God’s Miraculous Love Letter, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Faith is the unexplainable meeting the undeniable. It's the unexplainable meeting the undeniable. And what is undeniable is that these prophecies are divine.

These prophecies tell the life of Jesus, both the purpose and the details of it with staggering specificity. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of J.D. Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. You know, I've been doing this for quite some time now and it's safe to say that it is just as exciting and rewarding today as the day I started.

You know why? It's because messages like the one on today's program actually can change people. This isn't just a job for me. It's a mission.

So welcome back once again. You know, I bet if you asked an atheist why they don't believe in God, they'd probably say something along the lines of, well, there just isn't any evidence. But is that really the case? Is our faith just based on wishful thinking? Or are there logical evidentiary reasons to believe the Bible? Pastor J.D.

Greer argues that there are, and that's his subject today on Summit Life. He's taking us through the prophecies of Isaiah, a book that can only be explained by divine inspiration. In fact, he calls this book of the Bible, God's miraculous love letter.

So let's join him right now. If you have a Bible, I'd love for you to take it out and open it to Isaiah chapter 52. I'm going to use the text of Sally Lloyd-Jones' Jesus Storybook Bible, where Sally Lloyd-Jones summarizes Isaiah's prophecies in the form of a love letter that God wrote to Israel. You say, Jesus Storybook Bible? Isn't that a kid's book? Aren't you a Ph.D. in theology? Aren't we all adults? Why, yes you are.

Yes, I am. And yes, it is. I think that she just does a great job of capturing the entire message of the whole of Isaiah's message. So we're going to use her kind of summary of it. Let me walk you through it now, a few different parts of it, and explain it, because literally just about every word in that chapter just comes from a verse.

It's like she strung together a bunch of different verses. So here we are. Let's start at the beginning. Dear little flock, dear little flock, says Isaiah, you're all wandering away from me like sheep in an open field. You've always been running away from me, and now you're lost.

You can't find your way back. This is the substance of the Bible's description of the problem. From the Garden of Eden onward, we've all been running away. And now Isaiah says we're like sheep, sheep that every one of us believes we know the best way for us to go, and so we choose our own way. Now, most of you probably don't have a great deal of experience with sheep.

I certainly do not either. But those who do say that sheep are a particularly dumb animal. In fact, just this week I saw an article, you may have seen this, that a shepherd in Spain fell asleep for an hour, and 1,300 sheep went into downtown Madrid. That's where they ended up. What is there in the sheep's mind that thinks that's probably a good way to go? Let's go where the buildings are.

Let's go where all the traffic is. They're just dumb. Now, this is not a very flattering picture of us, but you have to admit, while unflattering, it's pretty compassionate. Because this is how God sees us. He sees us like sheep who have lost their way. We don't even know where we came from. We don't know how to get back, and we're confused.

We're lost. So God continues, but I can't stop loving you. I'm going to come to find you, so I'm sending you a shepherd to look after you and love you, to carry you back home to me. Y'all, the gospel is not that we came searching for God.

The gospel is that God came searching for us. And he said, I did this, Isaiah 43-4, I did this because you were precious in my eyes, and I love you. The God of the universe, Isaiah says, he looked at you, the rebellious sheep, and he said, you're precious to me.

So I'm going to come, like a shepherd, to find you. In Luke 15, Jesus would describe that shepherd. He's talking, of course, about himself by describing him like one who had a hundred sheep. That's a lot of sheep. And discovered late one night that one of them was missing. And Jesus said, that shepherd, this shepherd, left the 99 ones that he had to go after the lost one, which honestly does not make a lot of financial sense.

The only way that you would do that is if each individual one was precious to you. God says, this is how I see you. And then God continues through Isaiah. He says, I'm going to do more than just come after the sheep. I'm going to give up my life for the sheep.

And Isaiah 53-4, y'all, if leaving the 99 to go after the one didn't make financial sense, then this is just insane. Are there any words, any analogies we even have to describe that kind of love? He says, I can't stop loving you. You've been stumbling around like people in a dark room, but into the darkness, a bright light is going to shine. And that bright light is going to chase away all the shadows like sunshine. The light that is going to show up, the sunshine is going to come in the form of a baby. He'll be born miraculously to a virgin. And his name will be Immanuel.

Immanuel, which means literally in Hebrew, God has come to live with us. He is also, Isaiah says, going to be one of King David's children's children's children. This Jesus is going to be the son of both God and man, fully God and fully man.

Yes, somebody's going to come and rescue you, but he won't be who anyone expects. He's going to be a king, but he won't live in a palace and he won't have lots of money. He's going to be poor. He's going to be a king like nobody you've ever seen. He'll be a servant, but this king is going to be able to heal the whole world.

You see, God could have been glorified by coming to earth to avenge the wrongs and to punish the criminals. But God said, there's a greater glory that I will get that doesn't come through smashing them, but becomes from being smashed for them. As I give myself in love to receive them, he will suffer and die, but he won't stay dead. I'll make him alive again. And one day, one day, when he comes back to rule forever, the mountains and the trees will dance and sing for joy. The earth will shout out loud. His fame will fill the whole earth like the waters fill the oceans. Everything sad is going to come untrue.

Even death is going to die. Y'all, what an incredible story. What an incredible story. But like Isaiah laments, nobody believed him. Nobody believed him.

Why? Why did they not believe him? Well, it's like Sally Lloyd-Jones ends the chapter. She says, it seemed probably like a fairy tale. CS Lewis wrote an essay.

CS Lewis was a literary scholar at Oxford before becoming a Christian. And CS Lewis wrote this essay on fairy tales and myths in the process of becoming a Christian in which he explained, listen to this. He says, all of mankind's myths and fairy tales, they all follow a pattern. And that is because they are expressions, listen, of a yearning deep in our hearts. All these fairy tales follow a pattern, not because our hearts are making them up, but because they are hungering for the very thing they were created for. You see what he's saying there? All these fairy tales follow a pattern because there's something behind them that we're yearning for and we almost know is true. I'll give you an example. Beauty and the Beast.

Listen to this. In the Beauty and the Beast, what do you have? You've got a man who is disfigured beyond human likeness because of selfish, proud decisions that he has made. And as a result, he is appalling to look at. That's a picture of the human condition. Many of us feel like, at least inwardly, we're really ugly. And we don't want people to see inside of us because if they saw inside of us, they'd be appalled too. So what we want to do is we want to try to work on our exterior beauty and keep people at a distance from our inward ugliness. So some of us work really hard at looking good on the outside. Others of us looking great on the outside is not really an option. So what you do is you try to make yourself beautiful through becoming really good at what you do. And maybe you're really good.

Maybe you're good at your job or making a lot of money, or maybe you're just good morally. You become this attractive person that's adding beauty so that people will love you. But for the beast to be saved, beauty has to actually kiss him. Belle has to kiss him. Why would she kiss him?

She has to kiss him because she loves him. Jesus is going to go a step farther than Belle ever did because he's not only going to love the beast and kiss the beast, he's going to become the beast in our place so that by becoming him, him becoming us, we can become him and we can become beautiful like he was. Deep down, all of us yearn for that to be true. You see, our hearts know that kind of love exists, which is why the theme appears in so many of our fairy tales. The details of the fairy tales are all made up, but the yearning behind them is real because we're created for that kind of love. So it's not a fairy tale. It's not a fairy tale.

It is the story that undergirds all of our greatest aspirations and hopes. The other reason Isaiah said that nobody would believe him is he says, because we don't want it to be true in some ways. I know that sounds like a contradiction. Part of us wants it to be true, but part of us doesn't.

Isaiah says they don't want to hear God's promise because their hearts are sinful. Listen, and if these things are true, then that means that God is God. And that means that his ways are right. And that means that he's in charge, not us. And for us to confess that this is really from God means we have to confess that where he and I disagree, I'm in the wrong. And that means I got to stop arguing with God about how I think things ought to be.

Let me give you a more unusual example in this one. A few years ago, I befriended a girl named Carolyn, who was a Muslim who grew up in Central Asia and was now in the United States. Me and a group of friends shared the gospel with her numerous times. After about six months together, six months studying through different things, she said, I've come to the conclusion that Jesus really was the Messiah.

I believe he died for my sins, and I believe he rose from the dead. She said, the one thing I cannot accept and I can never accept is that he was part of this thing you call the Trinity. The reason she said that is because from childhood, raised in Central Asia, she'd gone to a mosque where every week they said God cannot be a Trinity.

God cannot be a Trinity. She says, it doesn't make sense to me. I can't accept that, so we showed her where the Bible taught that numerous times. I said, I can't accept it. One night, we were sitting around a coffee table and I said, Carolyn, listen, what if Jesus, all of a sudden, right now, the resurrected Jesus showed up, somehow proved to you that it was him, and then he looked at you in the face and he said, Carolyn, I'm not going to explain the Trinity to you. You're never going to understand it, in fact, in this life.

But it's true, but it's true. And I want you to trust me that it's true, even though you don't understand it. And one day when we get to heaven, I will expand your mind, Carolyn, and then you can understand it. But until then, you're just going to have to trust me, even when you don't understand it. I said, would you do it then? Would you believe him and trust him then? She was a super smart girl. She kind of sat back and she said, well, I guess that's really the question, isn't it? The question is, am I really to trust God if I can't understand it?

And do I believe that this Bible that you keep pointing me back to is the word of God? She went home that night. She calls the next morning, 6 a.m., just out of her mind, just like she's out of breath. And she's like, you're not going to believe what happened to me last night. She goes, you're going to think I'm crazy. You need to sit down.

I think I'm crazy. She said, last night at four o'clock, I woke up and somebody was knocking on my door and I tried to ignore it and they kept knocking on my door. And eventually I got up and I walked over to my door and they knocked the entire time until I got up to the door and I opened the door.

I went open, nobody was there. She said, I know you think I'm crazy, but I am positive that that was Jesus putting that sound in my heart, trying to show me that He wanted me to receive Him. She goes, maybe I am crazy, but I know that Jesus really is who He says He is. And if He says that He is a part of a Trinity, then I'm willing to trust Him even though I don't understand it. Now listen, that may not be your issue. In fact, it probably is not if you weren't raised in a mosque.

But you got something. I don't know why God's doing this in the world. I don't know why.

Why does He say this is wrong? You got any number of things you can't understand. If you wait on Jesus to answer all your questions, you will never come to Him because He never promises He will this side of eternity. Faith is accepting what you cannot understand based on what you can understand. And what you can understand is that these promises are divine.

These prophecies are legitimate and real. Or here's my other favorite definition of faith. Faith is the unexplainable meeting the undeniable.

It's the unexplainable meeting the undeniable. And what is undeniable is that these prophecies are divine. These prophecies tell the life of Jesus both the purpose and the details of it with staggering specificity.

I mean just think about it. Scripture tells us that the coming Messiah would be born of a virgin Isaiah 7 14. He'd be from the line of Abraham Genesis 22 18. He'd be a descendant of the line of Judah Genesis 49 10.

He would be from the household of David Jeremiah 23 5. He would be born in Bethlehem Micah 5 2. He would be presented with gifts at his birth Psalm 72 10 and then be forced to flee an evil king who wanted to kill all the children in the region of Bethlehem on his behalf Jeremiah 31 15.

He'd then be exiled to Egypt as a kid and return home to Israel from there Hosea 11 1. He would claim to be God with us Isaiah 7 14. He would function as a prophet Deuteronomy 18 18 a priest Psalm 110 4 and a king Psalm 2 verse 6. He would be a teacher of parables Psalm 78 2. He would be preceded by a messenger who cried out in the wilderness Isaiah 40 verse 3. He would begin his ministry in Galilee Isaiah 9 verse 1. He would perform many miracles Isaiah 35 6. He would enter into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey Zachariah 9 9. And then there are more than 20 prophecies that get fulfilled in his life in one day. Scripture tells us the coming Messiah would be betrayed by friends Psalm 41 9.

Sold for 30 pieces of silver Zachariah 11 12. That same silver would be thrown back into the temple and then be used to buy a potter's field Zachariah 11 13. In the hours right before his death he would be abandoned by his friends Zachariah 13 7. He would be accused by false witnesses Psalm 35 11. He would stand silent before his accusers while they taunted him Isaiah 53 7. He would be wounded and bruised Isaiah 53 5. He would be mocked Psalm 22 7. He would be beaten and spat upon Isaiah 50 verse 6. He would have his garments split up and gambled for Psalm 22 18. He would physically stumble under the weight of his affliction Psalm 109 24. At his death he would have his hands and feet pierced Psalm 22 16.

Be executed between two criminals Isaiah 53 12. He would experience great thirst Psalm 69 21. He would pray for his persecutors while they killed him Isaiah 53 12. He would have his side pierced Zachariah 12 10. Despite great physical travail and having his hands pierced and his side pierced not one of his bones would be broken Psalm 34 20. He would die at midday and during the hour of his death darkness would miraculously descend upon the earth Amos 8 9.

He would then be buried in a rich man's tomb Isaiah 53 9 after which he would be resurrected to the father's right hand and pour out gifts on his followers Psalm 16 10 and 68 18. Now you think well maybe some of that's just coincidence. Mathematicians say the odds of all these things kind of randomly happening to one person is 1 in 10 to the 157th power. That means 1 in 10 with 157 zeros after it. 52 comets separating those 157 zeros. Just to put that in perspective this book I was reading said mathematicians 1 in 10 to the 16th power.

Here's how they would describe that. If you were to take silver dollars and cover the the surface area of the states of North Carolina South Carolina and Virginia in silver dollars two feet deep so up to your shins in silver dollars everywhere paint one of them randomly red and just hide it mix it up somewhere one of them then take a blind man and catapult him from somewhere in Maryland and let him land in the middle of these states and give him one shot to pick out the right silver dollar the chances of him doing it 1 in 10 to the 16th power. This is 1 in 10 to the 157th power. Burrell's law it's a mathematical law that says anything beyond 1 in 10 to the 50th power is a statistical impossibility.

An impossibility. These in the Bible are given in great detail and not one of them has ever proven incorrect which put them into an entirely different category of Nostradamus or the Mayans or anybody else. You say well I know maybe the gospel accounts have been doctored up to confirm the prophecies. Like you know the early church was like hey you know I was reading Zachariah this 30 pieces of silver thing let's make up a story about Judas.

All right yeah that may have worked for a few of them. They may have been able to be able to get away with it but most of these prophecies were out of their control and they would have been easy to refute if they weren't true. Y'all the early Jewish and Roman leaders had a lot of motivation to refute these things. They would have been like he wouldn't mourn in Bethlehem. He didn't grow up in Nazareth. We never gave some kind in Judas 30 pieces of silver. The idea by the way that the early church just destroyed all the conflicting accounts of Jesus assumes that the church had some kind of controlling power that historically is just not true.

For the first 300 years of the church's life Christianity's enemies vastly outnumbered its followers and many enemies were the ones who had all the power and if they if it had existed they would have brought forward the things that would have undermined all these claims yet nobody ever did. Plus you got to ask this why would early Christians lie about these things if they weren't true? There's got to be a motive. People lie but there's always a motive. Typically when people lie it's to get them power or prestige or they're trying to escape harm or something. Is that what happened to the early followers of Jesus?

No the opposite. Their confession got them persecuted. They lost their homes even their lives. You say well you know lots of people have died for a religious lie. Yeah but there's a difference between dying for a lie and dying for something you know to be a lie.

There's a huge difference in those two. A great historical example of this Chuck Colson who just died last year was one of them Richard Nixon's what called him a henchman. His inner circle he went through Watergate with Richard Nixon.

He was not a Christian at that point and he said that the day that it broke they all got together in a room these six men that had all been a part of Watergate. He said I'm looking around the room these are the toughest men I've ever known. He said three of us were out of the Marine Corps.

The CEOs just really tough accomplished men. He said we vowed to one another that none of us would actually tell the truth. We would all maintain the story. He said within two and a half days every single one of us had broken.

Every single one of us because of the threats that were coming against us. He said the idea that 12 uneducated untrained fishermen would maintain this lie knowing it was a lie to the day of their death could only be postulated by somebody who has no experience with these kinds of things. It's like Blaise Pascal one of my favorite philosophers says witnesses who are willing to have their throats cut suddenly become believable. Do you know what Isaiah says the implications of this are?

You know what his love letter it gives you a handful of things. Listen really quickly this is how we'll wrap this up. This is one you got to believe. You got to believe the arm of the Lord is revealed. You got to believe.

Maybe you're like my friend Carolyn. Maybe you got all these reasons why it can't be true. Are you willing to doubt your doubts? I know you pride yourself on being a doubting person. Will you doubt those doubts in the face of evidence like this and at least consider it?

Because that's the the invitation. You say believe it. Believe it. It's verifiable. It's true.

It's confirmed by things that could never just happen. Number two to the church he says persist. You got to persist in proclaiming this even when people don't believe it because it is true and people's life and their death depend on it. You know Isaiah got the most ridiculous commission of anybody I've ever heard. Isaiah chapter 6 when God calls Isaiah he says Isaiah I want you to spend your whole life talking about this and nobody's ever going to listen to you. Never.

They're going to reject you. They're going to kill you Isaiah but I just want you to keep preaching and Isaiah kept preaching. He kept preaching.

He wouldn't give up. In fact you notice right there in your Bible how he opens up Psalm I mean Isaiah 53 the great prophecy about Jesus's crucifixion. He opens up by saying who is believed to report? Nobody. Nobody's listening to whom is the arm of the Lord been revealed but he kept preaching.

You want to know why? I love this. Isaiah 52 13 go back to these verses there's a promise my servant will prosper. God says my servant one day will prosper and Isaiah reasoned this way. Jesus would not have gone to the trouble of dying just so that people could reject him. He went to the trouble of dying because he wanted to save people. And so Isaiah went to people who weren't listening and he held up his hands and he proclaimed to them because he knew he knew that God would not have sent Jesus to die if God was not also going to give certain people the power to believe. Which leads me to number three depend.

Depends. You got to depend on God to change the heart. Look right there verse 15 in Isaiah 52.

This is awesome. He the servant will sprinkle many nations. All right what's he sprinkling them with? Like magic pixie dust?

What is it? Well watch what happens when he sprinkles them. Kings will shut their mouths on account of him. For what had not been told them they will see and what they had not heard they will suddenly understand. You see the contrast?

Nobody believes. And all of a sudden the servant stands up and starts to sprinkle. And as he sprinkles all of a sudden these people start to say whoa and now I see it.

Now I understand. You see what's got to happen when you tell these people in your life or in other nations that aren't listening is the servant Jesus has to start sprinkling. And he starts sprinkling not pixie dust but the Holy Spirit power that gives people the ability to believe. Which is why I tell you that you never ever ought to talk to men and women about God without also spending a lot of time talking to God about those men and women.

Because you preach all day long and nobody will believe but then that servant stands up and he pulls out the Holy Spirit and he just starts to sprinkle like this and all of a sudden people begin to come alive. So you got to persist. You got to depend. And then the last thing you got to go.

You got to go. See what Isaiah says chapter 52 verse 7. How beautiful up on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news. Y'all no one has ever called my feet pretty. My feet are not pretty at all.

They're exceptionally ugly feet. But my feet my feet are beautiful. Not because they look good but because they bring good news. And I publish peace. I bring good news of happiness. I publish salvation. I say to Zion your God reigns.

We get to go Summit Church into places whether it's in our community or neighborhoods or around the world. And we get to go in and we get to proclaim death does not have the last word. You do not have to die under condemnation. Jesus has suffered in your place and died. Jesus is raised from the dead. Death doesn't have the last word.

The resurrection of Jesus is the exclamation point to the story. This has been a powerful truth from Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. Maybe today you're in a place of skepticism. Maybe you're curious about God but you aren't completely convinced about him. Or maybe you believe the gospel but you're just not sure what that means for you personally. We'd love to help answer some of those questions for you. In fact we're really excited to make this new resource available to our listeners. JD what is so special about these books of the Bible cards?

Okay Molly, honesty time. Have you ever finished reading a book of the Bible and wondered what on earth you just read and who this message was for? Can you say minor prophets?

All right me too. That's that's why I want to spend my days helping you get the Bible because I believe the Bible is the book wherein God revealed himself and I think it gives you the hope that you need to deal with whatever whatever problems whatever challenges you're facing and it will carry you into eternity. This set of cards will help you as you read to make connections with the context of the original audience and you can use them keep them right by the place where you study the Bible. It'll give you an overview of each book some of the relevant most relevant points some reflection questions and help you connect that book to the to the greater context of the Bible. It's such a great resource from from a friend of Summit Life Mary Wiley who is a brilliant Bible teacher author book strategist I'd love to be able to give you these if you reach out to us through jdgrier.com I can I can point you to these and I think it'll be a real help to you.

You'll definitely want to ask for the books of the Bible cards when you give today by calling 866-335-5220 that's 866-335-5220 or you can give and request the cards online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Thank you so much for joining us this week here on the program. Be sure to come back Monday when we make a big move. Y'all we're headed into the New Testament.

We'll be continuing our overview study of the Bible called the whole story. We'll see you right back here Monday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.