Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, Pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and His Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts, I am the first and I am the last. Besides me there is no other God. That's Isaiah 44, verse 6. And in today's sermon we focus on how the living God, eternal and reigning over all, is an invitational God.
We see His love in that He initiated our restoration through Christ and invested in us, giving us Himself. Let's listen in to this message from Isaiah 44. Please have your copy of the Scriptures open to the 44th chapter of Isaiah for today's exposition of the Word of God.
We are going through Isaiah chapters 40 through 55 in the series entitled Behold Your God. It is very important for us to know God in the way that He has revealed Himself to us, lest we worship idols in our heart. In honor of the Lord and His Word, would you please stand with me this morning as we seek His aid to hear and heed His Word. Father, it is with great delight that we fellowship with each other as we commune with you. We thank you, Father, that you have made yourself known to us so that we can know you and walk with you and serve you with delight. That in that delight, Father, we can be satisfied in you. So, Father, we pray that you would manifest yourself to us this morning, open your Word to us, guide us by your Spirit as you open our hearts and our minds. For, Father, we understand, we recognize that your Word is given to us not just for information, but for transformation. And so, Father, I pray that you would mold us more and more into the image of your Son, the Lord Jesus, as you accomplish that work of transformation in our hearts and our minds today. We pray these things in Jesus' name.
Amen. Please be seated. You will remember that the context of this prophecy, which was written somewhere near 700 B.C., is Isaiah is prophesying, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that in time, starting about 605 B.C., Babylon would take Judah captive. The northern ten tribes of Israel have already been taken and scattered by the empire of Assyria. And now he is prophesying to Judah and he says, you're going to be taken and then Babylon will be overcome.
And then you, a remnant, will be brought back to the land and you will be restored by the command of Cyrus, the king of the Medes and the Persians. God prophesied that. He prophesied that return almost 150 years before the event. With that, in that context, from Isaiah chapter 44, God manifests himself to us as the living God. He is the living God. And that is how we must know him. He is the living God, first of all, because he initiates. Look with me at the beginning of chapter 44. Yet here now, O Jacob, my servant in Israel, whom I have chosen, thus says the Lord, who made you and formed you from the womb, who will help you.
Three words in there. First of all, chosen and made. God initiates purpose. He initiates interaction. He initiates correction. His people needed correcting. And so he initiates that correction because he loves his children as a father loves his son and corrects his son.
Why is that? He is a living God because he initiates relationship. And he knows that that relationship is the best thing for us. Now, the first word of chapter 44 in the New King James is the word yet. In your translation, it might be the word but.
So there's a contrast there. OK, and that's contrasting verse 28. What is happening in verse 28? Look at it of the previous chapter, the last verse of the previous chapter. Therefore, I will profane the princes of the sanctuary. I will give Jacob to the curse and Israel to reproaches. Because Jacob, because Israel had forsaken God, they had walked away from him thinking they knew better. They had forsaken the satisfaction of the banquet table.
And they had settled for eating out of the dumpster because they thought they knew better. God said, OK, if that's the way you want it, I'm going to let you have it. I'm going to let you experience what it's like to walk away from me like the branch suffering itself from the tree. I'm going to let you experience the death, the thirst, the hunger, the starvation of being away from your source and your sustenance and your satisfaction.
And then I'm going to bring you back. You see, God does that and he is the living God. He is the one who does that. It has been said, I've heard it said that pain plants the flag of reality in the fortress of a rebel's heart. Pain plants the flag of reality in the fortress of a rebel's heart. And that is exactly what God is doing here with his people.
Why? Because he is the living God and he loves them and he's correcting them. He says here at the end of verse two, who will help you, who will help you.
So he initiates. He's the living God because he initiates. And here he is initiating help. And here this word help means to rescue, to save.
It is often used in the Old Testament of a military rescue. And God is the one. He is the living God and he comes to the rescue.
He initiates the rescue of his people. You see, a non-living God can't do that. Of course, a non-living God is a non-God. We understand that, but we are such masters at crafting gods in our hearts and our minds. Other things that we trust besides the living God.
Christopher Wright says the worst thing about idols, as the Hebrew Scriptures so tirelessly point out, is that they are utterly useless when you need them most. But God is the living God. He is the one who initiates. He is the one who helps. Secondly, God is a living God, according to this text, because he is a God who invests. He is a God who invests. What does he invest? He invests himself. Verse 3, I will pour water on him who is thirsty and floods on the dry grounds. He's speaking metaphorically here.
Look at what he says. I will pour my spirit on your descendants and my blessing on your offspring. He is a God who invests. He is a living God because he is the God who invests. What does he invest?
Listen to this. He invests himself. That is the living God, the God of grace. He gives himself to us. And here we have testimony once again to the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And he says, I will pour out my spirit. And where God's spirit is poured out, life arises.
And this is God's promise because he is the living God. Like water on a dry land, from that life springs forth. I remember growing up in Columbia, South America, and for a while we lived up in the desert regions. And we went to visit a family that lived way out in the middle of the desert, very dry, very powdery for 10 months out of the year. It was just dry as a bone. And you had to dig wells very deep to get any water.
But I remember there going out one time. It was right after the rainy season. And I distinctly remember it like it was yesterday.
As we were traveling out there, I couldn't even recognize where I was because it had rained for a couple of weeks and everything was green. That's the work of the living God. He is the God who invests and he invests himself. He pours out his spirit like water. And where his spirit is poured out, life arises. And that is so true of you and me, who are in Christ. And he says, I will put my spirit within you.
You know what that means of us? If you are in Christ, that means within you exists life where it never existed before. He is the living God because he invests himself.
As it says in Titus chapter 3, according to his mercy, he saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the spirit. You see, he's constantly using the metaphor of water when referring to the Holy Spirit. Thirdly, God is the living God because he informs. He initiates, he invests, he informs. And throughout this section of the prophecy of Isaiah, God constantly comes back to this idea, to this truth, to this understanding that he is the God who is truth. He is the God who informs. He declares what is going to happen in the future and then he makes it happen. Only a living God can do that. He says, he asked the question, who can proclaim as I do?
No non-living entity can proclaim as the living God does. And why is it that he can proclaim as he does? Because he has an infinite perspective. He is the beginning and he is the end. He can see around the corner.
Why? Because he has the infinite perspective. You can understand and take comfort in that, in understanding and knowing that wherever you're going to be, God's already been there.
So trust him because he will not forsake you. Now I've said before that truth has a name and he is the living God because he informs. And truth is that which corresponds to reality. So God is not just communicating and verbalizing a bunch of ideals to his people here. He says, here is what is going to happen in history and then he makes it come to pass.
He makes it a reality. In other words, God is saying, let me tell you what history is going to be. And today, from our perspective, we can look back on history and say, look what happened. And throughout the scriptures we can look at the prophetic record, words that God has communicated through his prophets and we can say, it is a stellar record. What God prophesies comes true. What God tells us is what is going to happen. And that is why he says in verse eight, there is no other rock.
I know not one. 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.
