What matters is your relationship with God.
All that stuff is just gone away. You're going to these little back alleys in the Philippines and Wuhan, China and all these other places and you still say, at the end, what will matter is when I stand before my Maker, then I shall bow in humble adoration and there proclaim my God how great Thou art. Well, a part of that is being useful to God in this life. 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 Isaiah.
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. Now, here's Pastor Rick as he continues teaching through the book of Isaiah chapter one. Then there's the historic interlude that I mentioned with King Hezekiah and the Assyrians coming in.
We covered that in Kings. And finally, we have the last 27 chapters, which are messianic, especially so regarding the deliverance of Israel and the surviving remnant. And I've used that word remnant already and significant word to the Jewish prophets. That was a doctrine to them and it should be to us.
These are the righteous survivors. And we'll get some of that, I think, in verse seven. And so Isaiah, he preaches the severity of God and he preaches the solution of God and we should be doing it the same way because Christ did it that way. Paul, Peter, they all did it that way because that is the right way.
And Satan hates it so. So now, well, here's another interesting thing I'd like to bring up. This writing style of Isaiah has no rival.
He was well educated, plugged in, probably he may have been part of the royal line. It gets a little deep and not that necessary, but the versatility of expression, how he phrases things comes at the same thing from a different angle. The brilliance in his imagery that he uses, just a rich vocabulary. And so here he has a range and you have to appreciate those scholars that put these numbers together for us. All I have to do is come up and read them instead of count them. But he has 2,186 different words in the Hebrew.
If you don't believe me, you go count it and get back to me. Psalms has 2,170. Isaiah, 2,186.
And so he beat them by 16 words. Jeremiah has 1,653. You read Jeremiah you think he has 20,000. And Ezekiel, 1,535. And so, not that those men were less intelligent, not at all, but just to show you this, it's sort of like when God said, hmm, I need somebody to do something different announcing Messiah. And he found it in this man Isaiah.
Well, now we look at verse 1. The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Now when he says the vision, it refers to truth disclosed by God. He is not using it in the strict sense that every time God spoke to him he was sort of in a trance-like state as Paul was when he saw the Macedonian, you know, say hey come over and help us.
Isaiah has some of that. He does in the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. That's one vision that he had.
But much of this information was imparted to him as it is to this day. And the New Testament highlights that for us. 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 21.
For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Spirit of God. Who cannot love that? I love that stuff.
I love that God has given me a love for his word. Now I don't always like how it ends up in life. That is the fight. Otherwise there'd be no conflict.
This would be heaven if all we did was work. I just love the Bible and that was it. What right do I have to enjoy teaching the Bible in a country that's still free enough to teach it where in other places you can't even come close to standing up in a public environment and preach the word.
Well, God gives me the love for it and the orders to do it and others have been doing it for centuries and it has been beneficial to mankind whether they know it or not. Isaiah chapter 2 verse 1. The word that Isaiah the son of Ammon saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. The word that he saw, not the vision.
And this is part of the vision though. Under the umbrella of the vision of Isaiah. And with that comes that brilliant imagery and his use of language that I mentioned earlier. And when he says, when Isaiah says, thus says the Lord, he's not fooling around. And he goes on to say, thus says the Lord, and I'm telling you what he said, because he's shown it to me. And he's imparted this information. And much of his prophecies came true in his lifetime and certainly not the messianic ones and millennial ones, but others did. And the people respected him for it. This formal announcement is saying to the people that Yahweh is speaking through me and the righteous loved it. The unrighteous hated it.
And I'm not going to get in, well, maybe I should. Some of the rabbis have said, well, Isaiah was hated by Manasseh so much for not conforming to Manasseh's wickedness that essentially put him in a log and saw the log in two, which Hebrews alludes to it. But we don't have proof of that. And I guess I say that because some of you may be expecting me to say that.
Now you can relax a little bit. But anyway, this prophet continues here in verse one, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. They are the subject. He was alive when the northern kingdom was still intact, although spiritually it was a disaster, it was dismantled, but physically it was still a kingdom. And he saw the Assyrians come and defeat them. He knew the prophecies of Hosea and Amos.
He knew they were right, and there was nothing he could do about it. But he did a lot to stop the same thing from happening in Judah. Jeremiah will come along a hundred years later and won't be able to pull it off.
Not that it wasn't for him to do, he was just a messenger of the Lord. But Jeremiah will not have the victory that Isaiah enjoyed. However, Isaiah saw the cities of Judah burned, fortified cities.
Seneca says there were 46 of them. We have no reason to doubt that, that he conquered. And I'll quote that later also. But this vision for Judah and Jerusalem, it's over into the thousand year reign of Christ, and much of it fulfilled. No one else has what Isaiah gives us on earth, just the Bible.
In the Bible you can find fragments of it or parts to it, but you're not going to find another book on earth that has anything like what comes from these prophets in Scripture. And in the days of Uzziah he says, well he's very young when Uzziah was on the throne. Uzziah, 52 years he was king. And when Uzziah died, it made a great impact spiritually on the prophet Isaiah. We'll get to that in chapter 6.
And why would it not? He was still a good king. Even though he made some mistakes, but he was a good king. And if you have somebody on the throne that's good for that long, and all of a sudden he's gone, it leaves a big void.
What's going to happen now? Will his son, who was in Jotham, will he follow his father's footsteps? Well he did, but he didn't reign that long.
I'll come up with his time as king in a moment. But Uzziah's death, a great spiritual impact on him, but it sort of lit the powder keg as prophets go. He just explodes with prophecies and revelations.
I mean, think of the Christmas story. Unto us a child is given, a son is born. These things come from Isaiah. I mean Isaiah 53.
He's wounded for our transgression, bruised for our iniquity, chastisement for our peace upon him. I mean, it's just powerful things. So powerful, again, that the New Testament repeatedly references this prophet.
I'm not trying to sell it to you, I'm enjoying it. And I believe that the righteous will enjoy these things. You know, you just can't think these things up in your garage and just publish it as though it's a new Shakespearean play. But the span of his ministry, he was a prophet for anywhere from 60 to 65 years, give or take. I mean, that's a long time ministering the Word of God and all the things that press on you to stop ministering the Word of God. Why doesn't he not become, you know, jaded like Solomon almost did? He doesn't completely, I mean, Solomon just gets down to a different perspective.
I'm enjoying my own devotions, I'm reading Ecclesiastes, and I'm enjoying it. That's right, it's just a waste. What if you had a guy that could spit a watermelon seed a mile? So what? So what?
Even if he gets a conjure, you know, a sneaker deal or something, he's still gonna die. And a hundred years from now, he's just gonna be, look at that guy, he could spit a hundred miles, you know, a hundred, whatever I said. Not that important, right? In the end, because, alright, I've been home, watching a lot of things, I watched everything on the, well, no, I don't ever want to say I watched everything on the internet, that would be bad. But I watched a lot of stuff.
Been to a lot of countries, didn't need my passport. And just you realize in the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is your relationship with God.
All that stuff is just gone away. You go into these little back alleys in the Philippines and in Wuhan, China, and all these other places, you still say, at the end, what will matter is when I stand before my Maker, then I shall bow in humble adoration and there proclaim, my God, how great Thou art. Well, a part of that is being useful to God in this life.
And these are the kind of things that help us get there. So if you're in the workplace, say you're 17, 18 years old and you're in the workplace, and you're working next to somebody that's a Philistine, an unbeliever, and you know, what does Isaiah have to do with them? Well, you can say, hey, do you know anything about the prophet Isaiah? And when he says no, you can say you're an idiot. No, you cannot say that.
But that could start something. To have this knowledge is to be ready to be used by the Holy Spirit, like an arrow that is sharp and ready for flight, as opposed to an arrow with a blunt tip. Well, anyway, coming back to this, it reads, Jotham Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Well, Hezekiah, 52 years. His son Jotham, 16 years. Ahaz, wicked Ahaz, 16 years. Hezekiah, 29 years. Of course, he was one of the best. He was king. The northern kingdom was lost. And then into the reign of Manasseh's 55-year reign, much of it was just evil, but in the end, he gets saved.
And we should root for him, even though he did irreparable damage, which sobers everyone up. Now, before Isaiah, there were other writing prophets, because they were the prophets that performed and didn't write, like Elijah, Elisha. They just, you know, blew out miracles. You know, I mean, how can you, you know, if I'm a man of God, I'd like to come down and cook you. And it did. Twice.
And fingers on the button the third time. Anyway, Joel, Jonah, Hosea, Amos, and perhaps Obadiah had written by this time the contemporaries with him, Micah for sure, in the south. Well, he was warning them that time is running out. Verse 2 now, listen or hear, O heavens, give ear, O earth, for Yahweh has spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. Oh, wonderful.
Who doesn't love that? Well, this is the war that we did not volunteer for. We found ourselves in. The wickedness of Judah is what he's going to deal with. We'll close that on verse 9 when we get there for this evening. But God gets right to the point.
He introduces himself, you know, Isaiah, son of Amoz, during the reigns of these kings, and then he comes right out. Listen, O heavens. And then he says, I brought up children.
I've loved them, cared for them, and they turned on me. That was my reward from these children. Now, if you're a Jew in Judah and you hear this sermon, you know what it means. You're not like, hmm, what is he saying?
You get it right away. And he invokes heaven and earth to witness what he is about to say. Well, Moses used this figure of speech in Deuteronomy 32. Devils and men, they may not care for what God has to say.
They may not side with God, but other than that, all creation sides with the Creator. Paul says that all creation moans. This life is under the curse.
Everything living suffers. Well, he continues here, and that's a cheery word, right? I don't mean it that way.
It's just a fact. And so we find out, well, what's my role in the midst of all this? For Yahweh has spoken. Well, Isaiah knew his source, and he wanted everyone else to know. He says, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. And God knows this is profoundly ridiculous, a display of injustice in this world. He is not oblivious to it. It takes time to fight these things out.
We want the one-punch knockout in the first two seconds of the round, and not this slugfest that we have to endure for round after round. But that is how it is, and that's why we admire heroes of faith. Again, when Esther says, if I die, I die, you know, we just read the words. But for her, it meant horror.
I mean, they're going to kill me, and they may not do it cleanly. So these folks were facing hard times also. In verse 3, he says, the ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know.
My people do not consider. Well, from here to verse 15, he is delivering the message that he had been given about the folly and the sin of the people. This man is a prophetic battleship, and he is firing barrage after barrage with pinpoint accuracy, rebuking the behavior of the people that he lived around.
And you listen to this and you say, what's the point? Did they get it? Or there wouldn't have been no, there would have never, there would have been no remnant if someone didn't get what these prophets were saying. So they had that success.
They did not have the success that they wanted. Who does? And here, in verse 3, Israel refers not only to the northern kingdom, but to all of the Jewish people. He's saying, the ox knows its owner, the donkey its master's crib, and ox intuitively knows who it serves. A donkey knows who cares for it, and yet here you have human beings unable to come to a basic conclusion, to connect the dots.
When I say connect the dots, I mean you come to a conclusion, to a point. That's what our doctrine is. Our doctrine is we've taken what we've learned from scripture and we put it together in such a way we've connected the dots we can see what it says, we can see the image. We've arrived at a valuable meaning that is supported from scripture.
These folks could care less. He says, but Israel does not know, my people do not consider. The people called to be the people of God did not know their place in the universe spiritually, dumber than animals. That's what the prophet is saying.
That's exactly how it would have been received. In those days, there were oxen walking around and donkeys, you know, more than you would see in a city. And in fact, in all the years I lived in New York, I never saw an ox walking down the city once, walking down the street. Hey, that's an ox.
I can tell by the hat. Anyway, even farm animals were smarter than people who turn their backs on God. Psalm 32, do not be like the horse or like the mule, which have no understanding, which must be harnessed with a bit and bridle else they will not come near you. And so the psalmist saying, don't be like a dumb animal and God have to force you to do things. Well, the horse can want to run ahead impetuously. Mule can be stubborn, but God's people or any people exposed to what God has to say.
You tell me if this applies to the world or not. I was talking with someone last Sunday. Well, it was last Sunday I was here. It was last Sunday I slept in.
I did, but not on purpose. Anyway, they were talking about witnessing somebody and I so longed for those days. I missed those days being in the workplace, zapping the stupidity of unbelievers about Christ.
I so missed it, you know, miss it, you know, to sell somebody. Why do you say things about the Bible and you really don't know what you're talking about? Do you know what the word sacredness means? Is there anything in your life that is sacred? If you took for a human being to live without having something sacred in their life is to be a human being that is spiritually dumb.
And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way, though I'm not extracting the sarcasm either, but it is true. Some things should be, you know what? This is something that belongs to someone greater than me, purer than I, and I need to keep my humor away from it and my flippant behavior. It is sacred. It is good for us to have things that are in our heart. Now, someone else can trample something that's sacred to us and it doesn't take away from it. I mean, if someone wants to take my Bible and throw it into a fire, it's still sacred to me and I'm not going to put my hand in it to get it. It's sacred in my heart. This was the case with Isaiah, Jeremiah's scroll that King Jehoiachim cut up and threw in the fire and he said, I got another one.
So anyway, but it was a sacred deal nonetheless. So verse four, alas sinful nation of people laden with iniquity a brood of evildoers, children who are corruptors. They have forsaken Yahweh. They have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel.
They have turned away backwards. See, Yahweh was sacred to Isaiah, but not to the target audience. There was supposed to be a good relationship between God, the Creator, and man created. And so their guilt, he projects in living color right before them.
Just like, you know, he's just like, here's a movie of your corruption and it's in color with surround sound. Each description set in contrast to what God designed man to be. God did not want men to be laden with iniquity and a brood of evildoers, children who are corruptors. This is not what God had in mind.
It's blasphemous to charge him with it. He says, alas sinful nation. So whole nations can stampede against God. Well, we saw that with Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany. We've seen this in human history. In Exodus 19, God said, you shall be to me, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.
Well, they weren't. He says a people laden with iniquity. Picture a donkey overloaded. Picture a pickup truck so overloaded the front wheels come off the ground. This is the people with sin.
They were pickup trucks so overloaded with iniquity, they couldn't even move. They're useless to God. Psalm 36 four, he devises wickedness on his bed. He sets himself in a way that is not good. He does not abhor evil. Paul writes to the church in Rome, he says, abhor what is evil.
Cling to what is good. These chaps, they were just an abandoned to evil. They're still throwing the name of Yahweh around though. Brood of evildoers. This is the sermon, man. This is a sermon that you better make sure your audience is guilty of it.
You don't preach this to a saved congregation. So a brood of evildoers. God called them to be Abraham's seed, Genesis 21.
In Isaac, your seed shall be called. And of course, they just walked away from this. Children who are corruptors, they ruin everything. It's so pointless. That's one of the, such a disappointing thing about crime. It's so pointless, not to the criminals, not to the selfish ones, but to the victims.
It's just so pointless. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel, mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.
You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new editions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick right here on Cross Reference Radio.
