We will be like the angels to the Lord, but with this great thing, we came to Christ sight unseen, and God says, that's a very big deal with me. The angels get to see the Lord. We don't see the face of God, except through faith. And again, that is a big deal to God, and it is a big deal against hell. So don't undervalue your faith.
It is everything. There is the eternal new heavens and earth after the kingdom age, when God finally has his quota of those who love him, even before ever seeing him, by faith. Isaiah 65 is a beautiful verse, For behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered nor come to mind. God is going to be so busy throwing out new things, we won't even think about the past. I can't wait. I've already started forgetting.
I forget a lot of things. Anyway, to the house of the God of Jacob. God's house is the focus, but on behalf of human beings, that's where we come in.
Otherwise, why have us there, but why die for us? Well, we're important to God. God's word will go forth from Jerusalem to rule the nations. I don't know how many Christians miss out on these things from Isaiah, or any of the prophets.
How many of them just miss out? He will teach us his ways, and we shall walk in his paths. Survivors of the great tribulation and those subsequently born to them.
There will be marriages and births in the great tribulation period. There will be newcomers. They will not have automatic knowledge of God.
They still have to learn. They'll have a head start. There won't be, you know, the devil around. The flesh will still be there, but not as strong as it was. The world order of rebellion will be gone. You just really will have the flesh to deal with, and that will be drastically dimmed down. The strength that it has now won't be present. God's ways, his path, law, and word.
That's what it says. These are things that are important to God now, and will be into the millennial reign, and they should be critical to us. We as Christians should say, no, I want to know God's ways. Teach me your way, O Lord. I want to know what route to take on his behalf, and the law of the Lord, which comes from the word of God, but there's more to the word of God than print. It is Jesus Christ.
He is the word of God. This alone should teach us about our lives now as Christians. When you feel like, you know, I don't see the use of the study of the Bible, you got to punch through that stuff. You can't let the flesh, and the world, and the circumstances of life take away from you your zest, and even if you don't have it emotionally, do your duty, and that will make hell really disappointed. To find a Christian who is advancing without, you know, the emotions is just, what can hell do to that?
Because he stops a lot of people by just dimming down the emotions. Oh, I don't feel like it. Well, I don't feel like it. I'm going to do it anyway. You won't get three cheers in hell for that.
You'll get them from the angels, though. Anyway, Isaiah, he uses this term, Zion, more than anybody in the scripture. It doesn't show up much in the New Testament.
It's there a few times. Verse 4, He shall judge between the nations and rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. Again, God's mountain, the center of international justice or global justice, and I love this verse from Timothy, and I think you would, too. He who is the blessed and only potentate king of kings and the Lord of lords. He is the true benevolent dictator. He dictates something to us.
It is because it is good and it is right. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Well, no more munitions plants. That'll be it.
Everything will be redirected to good food and farming and things like that. This is an inversion, a switch from Joel. Joel probably wrote before Isaiah. Joel says, Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong. That's not a verse for the Christians.
That is God, through Joel, taunting his opponents. Said, No, no, no. Go ahead. Get ready for war. You want to fight with me? I'm going to judge you. You want to resist this?
I'll tell you what you need to do. Beat your plowshares into swords, because I'm going to mess you up. That's what's happening there in Joel. Here, God is going the other way.
He is announcing the coming end of wars. And so that's interesting. And so when Joel says, Let the weak say, we have a Christian song, Let the weak say, I am strong in the Lord.
Well, that's true. But if you're using the verse in Joel, you've made a stretch that you might want to just try to forget. Because when God says in Joel, Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears, Let the weak say, I am strong. Again, he's taunting the enemy and saying, No, no.
Go get strong and try to resist me. Anyway, I hope, I would think that you've probably heard that preached differently. Well, now you have the rest of the story. And you'll have to rethink it.
Some of you are like, I can't wait to get out here to get to Joel. Check it out. You'll find out. Anyway, neither shall they learn war anymore. Amen. The Prince of Peace will be without resistance. Verse five. Oh, house of Jacob, come and let us walk in the light of the Lord. This is the invitation to follow God as opposed to the darkness of idolatry.
Well, we have it in the New Testament. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not participate, do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sins. If you take that verse without being mindful of what the Gnostics were doing, whom John was addressing, you might, you know, be a little intimidated. That's not the purpose of the verse. The verse is not meant to intimidate you as you struggle through this life. The verse is to say, if you side with God and not this mysterious knowledge that's out there, that really the blood's not all that and Christ didn't do what Gnostics were doing, you're in trouble.
And so John holds up, he says, listen, stay focused on Christ and not these people that are coming along with these false teachings. Still to come, still to come is the greatest global movement to Jesus Christ ever known, and it is the Kingdom Age. And that's what Isaiah is talking about, and that's why Micah thought it was glorious, and we should too.
We should say, man, that Kingdom Age is going to be it. No wars, no trouble. We won't die. We will be in our glorified bodies. Because the angels are to us now, largely, to some degree, physically, or in the spiritual bodies, we will be to those who survive the Great Tribulation period and are born during that time. We will not be subject to sin. We will not be subject to judgment. We will be more Christ-like than we ever could have been in this life, and we will be like the angels to the Lord, and with this great thing, we came to Christ sight unseen, and God says, that's a very big deal with me. The angels get to see the Lord. We don't see the face of God except through faith, and again, that is a big deal to God, and it is a big deal against hell. So don't undervalue your faith.
It is everything. Verse 6, For you have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob, because they are filled with Eastern ways, they are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they are pleased with the children of foreigners. So now he switches gears. Micah doesn't have this section.
He's got his own rebukes. Isaiah goes back. You have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob. Now, in our language, we may be accustomed to thinking when someone forsakes you that they're the guilty party, but that's not the true definition of the word in the English, and that's not what's meant here in the Hebrew. To forsake is to withdraw companionship, and God tells us here in verse, he says, because they are filled with Eastern ways.
There's a reason why he withdraws the protection, the support, and the friendship, and he's totally justified in doing this. They abandoned God, and he abandoned them like anyone would abandon a sinking ship, pointless to continue with them. In fact, you send the wrong signal, and I'll come back to that, but God could tolerate them no more, and so he has forsaken them, but he is not guilty. He says, because they are filled with Eastern ways. There's the because, the justification. Yahweh says, don't blame me for departing.
You chased me out. That was the covenant. And of course, the Old Testament, the law, the first five books loaded with this, but here in verses six through eight, he repeats the word filled.
You're filled with the wrong things. We're going to come to another repetition here in this chapter where he talks about a pond, but this one is filled, and they became like the pagans around them. Instead of converting the pagans and being light to them, they were seduced, and they willfully so.
No one twisted their arm. They had no excuse. If Isaiah did not become an apostate, well, what was the excuse that they had? Why did he become one?
He had privy to the same light and exposure and environment. Whose fault was it? It was Ahab's fault. That's who.
That's why he has no one to blame but himself. The God of the patriarchs and the prophets was not enough for the idolaters. It was enough for Isaiah and others, the remnant like him, as with some churches. The Bible truths are not enough, so they start looking elsewhere. And many times they want to keep some of the Bible, so they want to mingle it in.
That's the definition of leaven that we're so constantly warned about. And yet they do it like it's not even written down. It's not a virtue to be ignorant of the scripture. It's not a virtue to keep yourself from being exposed to God's word.
And not only in your own time, in the assembly. This is exposure to the scriptures. As I've said in the past, even if you don't care for my comments, you are exposed to verses that are quoted. And almost every time I get up here, there's about 30 cross-references.
I don't necessarily use all 30, sometimes I use more, sometimes I use less. Anyway, coming back to this, don't crave more. The Bible has. If there's a writer out there contradicting the scripture, let him be anathema.
Let him be accursed. He's going against God. Paul had this problem with the Galatians, like who's bewitched you?
Were you craving other things? Were you made perfect in the spirit of the flesh? Having begun in the spirit is a big deal, not a little verse. Anyway, the defiant Canaanites, the caravans traveling through the lands, they all brought with them their plague of idolatry, eventually stealing enough Jewish souls to infest the nation. And they walked away from Moses, the God of Moses and the law of God. He says they are soothsayers like the Philistines. Yeah, but that's who they got it from, the newfound converts to sorcery, enchanted with enchantments and gibberish. The irony is pungent here, strong. Judah looked to soothsayers to know the future.
Hey, I sound like I'm from Boston. From the future, he uses that R. They wanted to know the future? God already told them the future. If you mess with me, you're doomed. He laid it out.
I'll give you the future. Deuteronomy 18, Deuteronomy 27, Leviticus 26, 14, Leviticus 20 verses 6 and 7 are just a snapshot of God saying, here's your future. When they stood on Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, on Mount Gerizim, they pronounced the blessings for obeying the Lord.
On Mount Ebal, they pronounced the curses for departing from the Lord. He is God. He has every right to lay this out, and he did. You want to know your soothsayers' future? Hell, that's their future.
How many times does this movie have to be played before we know the ending? Well, they're not watching it to the end. They're craving other things. No wonder. You know what Isaiah's going to say in verse 9? Lord, don't forgive them. And you know what God's going to respond? Okay. We're going to come to that in a moment. How can you not love Isaiah? Man, this is good. And they are pleased with the children of foreigners.
There's 11. Now, this has an ambiguous meaning. You can say they are just pleased with their neighbor's way of life or the intermarriages or both. So Isaiah doesn't have to lay it out because he knows his audience will figure it out.
If the intermarriages are going along, they're going to know that's what he's talking about. But nonetheless, it certainly has to do with the children of foreigners and their foreign gods. And so here he is saying the people are losing to a fake god culture, to a godless culture. You know, you can't say a fake god is god and therefore an idolater has a godless culture, even though they're practicing religion. They have the nothing gods, which is a favorite term of Isaiah. Ezekiel, as I've told you before, he uses a more crass description of the idols, essentially calling them dumb gods.
Isaiah goes mostly with the worthless ones. So here the Jews were raised to believe. They were raised to believe in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs and all the word of Moses, just like we see kids today raised in the church. They opted to forsake.
It is possible. And the foreigners, they thought their gods were better than Yahweh and the apostates agreed, as do so many in Christ today. You know, you want to practice martial arts, you want to practice yoga and bend and twist and do these things, that's one thing, but when you start getting into that spiritual element, you're in a whole other zone.
I'm not endorsing, I'm just saying, if you are looking to strengthen your spirit outside of Scripture, you're in trouble. You're losing your identity as a believer and you may lose your soul, as was happening to these Jews. Well, they were never saved. They were Jews. They were raised in the temple. They were circumcised and following the law.
I don't think we should insert that. I think we should understand. They opted out and God let them go. And as a result, judgment, verse 7, Their land is so full of silver, there's the second full, of silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures. Their land is full of horses and there is no end to their chariots. Their land, God says, not my land, because he's disowning them. And here they have this wealth and this might, that's the horses and the chariots, the gold and the silver. Who needed Yahweh? Life is good.
Meanwhile, they were oppressing the poor. Let's not leave that out. Who needs Yahweh? All his moral restrictions, you know, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. We just go to these pagan gods, do whatever we want, and look, we're doing pretty nicely in this life.
Yeah, you've got some treasures on earth, but nothing in heaven. So, they live their life this way. We see this happening with, look at, for example, the Antichrist, and this is just one category of cybersphere oligarchs. You know, the people that are responsible for all the technology and the internet and all these things of the world and the people that have all this money from them. Who needs God, they think?
Many of them, most of them. Satan was taking good care of these boys. For now, at death, he is, he runs out of power. People have to see Jesus Christ as holy and sovereign and we have to tell them that. Look, if you're not seeing your own sin in the presence of a holy God, you've got problems. And, anyway, God must be sought out for who he is and, of course, they reasoned. We made it this far without Abraham's God, we'll make it the rest of the way.
They were wrong. Verse 8, there is a way that seems right to man, but its way leads to death. Their land is also full of idols. Their land again, there's a third full. It's infested with false religion. They worship the work of their own hands. That which their own fingers have made. Isaiah's not going to finish with, he's not finished with this in the latter chapters.
He'll come back to it and he'll hit hard again. But it was ridiculous to him. Saved souls understand that. What do you do, making your God? Then he ain't God. If you can make your God, if you can make an image of your God, there's something wrong.
Sin makes fools of human beings routinely. And here, Israel's land had everything but God. Isaiah's favorite Hebrew term for idols, again, was the worthless ones, or the not gods, the junk gods.
None of the prophets ever gave any respect to idolatry. They didn't. Well, you know, hey, that's actually a pretty nice little statue. Where'd you get that?
You can get that from them. Once idolatry takes root in society, it is near impossible to get out. God had to send the Jews to, he got rid of the northern kingdom, then he had to send them to Babylon for 70 years. That drove it out of them, but it's back.
Tel Aviv now has probably pushed San Francisco to shame. Verse 9, people bow down and each man humbles himself. Therefore, do not forgive them. This is still New Testament teaching in some degree. Isaiah petitions God to not excuse these apostates who are damning other souls through this choice of treason. These are treasonous actions against this high treason against the king. And he had no illusions about saving apostates. Well, we got to show them love while they're damning souls. I mean, I think some Christians would shake hands with Satan. Well, you got to, you know, be nice.
No, you don't. Don't touch him. Matthew 26, verse 24, the son of man indeed goes just as it is written of him. But woe to that man by whom the son of man is betrayed. It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.
That's pretty serious. It would be good for that man if he had not been born for betraying God the son. And those who have heard the truth, that's who we're talking about. Those who have heard the truth and trampled it, they are accountable. You know, Jonah was angry with Nineveh, but Nineveh didn't hear the truth. And when they did hear the truth, it was an intolerant message of doom.
You got 40 days and you're done. That's his message. And they repented.
He wasn't going through Nineveh with a basket of flowers. You know, God loves you. He's got a plan for your life. There's a time for that, but it ain't all the time. Especially when you're dealing with monstrosities who are puppets for hell. And we risk contributing to the evil by withholding rebuke, by refusing to ostracize those who are damning souls.
I'm not going to sit down with a Jehovah's Witness pastor and have lunch and have a good old time. Well, you know, we're both trying to do the same thing. Make people feel, you know, stronger in their sorrow and reach out to the community.
For what? My taxes reach out to the community. I want souls. And, you know, the church is the conscience of the community. But if the community says, my conscience is seer with a hot iron, there's not much more you can do. And we must not send mixed signals towards someone's evil.
We got to lay it out. No, that is evil. And what they were doing, Isaiah says, therefore do not forgive them.
Again, we can't send the signal that, well, it really isn't that bad. Well, there's still hope for you in heaven. Well, there's more, you're leaning more, a lot more towards hell than you.
You're about to capsize under this misguided notion of Christian love. Matthew 23, 14, here's Jesus dealing with the scribes. He says to the scribes, what can I do to make you comfortable? I want to make you come back to church.
I don't want to offend you. Of course he didn't do that. The apostles protested at one point. They said to Jesus, master, you offend them.
What did he do? He doubled down. Woe to you lawyers.
He just kept going. So, Matthew 23, I'm not enjoying this. I'm enjoying the truth.
I love the truth. I love standing up to iniquity wherever I can find enough strength to do it. But I don't like the fact that people are against Jesus Christ. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. That woe is condemnation.
It means you're doomed unless you repent. He says, for you devour widows' houses. Well, he didn't want to make them feel comfortable with that. Poor widows were suffering even if no one was attacking them. They were struggling.
And here you had these monsters taking advantage of them. He continues, and for pretense you make long prayers. You act like you're religious. You know the truth, but you hate it. Therefore, you will receive greater condemnation. That's what he says, Matthew 23, 14.
And this is one snippet because he goes off on them. John comes along, again, with the Gnostics in mind, who heard the Gospel, but decided they were smarter than the Gospel, and they were going to improve it. And in their improvement of the Gospel, they were going to redact the Gospel, edit out what they didn't like, and put in what they did like.
That's what the Gnostics were doing. 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.
