Isaiah-The Prince of Vision (Part B)

3222, now the rest of the Acts of Hezekiah and his goodness indeed.

They are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, and in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. That's influence because he saw God, because he saw his role as a servant of God, because he saw his responsibility to answer what God gave him to see. He captured things on behalf of the righteous. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Genesis.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick will continue his message called Isaiah, the Prince of Vision, in Isaiah chapter 40. There was King Jotham, a good king, Ahaz, not a good king, and Hezekiah, whom we talked about in the series of the life and times of the people of the Bible. He was the king that cleaned house as they administered during this time and in these days. As to his life, the personal information about him is rather sparse. We know that he was a writer of considerable literary skill.

We enjoy that. The poetry of his book is magnificent. It sweeps across the pages and leaves us with a sense of awe. He was a person of strong emotion and deep feelings and you have to read his prophecies to have this come out at you. And I'll just give, we don't have time, I wish we had more time to make references, especially in this case where you make these statements, well, he was a man of great feelings.

Well, how do we know that? Well, he cries out in certain places, oh, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and you who have no money, come by and eat, yes, come by wine and milk without money and without price. And then there is Isaiah 40 verse 1, comfort, yes, comfort my people. These are the words of God through the man. However, God chooses men whom the message can flow more easily through. He needed a man like Elijah to do what he did with Elijah and that flamboyant ending of Elijah, going out in a chariot of fire.

How fitting! You could not expect that from some of the other men in the, Joel, you just don't see Joel going up in a chariot. But you see Elijah doing it.

And so when we read about what God told this man of God, his humanness, Isaiah's humanity comes off the pages and allows us to more readily receive what he has to say. Strong emotions, deep feelings, that's called passion. Where does that passion come from? What fuels that passion, as said earlier? It's vision. It's a look at God, it's to see God. That is the fuel and when you've lost that look or when the distance is gained between you and Christ, when there's a greater distance, the passion begins to die.

You say, well, can I pray to get it back? Well, that is a part of it. That is a critical part, indispensable. It needs more than prayer. It needs good preaching, for sure. It needs appetite.

It needs all of these things working together. You don't have to ask God, is it that you don't want me closer to you? You don't ever have to ask that question.

It's already been answered. I died. My son died for you, to bring you closer to me. Of course I want you closer.

The things that create this distance are things that distract so that they can attack. We've got to be mindful of it. We've got to work towards it.

It's worth it. Not drawing close to Christ is work, it just has no payoff that's worth having. He also was a man of steadfast devotion to the Lord, and I'm coming to a section in my notes that I'm quite excited about and I hope you share it. His vision of God and His holiness in the temple influenced His messages during His long ministry. That's captured for us in Isaiah chapter 6. I saw the Lord. That's what Isaiah says.

That's what John is referring to. When he said in our text, John 12, 41, these things Isaiah said when he saw His glory and spoke of Him, he did not just see it and that was that, he had a pulpit and he used it. He had a microphone, he turned it on. He did it in the form of his prophecies in writing. It says in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.

You can insert there, I saw the Lord Jesus Christ before the manger, sitting on a throne, high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. Then he goes and talks about the fiery ones, the burning ones, the seraphim. But not only did Isaiah realize that God is God, he realized the holiness of God. That God is a God of infinite holiness. He saw God as holy and pure, but one other thing went with that in this vision.

He saw Him as God enthroned, God sovereign, God ruling. To have a crown is to have something, to draw attention to yourself. It has authority with it. You got that crown from somewhere, from something. It causes that holder of the crown to be outstanding. This is what Jesus does for all of us. This is why it's pictured in the book of Revelation that they toss their crowns at His feet. I think the Lord is going to say, no, no, here's the crown.

I'm giving this to you. Because He's grace. He wants to give. He loves to bless. He cannot bless where sin is dominant, where sin rejects Him. There are places that Jesus left because they would not receive Him.

He did no great miracles there. We will receive a crown for our service in Christ. We will be significant because He has made us so. Yet He holds the crown upon His head. And Isaiah got to see this at a time when the crown of Jerusalem, Uzziah, was dying.

When his days were numbered, God allowed this prophet vision to see far enough to know that God was still going to be on the throne. Earthly kings come and go. Friends, loved ones, they come, they go.

God's not going anywhere. David said, my mother and my father, they may forsake me. He meant they may die. They will die.

They did die. But God will never forsake me. And when it's my time to forsake my children, in that sense, God will be there for me.

God will not forsake me. This requires vision. It requires seeing this through the eyes of faith. Spurgeon said, seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing. That's true.

That's very true. So when he sees God on the throne, he sees that nothing happens that God is not sovereign over. Nothing, nothing on earth, no matter how good it is to you, no matter how bad it is to you, nothing happens against the sovereignty of God. Nothing happens to His children that He will not make right after this life.

Not one thing. You can't enter into that without vision. Where there is no vision, the people perish. Where there is no vision in the sense that you've not seen Jesus Christ as Savior, you perish.

It's fundamental. Vision is the source of passion in the lives of the righteous. You see, the unrighteous, they can have vision also for something that is wrong. Maybe something that is right, but still it is outside of righteousness, of the righteousness that is from God. Maybe it is for evil.

Hitler had his visions, his passion for them. But the difference is that the Christian has a conscience that is not hindered by corruption. Not supposed to. We do. We do because the guilt comes back to try to undo everything Christ has done on the cross. Satan tries to exploit that. You call yourself a servant. You call yourself a leader in the church. You call yourself a Christian parent. How long you said you've been walking with Christ? Are you doing this stuff?

Are you still doing this stuff? And that's why Paul wrote certain things when he said, where sin abounded, grace did much more. Because Paul was dealing with people like you and me who were going through the same things. People who burned incense at the pagan altars. Many of them could not escape the guilt or the lust in all of its various forms.

And they wanted to be free from the corruption and the guilt and they knew they were free and yet Satan was dragging them back. And it was the power of preaching like men like Paul, from men like Paul, that has caused the church to survive in spite of the seduction of Satan and the pull towards defeat. Vision is the fuel of service everywhere in Christ.

Everywhere. If you're serving Christ without vision, you're serving on the strength of what? A merit system? A sense of responsibility? Well there's an element of merit in what we do. We know God will reward us but that's not our motivation.

Outside of we know that we will be in paradise with him. We know that there's a decency, there's a responsibility entrusted to us as servants and so yes we do serve. But those are secondary. They're in second, third, fourth position. They're like servants in the house. Secundus. Quartus.

But they're not numero uno. The first thing is this passion. Passion is this love that is flaming.

It's not died, it's there. It doesn't come naturally to us. Love for our self does.

Love for people we choose to love or are attracted to, that comes very easily. But this agape love, it is not natural. Phileo, natural. Eros, natural.

Stroge, natural. Agape, that is spiritual. It can only come from seeing Christ. It can only come from seeing him high and lifted up and on the throne no matter what you're going through.

If you can only see him on the throne in days of sunshine, what good is that to you? But to see him high and lifted up when the dark clouds are rolling in through the entire process, though he slay me, I will trust in him. That's what Job said. We know he said that. Not because of any other reason that you remember he said that because it's outstanding to you. When Isaiah saw the Lord on the throne and the seraphim was dispatched, he writes this in verse 6 of Isaiah 6, he says, then one of the seraphim flew to me.

I love that. He flew to me. What would have happened if he flew by me to someone else? Isaiah writes, then one of the seraphim flew to me. We know that this man Isaiah was married, but he was married and she is simply called the prophetess in Isaiah 8, 3. That tells us he was married to a godly woman.

A woman who was very interested in what God had to say, and when God said it, she was quick to say it with proper application. And yet she does not, she does not overtake her husband. It's not her role. It's not a competition. How many marriages go south because they're competing with each other? I'm telling you, the Greek word for such behavior in a Christian home is stupidity. Do not compete with each other.

The wife is the helpmate. That is a high and lifted up role. You've heard me say this many times. Because we need to be reminded of it, lest we drift away.

And I will not get tired of reminding you. And wives, if you see it as anything less than a high and lifted up role because God has ordained it, you've been gypped already. And husbands, if you think that makes her your slave, you are a fool. But if you see it as a companionship, as a Jonathan and his armor bearer, then you see what the Bible is talking about, why marriage is sanctified in the eyes of the Lord. Because the marriage is supposed to become a ministry, not the ministry, but a ministry. It is supposed to serve the Lord no matter what happens.

Those two are supposed to stay together. Oftentimes, Christians fail. God is so merciful and He is so wise. He knows what to do with that. And He also knows how to instruct us on what to do with it when we witness it in the lives of others. It may take time.

It is going to take pain. But we've caught the vision of God. We are His subjects by consent, with delight. A word that we don't hear too much is glee.

It's a joy that's out loud. I remember in school they had the glee club, which I thought was all for, you know, guys who played with dolls. I don't mean G.I. Joes.

G.I. Joes are not dolls. They're almost human. Anyway, his sons, his wife, the prophetess, his sons were given symbolic names that encapsulated his prophecies. He caused his sons to minister just by having these names.

We do the same thing. We name our children after people in the Bible. This is Luke. This is David. This is Isaiah. This is Jeremiah.

Because we want that. We want to encapsulate our witness through our children. The name part is the easiest part. But the first child that was told in Isaiah chapter 7 verse 3 is Shira-Jashub. Why don't you parents say, we don't know what the name of him is.

His brother's name is even better. We'll get to that in a minute. But his name means the remnant shall return or the survivors. In other words, God's going to take care of his own. He's not going to take care of those who did not qualify to be in the remnant. He's going to take care of those who are his. That's what the name meant. And so whenever that little boy was playing, whenever he introduced him to someone, it was a rebuke or it was an encouragement. But it was not neutral. God's faithful to his own.

That was the message. The second name, Mahir-shalahashbaz. Come with me to the hashbaz. But anyway, the name Mahir-shalahashbaz, which incidentally is the longest name in the Bible in the English language when translated.

The name roughly means swift to the spoil, speedy to the prey. Yee-haw, yee-haw. Andre, Andre. Speedy Gonzalez going on there.

And if you don't know who Speedy Gonzalez is and you were born in this country, you have been ripped off, man. You've got some work to do. But his name was the judgment of God is coming. And the instruments that he is going to use are going to be delighted at the fall of the wicked who should have been righteous.

They're going to swoop down here so quick. The Lord is going to whistle for them and there will be no delay in their response. This we talked about the poetry in Isaiah. Isaiah chapter 5 in verse 26.

Listen to this. He says, he will lift up a banner to the nations from afar. This is concerning the judgment. He's not calling the Assyrian, will be the Chaldeans when they finally come to Israel to judge. He says, he will lift up a banner to the nations from afar and will whistle to them from the end of the earth. Surely they shall come with speed swiftly. Then he goes on to say, whose arrows are sharp and their bows bent, their horses hooves will seem like flint and their wheels like the whirlwind. Could you imagine if they run on those horses running on rock, they'd be sparking as they're moving.

The idea is they will not wear out. They won't get flat tires on the way, during the invasion, on the way to your destruction because it will be a judgment of God. And so that was the second son's name. We know that Isaiah was a historiographer, a historian who wasn't solely into the history, but he documented things about certain people into history.

We call it the scripture. We believe he was raised in the king's court. He may have been. There's some evidence in other writings that he was a prince. He was from the line of David. But either way, he was certainly in the court of the kings.

He ministered to the kings. But we read this in 2 Chronicles chapter 22 verse 26. He says, now the rest of the acts of Uzziah, catch this emphasis, from first to last, the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz wrote.

So he's plugged in. He saw these things as being spiritual. This was God's appointed king and he was going to be careful to write the story of this king that has found its way into scripture. Concerning King Hezekiah, the record states in 2 Chronicles 32, 22, now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and his goodness indeed, they are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, and in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel. That's influence because he saw God, because he saw his role as a servant of God, because he saw his responsibility to answer what God gave him to see. He captured things on behalf of the righteous. Information, truth, history. How many times do you read in the Bible and say, boy I wish there was more information on that.

I'm grateful that we have any information that has survived. God is able to protect his word and he has protected it so precisely that we have all we need to do what we have to do. And he has made it interesting nonetheless. And though Isaiah was known more for what he said than for what he did, there are still what we call action parables. No lack in his ministry. Once he removed his outer garment, he's illustrating a truth from God. He took off his shoes and he walked about the streets of Jerusalem in a long tunic next to his skin. We're told this story in Isaiah chapter 20. And he played the role of a captive. And it was a message to the people that they were not to join with Egypt to fight off the Assyrians. The Assyrians were the world power at the time. And he was saying you trust God.

Because these Egyptians are going to go into captivity and I am dressed like a captive to illustrate how true this is going to be. And that is exactly what happened. And so when God would give him a message before the thing happened, he illustrated it from time to time. When Hezekiah was sick unto death, Isaiah ordered a clump of figs to be put on the place of the boil that was killing him. And of course he was healed. This symbolized the beginning of healing, but it also symbolized that God is outside of man's methods for healing and yet God uses man's methods to heal whenever He wants to.

In this case, it was symbolic. Put some figs on that. Don't try that. You get a headache, put some figs on your head, I'm telling you it's not going to go away.

I haven't tried it, but I have a deep suspicion that you'll just smell like figs. On another occasion, he wrote the name of his second son on a large scroll and sort of used it as a billboard. We read about it in Isaiah chapter 8.

I'm not going to take the time to read it, but you can read about it yourself. Well I'll take verse 1. Moreover the Lord said to me, take a large scroll and write on it a man with a man's pen concerning Maharashalahashbaz.

This is an illustration of him using his children for ministry simply through how he named him because God was guiding him through his life. His illustrations painted vivid pictures of God's judgment as well as God's peace, but we'll take God's judgment in Isaiah chapter 66. Isaiah 66, the last two verses of the book, verses 23 and 24.

And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon the corpses of the men who have transgressed against me, for their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched. They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh. It's kind of a gory picture, but he's telling people about God's judgment. There's nothing clean about this. It is nothing appealing about the judgment of God.

There is everything that is to appeal to us about avoiding the judgment of God. And so that was the man, but the times of the man. As I mentioned, he lived during the Assyrian Empire. They were a vicious group. They had become a vicious army. They took pleasure in torturing those who they took captive in war. They were a fierce people who were known to skin their opponents alive. And so, of course, if you had the Assyrian army coming against you as they did against Jerusalem, you had something to be troubled about. And yet this man, Isaiah, remained firm in his faith in the face of a very serious threat. I find that difficult sometimes. When there's a very serious threat, I have to try to remind myself to not respond to this emotionally, but how do you turn it off? And even though I don't feel like I succeed sometimes, I do succeed at this.

I keep trying in the midst of whatever I'm going to. You've been listening to Cross Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Pastor Rick is teaching from God's word each time you tune in.

As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, this teaching is available free of charge at our website. Just visit crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can do so at crossreferenceradio.com or search for Cross Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app store. That's all for today. Join Pastor Rick next time for more character studies right here on Cross Reference Radio.