Thousands of years ago, the prophet Isaiah pointed out the futility of worshiping idols, and yet in our day. idolatry of one sort or another continues to be prevalent. Why is that? Alastair Begg explores the answer today on Truth for Life and explains how easily even good things God has given us to enjoy. can become objects of idolatrous worship.
I invite you to turn with me to Isaiah in the Old Testament and chapter 42. And I encourage you to turn to the scriptures. as they're read and to follow along and look into them as we teach them. Isaiah chapter 42. And here we have the first of Four servant songs.
that are found in the prophecy of Isaiah. Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom I delight. I will put my spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout, or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice. He will not falter or be discouraged. till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope. This is what God the Lord says: He who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it.
who gives breath to its people. and life to those who walk on it. I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness. I will take hold of your hand, I will keep you, and will make you to be a covenant for the people, and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison. and to release from the dungeon Those who sit in darkness.
I am the Lord. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols. See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare, before they spring into being. I announce them to you.
We worship you. In our song. We seek you in our prayers. We listen to you in your word. And we ask now that as we bow before you, Our great God.
that you will be pleased to make yourself known in the preaching of the Bible. And that is a result of meeting you. We might bow before your majesty. And that we might live to the praise of your glory. And this we humbly pray in your Son's name, Jesus.
Amen. Thank you for the Amen. You're an encouragement. In all kinds of ways. I've been watching.
from my room, young families. coming up the pathway at the back with their children in various uh stages of dress and undress and uh My mind went way, way back, and I saw we commend you all, and commend particularly those young families. There was one young couple, they had two. And then the lady was carrying a basket which I thought was full of you know provisions Cookies, maybe. And then I saw a little bubble sticking out of the basket, and I realized there was a third one in the basket.
I wanted to open the window and shout congratulations and uh And we're so glad you're here.
Well, Isaiah chapter 41 and 42 is the source of our study this morning, and indeed the next Sunday morning, too. You may recall that in 1932, Einstein in his credo uh wrote as follows. Our situation on this earth appears strange. Every one of us is here. involuntarily and uninvited.
for a short stay. without knowing the whys and the wherefores. It's not dissimilar to what you find in Don't Sleep in the Subway, Baby, where it has the same lines. You wander around on your own little cloud. And you don't know the whys or the wherefores.
It's just a sort of more down at the street level expression of something that is not an uncommon sentiment. Indeed, You won't have to have been listening particularly carefully this week to have discovered that somewhere within earshot, and perhaps even out of your own lips, You have heard the sentiment expressed that we live in a world of chance. that history is merely repeating itself. and indeed that there is no overarching purpose. in the universe, that there is no rhyme or reason to our world.
This is classically expressed, and I use this illustration all the time, make no apology for it. But in the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe, one of the characters is Trudy the bag lady, and as she is negotiating her grocery cart full of her lifelong possessions from one side of the street to another, she is expressing all that gives occasion for her to be anxious and worried. And in the course of many trivial things, she finds herself saying, I worry about my place in the cosmic scheme of things. And then she says, I worry. that there is no cosmic scheme.
Yeah. And of course that is not an unusual notion. Men and women asking the question: do things just happen, or is there a God who is at work in our world? Are we part of a larger story? Do our lives have significance in a far larger narrative?
Or are we left simply on our own to try and make sense of our human existence? These questions are, of course, not unique to the time in which we are living. Throughout every generation, people have been born and looked and thought and wondered. And when you go back to the time of Isaiah the prophet, the time that we read here in Isaiah 42, we discover there, just as we find today, that men and women are trying to prevent their lives from toppling. even as history appears to be collapsing all around them.
In the case of these individuals, the advance of tyrannical powers sweeping many of their brightest and their best away into bondage, the hopes of liberation perhaps in the arrival of another world figure who on the stage of history will be a deliverer to them, and so on. But in the midst of all of that, great macro. the micromanagement of individual lives, the birth of children, the growth into teenage life, the question of employment and so on. And in all of that, the same kind of questions. Who am I?
Where did I come from? Where am I going? And does it does it actually matter at all? These questions are real questions in every generation. And the response that men and women make to those questions reveals a great deal about them.
So for example, in chapter forty-one, in verse six and following, As the earth trembles, And as people find themselves buffeted by all kinds of circumstances. The prophet describes them. as helping each other. As one saying to his brother, Be strong. Essentially walking around singing uh Uh lean on me.
When you're not strong, I'll give you strength. I'll help you carry on. That's why they're saying, come on now, let's be strong. And legitimately, they look at one another and say, Well, if I'm going to lean on you, upon whom are you leaning? Where does your strength come from?
And there you will see in verse 7. that these people are ultimately leaning on On crafty little creations of their own invention. The craftsman encourages the goldsmith, and he who smooths with the hammer spurs on him who strikes the anvil. He says of the welding, it is good. It's very interesting that man, in his proud attempts at making non-gods, Uses the same phraseology as is used by God when He had made the universe.
You remember that He looked on everything that He had made, and Genesis tells us that God said, It is good. And here there is a picture of man in his futility creating his own little gods and idols, and when he finally puts them all together and hammers them into shape, he decides to say as God says of his creation. And actually look at this, it is really quite good. And there you have it in verse 7. An idol.
are just in danger of toppling.
Now, still in chapter 41, God then challenges the people in relationship to their idolatry. to bring out their idols and have them do something. That's verse twenty two. Bring in your idols to tell us what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their outcome, or declare to us the things to come.
Tell us what the future holds, so that we may know you are gods.
Now, you see, there's something implicit in this, and that is that God, a real God, knows the future. That God knows the end from the beginning. It was Augustine who said: a God who did not know the future would not be God. And so the challenge is, why don't you bring your idols out and let's have them say something? Let's have them tell us something.
And why don't we have them not only reflect on what has happened, but perhaps they can tell us something about the future? And of course, they have nothing to say. You might as well expect a ventriloquist dummy to go out and get you a sandwich. as expect one of these idols to say anything at all in response to the challenge they face.
Now, what I found so interesting in studying this was to Note to myself, and I shared it with you. That here we have the people In 600 BC, if you like, in that era. Asking Uh 21st century questions, if you like. In other words, we read of their time and we realize that it all sounds very contemporary. What are we doing?
Where are we going? What should we do about the financial crisis? How do I make sense of my life? Do I fit in a big picture or not? 600 BC, the people are asking 21st century questions.
But what is even more glaring? is the fact that here in the twenty-first century AD, We have men and women attempting Six BC answers. That despite all of the time that has passed, idolatry is alive and well. Oh, not necessarily in the way that it is described here, the hammering out of little creatures, although there are plen plenty of little creatures that I find in people's places, uh on their mantel shelves, and some dangling from their mirrors in their car, and so on. Yeah.
But no, what Calvin observed on one occasion I think is pretty accurate, namely, that the human heart is a perpetual idol factory. that the human heart, if you look into it, you don't analyze it as a cardiologist, but as you look at the human heart as the center of human existence, Calvin says what that's what the center of humanity does again and again and again is invent idols.
Now we have to be clear that these idols are simply heart-level substitutes. For the real God. We ought not to think immediately of bad things, although many of them will be bad. But they're probably good things. They become idols.
good things that God has created. that He has created for our enjoyment. which we have actually turned into substitutes for himself.
So he gives us the joy of interpersonal relationships in family, and we turn family into an idol. We can't go anywhere, we can't do anything because of our idol. We have to worship family. He gives us food. And instead of enjoying it, we become gluttonous.
He gives us sex, and instead of taking it within the context in which he set it, we take it out with the bounds in which he has set it and we turn it into a perversion of that which is perfect. In all of these ways and more besides, We find ourselves not too far removed from those whom. God addresses here in Isaiah 41. In essence, The problem that faces humanity in this generation, as before, is not moral. It's not social.
It's not intellectual. It's not financial.
Now the fundamental problem is that we keep Creating false gods. to whom we go Seeking false salvations.
So Turning our back on the God who has made us and made Himself known to us in the world, in His Son, in creation, in the Bible. We don't just simply sit in the absence of worship. But we all worship. As Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. We all serve somebody.
Or something. And here God looks down and He says, Look at these people. Rejecting me. and inventing their own Little gods. And how futile they are.
The idols weren't bringing bad news, they were bringing no news. If you look at verse 26. Who told us this from the beginning so that we would know, or beforehand, so that we could say he was right? No one told of this. No one foretold it.
No one heard any words from you. What use were you? You're absolutely useless. We we we made you. And we thought that you would speak to us, or that you would be able to reflect on the world, or that you would tell us something about the future.
But we got nothing from you at all. It's not as if you had bad news for us. you had no news for us. They cannot speak. And in verse 28, that ends chapter, well, 28 and 29, that ends 41, you have there the sounds of silence, don't you?
I look. But there is no one. No one among them to give counsel. No one to give answer when I ask them. See They're all false.
Their deeds amount to nothing. Their images are but wind and confusion. These things, he says, are full of hot air. And this hot air There are no answers blowing in this wind. The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind.
All that is blowing in the wind. are more questions. More unfulfilled expectations. More silly notions. And this morning you come to worship here at Parkside.
I come to worship here at Parkside out of a week in which I have been absolutely invaded, advanced upon. by the idols of the 21st century. By the things that call out from my attention. That suggests to me that if I go there, I may find my ultimate fulfillment in this or in them. And the Bible corrects us.
That's why it's so important to read the Bible. That's why it's so important to listen to the Bible taught. I hope you understand that. That we come together to put ourselves underneath the Bible on the Lord's Day in part so as to make sure that what we've imbibed in the previous six days. can be addressed Redirected, refocused by the truth of Scripture.
That's why it's important to read the Bible at the beginning of the day before ever we get going. You don't want to start the day with ABC or NBC or BBC or any C for that matter. You need to start the day with the Bible. If you start the day with that nonsense hitting you from the get-go, and it's just a personal predilection, but I cannot stand that stuff first thing in the morning. I don't want to hear from some cheery chap in New York what he thinks about the universe.
But I do want to know what God says. Because I'm fearful lest I listen too much to that nonsense and pay too little attention to what God says. And if I don't have God tell me that that is false and worthless, I may be tempted to believe that it is true and worthwhile. And then I may find inadvertently that I have become to worship at that shrine. And so God pronounces on these things.
God says, listen, they're all false, their deeds amount to nothing, and their images are but wind and confusion. No one answers. No one answers. What is required in the absence of counsel is a wonderful counselor. What is required in the absence of reality is the ultimate reality.
And so it is. That he introduces us in chapter 42, right on cue. to his servant. Here he says, in contrast to the no one, the no-one, the know-one of verse 27 of 41. is someone There's no one out there for you, but here I have someone for you.
Behold, here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. I will put my spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations. As I said to you, this is the first of what are referred to as four servant songs in Isaiah. And in each instance These prophecies clearly find their fulfillment in Jesus. No You are sensible people and you're listening to me say that.
And if I am where you are, Given the way that my mind works. I'm saying How does he get there from there? How can he say they find their fulfillment in Jesus?
Well, that would be a good question. That's the very right question.
Well, that's why I tell you all the time, it's important to read your Bible from the back to the front. And when you read your Bible from the back to the front, you will find that when you get to the front, it's a lot easier to understand than it was because you started in the back.
So let me give you one cross-reference, and I won't do more than that. But if you're interested, you may turn to Matthew chapter 12. And in Matthew chapter 12, we have in part the story of how Jesus healed the man with the withered hand. on the s on a Sabbath. It's a great story.
It's a great story on multiple fronts, not least of all because the man had a withered hand. And he couldn't extend it. That was because it was withered. And so Jesus said to him, Stretch forth your hand. which he couldn't do.
But he did. It's a good story. You can read it for yourself. As a result of the man being healed, the Pharisees were annoyed. And so Jesus, verse 15, withdrew from the place And many followed him, and he healed all their sick.
Warning them not to tell who he was. The reason was he didn't want to precipitate a crisis. He was moving according to a calendar, he had a plan in view. And he didn't want people to get the wrong end of the stick and hail him simply as a miracle worker, because the real miracle that he was about to perform was the miracle of being a savior for sinners. And so he said he didn't want anyone to tell them.
And then listen to how Matthew explains this. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah. Here is my servant whom I have chosen, The one I love. in whom I delight. And what is he quoting?
Isaiah chapter 42. Verses one and following.
So these servant songs Which are written into real-time history. Six or seven hundred years before Jesus, causing the people who are reading them to say, What in the world is this all about? causing a reader to say How am I to understand this? When the story unfolds out through and into the New Testament, and by the time the gospel writers are taking all their discoveries of Jesus. and theologizing them.
What they're doing is they're reading their Bibles, namely the Old Testament. They're listening and looking at Jesus, and then they're saying to themselves, well, this. is clearly that. That's what we have here. You're listening to Bible teacher Alistair Begg on Truth for Life, and we'll hear more about.
God's servant tomorrow. In the meantime, Alistair is here with something special. to talk with us about. Thank you, Bob. It's a humbling privilege to open God's Word with you every day on Truth for Life, and to realize, as we do, that our teaching now reaches people in nearly every nation.
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Keith and Kristen have also included prayers and readings from theologians like Billy Graham and CS Lewis, and at the back of the hymnal you can browse through stories about each of the songs. Alastair described the hymnal as theologically sound and melodically enlivening. It leaves no doubt that true praise and worship begins with God and His glory, not man and his need. Once again, the title is The Sing Hymnal. It's yours by request when you make a year-end donation online at truthforlife.org/slash donate.
I'm Bob Lapine. Tomorrow we will consider how God reveals His identity, power, and purpose in Isaiah's servant song. How will we respond? The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life. Where the Learning is for Living.
