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Isaiah 6:1-13
6:1 In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train1 of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!”2
4 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” 9 And he said, “Go, and say to this people:
“‘Keep on hearing,3 but do not understand;
keep on seeing,4 but do not perceive.’
10 Make the heart of this people dull,5
and their ears heavy,
and blind their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”
11 Then I said, “How long, O Lord?”
And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is a desolate waste,
12 and the LORD removes people far away,
and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
13 And though a tenth remain in it,
it will be burned6 again,
like a terebinth or an oak,
whose stump remains
when it is felled.”
The holy seed7 is its stump.
[1] 6:1
[2] 6:3
[3] 6:9
[4] 6:9
[5] 6:10
[6] 6:13
[7] 6:13
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
If you have a Bible, I invite you to turn to Isaiah chapter 6. We're gonna be looking at several places in Isaiah, but we'll we will start there. So we are 3 days away, people. 3 days away from that new Lexus with a red bow on it for me. Maybe a Mercedes.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm not sure. Apparently, I'm supposed to get my wife something from Jared. That's what I keep being told so she can Instagram it. But every kiss begins with k, so there's a dilemma for me as to what I should do. I've heard I can't remember who said this, but they some pastor.
Jeffrey Heine:But he said, the most significant event in human history will be celebrated with or without understanding. But it will be celebrated. The most significant event in human history will be celebrated in 3 days with or without understanding. Now I'm assuming that all of you are here because you want understanding. You actually want to know what it is we will be celebrating this Christmas.
Jeffrey Heine:And of course, that's why we open up God's word. To seek understanding about Christmas, we typically, we go to Matthew. We go to Luke. We've got, you know, Luke chapter 1 and 2, and Matthew chapter 1 and 2. Those are Christmas stories there where you will hear about the angels, the choir of angels, the shepherds, the wise men, the finding Mary and Joseph there in the stable and this baby lying in a manger.
Jeffrey Heine:But what if you want more understanding than just those 4 chapters in the New Testament? Where do you go? Well, you gotta go to the Old Testament. And it's there that things begin to get a little fuzzy for you. I mean, you know that somewhere out there, there is a prophecy about a star.
Jeffrey Heine:You just you're not really sure. Anybody know where the star prophecy is? Exactly. Numbers 24. Numbers 24.
Jeffrey Heine:Usually, you give up in your bible reading plan about a month before that. But it's in numbers 24 that you you read about the Star of Judah. And didn't you know that there is a minor prophet somewhere that talks about the savior being born in Bethlehem. That's in Micah. And you're thinking about where else?
Jeffrey Heine:And you you remember Isaiah. Isaiah. Yes. During all the 9 lessons and carol services, different Advent readings. Isaiah is the prophet that we tend to go to around Christmas time.
Jeffrey Heine:And sure enough, you go to Isaiah and you find those familiar passages, like Isaiah chapter 7, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. Or Isaiah 9, where you read how the people who have walked in darkness, they have seen a great light. And that his name shall be called, you know, wonderful, wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And as long as you don't, you know, read the verses right before that or the verses right after that, you're okay. Because we like to read our Christmas passages in a vacuum because that's really the only way they make sense for us come Christmas.
Jeffrey Heine:But what we do is we've just kinda created this fuzzy mess around Isaiah and we don't really, really understand what it's talking about. But if you wanna know what Isaiah preaches about Christmas, and he has a lot to say about Christmas, you need to not start with the virgin shall be with child. You need to go back to the chapter before it in Isaiah 6. And this is what I want us to unpack this morning. Isaiah 6.
Jeffrey Heine:I'm gonna start by just reading the first eight verses. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the Seraphim. Each had 6 wings. With 2 he covered his face, and with 2 he covered his feet, and with 2 he flew.
Jeffrey Heine:And one called to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of Him who called and the house was filled with smoke. And said and I said, woe is me for I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.
Jeffrey Heine:For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with the tongs from the fire or from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send?
Jeffrey Heine:And who will go for us? Then I said, here I am. Send me. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks, John.
Jeffrey Heine:You would pray with me. Father, we pray that, Your Word would come alive to us through the power of Your Spirit. You would write in on our hearts, and we begin to understand the words that You spoke so long ago through Your prophet Isaiah. Lord, may the prayers of our heart become, Lord Jesus, both in this Christmas, as we look back, and as we look forward to the Advent to come. I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore, but Lord, may your words remain and may they change us.
Jeffrey Heine:We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. I know we're not supposed to do this, but if you were to choose favorite prophets, maybe maybe make a Mount Rushmore of prophets, Isaiah would be on it. He'd have to be on it. He's widely considered the the greatest of all of the prophets.
Jeffrey Heine:You don't have to take my word for it. If you were to take all the times that He has quoted in the New Testament, Isaiah is quoted more in the New Testament than all of the other prophets combined. So the New Testament writers were always looking back towards Isaiah. And the reason they do so is because the spirit of God gave Isaiah such clarity concerning the Messiah. Who the Messiah would be and what the Messiah was going to do.
Jeffrey Heine:But we have to admit that as clear as that picture is, it's still a little fuzzy as we read through it. So confession, I'm a pastor, which isn't the confession, but the confession is I'm a pastor who struggles with Isaiah. I really do. I struggle to understand Isaiah. So I went to Beeson Divinity School.
Jeffrey Heine:I have my masters in divinity, which means I should be able to master books like this. And I haven't. I'm often confused by Isaiah. So don't feel bad if when you read through these texts, you're a little confused as well. Because there's parts that I struggle to understand.
Jeffrey Heine:And this is with me. I spent 10 years of my life, 10 years every day reading a part of Isaiah. And still, even after 10 years of reading a little bit every day of Isaiah, there are parts I still really do not understand. But the reason I gave myself to doing that through Isaiah is because what I could understand was transforming. It's kinda like climbing Mount Everest, alright?
Jeffrey Heine:Even if you don't make the top, every step you take, you get a better view. And that's how I felt when I was going through Isaiah. I might not ever reach the pinnacle of it, but with every step I took, I could see more and more of the glory of God and it just kept propelling me to keep taking another step, taking another step. But one of the reasons that Isaiah is so hard to understand, is well he lived 27 100 years ago. Different time.
Jeffrey Heine:Different culture. And he didn't just sit down and write the book in one setting. This is a book written over his entire life. And so the first few chapters of Isaiah were written when he was likely, maybe, you know, perhaps in his twenties. Towards the end, it was when he was an old man.
Jeffrey Heine:And he wrote and served during many administrations. He was a prophet to many kings. 5 different kings. And so this would be, just imagine this, if somebody who had served the administration of Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, George H.
Jeffrey Heine:Bush, somebody who had served all of them and then decided to write you one letter about it. About, I mean, how do you summarize all that's happened? Each person, each king is different. The situations are all different. But that's what we have in Isaiah.
Jeffrey Heine:It was written over the whole course of his life and so, it's confusing. But I'll say this. You get Isaiah 6. You understand Isaiah 6. The rest of it begins to come into focus.
Jeffrey Heine:You really do get these glasses, these lenses, in which you can really understand most of what's happening in this book. And that's why I want us to start with Isaiah 6, which is Isaiah's prophetical call into ministry. Once again, he's young. And when he's young, he the Lord gives him this terrifying vision. A vision of the glory of the Lord coming and filling the temple.
Jeffrey Heine:And there's angels in there. And they're calling to one another about the holiness of God. And things are shaking. And there's smoke coming up. And Isaiah is absolutely terrified.
Jeffrey Heine:His response to this vision is not praise. His response is he thinks He is coming undone because he becomes aware of his sins. My wife and I, we've had a number of parties at our house this Christmas season, which means we've been cleaning up just pretty much nonstop. And so I was cleaning up upstairs, or cleaning up, I mean, just throwing things in the closet. And, and I looked at, by my bed there was just one shoe.
Jeffrey Heine:And, I couldn't find the other one. And so, you know, it's like, it must have got kicked under the bed. And so I went and looked under the bed. I couldn't really see things. So I went and I got a flashlight, and I I shone it under the bed, and I was like, ah, I'm sleeping on top of all of this.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean, it was nothing but all of these, a polite way of calling them as dust bunnies, but but they were more than that. These these said I'd I'd given life to something under there. And, but there were also a lot of dead bugs and things like that. That's what's happening with Isaiah. The glory of the Lord is coming and it's shining on him And it's exposing every sin.
Jeffrey Heine:He thought everything was fine up until that. Now all he can see is he is completely covered with filth. And so he says I'm lost, or as I memorize this as a child, woe is me for I am coming undone. I'm being torn apart as the the glory of God shines on me. And so he needs one of 2 things to happen.
Jeffrey Heine:The glory of God either needs to stop shining on him or he needs to be cleansed. And the Lord cleanses him. The Lord takes a coal, one of the angels takes a coal and touches his lips and purifies him. And then says your sins are forgiven or we read that his guilt's been taken away and that his sin has been atoned for. And then after the angel does this, we hear the Lord speak and He says, whom shall I send?
Jeffrey Heine:Who will go go for us? And so apparently, the Lord was doing all of this because He was raising up a messenger and He needed to get a message out to the people. In Isaiah, I mean, I guess He had a choice. But really, do you have a choice after seeing that and then being so radically cleansed? Isaiah says, here I am.
Jeffrey Heine:Here I am. Send me. And this is Isaiah's calling into His prophetical ministry. And Isaiah's gotta be so excited about this call, because what this means is that God is finally about to do something. That God's gonna do something and they're in desperate need at this point in Israel's history.
Jeffrey Heine:They are in desperate need for God to come and to intervene. The year 700 B. C, which means it's been 100 of years since King David was reigning and King Solomon had reigned, and they're way removed from that. And now they are a kingdom that is on the verge of collapse. Their northern neighbor, Assyria, a ruthless, brutal power, was breathing down their neck.
Jeffrey Heine:Conquering everybody around them, and now they are parked at the border of Israel. And it's only a matter of time before Israel is invaded. And the Assyrians were brutal people. They would You'd be lucky if you were killed, because they took away their prisoners, they had fish hooks and they would hook them through people's noses and that's how they linked their captives together as they led you away. And night after night, the Israelites went to bed with a sense of impending doom upon them.
Jeffrey Heine:It's hard for me, hard for all of us really to imagine what it would be like to live under that. Everyday living under that impending doom. I grew up as a child of the seventies and the eighties. And for us, the closest we had to that was, you know, the threat of Russia. The threat of nuclear war.
Jeffrey Heine:We were also scared of communist Russia. I actually remember, because this went on in the early eighties. I remember in our class, being taught about what we should do should a nuclear missile attack happen. And for some reason, they thought if you duck and cover, that that would protect you, you know. Or at least they were just trying to give you something to do.
Jeffrey Heine:But we watched videos about this. This is the early 80s. In 1983, for those of you who remember this, remember the movie that came out the day after? In which it was all about the day after Russia sent their nuclear missiles to destroy the US. What it would look like.
Jeffrey Heine:And it wasn't released in the theaters because they wanted a wide audience, both adults and their children to watch this. And over a 100,000,000 Americans watched it, me being one of them. And I remember the parental advisory before it. And it was a terrifying film. But but even after watching that, more people watched that than watched the Super Bowl.
Jeffrey Heine:Still, Russia was so far away. I mean, they're an ocean way. It's just it's not really this impending doom. But Israel, they could smell the campfires of Assyria. At night, if they listened hard hard enough, they could probably hear the army's voices coming over the mountain.
Jeffrey Heine:The threat was real and it was imminent. And every night, they'd go to bed thinking, is this it? Well, tomorrow, they invade. And so this is the threat that's happening at this time. And so Isaiah is thinking, finally, God is raising a prophet.
Jeffrey Heine:Finally, God is intervening. He's going to deliver Israel. This is what He's got to be thinking at this time. And then the Lord tells Isaiah what he's supposed to say. Look at verse 9.
Jeffrey Heine:Isaiah or the Lord tells Isaiah. He says, go and say to this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes. Lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.
Jeffrey Heine:Okay. Not what Isaiah is expecting. Alright. This is not what he's expecting at this point. God is literally raising him up to be a prophet that no one listens to, all right?
Jeffrey Heine:It's kinda like preaching at the 9 a. M. Service this morning, okay? It took a while for people to wake up. Isaiah's confused.
Jeffrey Heine:It doesn't it doesn't make sense to him. He's like, oh, alright. So he asked a question, for how long? For how long? In other words, okay, God, You have a mysterious way of doing things.
Jeffrey Heine:Okay? So the people won't listen at first, but then you're gonna turn their hearts hearts around and then they're gonna listen to you and then you're going to come and deliver us. Right? That's gonna happen. That's what Isaiah is expecting.
Jeffrey Heine:And he's thinking, so how long are we talking here? The Lord's answer, verse 11. Then I said, how long, oh Lord? And he said, 'until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, And the land is a desolate waste. And the Lord removes people far away.
Jeffrey Heine:And the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again. Like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is in the stump. It would be hard to overstate the shock that Isaiah would have felt upon hearing these words, Because the one thing he would have been certain of, that all of Israel had been certain of, is that God rescues.
Jeffrey Heine:That's kinda what God does to Israel. He rescues. It's in their DNA. I mean, things get bad. God comes in, saves them.
Jeffrey Heine:He always rescues them. Isaiah would have grown up hearing all of the stories. The stories about the battles won. The stories about Moses taking on pharaoh and winning. Or about Joshua and the battle of Jericho and now the walls came crumbling down.
Jeffrey Heine:Or about a boy fighting a giant with nothing more than a sling and winning. Or Elisha in Dothan, when he's surrounded by the enemy, God sends angelic armies with chariots of fire to protect him. I mean, often it was when Israel was hanging on by a thread, when the hour was at its darkest, God then stepped in, but He always delivered. But this time, God says, I'm not. I'm gonna let it burn.
Jeffrey Heine:He's gonna let the cities of Israel be leveled. The people who are not killed, He's gonna let them be taken off as prisoners in exile. And even the remnants of the cities that do remain, it's as though a tenth remain, those are gonna be burned. I mean, what he is talking about here is total devastation, annihilation. God is going to use Assyria to judge the people of Israel.
Jeffrey Heine:No escape. No last minute rescue. Everything burned to the ground. Not the message you wanna hear when you're being called into prophetical ministry. Poor Isaiah.
Jeffrey Heine:So what is God doing here? I mean, what is He trying to teach? Both Isaiah trying to teach Israel teaching us. First, He's teaching us that He will judge sin. Sin will be judged.
Jeffrey Heine:Even though God had been so gracious to Israel in the past and so kind to them in the past, delivered them so many times in the past, their response to it had not been trust and obedience. It had been infidelity. Israel, for 100 of years, had been continually unfaithful, And God finally has said, enough. You will be punished. Second thing, God's teaching, them teaching us, is that we are actually the problem.
Jeffrey Heine:We are the problem. We are not the solution to the problem. Our sins are desperately sick and we are wicked. And we cannot be a light to the world or rescue this world. Now, this seems to present to Isaiah, to the people there, it seems to present a big problem.
Jeffrey Heine:Because how exactly is God going to use Abraham to bless the entire world? Remember, God had made some pretty big promises. He promised that the entire world would be blessed through Abraham. But how can that happen when history has repeatedly shown that every one of Abraham's descendants are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Mere humans cannot fix this world.
Jeffrey Heine:They can only break it. That's the pattern we see over and over and over. Going back to the eighties. I am a child of the eighties. Frank Rizzo, he was a he was the mayor in Philadelphia.
Jeffrey Heine:People absolutely loved him, because there was not a politically correct bone in his body. He couldn't last today, maybe. But, anyway, he was being interviewed one time and somebody said, So what are you gonna do about street crime? And he goes, Streets don't commit crimes. People do.
Jeffrey Heine:Next question. And I love that. Streets don't commit crime. People do. Next question.
Jeffrey Heine:But we tend to always point to, like, something else besides us is the issue. And so we talk about things like bad government, but there's no such thing as bad government. There's bad people in the government. There's no such thing as bad neighborhoods. There's bad people in the neighborhoods.
Jeffrey Heine:People are the problem. Wouldn't you love to one day just see a, you know, a protest maybe happen at the National Mall, millions of people gathered together, all holding signs saying, I am the problem? Like, would you love, like, if we actually became that self aware that that that we all are the problem? But we don't do that because what we do is we ignore our own sins and we just point to everyone else and blame everyone else. But we're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Jeffrey Heine:So the question is this. How is it that God is going to bless the entire world through a descendant of Eve or through a descendant of Abraham when every single descendant so far has proven to be a sinner and part of the problem. How can sinners bless this world? Parents, you have a hard time even blessing your children. You feel this all the time.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean, parents want to bless their kids. Any good parent wants to bless their children. But often, it backfires. I mean, we try to bless our kids by taking them on trips, you know, taking care of them, buying them clothes, giving them gifts. But sometimes, those things provide the exact opposite of a blessing.
Jeffrey Heine:Instead of producing kindness in them, thankfulness in them, haven't you, parents at times, just seen a sense of entitlement? Or how you've fed selfishness instead? I mean, besides just thinking about Christmas. Easy example there. But just think about, you know, dinner.
Jeffrey Heine:A nightly occurrence. If you happen to, you know, you make a meal and your child happens to eat it, sometimes after they eat it, then they demand ice cream. Why? Because they're entitled to it. I did it.
Jeffrey Heine:I ate. Give me ice cream. And you're like, there's no kindness. Alright. This is from you who love your children.
Jeffrey Heine:You want to do nothing more than to bless your children. But sometimes it just backfires because you can't change their hearts. Your heart is full of sin. Their heart is full of sin. There's no way you can actually really bless them unless you could deal with their sin and change their hearts.
Jeffrey Heine:So what's gonna happen? I mean, if the problem is our hearts, then then then how can God possibly bless the world through sinful man? Is there any hope? And God says, yes. Just this one little seed of hope if you will.
Jeffrey Heine:We read that the very end of verse 13. And he says, though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again. Like a tarrabant or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is in the stump. The picture here is of total devastation.
Jeffrey Heine:An army has come through, has burned everything to the ground, chopped everything down. And the only thing that is left, all the trees, of course, have been leveled, is the images of this one tree stump. It's just a stump. It's been cut down and then it's been set on fire. And so it's this charred stump there And God says, I want you to look at that.
Jeffrey Heine:Look at that. There's a holy seed in there. Don't give up hope. There's one little seed of hope that's gonna come from all of this. And so what is gonna happen from this point on, from this point forward in Israel's history, God is essentially causing them to start over.
Jeffrey Heine:Because like Abraham before them, the only thing they will have from this point moving forward, is God and His promise. Land's gonna be taken away. Material blessings, taken away. Freedoms, taken away. The only thing that they are going to have is their God and His promise.
Jeffrey Heine:Nothing that they feel says God is around here. Nothing that they see here says God is for them. All they see is devastation, but they have God and they have His promise. And the question is, is that enough? They're starting over just like Abraham.
Jeffrey Heine:That's all Abraham had. God and His promise. Some of you can relate to this, in which there is nothing currently happening in your life right now, in which you can see any bit of hope at all. Perhaps, you're single. You're single and you actually feel a profound loneliness.
Jeffrey Heine:You wish it was not so. You've tried to preach it away in your life. But honestly, you feel very lonely. Perhaps, you're married and all you want is out. You just wanna get out of that relationship that you see is so toxic.
Jeffrey Heine:Perhaps, your health has completely failed you. Or you're in financial ruin. There's nothing. There's nothing you can see. There's nothing that you can feel that says that God is for you, but all you have is your belief in God and His promise.
Jeffrey Heine:That you do have a glorious future. We all do who have trusted Christ. Is this enough for you? Do you know what's gonna happen to God's people now from this point on? After God burns it all to the ground and He says we're gonna start over, this is what happens to the people.
Jeffrey Heine:They begin to cry out, Messiah. Messiah, come. Messiah, come and save us. We cannot save ourselves. We've tried.
Jeffrey Heine:We've tried. Messiah, come. The people begin to cry out over and over that God would raise up a Messiah. It's from this point on that God actually begins raising up prophets that point forward to the Messiah. The messianic titles that will be given to this Messiah, you recognize the branch or the shoot of Jesse.
Jeffrey Heine:All that stems from here, from that charred stump. Something's gonna spring forth this new life. But the prayers from this point on are, come, Messiah. Come, we cannot save ourselves. Come, Messiah.
Jeffrey Heine:Come, we cannot bless ourselves. Come, Messiah. Come. We can't change ourselves. Come, Messiah.
Jeffrey Heine:Come. Now, of course, after this, Isaiah still had a lot of questions. Yes. God promised He was gonna spring up from that charred stump some holy seed, but He had questions like, how do we know you're really gonna do this? And how would we recognize this Messiah when He comes?
Jeffrey Heine:Can you give us a sign? And still there's the issue of, but He's gonna be a human and we're the problem. So how can even this this human, this chute that springs up, how can that person actually really save us? These are the questions that are going on in there. Isaiah's thinking, if Abraham couldn't save us, if Moses couldn't save us, if David couldn't save us, how could any future king or Messiah save us?
Jeffrey Heine:And this is when we get to the Christmas passages in Isaiah. This all lays the ground, the foundation. This is the fertile soil for now which Christmas begins to spring forward. This is the backdrop of all those prophecies you know and you've come to love. This week, it's so good.
Jeffrey Heine:Chapter 7, God begins to answer these questions. Verse 14. God's saying, Okay. You want a sign? Here's your sign.
Jeffrey Heine:Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel. The Lord tells us this is how you're gonna know who the Messiah is. Well, he's gonna be born of a virgin, Which means that this isn't gonna be just a mere child. It's gonna be a supernatural child. His name's gonna be called Emmanuel, because I have not forsaken you.
Jeffrey Heine:I know there's total devastation all around you, but I have not forsaken you. I will be with you. Then we come to Isaiah 9. Isaiah chapter 9. There's so much I want to go here.
Jeffrey Heine:We just don't have the time. Verse 1. But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time, he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali. When the latter time, he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan.
Jeffrey Heine:Galilee of the nations. So this land of Zebulun and Naphtali, that's that's Galilee. Galilee is the place that's about to be leveled by the Assyrians. The place that's about to come under total destruction. It's also the place where Jesus would live and grow up.
Jeffrey Heine:Verse 2. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. From that point in Isaiah, moving forward in Israel's history, Galilee would be a dark, dark place. It's by, you know, the Mediterranean Sea there.
Jeffrey Heine:You've got, you know, the Sea of Galilee also there. But nobody was vacationing there for the next few 100 years. Because it was nothing but army after army after army coming through it, destroying everything. It would be a dark, dark place. Which is why you have in verses 3 through 5 there, all of this imagery of battle and garments soaked in blood.
Jeffrey Heine:God says, I know this has been the darkest of dark places, Israel. But light is coming. Jesus is coming. Light is coming. Verse 6, there's that child again.
Jeffrey Heine:For to us, a child is born. To us, a son is given. This child is going to be their king. I wanna read that the government is gonna rest upon his shoulders. And then the Lord begins to now answer the question, how this king will save us when all the other kings failed.
Jeffrey Heine:We read things like this. And the government will be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor. Meaning this, this King won't need advisors. This king won't need counselors. Those are the most important positions for a king is to have very wise counselors.
Jeffrey Heine:He's saying, this king won't need it. Because all of his counsel will be wondrous. And then we read, His name will also be called mighty God. And hear me, people. This is when the penny drops.
Jeffrey Heine:Right there at mighty God. This is the first time in prophetic literature that we realize that the savior, the heir to David's throne, will not be a mere man. He will be both human and He will be mighty God. Jewish scholars to this day, they struggle interpreting this. I actually went through a number of Jewish commentaries and whenever they get to this, they're like, it certainly sounds like that this Messianic figure is being called mighty God.
Jeffrey Heine:It's like, it's because He is being called mighty God. He's human, but he's more than a human. This is God come to be with us in the flesh. Well, this might be how He saves us. He's also our everlasting Father, meaning you'll be adopted as his child into his family.
Jeffrey Heine:And although, parents, we struggle to bless our kids, this father will bless us. And he is the prince of peace. This messiah is gonna end all war and he's gonna usher in a new time of peace that will never ever end. Verse 7 says of the increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end. If we had time, we'd walk through the rest of Isaiah and you could go through Isaiah 11 where once again, you have this shoot coming forth from the stump of David.
Jeffrey Heine:And it tells you about the messianic figure here and it says that the spirit of the Lord is gonna rest upon him. It's one of the first things we see about Jesus in Luke chapter 4. The spirit of the Lord is upon him. And he is one who is going to rule with wisdom. Actually, it says in Isaiah 11, he's not gonna judge by what he sees.
Jeffrey Heine:And you're like, what? Cause isn't that how you're supposed to judge? Not this one. Because He could see in the hearts. And then Isaiah begins to go on throughout his magnificent letter about how this Messiah will actually deliver us from our evil hearts and from our sin.
Jeffrey Heine:And he gets Isaiah 55 and he says, this Messiah is gonna take on our suffering. He's gonna take on our sin. He's gonna die on our behalf. Now, these things that Isaiah prophesied, many of them came true that first advent, which is why we celebrate Christmas. We look at Jesus' birth.
Jeffrey Heine:And sure enough, through Jesus' birth, and as he grew up, through his life, death, and resurrection, we actually do have forgiveness. We have new life. We have the gift of his spirit. These things have broken in. But yet, we still join with Isaiah and the rest of Israel in our prayers, which is come, Messiah, come.
Jeffrey Heine:Because we are waiting for that second advent. Come, Messiah. Come. Come and bring your shalom in this world. Your light has broken through, but let it come in full.
Jeffrey Heine:And so as we go and we celebrate this Christmas, yes. We look back to the birth of that baby lying in a manger. And we thank God that God Emmanuel did break in, but then we also look forward and we say, come Lord Jesus, come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Pray with me.
Jeffrey Heine:Lord Jesus, we join with all the saints throughout history in this one prayer. Come, Lord, come. Come, Lord Jesus. Come. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:Earth is ready to receive you as king. Come. Lord, I ask that this Christmas, through your spirit, you would allow us to embrace its wonder. That we would look back and we would have an incredible wonder in our hearts and a thankfulness for you coming and shining light in a dark place. And then Lord, we also look forward with hope and expectation, knowing that you will come again.
Jeffrey Heine:Thank you. We pray this all in your sweet name, Jesus. Amen.