Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. In Isaiah 47-8, God speaks to Babylon, saying, Hear this now, you who are given to pleasures, who dwell securely, who say in your heart, I am, and there is no other besides me. Throughout the chapter, God has severe warnings for Babylon, a nation often symbolic in Scripture of organized rebellion against God through self-exaltation. Humanity is greatly drawn to self-preeminence, but it is God who rules in the kingdom of man. Without Him, we're lost.
Every other object of trust, including a trust in our own selves, will leave us utterly unsatisfied. The teaching series through Isaiah chapters 40 through 55 is entitled, Behold Your God. May that be what we do this morning as we engage the Scriptures, to behold our God as He truly is. In honor of the Lord and His word, would you please stand with me as we seek His aid to hear and heed His word. Father, it is our delight and our high privilege to fellowship with each other as we commune with you, as we open up the Scriptures, that is the word from you, to engage it, to study it, to know it, to see you, Father. And so we ask, Lord, this morning that you would open our hearts and our minds, rescue us from anything that distracts our thoughts, and may we come before you with expectancy and humility, Father, to see you as you truly are. Guide us by your Spirit through your word, Father. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated. In chapter 47 verse 8, the writer of Hebrews says, As the Lord says, Hear this now, you who are given to pleasures, who dwell securely, who say in your heart, I am, and there is no one else beside Me.
I am, and there is no one else beside Me. This prophecy written over 2700 years ago is absolutely relevant and appropriate for us today, because it is a timeless word that comes from a timeless God. We see that mankind has not changed, and God is still God, always has and always will be.
And so He reveals Himself to us this morning, and the events that we consider are in fact historic events, and they are being prophesied, but we can look back in history and say, they have been fulfilled in history, and yet there is so much that we can learn from it today. What we learn today about God is His uniqueness, the uniqueness of God. Those who would say, I am, and there was no one else beside me, imagine the arrogance of a created being saying such a statement. There is only one who can say that, and that is the Creator Himself. The Lord said in chapter 42 verse 8, My glory I will not give to another. My glory I will not give to another. He is a unique God, He is alone, He has no competitors, He has no equals. And we, in our self-preeminent human pride, can often find ourselves marginalizing God and placing ourselves at the center of our lives.
And God says, My glory I will not give to another. At the end of high school, saving up for college, I worked at a steakhouse called Russeller's Steakhouse. I started out in the pit.
The pit is in the back of the kitchen where the busboys bring in all the plates and trays where people are done eating their meals, and you take a plate and you scrape it off into the tray. Oftentimes, I was scraping almost whole steaks right into the trash can. This missionary kid had a hard time dealing with that. But you can imagine, and it was a big barrel of a trash can too, and there was a bag in it of course, and at the end of the night it had to be emptied out, and you can imagine how heavy those things get. Usually at the end of the night at closing, when you had to close up, it was a two-man job to wheel this thing out and let it go. It was a two-man job to wheel this thing out and lift it up and dump it into the trash can.
One particular night, we were short on staff, and there was not another guy available to help me take it out there, oversight of management, but I got out there, and I thought, okay, I need to empty this. I am tired. I am as greasy as the pit. I am ready to go home. I've got to get out there and empty this trash can. And I said, I know what needs to happen, so I'm before the Lord. Honestly, I said, God, I need to get this thing up there. I don't know how I'm going to do it.
Please help me out. And the Lord granted me wisdom, the insights of an engineer to lift it up as much as I could, prop it up, and wheel it on in there, and mission successful. Mission successful, and I go back inside, and they're looking at me like, who helps you do that? I said, nobody. I said, you did that on your own?
Yeah. I said, how did you do that, Rich? And I, in absolute humility, said, brute force. The Lord is not letting me forget that day because the Lord said in Isaiah 42, 8, my glory, I will not give to another. My glory, I will not give to another. God stands alone. And we in our humanness can very easily think that all the goodness that I'm experienced, my current status, everything that is about everything good that is, look what I have done for myself.
Look at the life that I have made for myself. And God says, my glory, I will not give to another. The uniqueness of God is the message from Isaiah chapter 47 today, because he is speaking directly to the Empire of Babylon and the Babylonian people represented by the hubris of their great King Nebuchadnezzar. Throughout scripture, Babylon is symbolic of organized rebellion against God through self-exaltation. You cannot exalt yourself and exalt God at the same time.
They are mutually exclusive. And Babylon is spoken to in this chapter by God as an indictment of their disposition. And Babylon, you need to consider her end, because though she was a historic empire as a tool, as an instrument used by God for his purpose. And yet throughout history, Babylon has symbolically represented this rebellion, this organized rebellion against God by self-exaltation.
And so consider her end. Read Revelation chapter 17 through 19. Not now, but read sometime Revelation 17 to 19.
And what happens? Babylon falls, organized rebellion. Organized rebellion, human self-exaltation collapses absolutely. And in Revelation 19, we have the great chorus line, the Lord God omnipotent reigns.
He alone is worthy of trust and exaltation. So as we consider what the Lord is saying to the people of Babylon, here in the 47th chapter of Isaiah, I want to propose that the Lord is asking them, he's implying some questions here. Okay, remember he is speaking prophetically because the things that he's describing haven't even happened yet.
They're more than a century away before they happen. The question that he asks Babylon, the question that God is asking us today is, whose purpose are you pursuing? Whose purpose are you living?
Do you think it's your own? Babylon made a mistake. Babylon misinterpreted her state in history.
A luxurious, powerful empire. But her mistake was this, thinking that she had captured Judah in spite of Jehovah God. That was her mistake. And as a result, her disposition in all of this, and this is what God indicts her for. Her disposition in this, if you were to look in verse 6, is she is merciless. She is merciless. She is unaccountable for her treatment of others. She thinks she is anyway. And it is because she has no sense of a merciful God. Not only is she merciless, but you look in verse 8, she is self-indulgent. She is living for her own purposes.
She is self-indulgent, thinking all is for my satisfaction. I am living for myself. And so we go back to the question, whose purpose are you pursuing? Whose purpose are you living? You think your life is your own and you are living out your own purpose. Don't be so deluded. Your life has been entrusted to you as the Lord speaks to Babylon here.
Babylon failed to recognize that there was a trust here by God. Not only was she merciless and self-indulgent, but she was self-sufficient. Babylon, verse 8, she flattered herself. Look what she says, Therefore hear this now, you who are given to pleasures, who dwell securely, who say in your heart, I am, and there is no one else besides me. I shall not sit as a widow, nor shall I know the loss of children.
She was self-sufficient. She flattered herself, thinking she will last forever. I will always have kids.
I will always be well off. You know, we tend to think of that as Westerners, particularly as Americans. We just have a hard time imagining that someday there's going to be a day when America is no more.
Wake up. We're not even in the scriptures. She flattered herself, thinking she will last forever. And here's the kicker, and this is what we see presented in the first three and four verses of this chapter, that she kept everything disagreeable at a distance.
And you know what? We're so good at that, aren't we? To keep everything disagreeable at a distance. We cushion ourselves against the harsh realities of life. And that becomes one of our main preoccupations throughout the course of the day. Insulating ourselves from the frustrating characteristics of a fallen creation.
Not only was she self-sufficient, but she was also self-exalting. Thanks for joining us here at Delight in Grace. You've been listening to Rich Powell, the lead pastor at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. The Delight in Grace mission is to help you know that God designed you to realize that your highest good and your deepest satisfaction in Him, the one who is infinitely good. We hope you'll join us again on weekdays at 10 a.m.
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