Human beings pull these kind of stunts before God and still expect that they're going to somehow survive in hell.
That's going to be alright. In the Bible ever since Genesis 3, snakes have come to represent the ultimate personification of evil. The eggs of vipers and the spider's web, they speak of the evil, the toxins that these people brought into society. They were rotten apples.
They're good for nothing but making other apples rotten. That's where I'm going with this one. Sin not only distances man from God, it infects other people, too. Galatians 5, 9 put it this way, a little leaven, leavens the whole lump.
In fact, the leaven is the whole lump. In fact, Paul said, Do not be deceived. And then in Corinthians, he says, And then in Corinthians, he says, again, do not be deceived, evil company corrupts good habits. And old King James says, corrupts morals. The Greeks, to legitimize their sins, they just created gods that sinned. And it worked well for them for a lifetime.
That's about it. In Proverbs, we read fools mock at sin. God never mocks at sin, nor should we. So Isaiah, he continues preaching against the transgressions relished by the people. They loved their sin so much. Their religion, too.
I want to get to a few Old Testament quotes from the prophets, but when I get to the one from Hosea, he really brings out how they just continue with their religion in spite of their disregard for what that religion stood for. These people apparently thought sin was no big deal. Religion was more important than your sin. Now, I'm not saying this as Christians, that we should, you know, try and lay guilt on us, because we're not in this category. We sin, we struggle with it, we love the Lord, and we don't make excuses for it. They weren't doing that.
They were quite content with their hypocrisy. And they even went so far as to fault God for not answering their prayers, because sin was no big deal again to them. So verse 1, behold, Yahweh's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy, that it cannot hear. Well, nothing's outside of God's reach, and he's making that clear.
But then he gives a punchline. And give me time on this second verse, because it really is not for true believers. But your iniquities have separated you from your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. Now remember, Jesus said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Jesus said through Paul, there is now, therefore, no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. He said, we're sin-abounded, grace did much more. Jeremiah said, the mercies of the Lord are new every morning. This is directed at those who are playing with God, playing with serious things. Can a man take fire to his bosom and not be burned?
There are consequences to this kind of behavior. So it's important to remember that Isaiah is addressing impenitent, not true believers, make believers. And verses 3 through 8, we'll just make that patently clear. If this were said to devout believers, then we would all be crushed. And David writes about that in his Psalms. Lord, if you numbered our sins, who could stand? So when we learn all the wicked things they were doing, we understand why their prayers did not reach heaven. Even in the New Testament, God gives outlines for prayers that are not answered, that he's just, I don't want to hear it. Till you fix this, I do not want to hear it. One of them was, you got to gripe with your neighbor, and in the context of its statement, you're the guilty one.
Leave your offering there and go settle this. So this application is to those doing evil, disinterested in obedience, having no intention of conforming to God's word. And so the prophet says, God speaking through him, don't blame me for not blessing your evil. James writes it this way.
But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Where are the people that need to hear this? Oh, they're out shopping. They're out doing this. They're out watching at home, making dinner.
They're playing with their kids. They're just marrying and giving in marriage. They're going on with life apart from God.
No, of course, not everyone, but a large amount of people need to hear these things. That which separates man from God is impenitent sin. I'll get to David when he was going through it in a minute. But Isaiah, in the first chapter, rereading this, I think I read this section last week.
I know I did. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not hear your hands are full of blood. Now remember now, you may make prayers as a Christian for years, and God's not listening. But it's not because of your evil, not because you did something.
And if you did, he's going to point that out to you, and you'll know it. But this is a different group. And your sins have hidden his face from you. So yeah, if the unbeliever says that a Christian, well, you're no different from me, because yeah, I am.
I'm just as weak as you, perhaps. But I am not the hypocrite before the Lord, at least I hope we're not. And the hypocrite is the one that knows he's up to no good and thinks he can get away with it. But we know as believers, there's nothing we can hide from God. Our thoughts and our intentions are known. They were known to him before we were born. And your sins have hidden his face from you. That's a lost benediction.
Aaron was told by Moses, God giving the direction, when you send the people away, put this blessing on them. The Lord bless you. The Lord keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you.
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Well, here, the Lord has hidden his face. He's not going to lift up his countenance.
His face is not going to shine on them. Isaiah himself knew he wasn't perfect. We covered that in Isaiah chapter 6.
Woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips who dwells amongst the people of unclean lips. So he knew. He was not self-righteous. And then when he gets to chapter 64, he comes back and says, all our righteousness is like filthy rags.
So it's a different category, different class of people that he's addressing. And David, when he had sinned with Bathsheba and he went there almost a year without addressing this, he then writes about it after he does confess, when I kept silent, my bones grew old, my groanings all the day long. And so there he knew God's face was turned against him. God's judgment on a people determined to disobey is not the same thing. Well, that's where David was in that category.
He was in that camp, but he got out. And the reason why Isaiah is saying these things so others can get out too. And I believe there were those Jews that would come in touch with Isaiah's teachings and consider their ways and repent. God's judgment on people determined to disobey, to disregard him, to disrespect him all at the same time. These were not the sins of the weak flesh, but of a rebellious, make believing heart that was self exalted and in love with its own passions. And so here's a barrage of Old Testament verses so that we see the prophets hammering this.
It could have taken, probably could have taken one from each of the prophets. But I'm going to major in the major prophet Jeremiah and give you that Hosea verse. Jeremiah 2.17, to the people he said, have you not brought this on yourself in that you are forsaken, the Lord your God, when he led you in the way? A lot of people are going to hear that on judgment day. Jeremiah 4.18, your ways and your doings have procured these things for you. This is your wickedness because it is bitter, because it reaches your heart. Jeremiah 5.25, your iniquities have turned these things away and your sins have withheld good from you. One of my favorites, Jeremiah 5.31.
It's a favorite because it's just so right on, spot right on, getting right to human. I don't need a psychologist to tell me how people behave. The Bible tells me, and it is an easy fit. The prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule by their own power.
And my people love to have it so. What are you going to do in the end? That's what he says, what will you do in the end? What are you going to do with judgment? Then here's the one from Hosea. With their flocks and herds, they shall go to seek Yahweh, but they will not find him.
He has withdrawn himself from them. They have dealt treacherously with Yahweh, for they have begotten pagan children. They're just living like the Old Testament doesn't even exist. The Bible doesn't even exist, except the part about this, but let's go make some sacrifices.
Anyway, I don't give you any anecdotes. It's, I think, just verse one is just so powerful. So he says here at the bottom of verse one, so that he will not hear, not listening, but your iniquities have separated you from your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear. They cherished the things that God despised that were abominable to him. Verse three, for your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies.
Your tongue has muttered perversity. So we know by that, he's not talking to the righteous Jews, the remnant in the days, and again, I think this section is in the days of Manasseh, late in Isaiah's ministry, but it doesn't really matter. There was always the guilty around them, shameless sin, their bloody hands, their dirty fingers, their lying lips, their twisted tongues. They were violent. They were manipulators. They were dishonest. They were sinister, the audience that he is addressing. And there were many Jews who would listen to this from coming from Isaiah and say, thank you, Lord.
Somebody is speaking up against these things. And Isaiah was a man of the palace. He had high connections. And when the good kings were in place, he was right there. And when the bad kings were in place, he would go against them. Verse four, no one calls for justice, nor does any plead for truth. They trust in empty words and speak lies. They conceive evil and bring forth iniquity.
Well, we know people like this, undisturbed by their sin, but yet bringing their herds and their flocks to the temple. Again, Isaiah chapter one, because from the very beginning, he gets to the punchline in his first chapter. You see a YouTube thing. This may kill you. Then you've got to wait 40 minutes into their talk about themselves before they tell you what it is.
Only for you to find out that there was nothing. Well, Isaiah doesn't pull that one. In chapter one, he gets right to it. Your princes are rebellious and companions of thieves. Everyone loves bribes and follows after rewards. Is he talking about congressmen and senators? Is he talking about the executive office? You hang out with a bunch of crooks and you love it.
You take bribes and you want the kickbacks, the rewards. So metaphorically, he depicts the evil rulers here in this verse as pregnant women giving birth to sin. They conceive evil and bring forth iniquity. Verse five, they hatch vipers' eggs and weave the spider's web. He who eats of their eggs dies, and from that which is crushed, a viper breaks out. Well, what did the seeker-friendly church do with these kind of verses?
They edited them out. This is what people need to hear, that human beings pull these kind of stunts before God and still expect that they're going to somehow survive in hell, that's going to be all right. In the Bible, ever since Genesis 3, snakes have come to represent the ultimate personification of evil, the eggs of vipers and the spider's web. They speak of the evil, the toxins, that these people brought into society. They were rotten apples. They're good for nothing but making other apples rotten.
The eggs and the spider's web, they speak of life and death. I mean, we can see these things there. It doesn't take much. Not only sinning, but spreading sin. We have that all over the place today on the internet and just in society and in the schools.
I mean, it's just so awful. You don't even want to repeat what these people are doing. You know, a spider puts a lot of work into the web, and wicked people put a lot of work into doing evil. Verse 6, their webs will not become garments, nor will they cover themselves with their work. Their works are the works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. Well, they will stand before God without a covering. They will be stripped of everything. And the policies of the wicked, they're inadequate in covering the needs of life.
When we look at the astounding, the nonsense, the collapses taking place in cities, the big cities of this country through these progressive policies. Anyway, we'll go back to that, verse 7. Verse 7, their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity. Wasting and destruction are in their paths.
This is gangster behavior, ever prowling for criminal gains, always scanning the horizon to see what they can snatch from somebody else. Psalm 34, he devises wickedness on his bed. He sets himself in a way not good. He does not abhor evil. See, that's the difference between the righteous and the, one of the differences, the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous hate evil, and that definition of evil is handed to us by God. God tells us what evil is, because we were just limited to the things that offend us. God says, this is what offends me. These descriptions of their evil doings, verses 7 and 8, were used by Paul in chapter 3 of Romans, to lay out, say, hey, humanity, you're all messed up.
You need a savior, whether you're Jew or Gentile. Verse 8 of Isaiah 59 now, the way of peace they have not known, and there is no justice in their ways. They have made themselves crooked paths. Whoever takes that way shall not know peace. Well, the travelers in the hill country of Judea would avoid night travel, at least that's what I've read, because, of course, in that hill country, there were some slippery slopes, and at night, you couldn't see them. And in that darkness, you could die, fall off a cliff.
And if you've been to Israel, you may have seen some of those places, some of the tourist sites, the caves of En-Gedi. I mean, there's some very dangerous spots there. Anyway, whoever takes their way shall not know peace. So don't get mixed up with their unjust ways. You have to learn to spot wicked people from a distance. If not, you know, you get with the wrong crowd and you want them to accept you, and they say, hey, could you just drive us over here? Hey, sit out in the car and wait for us. And they don't tell you they're robbing the bank. And then you're the getaway guy, right? You go down with them.
You just gotta learn that rotten apples, they spoil the whole barrel. Verse nine, therefore, justice is far from us, nor does righteousness overtake us. We look for light, but there is darkness for brightness, but we walk in blackness. Now the prophet shifts and he's lamenting their condition. He moves from the ways of the wicked to the response of the righteous that have to live in that society amongst the rotten apples that are trying to get to them. So he surveys and he summarizes the state of Judah's kingdom at the time he's writing this. He speaks as a citizen among the ruins of his beloved Judah, not by outsiders, by insiders.
A fifth column of wickedness, ruins caused by a anti-Yahweh policies of that evil culture. And as stated in the preceding verses, but he's not done. So this, he starts this lamentation of the righteous over the deeds of the wicked.
He says the outlook is bleak because of them. What a beautiful phrase to have righteousness overtake you. But here he says, nor does righteousness overtake us. We're not filled with the spirit. Evil people do not care about waste or sorrow or the misery they cause.
They're just not even interested in that. They know it's evil and they've resigned to it. Verse 10, it's hard for good people to understand that because we say, I wouldn't do that.
Why would anybody do that? Well, they do do it. Verse 10, we grope for the wall like the blind. We grope as if we had no eyes.
We stumble at noon day as at twilight. We are as dead men in desolate places. This is what the rotten apples have achieved in Judah. A nation that was given righteousness, but now they can't find righteousness because evil has overtaken the land. The politicians and the people who empowered them. Now, granted, they did not have voting booths to elect their leaders, but they did in their wicked hearts.
They were fine with it all. The law had very clear instructions about handling the things that these wicked kings were doing. There are some times that the people did resist. Uzziah, the good king, he overstepped, man. He was not supposed to step into the tabernacle of God to offer an incense that was exclusively for the priest.
He couldn't say, well, I feel I have a calling on my life. They were about to take his life. They withstood him with weapons. And had God not struck him on the head with leprosy, it would have gone violent. But that's an example of the righteous people standing up. Well, that means there were other times that they didn't stand up under kings like Ahaz and Manasseh. No, because they really liked these wicked policies. No, good, this administration is going to change the law.
Keep your change. Anyway, they didn't mind trampling the scripture. And they committed themselves to their evil kings while the remnant stood firm, but the remnant were marginalized.
What are so few amongst so many? You know, there just weren't enough righteous people to achieve anything. What he mentions here, the noon day and the twilight, they should have been able to see. They had the light of the law.
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. They had that scripture already. But they couldn't see.
They didn't want to see. Moses called this long ago, Deuteronomy 28, 28. It's going to take Deuteronomy 28 and 29, but verse 28 is one for us to commit to memory. Here's verse 28. Yahweh will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart, and you shall grope at noon day as a blind man gropes in darkness. You shall not prosper in your ways. You shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you.
Well, that's what happened to them. But let me back up a little bit. I said that was a verse to remember, but that's not. And I don't remember the verse to remember.
So maybe I'll come to it later. But that's not the verse I wanted. Oh, no, that is it. That is it.
See, even my errors are correct. The Lord will strike you with madness. That's the one. So let me put that in our language. The Lord's going to let you go crazy.
That's what that means. Manasseh, if he was the king, whether he was or not, the righteous did suffer under Manasseh, and I've been bringing him up. And so now I'm going to give you his fall and then his salvation, which kind of just almost irks the righteous. Second Chronicles 33, 9, Manasseh seduced Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to do more evil than the nations whom Yahweh had destroyed before the children of Israel. Now, what the chronicler is saying is the people that, under Joshua, that pushed out those Canaanites, God listed the things they were doing and said, don't think you're better than them. They're doing this stuff.
Don't you do it. And that's what this reference there. Then 2 Kings 21, 16, moreover, Manasseh shed much, very much, innocent blood till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to the other besides his sin, by which he made Judah sin, in doing evil in the sight of Yahweh.
And there's the rotten apple. He made others sin, but also he spilled very much innocent blood. No wonder the righteous couldn't stand.
No wonder they were marginalized. Second Chronicles 33, 10, and Yahweh spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they would not listen. No, because they would kill those who would come and tell them God's word or persecute them in some other form. But then, by the time we get to Second Chronicles 33, what has happened is the Assyrians came in and they took him captive. And they put hooks in his, likely his archaeologists have discovered evidence of the Assyrians practicing putting hooks in people's noses with chains and leading them into captivity. Well, that's what they did with King Manasseh. Again, 55 years he was king.
Not all those years was he wicked. He did, and that's what I'm getting to. Well, anyway, the Assyrians come and they put the hook in his nose and they cart him off to Babylon because the Assyrians at that time ruled Babylon too until Babylon kicked back and overthrew them. But anyway, at that time, in his misery, we pick it up, Second Chronicles 33, 13, he prayed to Yahweh and Yahweh received him his entreaty, heard his supplication and brought him back to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew Yahweh was God. And he goes on to then purge the land, but the damage was so extensive it just really didn't take and God brings that up later.
But what an amazing event. If a rotten man like him can get saved, then we should never lose hope no matter how rotten we think someone has become. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reference Radio. This is the radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.
We trust that what you've heard today has been something to remember. If you'd like to listen to more teachings from this series, go to crossreferenceradio.com. Once more, that's crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. You can also connect with us through YouTube. We hope you'll tune in again next time as we continue spending time reading God's word and learning together. Make a note in your calendar to join Pastor Rick again right here on Cross Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-12-18 08:07:06 / 2024-12-18 08:18:17 / 11