Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. According to the Bible, God is holy and just, necessarily opposing evil, including the evil that runs through the heart of every person. God is also full of compassion and tender love.
He's deeply moved by our broken and lost state. But how can His justice and compassion meet? Well, the two are most beautifully displayed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. The Son of God bearing the just wrath and punishment that was meant for man.
Why? Because of His great love for us and for His Father. What a Savior! Let's take a closer look at His character in this message from Isaiah 49. Once again, if you would have your copy of the scriptures opened to the 49th chapter of Isaiah's prophecy, we come now to the time for the exposition of God's Word as we continue in the series, Behold Your God.
Isaiah chapter 49. In honor of the Lord and His Word, would you please stand with me as we seek His help to hear and heed this word this morning. Father, we stand before you this morning in awe of who you are.
We bow our heads before you in submission and humility of your greatness and your holiness. Father, we thank you that we can know that as we open this word, we know that we have a word from God. And so, Father, I pray that you would guide us as we engage your truth this morning. For your truth is given to us not just for our information but for our transformation. So rescue us this morning, Father, from just learning something new this morning. But, Father, change our hearts and our minds. Manifest yourself to us in the fullness of your goodness and your majesty. Open our hearts and our minds, I pray this morning, Father. Guide us by your Spirit. We thank you for who you are and for what you have done and for what you will do. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
Please be seated. You'll remember that the historic context of this prophecy that is given, and it is a prophecy, what we're reading in this text is prophetic, meaning it has not yet happened when it was written. We can look back at it in history and say, aha, there it was, as God prophesied it would be.
But when it was written at this time, it had not yet happened. And what it is, is that God and his people, the people of Judah, are being informed that they are going to be taken captive by the Babylonian empire because of their rebellion against God, because they are choosing something else for their security and their satisfaction other than God. And he says, fine, let them protect you, let them satisfy you, and they will find out that it doesn't work. And God says, when you've experienced that for seven years, I'm going to bring you back to the land that I promised you and your fathers. And I'm going to do it through my chosen servant, Cyrus, hasn't even been born yet, but he's the one that's going to do it. He's going to be the king of the Medes and the Persians. He will overthrow Babylon, and Babylon will be overthrown by me in judgment because of their treatment of you. And then I am going to, through his decree, I'm going to bring you back into your land that I promised you. The city is going to be rebuilt, the walls are going to go up, the temple is going to be rebuilt. And I'm doing this because you are my people, I am your God.
And you will know that it's not worth it to trust anything else other than me for your security and your satisfaction. That's the message of God in Isaiah's prophecy. What do we have here now? Chapter 49 brings us into somewhat of a different section of the prophecy. Something new is introduced, but in that context, we have to understand that God has revealed himself as a holy God. So we have here a holy God and an oppressed rebel, a holy God and the oppressed rebel. Chapter 50 and verse 1 has a very telling statement and it says, for your iniquities, you have sold yourselves.
For your iniquities, you have sold yourselves. This teaches us about the nature of sin. What is sin? It is very attractive and yet it is destructive.
There's no doubt that sin is attractive. There is the flesh that we have to deal with all the time. There's our natural appetites.
Not that those appetites are necessarily bad, but to the degree that we go in the direction that we go to satisfy and fill those appetites is what leads us to destruction. I often use the illustration of antifreeze. A dog loves antifreeze.
If there's a puddle of antifreeze on the ground, a dog is attracted to it and it laps it up because it loves the taste. And it laps it up without recognizing that it's going to destroy him from the inside out. And that is the nature of sin. And God has allowed his people to experience that so that they will recognize that he is their satisfaction and their security instead of anything else. What we must recognize through this, through understanding the nature of sin, is that we are not just passive victims of our circumstances. We are not just passive victims. We are rebels.
We are born rebels. Here's an example of that. In September of last year, a 25-year-old New Yorker named David Villalobos jumped 17 feet from the Bronx Zoo monorail into the tiger pen in the Bronx Zoo. He broke some bones in the fall. He suffered broken ribs, broken right ankle, and was also mauled by the tiger. He suffered a collapsed lung and a broken pelvis, and the 400-pound Siberian tiger named Bachuta bit into his foot and dragged him around a while until the keepers could rescue him.
You just envision that. This guy, on purpose, jumped 17 feet into the tiger pen. And then the tiger, you know, all these broken bones, punctured lung and all this, and the tiger's 400-pound beast is dragging him around by the ankle.
You know, it's like playing with dinner. It turns out that David wasn't upset because he was completely obsessed with tigers. When the police asked him what he was thinking, he replied that, quote, everyone in life makes choices and that he wanted, quote, to be one with the tiger. As a matter of fact, he told the police sergeant that he actually got to pet a real tiger. Nice kitty.
Nice kitty. You know what? Had he been in there long enough without being rescued?
He would have been one with a tiger, as in dinner, right? You see, there's the nature of sin. We're not just passive victims. We are victims of our own devices, and this is what Israel had to learn.
Victims of our own devices. The Lord says in Ecclesiastes chapter 7, verse 29, that God made man upright. By man, he speaks mankind. We are created in God's image. God made man upright. What does that mean? Every one of us understands that there is a God and we were designed for the purpose of relating to him. God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. We are victims of our own devices.
What does that mean then? That means that we are helpless. We cannot rescue ourselves, just like this David in the Bronx Zoo. Were it not for outside help, he would have been one with a tiger. He needed rescue and he was not capable of rescuing himself. But not only was he helpless, he was also deserving of judgment. You could sit back and say, hey, he jumped in. He wanted it. Let him have it.
But he was at least deserving of some judgment for his choice of action. We see this and the effects of this in the character that probably all of us are aware with, and that's Gollum. He is the slimiest character in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Originally, Gollum was a hobbit named Smeagol, but his obsession with possessing the ring deformed him into Gollum.
Smeagol still vaguely remembered things like friendship and love, while Gollum was slave to the ring who knew only treachery and violence. This is precisely what happens to us as victims of our own devices. We become what we live for. We become what we live for. So in that sense, with the attractiveness and yet the destructiveness of sin, we see ourselves being lured in and drawn into a life of self-destruction.
Like David jumping into the tiger pen and being dragged around by the ankle, unable to rescue himself. Yet in understanding this and the oppression of our state, of our sinful state, there is another factor that is revealed in scripture that cannot be missed. Let me present to you another image. If you watch the news at all this week, you probably saw the images of the rescue of a Chinese newborn from a sewer drain. It was an apartment building in a public restroom in that building. Someone heard the cries of an infant. They called the authorities and the authorities determined that it was trapped in the sewer drain. And so they cut the pipe down above and below it and they take the pipe down. It's a very hard plastic. And on the news, it showed the very images of this newborn infant. And they're tearing apart the plastic piece by piece by piece.
And this newborn emerges and it's laying there helpless. 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.
