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December 6, 2006
Midweek Advent 1
Isaiah 40:1-2
Pastor Joel Zank

God's Promise to Israel...

(Isaiah 40:1-2) Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. {2} Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins... {9} You who bring good tidings to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, "Here is your God!" {10} See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power, and his arm rules for him. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him. {11} He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.

In Christ Jesus who carries us all close to his heart, dear fellow redeemed,

What do a threat and a promise have in common? Both involve words and both speak of the future. In other words, both are an announcement of some intended action or event. What, then, is the difference between a threat and a promise? That's easy! A threat is a statement of intended harm, while we usually associate promises with something good and enjoyable. During our midweek Advent services this year, we'll be looking at some Advent promises that God has made. As we study these promises, I have no doubt that God's Spirit will strengthen the faith he's given us, and as he does, we will come to enjoy all the more those good things that God has in store for us here on earth and in heaven above. Tonight we consider God's Promise to Israel, a promise that brings comfort to us who have sinned; and, at the same time, a promise that brings hope to us who are afraid.

The Advent promise before us is most remarkable for at least two reasons. First, you should know that this promise in Isaiah, chapter forty, follows thirty-nine chapters of threats, threats made by God to a people who deserved to hear everyone of them and more. God had made a covenant with Israel, a solemn agreement in which God said, "Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people" (Jeremiah 7:23). What was Israel's response to God's offer? "We will do everything the LORD has said" (Exodus 19:8). This contract was made and ratified 1500 years before the Lord's birth, but over the next 800 years, Israel broke its side of the agreement again and again, chasing after the false gods of its neighbors and committing every sin imaginable. Again and again God called his people to repentance, but they would not listen. Finally, in the days of Isaiah, God threatened to hand his people over to the nation of Babylon. He warned of the destruction Israel's impenitence would bring upon Jerusalem and its temple. He told of the misery and the loneliness his people would experience for seventy long years of captivity. I think you'll agree, this is the only kind of message those people deserved to hear-a message of threats and curses. How surprising, then, to turn the page of Isaiah's prophecy and find these words of promise: "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God." What patience, what kindness, what grace on the part of our God. But here's what makes this promise even more remarkable: at the time God speaks it, the captivity to which Israel will be made subject is still more than 50 years in the future. You understand what that means, before the captivity takes place, before it even has an opportunity to humble such a stubborn and rebellious people, God is already speaking words to comfort souls that are not yet sorry for their wrongs and won't be for another one hundred years.

How can there be forgiveness for such sinners? As sinners ourselves, we'll be most interested in God's answer. It's found here in his promise. God instructs his messenger to "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins" (Isaiah 40:2). How could God say that Israel's hard service had been completed-it had not yet begun? And even if it had, how could a seventy-year prison term make up for centuries upon centuries of sin? How could that be? Friends, it cannot be. The Bible declares that the wages of sin is death, not in some far away land, but in the dungeon of hell itself.

The people who had for so long broken their side of their covenant with God would not and could not make things right, not over the course of 70 years, not over the course of a million years. Nothing short of an eternity spent suffering the most unspeakable horrors can atone for sin; but that payment would, of course, cost God the very people he so graciously wanted to save. So in love that no sinner deserves, God made a New Covenant with Israel, a one-sided agreement in which God would do everything. Do you see what that means? In this covenant Israel would have no terms to meet, no obligation at all, only a promise to believe, and even that belief, that faith would be the work of God and the gift of his Spirit, a gift just like the promise itself. This New Covenant would cost Israel absolutely nothing. As for God, the New Covenant would cost him everything - his own Son, who would come to this world as a baby so he grow up keeping God's law in every sinner's place, and then as a man, the God-man, offer that perfect life as a ransom to free all sinners. By way of the cross, God's Son would enter the depths of hell and stay there till he had suffered every last bit of God's wrath for every single sin that would ever be committed on planet Earth. This is the One of whom Isaiah writes: "Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. {5} But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:4-5). It was not Israel, but Israel's Messiah that would bear the load of her hard service and bring it to completion, not in Babylon, but in that prison built by God for the devil and all his demons. It was not Israel, but Israel's Messiah who would pay for her sins. He alone would take the full brunt of God's anger, and with his holy sacrifice make a payment so sufficient, that Israel could live with God's blessed assurance that her sins had been paid twice over, that in the person of her Substitute, she had received double for all her sin.

My friends, it is this wondrous truth that makes God's Advent promise to Israel, his promise to us as well. Speaking to our Savior seven hundred years before his birth, God says in Isaiah 49:6, "It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." The New Covenant that God made with Israel was not for Israel alone, but for all people. The blood that Jesus spilled on the cross was too precious, too valuable to redeem only one people of one particular time, so God the Father declared that blood to be the redemption of all sinners of all times, even the redemption of stubborn and rebellious sinners like you and me.

Friends, because God's plans and God's promises cannot fail, he could speak of the Savior's mission, here in our text, as being successfully completed hundreds of years before Christ's birth. What certainty and comfort is ours, then, who live in these days after our Savior's victorious announcement: "It is finished!" (John 19:30). Because our Jesus lived and died and rose for us, our God is forever consoling us. Like a father telling his little one, "There, there! Everything's fine." God is always saying to you, "Comfort, comfort. I'm with you to forgive the sin that is bothering you. That sin, all your sin, is paid for. All is well between us. That means that the trouble you're having in life right now is not a punishment from me. In fact, I promise to take that heartache of yours and turn it into a blessing for you. I know just what to do."

Yes, God's promise to Israel, made so long ago, still brings comfort to us who have sinned. Because the promised Savior has paid for our wrongs and has completed hell's hard service in our place, our God is at peace with us. He's at peace with us today, but what about tomorrow. What if God's love for us should change? Or what if Satan should capitalize on our weakness and steal us away from our God? What if temptation should get the better of us or our children and we end up lost to God and his kingdom. These are frightening thoughts. But listen! God's promise to Israel brings hope to us who are afraid.

First God instructed his messengers to speak God's comforting forgiveness to Israel. Now he tells those same messengers to climb the nearby mountains and from that vantage point to broadcast more good news to Israel: "You who bring good tidings to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, 'Here is your God!' {10} See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power, and his arm rules for him" (Isaiah 40:9-10). Remember the captivity I told you about. Because of her faithlessness, Israel would need to endure it, not as punishment for sin, but as the discipline God would use to teach his people to depend only on him. For a time Israel's sons and daughters would live in exile, but when God's purpose had been accomplished among them, God himself would come for them. His powerful arm would free them, and in this way, Israel itself would become God's reward for his efforts.

Christians, it is no different with us. God has gotten us the victory over sin. He has fought hard to win our salvation. He considers you and me his reward. Isn't that something! You're the prize our Savior has sought and won. Don't you suppose that he will now do everything in his power to keep you his own? Of course he will, but how? Look at the verses of our text. God commands his messengers to "To speak...to proclaim...to lift up their voices... to shout good tidings." God has taken all this power that he used to defeat sin and temptation and Satan and death and he's packed it all and more into the good news of his gospel. That power is ours as often as we hear proclaimed and read for ourselves God's good tidings of great joy. The gospel is the staff by which our Savior guards us. Isaiah says, "He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young" (Isaiah 40:11). When we are in the Word, when we're studying it and pondering it, when we're sharing it with our children, when that Word is dwelling in our hearts and minds, it is then that we are resting in our Savior's arms, nestled close to his heart where neither sin nor Satan can get their claws into us.

The Word is our sure hope for the future. It is our guarantee that nothing and no one can separate us from the love of our God. It is the Word that drives away our fears, the Word of a Savior who came all the way to Calvary's cross by way of Bethlehem's manger, the One who willingly faced and successfully endured all of God's threats so that we would know only God's promises, promises that bring us life now and forever. Amen.