It was his death, that's the main thing, that the blood of Jesus Christ is connected to the prophecies, the sacrifices, the types, all of it is tied in. The reason why I say it, you know, use the poison analogy is because it's not, what he went through did not, in the flesh, did not save us.
What he went through in his death, the Son of God being murdered, that is the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses us from all sins. 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 tuned 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 Isaiah chapter 52 with today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. God never loses control no matter what's going on. He was not defeated by Israel. He was not defeated by Israel's defeats, although the Gentiles thought, you know, your God, he couldn't protect you, but that they had an opportunity to tell the whole story and they did, especially Daniel and Ezekiel.
Anyway, Israel defeated because they exchanged lies. Verse 8, your watchmen shall lift up their voices with their voices. They shall sing together, for they shall see eye to eye when Yahweh brings back Zion. Verse 9, break forth into joy. Say together, you waste places of Jerusalem, for Yahweh has comforted his people. He has redeemed Jerusalem.
Verse 10, Yahweh has made bare his holy arm in the eye of all the nations and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God. Now, of course, this has not yet happened. This is why, you know, you can't apply this to the Babylonian captivity.
This is still future. And, you know, you want to know about prophecy? Well, here's prophecy.
You know, this covers a broad range of things. Verse 8, those looking for redemption, your watchmen, in contrast to those who don't care, who are disinterested. When Simeon was in the temple and Joseph and Mary bring in the baby Jesus, Simeon takes the child in his arms and he pronounces his blessing.
Well, Anna shows up. And Luke chapter 2, she speaks and she says, and coming in that instant, she gave thanks to the Lord and spoke of him to all who looked for the redemption in Israel. You catch, she shared, there were others that were watchmen. They were interested in the redemption of Israel. They wanted their Messiah. And Anna, she addressed those people.
And so, in verse 8 of Isaiah, he says, your watchmen shall lift up their voices. Well, who's not going to lift up their voices? Well, the ones that weren't interested. Anna found those that were interested. Simeon was one of them. And Joseph and Mary clearly were because that's how Luke got the information. He wasn't there.
Someone had to tell him. And by the time he comes along, Simeon and Anna were long gone. But Mary was still around. Joseph was probably gone, but Mary was there. Mary hid a lot of things in her heart. She'd hide the blessing. I don't know what this is, but I'm not going to forget it kind of a thing. You've got to love her for that.
She didn't feel like, well, I must know. This is crazy. I have the best kid in the whole neighborhood. And it was true. The first time. The first time a mom got it right about their kid. Especially the youngest. Don't mess with the youngest. They've got a double dose of venom for those who mess with the youngest.
And I'm the youngest, but now I'm old. How's that work? Anyhow. So when he says, they shall see eye to eye, vividly, it would be vivid. This is not going to be.
It's kind of obscure. It won't be. Verse 9, the arm of Yahweh is his earthly exercise of strength, saving the people. This is going to be a global headline. That's what the prophet is saying. It's not going to be hidden. The world is at a loss to explain Israel's survival. Because they don't want to.
That's why. And those in the world who want to end up coming out of the world. Revelation chapter 1. Behold he is coming with clouds and every eye will see him, even they who pierced him. We're back to that Zechariah prophecy.
Question. How is everybody going to see him at the same time? Well, I don't know, but I have some ideas and I've submitted them to heaven.
He could make a slow, you know, it doesn't say, he could slowly approach the earth like a comet or something, you know, just reenter, coming into, you know, that's one way. I don't know that that's going to be it. He says as lightning flashes from east to west, you know, they're going to find out. It's going to happen. I'll be there, but I won't have my phone up. Because I think it looks pretty dumb.
500 people standing there. It's like, what? You want to just smack their hand, but they might get you and then record it and post it. Look, this is me getting beaten up by a bunch of angry people with telephones for cameras. Anyway, that could be a good thing.
You could have telephones for cameras, kind of a fun drive for, all right. Verse 11, depart, depart, go out from there, touch no unclean thing, go out from the midst of her, be clean, you who bear the vessels of Yahweh. I think he circles back here to his audience because he's a preacher and he's a very knowledgeable preacher. So he circles back and he's sort of like, hey, let's just remember in the face of all of these glorious prophecies, we have a commitment to separation from those things that are evil. That's what the saints are all about. And so he circles back, tells the righteous to double down. Paul picks up on this in 2 Corinthians and they needed it. We know about that church.
Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers for what fellowship is righteousness with lawlessness and what communion is light with darkness. Get your identity right. Who are you?
Especially the youth. You don't know who you are. It's emerging. You're coming out into adulthood. And it's an evolution more than a revolution. You're gradually moving into it. You can have a revolution experience into adulthood. You know, be born in a country where bombs are falling. Well, make you mature real quick.
But most of the time, you emerge into adulthood. Well, know who you are, what uniform you wear, and wear it with pride. How come we don't see troops anymore walking around in uniforms? Say, yeah, that's right. I'm proud of this.
Well, there's probably a couple of reasons why. But I would wear the uniform of Christ with pride if it weren't for that whole humility thing. Are you a humble Christian? Of course I am.
Silly question. Say, okay, the verses are all over the New Testament, so I'm not going to go into them. Every Christian should know Ephesians 4 verses 17 through 21 and actually to the end of 17 to 30.
Just every Christian should go back to that and recalibrate their walk from time to time. Anyway, I'm going to skip over the stuff about the commentators and their, you know, attaching this to the Babylonian thing, but let me put it this way. The Babylonian, the Jews that came out of Babylon, they would have seen these verses and they would have applied some of it to themselves, but they would have looked far beyond and saw into the days of Messiah. When the first wave of Jews came, back to Jerusalem from Babylon, Jerusalem was just wasted. There was nothing there. It was a barren land.
The Arabs were there and they weren't friendly, then or now. Their hand was against every man and every man's hand was against them, as it was against Ishmael. Anyway, only 50,000 Jews of, you know, millions, hundreds of thousands for sure, that were in the Babylonian Empire, only 50,000 came back with Zerubbabel. You read this in Ezra chapter 1 and 2. And they carried the vessels of the Lord, like the Levites did, you know, when they were in the wilderness.
And so, yes, some of this applies. The second group that came back to the Promised Land some 80 years later, by under Ezra's authority, only 1,800 of them. And Ezra was a tough believer. You know, I'm not going to ask the king for an escort. I know that there are robbers on those caravan routes and the way we're going, we said we're going to trust God, we're going to do that.
Man, what a man. Anyway, the Jews coming out of captivity, or wherever they find themselves, were not to salvage any input from the Babylonian religions. They weren't to say, man, I picked up this book on palm reading while I was in Babylon. That merits a capital crime. Christians will do stuff like that. You know, not all Christians.
Some, I think, that are poorly schooled. Well, I'm a Libra. You're a nut. That's what you are. I don't know if you are an almond or a macadamian, but we don't believe that we are to have anything to do with looking into these spiritual forces out there. Unless you're biorhythm, no, I'm just kidding. Verse 12.
So anyways, it's always a problem. Satan's always trying to seduce us into looking for alternatives to faith. There are no alternatives to faith.
You know, there's no auxiliary salvation or auxiliary methods of God. They're put in code for us. Verse 12. They're not put in code like you can't read them. They're codified.
They're documented. Verse 12. For you shall not go out with haste, nor by flight, for Yahweh will go before you and the God of Israel will be your rear guard. Now Isaiah points back to the Jews coming out of Egypt. This would be applied to the Jews coming out of any captivity. When they left Babylon, when Cyrus released the Jews, and he did other people's too, back to their lands, they weren't chased out. They didn't have to eat their Passover meal and rush out with their belts on. And there was no Pharaoh army coming behind them to re-enslave them and slaughter them. So God makes this distinction.
The rear guard, Exodus 13, and then the Lord standing between Pharaoh and the army, Exodus 14. And Isaiah references this. And what he is saying to his people is God's going to cover you. The righteous Jews would be all on this, man.
They'd be loving this so much, but then you had the naysayers as you do everywhere else. Verse 13. Behold, my servant shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted, extolled, and be very high. Now these last three verses of chapter 52 really go with chapter 53. We don't claim anointing to chapter verse divisions. They are very helpful.
They've done a fantastic job. But there are a few places where you scratch your head and say, why did he put that here? And you can say, well, it's a preface.
Yeah, but put the preface with the other stuff. I think it's a mistake, and I'm not alone. And I have to say that because if I don't, then you're like, who do you think you are? Well, I'm a guy that agrees with the other guy whose congregation said to him, who do you think you are?
And he said, I agree with you. Anyway, so these form, beginning at this verse to the end of chapter 53, the greatest, one of the greatest sections in scripture and all of human history. It is the Mount Everest one man of God called it, of messianic prophecy.
It is just, no one, the predicted details are too precise, too minute, too exclusive to one human being for anybody to have made up and for any imposter to come along and say, see, I duplicated it. How do you get born in Bethlehem? How do you come from the tribe of Judah and the house of David?
Just to begin. Then we can go on and on about the miracles and the crucifixion and just the unfairness, the innocence, the sinlessness. You can't make this stuff up. The prophecies are astounding and it doesn't take much to verify them. You know, if Julius Caesar writes something, the world, oh yeah, it happened. On the strength of one witness. We've got many witnesses in the New Testament. We have four right out the starting gate, the gospels.
Look at all the people in there. There are plenty of people around that could have protested. They could have said, well, let's go down to the house of records and let's find out that Judah, Christ was really born in the tribe of Benjamin. Well, they couldn't do that because he wasn't born in Benjamin.
He was born in Judah. He had rights to the throne. Oh no, okay, we're going down another, too much there. So this phrase, deal prudently means successfully.
He makes right decisions. The crucifixion looked like a defeat to carnal eyes initially, even to the beloved disciples. But Paul writes about the outcome, having disarmed principalities and powers, he made a public spectacle of them triumphing over them in it. Triumphing is really kind of hard to say when you're reading fast.
So, this is important. Up to the 12th century, during the dark ages of the Roman Catholic dominance in Western civilization, the rabbis believed Isaiah 53 applied to their suffering Messiah. They had some different opinion to be too Messiah. They were a little all over the place, but they believed Isaiah 53 was the sufferings of the Messiah. Well, the Christians began, they were still faithful.
There's always a remnant. But the Christians were saying, no, this is the Christ Jesus of Nazareth. And once that started, you know, picking up some steam, the Jewish scholars started reinterpreting Isaiah 53 in this section here before us and said, no, no, no, it's not Messiah. It's personifying Israel.
Well, then we got some problems. How could Israel die for the sins of Israel? Isaiah 53, 8.
We're running out of time because you people got places to go. But he is taken from prison from judgment and who will declare his generation for he was cut off from the land of the living for transgressions of my people he was stricken. Well, Israel wasn't stricken for Israel. That's circular reasoning. Who declared that Israel was innocent of sin and therefore suffered unjustly? Who's willing to say Israel was, there was no sin.
The bold book of Kings is a judge's. Just disregard that stuff. It's propaganda. No, it's truth. It's documented.
So it can't be Israel. Isaiah makes it clear that this is an individual that died for the sins of guilty people and he was guiltless. And the New Testament comes along and says, amen. And Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, 1 Peter, there's no way to get away from this. And if you're witnessing to a Jew and you take him there, you tie him up in knots.
But he won't repent many of the times. So Isaiah, of course, this is the most frequently quoted of the Old Testament writers. And this chapter, of course, is all over the New Testament. The opening words, behold, my servant is speaking of this suffering servant in Isaiah 53, 53 10 in particular highlights that. Maybe Peter had this in mind when he said in 2 Peter, and so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place. Maybe Peter was saying, if you read Isaiah 53, you know it's been fulfilled. How dare you still disagree with the scripture.
It's not going to work well for you. Because if the prophecies are true, the judgments are too. You can't just, you know, edit as you wish without consequence. If you edit the scripture, you are suppressing the truth and you will be judged for that and you're not going to make it. Verse 14, just as many were astonished at you, so his visage was marred more than any man and is formed more than the sons of men. Now when he says, just as many were astonished at you, he's talking about Israel and her disfigurement. Because Israel was not supposed to be made a prisoner or a, you know, the whooping boy of the Gentiles. Israel was supposed to be a light of the world, but that was disfigured because of her obedience. But it's not going to, Messiah, it's going to be a disfiguration there, not because of his sins, but because of our sins.
So this is the servant. I think that some pastors, and certainly the entertainment world, they take liberties with the sufferings, the physical sufferings of Christ that I think we'd be better off without. When the apostles got to the crucifixion, they said, and they crucified him, and they left it there.
They didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want, you don't need any details on this because the sufferings, the physical sufferings were nothing compared to the spiritual sufferings. I can put it this way, this makes a lot of Christians uncomfortable, that to say that his disfigurement was spiritual and immeasurable. The reason why he suffered the spittings, the beatings, and all the things that led up was documenting the connection to the prophecies of the Old Testament that God had this totally under his control.
None of this was random or off script. God detailed it. If God wanted to take a different route and say, you know, I'm not going to document his sufferings, I'm just going to have them poison him and kill him. If he died that way, I'm not saying he did, just bear, make my point, he still would have saved our souls, because it was his death.
It was his death. That's the main thing, that the blood of Jesus Christ is connected to the prophecies, the sacrifices, the types, all of it is tied in. The reason why I say it, you know, use the poison analogy is because it's not, what he went through did not, in the flesh, did not save us. What he went through in his death, the Son of God being murdered, that is the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses us from all sins. Otherwise again, you'd need the blood to sprinkle on people to get them saved if it was a physical thing.
I hope I'm making that point, I should have said this in the beginning, I would have had more time, would have taken my, we've talked to you in this kind of a tone, but at the end I'm kind of pushing it forward. So don't be, you can't measure the suffering of Christ. It's not possible. You cannot recreate it.
You just, you won't, you'll never come close. We'll never fully grasp how, what the impact was on a holy and pure being to take all the sin on himself. We accept it by faith. The suffering that we do have in scripture of him is vital to understanding what is, what has been involved since the foundations of the world. When again, you take a verse like, salvation through the seed of the woman. You see, that was the virgin birth.
And Isaiah 53, when he starts documenting his suffering, he eliminates all humanity except one person. So it's vital. I hope I'm not losing you on that.
You'll feel free to ask me later. And I like to be right again and again and again. Verse 15, so he shall sprinkle many nations, kings shall shut their mouths at him for what had not been told them they shall see and what they had not heard they shall consider. Boy, that must have been a sight for the prophet because in his days no other kings were going to have any of what he was talking about.
What he is saying is the true awesomeness will mute the critics. There's coming a time where no one's going to be trying to institute these depraved laws that we see. No one's going to try to get the Ten Commandments. You know, that was an easy argument to win. All the Christians had to say was, it's Hebrew literature, what are you talking about? What could they have said to that? That you have to get Shakespeare out and everybody else?
But no, they wanted to make it a religious fight. Why is a serpent as harmless as doves? Now I make it sound like I've got all the answers. Because I like, I don't. And I don't think I do.
But sometimes I do get them right. Coming back to this, Paul applies this to the preaching of the gospel and I want to close with this verse from Peter. Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the pilgrims of the dispersion. That alone is a story. How did the Jews get to be the people of the dispersion and nobody else?
Nobody has been part of the diaspora as the Jewish people have been. And then the return. It's just phenomenal. He continues, Peter does, elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. God has elected people to be saved based on foreknowledge. What is that foreknowledge?
That they accept the invitation of Jesus Christ. It's not like, well, I've just elected you because I like you. And I don't like him. That's not with God. That is not election.
It's an insult to say to someone, is it not? You mean you vote and you don't even know what you're voting for? We call them low-information voters. Don't do that with God. God is not a low-information voter.
When he elects, it is based on his son, the blood of the cross. And, you know, no one's going to be able to say, well, how did I end up in hell? You'll know. We'll know why we ended up in heaven.
Jesus Christ. There'll be no braggards in heaven. Anyway, elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father in sanctification of the Spirit.
Come out, come out, be separate from them. For obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ, grace to you and peace be multiplied. See that sprinkling of the blood? Look again at verse 15. So shall he sprinkle many nations. It goes back to the image of the priests and the cleansing rituals. And Peter's summing it up and says he is our high priest.
He's the one that cleanses us. 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.
