging low, finding no reason for optimism, and no reason to celebration. Resources were low, and many loved ones were lost. It’s not just a military loss, but also a loss of morale as well. It would have been a time of despair.

Those who found themselves on the winning side likely had reason to celebrate! They were victorious, and probably had a more positive outlook on things. Yet even underlying the joys of victory, there was probably a sense of grief that came with it. Some people lost dearly loved friends and family, and the anxious waiting likely took its toll. The victory came with no lack of suffering and loss, and potentially with remorse for the other side as well. This is the kind of tension we will see today in our passage.

Introducing new themes

Before we get there, I need to note that Chapter 24 serves as a transition in this section of Isaiah, and so far this sermon series has largely been a lesson on trust. The human nations around Israel were not to be trusted, and God revealed how he would bring their power, their pride, their glory and their gods to nothing.

After this, one might feel as though the nations are actors doing their own thing, and that God is simply reacting to them. This next section will make it very clear that is not the case. Yahweh is working and purposing everything for their appointed end. And we will see this as God addresses his judgment to the whole world in today’s passage.

There are two themes that we will see come up in these chapters, and they are each shown as a contrast. The first theme is song. There is the song of the ruthless and the song of the redeemed. The second theme is of cities, the ruthless city of earth, and the city of salvation.

Today’s passage will primarily focus on the city of the ruthless, the earth city.

The Size of Sin (Vv. 1-6, 17-20)

With that we will look at today’s passage, starting with verses 1-3. These verses are bracketed by statements that the earth will be emptied and made desolate, and it is made very clear that this will be the Lord’s doing, for he has spoken it. God has said, and therefore it will happen. Just as God spoke the world into existence, he can speak it out of existence.

We also see in verse 2 that this desolation will affect everyone. There will be no-one exempt from this, whether rich or poor, high or low. No-one can escape. But why does God have to do this? Reading further we see why.

 

“The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants.” 

The word “defiled” here is better translated as “polluted” as the NASB translates it to communicate the idea. We see this as one of the results of Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden in Genesis 3, when the ground is cursed because of them, as it both fights against sinners and reveals that the earth which God declared good has been damaged because of them.

God then states three charges against the inhabitants of the world in verse 5. First, they have transgressed the laws, better understood as authoritative instruction. So, the charge is that they disregarded divine instruction that was given for their good.

Second, they violated the statutes, or as the King James Version says, they changed them. The second charge is that the world has not only disregarded God’s instruction, but have created their own system of morality in replacement of his.

Third, they have broken the everlasting covenant. The covenant being referred to here is the covenant that God made with Noah. 

We have just finished a Sunday school series on the covenants in the Bible, and if you would like to learn more about covenant in the Bible I encourage you to find them on the church website under the resources tab. Or there is also a sermon series from a few years before that on the bottom of the home page titled “You are Here.”

In short, this covenant was made with Noah on behalf of all humanity, restating much of the covenant God made with Adam that had been broken, and they are to be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth, as well as uphold justice, in order to honour the image of God in man. By failing to do this, the inhabitants of the world refused fellowship with their creator.

This is why the earth is cursed, and those who dwell on it suffer. It is a consequence of their own sin. This is why God must empty it and reconstruct it. The weight of wickedness is enough to corrupt the the whole world.

And there will be no escape either, moving ahead to verses 17-20 (we will be returning to verse 7-16 later), “Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth! He who flees at the sound of the terror shall fall into the pit, and he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare.” Even if someone tries to flee, they will fall into a pit, and even if they manage to climb out of that pit they will be caught in another trap.

I am reminded of 2012, a year where the world was predicted to end in my conscious lifetime and some had built doomsday bunkers which ended up being a multi-million dollar industry. 

Or in more recent memory during COVID-19, where people had stockpiled hand sanitizer and toilet paper, shutting themselves up in their homes. Doomsday prepping and bunkers will not save anyone in this event. There will be no escape because “the windows of heaven are opened.”

This is the same language that was used in Genesis 7:11 when God opened the windows of heaven to pour out the flood in the days of Noah. The earth is broken, split apart, violently shaken, staggered and swaying under the weight of the waters. But the water is only an image and the real weight that lies heavy upon the earth is the weight of its transgression.

When a house is rotting, because there is mold in the walls and trash litters the floors in heaps and mounds, the proper course of action is to either demolish the whole thing, or to empty it and strip it down to the framing and rebuild. By the end of either process, the house is made new. In much the same way, God will empty the earth and recreate it, and the recreation part will be described in more detail in the following chapters in following weeks.

The Sovereign Supreme (Vv. 21-23)

God’s judgment moves in verse 21 from the earth to the everything created. He will “punish the powers in the heavens above, and the kings of the earth below” as the NIV translates it. The gods of the nations, as well as their kings will be shut up in a prison.

When a rebellion arose, opposing a king, the rebels would be imprisoned until the king had final control over the uprising. Then the king would make a reasoned judgment in response to their treachery, and declare their sentence.

“Then the moon will be confounded, and the sun ashamed.” In the time of Isaiah, the sun and the moon were considered to be deities. But God puts the lie to that. They are just as much a creation of his, and just as much subject to him as anything else he has made. He is the one who said, “let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night” in Genesis 1. And he can shut them up in a dark dungeon should he choose to do so. In fact, there will be no need for them anymore in the new creation, because it is the glory of Christ that will be the light for the new earth.

God alone will be Israel’s king, reigning from Mount Zion, and his glory will be before his elders. The elders once led God’s people astray earlier in the book of Isaiah. But now, whether they have turned from their old ways or were replaced, they will take part in his coronation. The image presented in Revelation 4:9-11 fits this nicely, where the elders cast down their crowns before him, that he had bestowed them, and give him the glory.

There is an irony in this, that God will judge those who seek to glorify themselves, yet he will give glory to those who humble themselves before him, and it will be given back to him. It is as we heard in last week’s sermon, that God opposes the proud, and gives grace to the humble.

The Songs of Saints and Sinners (Vv. 7-16)

Finally, we will move back to look at the middle of this passage in verses 7-16. “The wine mourns, the vine languishes, all the merry-hearted sigh. The mirth of the tambourines is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased, the mirth of the lyre is stilled.” We see the city of the ruthless seeking immediate and earthly joy and satisfaction in a lifestyle of partying. But as we saw earlier in verses 4-6, the earth will not work for those who oppose its creator.

J. Alec Motyer wrote about the irony here: that it is their spiritual depravity that brings them to rely on the earth’s productive powers instead of God, and also to destroy its productivity at the same time. Not only the fruit but also the vine will fail, and their wine will be bitter to those who drink it.

“No more will they drink with singing.” This is a striking picture. What is something that drunk people often do without inhibitions. They sing! There is a reason there is often karaoke and jukeboxes in bars. Generally speaking, drunk people sing. But their song will be stilled at the time of God’s judgment.

Their city will be broken down. The word for wasted here is the same one used in Genesis 1, where it says the world was formless. In other words it is nothing but chaos. The picture of a city is fitting here,...