Behold Your God Isaiah 48, Part 1

Music Music Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. The mythological Greek gods and goddesses worshiped thousands of years ago were portrayed as better, more powerful versions of humanity. They could still be capricious and full of the same vices found in man. Not so with the God of the Bible. It's easy to see throughout the narrative of scripture that God is unlike us. He's holy, set apart, completely other.

God himself is the very definition of what is good, beautiful and right. His person invokes awe in those who observe it. In today's message from Isaiah 48, Pastor Rich lays out the holiness, the otherness of God, along with a challenge for us to consider. Do we view God as simply a larger, better version of ourselves?

Are we guilty of treating him as common? May God enlighten our hearts to the beauty and greatness of himself today. Please have your copy of the scriptures open to the 48th chapter of Isaiah's prophecy. And when you do, please join me standing in honor of the Lord and his word to seek his aid to hear and heed his word. Father, we stand in awe of you this morning. We are humbled and we thank you that we know that when we open this book, we have a word from God. Guide us by your spirit this morning, O God, into your truth where you manifest yourself to us. May we know you as you truly are, O God. Thank you. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Please be seated. The Lord says, For my name's sake, the Holy One of Israel, behold your God is the series that we are going through, Isaiah chapters 40 through 55. It is important for us to know God as he truly is. In the beginning of this chapter, particularly the first eight verses of Isaiah chapter 48, there is a challenge to the people of Israel. Remember, the Lord is speaking prophetically in this portion of scripture. And he is telling Israel that they are not living up to their name because they are the people of God. They are a people who are in covenant with God. He is their God and they are known as that, the people of Jehovah God. But he says, You are not living up to your name because they are thinking of Jehovah as common.

They are treating Jehovah as if he is common, as if he is just another one of the gods. What does common mean? Common means something that is ordinary. It is not particularly special. Common means something that is familiar. You don't really have necessarily high regard for it.

It is something that is unweighty. It doesn't have a whole lot of impact in your life because it is just something that is common. So therefore, you are kind of casual about it.

This is how Israel was regarding God, Jehovah, the Creator, the Redeemer. Not only is it ordinary and familiar, but common means something is actually inferior. It has lesser value or quality. It has a lesser worthiness of trust.

There are other things that you are trusting and you are not trusting me, he says, and you are treating me as common. We see this in the way that he describes Israel. If you look with me at verse 8, he says, You deal treacherously, for I knew that you would deal very treacherously. He knew from when? From eternity. Remember the omniscience of God. From all time, God knows everything right here, right now. His knowledge is infinite. It is complete.

It is perfect. And he says, I knew that you would deal very treacherously. He calls them a rebel, a transgressor, a rebel from the womb.

They were born that way. They are obstinate, he calls them in verse 4. The idea of dealing treacherously means to be unfaithful, to not keep their word, to renege on commitment. How true it is for us today. For today, commitment is only good as long as it is convenient for me.

But when I find something else I like better, then I abandon my former commitment. And this is how Israel was treating God. John Oswald in his commentary says, The human spirit is not a blank page, equally ready to be inscribed with good or evil. It is according to Isaiah and all the rest of the Bible already blotted with a well-nigh incurable insistence on our own way at all cost. That's the born rebel within us.

My own way, the self-preeminence. Alexander, the Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes this. He said, If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

May God grant us ears to hear. The Lord speaks of them as profane, the word profane. It's not a word we commonly use today, but profane means to defile, to abuse or to pollute.

It is a polluting element. The profane there is, you know, sometimes the Bible has some great little nuggets in their scriptures there that you just kind of, you know, they kind of jump out at you. Here's one of them. Ecclesiastes chapter 10 verse 1. Dead flies make a perfumer's oil ferment and stink.

Isn't that good? I mean, that'll preach. Dead flies in the ointment of the apothecary cause a stinking savour. You know, well, you know, the perfumer's oil, you know, the fly is attracted to it and it falls into it and it dies and then it decomposes and then it stinks.

And who wants to have perfume that stinks? And so something that profanes is a polluting element. It is the entrance of something that makes it inferior, undesirable, imperfect, impure. This is what Israel had done to the Lord's name.

And God says in verse 11, how shall my name be profaned? And from what must this concept arise? When you have the idea of inferior, imperfect, impure, what does a concept like this arise from?

A standard, a reference, a rule. Did you know that there's one thing that an atheist cannot do? And that is an atheist cannot live a perverted life. Because to live a perverted life is to assume the violation of a standard or the abuse of a designed purpose. Where would that come from? A sense of right and goodness.

Where would that standard come from? An atheist has nothing like that. So an atheist cannot live a perverted life.

Think about that. This is one way that you might be able to help your friends think through their worldview. They can't live consistent with it.

Where does such a standard come from? In the series Behold Your God in Isaiah, what we're focusing on today from Isaiah chapter 48 is the holiness of God, the holiness of God. God is a holy God. Now remember, his indictment against the people of Israel was that they were treating him as common, as common. And the holiness of God is the opposite of what is common. The fact that God is a holy God means that he is not something common.

What does common mean? For example, we have, so those of us who have kids when they're young, we like to give our kids toys. And we give them a toy because we love to see them get so excited about this special toy and to really just enjoy it and that it becomes something special in their lives. And we love our kids so much that we give them a new special toy every week.

And before you know it, the floor is covered with toys. And when everything's special, what? Nothing's special. And they treat all of their toys as common. And you know what's great? This is great.

Try this sometime, okay? Take away some of their toys that they've forgotten about and repackage them and give them to them for Christmas. And then it becomes special all over again. You see, that toy became common because it just became another one of the myriad of toys that they have. The idea of holiness is the opposite of that which is common.

Whether it's toys or clothes or people or whatever, something that is not so special, something that is held in low regard, you're casual about it. 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 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. .