Introduction
An Unimpeachable Plan (Isaiah 46:1-13)
1)Man's gods Are Burdensome And Cannot Rescue (Isaiah 46:1-2)
The gods of Babylon had no choice in where they were going. Not only could they not help those who worshiped them, they couldn't even save themselves.
2)The Lord Sustains, Carries, And Rescues His People (Isaiah 46:3-5)
God conceived Israel, not the other way around (Isaiah 46:3). He wasn't an idea conceived in the mind of man, but God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram didn't call out to God and seek Him.
God is characterized as a God who is with His own in every and all circumstances. He doesn't keep us from troublesome circumstances but instead ordains the right circumstances and upholds us through them.
His purpose is to grow our faith in Him. If life is always easy, then you and I begin to put our faith in lesser things. But when God puts us in situations where we have no resources, that is when our faith in Him is tested and strengthened.
From conception, to birth, to old age. God is pointing out to Israel (and to Christians today) that our source is God himself. We don't take on a label, Christian, but we receive that identity in Him alone.
And those who are His are His forever. He never leaves His own. His own cannot be disowned.
And as His own, we are upheld by Him. He alone is our rescuer.
3)The Birth Of A god (Isaiah 46:6-7)
God conceived His people. But in verses 6-7 we see a god conceived by man.
Not only is this a waste of money, but it steals what belongs to God alone (worship), it's a burden to the owner, it just stands there and can't answer prayer, and it can't save from trouble.
Why do men seek fulfillment in created things in exchange for what only the Creator can provide?
[Example from India]
We spend what we have to get something that can't provide what we need.
4)Remember You Rebels (Isaiah 46:8-11)
The only way to find meaning and purpose in life is to go to the source of meaning and purpose in life.
Sometimes when you call something what it is, there's a sense of surprise and awakening. That is especially if the one being addressed is not really aware of their condition.
God calls Israel to a change of heart and mind. He tells them to remember something about the reality of God himself.
But He calls them a rebel, indicating that the things He is reminding them of should not be a surprise, but up to now they have not taken them to heart. They have not lived as if the thing He is telling them is real.
Your rebellion has lead you to believe in your mind and heart that there are other valid pursuits outside of me. But God is God alone, there is no other. All pursuits outside of Him are fruitless and lead away from Him.
But when God is our primary pursuit, all other areas of life come into proper perspective. We begin to see that life is not all about my wants and dreams but it's about God's direction and plan. And in that mindset there is fulfillment that cannot be found anywhere else. There is freedom in knowing that no matter what happens, I am part of what God is doing.
I must have a bit of rebel in me too. Because God has had to reteach me this lesson many times. All too often I find my focus off of God and on myself and what I am aspiring to do. Not that I can't have a life, but when I rule my life direction, then I become my own god and I find myself dissatisfied with the way things are, and rightfully so.
God's purposes are what matters. He has the plans in place and He knows the end from the beginning.
And so the rebels want to go their own way, but God says that plans and purposes are His and He will carry them out. “What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that will I do.”
5)Listen You Unrighteous (Isaiah 46:12-13)
When you want someone to pay attention, sometimes you say “listen” or “listen up”. When I want my granddaughter to pay attention to some correction I am trying to make I say, “Darby, look at me.”
God tells Israel to listen. And he adds to that the scathing remarks that they are stubborn-hearted and far from righteousness.
Not only do you go your own way as a rebel, but you are not even close to being righteousness. But then again, how can a rebel live a righteousness life, he can't.
The righteous will live by faith. But a rebel is not trusting in God but in his own direction.
You see, this people bore the name of Israel, but they were rebellious and unrighteous. They needed God's righteousness to come near. Because man has no righteousness in himself, God alone can provide it.
In this passage He points out the salvation as coming to Zion through Cyrus, God's anointed. This deliverance that God has promised from captivity in Babylon prefigures the Messiah's deliverance in His first advent – a deliverance from bondage to sin.
No man can be righteous before God. We are all rebels from birth. We are all far off when it comes to righteousness and the type of life God requires.
Not until God's righteousness comes near – not until His salvation meets us where we are, far off and distant as we may be. By faith, God imparts a righteousness that is not our own.
6)Principle:
Only God is able to satisfy man's greatest need.
8)Applications:
To What burdens are you held captive today?
What things that God has said are “fixed in your mind” but you have yet to “take them to heart”?
God's righteousness and salvation are near, but are they yours?
An Inescapable Fall (Isaiah 47:1-15)
Most of chapter 47 is descriptive either of the downfall of Babylon or the boastful empty claims of Babylon. A short segment, right in the middle – verses 3b-6a, describe God as the Avenger, Redeemer, and the Enabler (kingdom builder).
1)God's Vengeance Against Babylon (47:1-4)
He uses vivid imagery to describe the degradation and destruction of Babylon.
From virgin to naked and exposed.
From tender and delicate to one who is put to force labor.
From royalty on a throne to one who sits in the dirt.
All this to depict the vengeance God was going to take on Babylon. This nation had experienced world supremacy since their rise to power. They had gone unchallenged and so were untouched by outside forces. They ruled the land and sea.
But the LORD Almighty, the Redeemer of Israel, had an issue with them, and that issue was going to be resolved in God's timing and by His power.
2)The Pride of Babylon (Isaiah 47:5-7)
Babylon was an empire for a purpose. The purpose was God's purpose as seen in verse 6. We also saw that previously declared to Hezekiah after a small sympathy party had left the palace. But they were who they were because God ordained them.
Their power was intended to conquer and discipline Judah. To provide a place where Judah could reflect on a life apart from the good things God had provided them. Where all the material possessions were stripped away and all they were left with was their life as a servant of Babylon.
But many times, those who have a humble beginning, once they become powerful begin to believe they are something. They begin to believe the press and think they are indestructible.
We've seen such boasts in our recent past. Adolf Hitler claimed that the 3rd Reich would last a millennium.
[other examples]
Rather than acting as the custodians of Israel, like God intended, they were merciless and put a heavy yoke, even on the aged.
But that's what pride does. The proud person forgets that their purpose is bound up in who God is and instead seek whatever is expedient.
And the extreme forms of pride, national pride of the Babylonian sort, lead to extravagant boasts like the one in verse 7. “I will continue forever – I am the eternal queen.”
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
A. Lincoln, Proclamation of a day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, 1863.
3)Listen Wanton Creature (Isaiah 47:8-11)
Once again God uses the directive, “listen”, to call attention to what He is going to say. He calls Babylon “you wanton creature”.
Wanton is not the same as wonton (a sort of dumpling with shrimp and pork inside). This is a term describing sexual immodesty or promiscuity. Rather than the virgin of verse 1, he describes Babylon as wanton.
The OT often uses the metaphor of an unfaithful wife to describe those who depart from God or have no relationship with him. Many times he addresses Israel as an adulterous wife because they continuously sought after foreign gods.
So His description of wanton is fitting, given the next few verses and what they point out about their attitude:
I am and there is none besides me. There's no nation like me. I am going to continue on in the way I have always been.
But what they believe and what is true are two different things. Their superstitious sorceries and spells could not hold off the full measure of God's wrath against them.
Babylon was a very religious place. But is was religion more of the form of Wicca, black arts, psychics, astrology, along with a bit of idol worship.
The amazing thing is, the head of their magicians was a man named Daniel. He was not a magician, however, but was instead a man who was empowered by the Spirit of God to discern dreams and see visions. He was a wise man.
So the culture of Babylon was one of integrating all types of world religions together and picking and choosing the “best” of each. Kind of sounds like many in our pluralistic society today.
We find many blends of borrowed pieces of Christian traditions, Hindu practices, New Age experiences, all mixed together. After all, this is the tolerant way.
How repulsive that must be to God.
4)Godless Religion Cannot Save (Isaiah 47:12-15)
The emptiness of godless religions wears a person out. Just like seeking purpose and meaning in temporal things wears you out, so too the demands of empty religion are nothing more than superstitions designed to appease a guilty conscience.
But they never can address the guilt and remove it. They have no salvific merit.
[Hindu temple; flowers hung over the door; priests coming to cast out demons]
All such practices are destined for the fire. Those that are performing these things on behalf of other are not even able to save themselves let alone those they represent.
And so, Babylon, in her arrogance and pride, thought she was something but would find out the truth when God brought her down in a single day.
And that is what happened when Cyrus flew in from Persian.
5)Principle:
God has no barriers in carrying out His plans.
7)Applications:
What gifts from God have subtly become areas of pride in your life? What are you willing to do about them?
What opportunities has God given you to show mercy and how well are you doing with those opportunities?
An Unearned Redemption (Isaiah 48:1-22)
1)Nominal (Isaiah 48:1-6)
Labels can be a dangerous thing. I'm not talking labels on products we buy, I'm talking about labels that we use to define broad generalities.
A label tends to categorize certain aspects of those under the label. And here God is saying that the things that are claimed by these people are actually names only.
He calls them again to listen and He calls them house of Jacob. The name that means deceiver.
Called by the name of Israel.
Take oaths in the name of the Lord.
Invoke the God of Israel.
Call yourselves citizens of the holy city.
Rely on the God of Israel.
That sounds like a set of good credentials, doesn't it.
And they would be if they were true. But in verse 1 He tells them that they are lacking truth and righteousness.
Taking on the labels that appear pious is a farce and they yield nothing that God would consider valuable because they cannot produce righteousness.
Look To Me
Rather than looking to the labels and practices that you think make you right before me, look to me. God calls attention back to himself – His faithfulness to carry out everything His mouth declared and made known.
God isn't interested in a bunch of people who bear the label Christian, He is interested in people who live up to that label and what it really means.
2)God's Mercy (48:9-11)
God had used quite a few names to describe Israel in verse 1-8:
false, unrighteous, iron-necked, bronze-foreheaded, stubborn, idolatrous, deceitful, unfaithful, treacherous, rebellious, etc.
When God uses these terms to describe a people, that people usually don't stick around too long. But Isaiah 48:9-11 give a glimpse of God's purposes, even in sparing these rebels.
Verse 10 tells us that He is putting them through a furnace of affliction in order to refine them. Babylon is that furnace. He didn't let that furnace utterly destroy them even though He had every right to do so.
God's refining removes those things that detract from what He wants His people to be. In the process, faith in God is built as He carries His own through adversity.
And He didn't destroy them – He delayed His wrath – for my own name's sake.
He says this 3 times, once in verse 9 and twice in a row in verse 11. His name, the LORD, is the reason. The character of God is why He retains these rebellious people.
It all comes down to the purposes of God in fulfilling His plan of redemption. These people, stubborn as they are, are part of that plan. It isn't like God is stuck with them and has no options. He could raise up descendants of Abraham from the rocks.
God is able to take a godless, pagan nation, like Babylon, and use them to conquer His wayward and rebellious people. To capture them (as God predicted 100+ years earlier) and keep them in bondage for 70 years. To totally wipe out their land and property.
God has the ability to carry all this out and in the process, keep a remnant from being totally destroyed. He then has the ability to sack that nation with His anointed one, Cyrus. All predicted long before.
And why, so that His good name is not defamed. So that no other receives glory for what He has done. To reveal His mercy in holding back the deserved wrath which is justly warranted. To show His grace in saving an unsavory people such as Israel.
This is for God's sake and His reputation.
Aren't you grateful that God did save Israel?
3)God, The Eternal Creator, Not Some Idol, Will Defeat Babylon (Isaiah 48:12-15)
None of the gods of Persian or Media will be able to take credit for what God does to Babylon.
4)God's Ways Are Best (Isaiah 48:16-19)
Sometimes God uses a hard path to teach us to depend on Him. That was necessary with Israel.
God's ways, unlike popular opinion, are not designed to ruin our “fun”. They are designed for our best.
Obeying God is a protection.
Look at verses 18 and 19. The things that could have been, had Israel been obedient. The very things that God had promised Abraham.
5)The LORD Has Redeemed Jacob (Isaiah 48:20-22)
Can you imagine
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