They Should Have Known Better (Part A)

Yahweh of hosts is his name. Would you accuse Isaiah of being an anti-Semite?

Of course not. He's a Jewish prophet. He is pro-Yahweh. That's what he is. It's like Joshua, you know, when Joshua saw the angel of the Lord, he asked the angel of the Lord, whose side are you on? Are you with us or the enemy? And he says, no, with Yahweh. That settles it right away, doesn't it?

Because you didn't get the choice to join the side of God or not. 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. And now here's Pastor Rick in the book of Isaiah chapter 48 with today's edition of Cross-Reference Radio. Israel's greatest sin was not simply abandoning Yahweh. It wasn't that easy.

Oh no, it wasn't that. We're just going to ditch Yahweh. We're going to keep him. We're just going to add some other stuff.

The epitome of leaven. Their major sin was elevating to the status of worship other people's gods. And so when you hear some Christian author tell you that, well, the other religions aren't that wrong, it's the same thing. It's idolatry. And we've had them. We've had quite a few of them. There'll be more. Even though this kind of behavior was explicitly forbidden, they did it anyway.

The golden calves set up by Jehu when the kingdom split to north and south, they're in 1 Kings 12, likely shrines golden calves to Yahweh. Yeah, but he forbade this stuff. You would think sometimes you hit somebody with three or four verses. You would think sometimes they would say, wow, I was wrong. Well, they do sometimes. But many times they don't. They just keep going. Oh yeah, well, what about?

What about what? The verse just shut you down. You would think you'd say to somebody who prays to Mary, this is forbidden throughout scripture. Here are the verses. You would think they would say, huh, there they are. Well, I'm going to stop doing that.

Double down. Oh yeah, well, God says in Deuteronomy 7 he hates these things. They are an abomination. Sometimes he stops in scripture to just cross reference. 1 Kings 11, 2 Kings 23.

I mean, you know, the good kings, they pulverize these statues. Yeah, Yahweh is God, but who cares what he says? Yeah, I'm a Christian. Who cares what the Bible says? Why come to a Bible study if there's no application to life? Religious blending in ancient Israel, again, is identical to professed Christians viewing non-aeven anti-Christian religions as legit.

They're not, and we're hated for that. Verse 2, for they call themselves after the holy city and lean on the God of Israel. Yahweh of hosts is his name. Would you accuse Isaiah of being an anti-Semite?

Of course not. He's a Jewish prophet. He is pro-Yahweh. That's what he is. It's like Joshua, you know, when Joshua saw the angel of the Lord and he asked the angel of the Lord, whose side are you on? Are you with us or the enemy? And he says, no, with Yahweh.

Settles it right away, doesn't it? Because you didn't get the choice to join the side of God or not. For they call themselves after the holy city. Jeremiah will deal with that. You know, they're going to the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.

Are these? And Jeremiah said, watch what happens to that temple of the Lord. And of course they tried to slap him with being a treasonous.

They tried to kill him more than once. Tough ministry for Jeremiah. Anyway, they lean on the God of Israel. So Jerusalem, as the place of holiness, you would think would obligate them to honor the God who established his temple there. Well, after all the pagans do, they honor their gods. By the time we get to the New Testament, we see Paul dealing with the Ephesians and the temple of Diana and how defensive of that temple they were. Why weren't the Jews defensive of their scripture? The guilty Jews.

Of course, it certainly is. There's always righteous people wherever God's word is. So Yahweh demanding submission and not this just eternal stuff. Jeremiah 7, 4. Do not trust in these lying words.

That's what he says. Saying the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these. They're lying words because of the heart of the people speaking them. We learn from God's dealing with his people in both Old and New Testament to not judge God by his people. Consider the church in Corinth. If you judge Jesus by the way that many of those Christians were behaving, you wouldn't become a Christian. That's the problem of the bad testimony. So people will do that. So we learn again from God's dealing with his people in the Old Testament, with his people in the New Testament to not judge God by his people.

Unless it's positive, of course, and that just makes sense. Here it says that they wanted to lean on the God of Israel like a rabbit's foot when they need it. Verse 3, I have declared the former things from the beginning. They went forth from my mouth. I caused them to hear it.

Suddenly I did them and they came to pass. This is the argument of prophecy predicted and fulfilled. It was previously used by Isaiah against the heathen and here now he's using it on the covenant people. He's saying doesn't prophecy mean something to you? If you've seen it, you know it's been spoken and you see it fulfilled, doesn't it mean something? Well, the defiant skeptics are waiting. Isaiah is going to call them out beginning in this verse through verse 8.

They had no excuse. Moses, well not Moses, the Lord, when he gave a parable of a man in hell, that man wanted someone, Lazarus by name, to go back and tell his brothers about this place. And Abraham said to him, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. Let them read the scripture and act upon it if they want to stay out of hell. That's the solution. And too many Christians go to church and the Bible says it's not enough for them.

They have to have something else. The Bible divides neatly into three parts. If you just, you know, you look at the scripture, if you're familiar enough with it, you see there's instruction, there's history, and there's prophecy. And prophecy is about 26%, almost 27% of our scripture using this formula. According to one source, there are 1,239 Old Testament prophecies, give or take, 578 New Testament prophecies, totaling 1,817. And they are in 8,352 verses since there are 31,124 verses in our scripture. Again, give or take, some of the translators move a verse a little bit here or there, nothing major. But anyway, since you take that number, 31,124 verses, you come up with, with the 8,352 verses dealing with prophecy, at 26.8% of the Bible is prophecy.

You're most welcome to go home and verify this. We're going to take you some time because it's going to take a little skill to just to recognize, hey, that's a prophecy, with some of them. Some of them are just right out, they glare right out at you.

But some of the others are a little bit more subtle. Verse, so I'm saying prophecy is a big deal, and God is bringing that up to his people. You know Abraham divided his forces in three when he retrieved Lot from Cetilomar and his confederation when he came and took all of the people of Sodom, a way captive. When Abraham finally pounced, he divided his forces in threes. And so there you have the scriptures. You divide it up in three on that approach, instruction, history, and prophecy. Verse four, because I knew that you were obstinate and your neck was an iron sinew and your brow bronze.

Guys, I knew it. You're stubborn, you're defiant, and you're shameless, all rolled into one, and you should not have been. These produce a violent religion against truth. When you have a religion you're passionate about, but you're stubborn, you're defiant, and you're shameless because you're not with God, you get very nasty. Acts chapter seven, Stephen said, you stiff necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. He said, you don't have a relationship with God. That's what that uncircumcised statement is about in heart. You always resist the Holy Spirit, as your fathers did.

So do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? You're talking about one of the greatest just, I don't know, comebacks or sermons, death row sermons. This is at the top.

You're not going to top this. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the just one, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers who have received the law by the direction of angels and have not kept it.

You should have known better. That's what Stephen said. I'll circle back to this when we get to verse eight.

We'll hit it again. Verse five now, even from the beginning I have declared it to you. Before it came to pass, I proclaimed it to you. Lest you should say, my idol has done them and my carved image and my molded image have commanded them. Well, Israel, the nation, was born into God's word. Moses told the story in 124,911 words.

That's the first five books of the Bible. Moses wrote it down and told them their history and they were a part of it. And many of those that were named in the Bible by Moses at the time died in rebellion against God. All of them died in the wilderness that didn't believe, which was almost all of them, but you had others like Dathan.

Before it came to pass, I proclaimed it to you. So there they were, surrounded with this spiritual feature from their very beginning. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, all experienced the miraculous. All had something to say about Yahweh. He says here in verse five, lest you should say, my idol has done them. And he goes on to give the variations of their carved images and such. Defiant hearts routinely, routinely attempt to disprove prophecy.

Second Peter chapter three, where is the promise of his coming? You know, they always got something to say. You show them a prophecy, your Bible called it, and they try to just come up with some lame reason not to believe it. They did this with science also, with junk science on their end. Like people who chase the paranormal, but rule out God.

How do you do that? How do you look into having a seance to talk with the dead? Well, where are the dead?

Is there anybody over them? Who caused death? You open up so many questions that the Bible is ready to answer. Evolutionists that deny God, that won't tell you, yeah, he did this. And of course, you know, just so many, even apes know evolution is not possible. And yet they march on with this, without shame, with a hard head, and they just keep going forward. They deliberately lie. They'll believe in anything but the Bible.

This is true. And some people would kill me for saying this, or anybody for saying this. First Corinthians 12, you know that you were Gentiles? Listen to what Paul says, carried away to these dumb idols. Those used to be your God.

And it's true. What could they say? All of us could say, yeah, I remember when I wasn't a Christian. Well, most of us, some of you, have fortunately been born in a Christian home and have not deviated and have come into that real relationship with Christ, even at a young age. Romans 1, for since the creation of this world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. That's to the Gentiles. They don't have Moses to read.

They've got other things to look at. They cannot deny that there is a real God. Verse 6, you have heard, Isaiah 48, verse 6, you have heard, see all this, and will you not declare it? I have made you hear new things from this time, even hidden things, and you did not know them. So God says, I gave you the prophets.

Did you avail yourselves of their rich predictions? Now, the language of this verse looks beyond Isaiah's time, Isaiah's Israel, and it just moves all the way to a time that still has not yet happened. And it's going to start lighting up from chapter 49 on. We're going to get more Messiah and more of the messianic kingdom, and he's starting right here. This is sort of like the turning point in his prophecies. I mean, he's had some of Messiah in it, but now he's going to really start changing it, and you've got to be a little bit familiar with the scriptures to identify a lot of what's going on. These prophecies of Messiah's first and second coming, Israel's restoration, ultimate restoration, literal Israel as a people, he's going to deal with it, he's going to expand. As I mentioned, his contemporaries, the Jews reading this during the Babylonian captivity, they're going to get something from this.

We are getting something from this. All the generations of believers have gotten something from what Isaiah is now beginning to do. Ancient Babylon becomes apocalyptic Babylon, that world system. That's what that apocalyptic Babylon is, the global system under Antichrist.

He'll have problems too. You're going to have a big one when Christ comes back. Isaiah 65, 17, for behold, I create the new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered nor come to mind. See, we're looking way up in Isaiah now, and there he is giving us information about what's coming.

He's going to be moving away from rebuking so much and just pouring it out. Verse 7, they are created now and not from the beginning. This is the things that he's going to tell them. And before this day you have not heard them, lest you should say, oh of course I knew them. Bunch of know-it-alls, right?

You know, little smart alecks. Cain was a smart aleck. Cain, where's your brother that you just killed?

Am I my brother's keeper? I mean at that point you want God to give him the back of his hand. But of course the Lord works right on trying to offer Cain a solution. Cain, you got to fix this.

Never took it. But anyway, here God is saying, I'm going to tell you some new things. God says, no way you could know some of these things and these things that I'm going to reveal. There's no way you could have known them.

I've been holding them back, but now I'm going to start revealing them. There was no way they could have known that Cyrus, a Gentile Persian king, would be the one God would use to get the exiles back to Babylon. There's no way they would know that Messiah would suffer unless they really understood Genesis 3. We'll come to that shortly, which they did not. Prophecy is not easy reading. It's a lot of work and charts and review and it's fluid.

It's constant. There's no way that this Messiah would face a sacrificial death for sinners unless God told them. There is no way mankind can know Israel's future without the Bible. You are only able to stand up and say, we see what's happening, but they're not going anywhere. Israel will be here forever.

There'll be a lot of suffering, and I can tell you why and how it's going to work, because of the Bible. And nobody else has got that. And we're looking, we got the proof.

What other people have been taken out of their land for 2,000 years, retained their ethnicity, their religion, their language, their culture, and then brought back into their land. And the size of New Jersey, no one on earth can get them out. It's incredible. There's nothing like this. That alone should make an unbeliever say, the Bible is God's word, and I will line up with it. But no, this is why when it comes time for judgment, God says, there's no more mercy left.

You've had a lifetime of opportunities, and you spent it on defying me. Anyway, the Old and New Testament, both of them more short of prophecy, and siding against them may damn your soul. And the world's hatred of Israel is unexplained without God, without his word. And the face of hell is not going to be able to have joy in the end. Israel is not, let me rephrase this, the nation Israel will face hell and prevail as a nation.

They're not going anywhere. Now verse 7, that we're in now, indicates that God had never revealed certain features to them before, and he's revealing it to them now with the expectation that they're going to say, yep, my idol's never done anything like this because it's fake. So I'm going to abandon my idol, and I'm going to worship the God of the Jews.

You would think there would be even some patriotism involved, that the love of their nation, nope, didn't happen. Verse 8, surely you did not hear, surely you did not know, surely from long ago your ear was not open, for I knew that you would deal very treacherously and were called a transgressor from the womb. You know, you've been born, you're born a sinner, is what he's saying.

We all are. We're born in iniquity, David wrote. And so we're all sinners. The cutest little baby has every code for sin built into them, and given time, they might not sin, they will sin.

It's guaranteed. You just say, how did these things happen? How did something so cute and innocent and harmless become so defiled? Well, when you change their diapers and pampers, they're warning you. They're warning you. This life is not what it should be. I thought that was kind of funny at the moment.

Some of you are like, that's not funny. But I mean, to me, it's true. Anyway, 1 Samuel, chapter 15, Saul wanted to hide behind religion. He wanted to do what he wanted to do and use religion as a smokescreen. And of course, the great prophet Samuel busted him.

And so we're here in verse 8 where Isaiah says, surely you did not hear, surely you did not know, surely from long ago your ear was not opened. But they were doing the religious thing. Well, Samuel says this, behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed, then the fat of rams. God would rather you bring no sacrifices to the temple if he could just get you to obey.

But that's not it. And many churchgoers have perfected disobedience in the same way. Overly religious people, I said I'd come back to this in verse 8, do not make room for truth.

They make room for ritual, they make room for their religion, but they do not make room for truth. Jesus was not allowed to apply scripture to the guilty people. He had their scripture, he tells them, he points it out, and he tried to kill them.

Here's an example. This is in Nazareth, his hometown, when he goes into the temple, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me. And he says, I tell you a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a great famine throughout all the land, but to none of them was Elijah sent except Zarephath in the region of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow, and many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. So all those in the synagogue when they heard these things were filled with wrath.

We pause there. Jesus is saying there were plenty of lepers in Israel, but because there were no believers, God sent his prophets to do healings amongst unbelievers. It was true, it was in their Bible, and they hated him for pointing it out because they were guilty.

And then it goes on to say, after they were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city, and they led him to the brow of a hill on which their city was built that they might throw him down over the cliff. Then Luke says, but he just walked away. That was just a miracle, that's another miracle. That's a hidden miracle, that's one that you might miss, but how else do you do that?

Unless it's some extraordinary event taking place. So there you have from Luke, Jesus simply telling the truth to the guilty people and they would have none of it in the name of their religion. All they had to say was, you're right, you're right.

But no, that's not what happened. Anyway, verse 9, for my name's sake I will defer my anger and for my praise I will restrain it from you so that I do not cut you off. Incidentally, in the last verse reading about Luke, of course we have this today, we have people who are not interested in the truth, they just want what they want, and it's just as evil. But here in verse 9, his promise to protect Israel, guess what?

It will not be ruined by Israel. 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.