He Will Reign Forever (Part 1 of 2)

Hey, how are you doing? For most children, or even someone who's a child at heart, Christmas morning can't get here soon enough. It's not easy to wait to unwrap a gift we really want, or something we need. And yet that's exactly what God's people did. And today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg examines the eager anticipation of those who spent their whole lifetime waiting for God's promise.

Our series is titled, A Child Is Born. Isaiah chapter 9 and verse 1. Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress.

In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles by the way of the sea along the Jordan. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy. They rejoice before you, as people rejoice at the harvest, as men rejoice when dividing the plunder. For as in the day of Midian's defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor.

Every warrior's boot, used in battle, and every garment rolled in blood, will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.

He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. Gracious God, what we do not know, teach us. What we do not have, give us. What we are not, make us. For the glory of your Son's sake, we pray.

Amen. Now, the first seven verses of Isaiah chapter 9 provide for us one of the clearest and most meaningful prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah Jesus. Isaiah writes in his own time as his own man under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as Peter tells us in his letter, and in the confusion and uncertainty which marks the time of Isaiah, he is enabled to describe the coming events with a certainty that speaks of completed action. And as we noted in our very first study, we will quickly go wrong if we don't understand this—if we don't recognize that what will happen is described by Isaiah in terms of what has happened. And he uses, for those of us who are interested, prophetic perfects in the original in order to make that point.

But since we don't have the original, we need to be told that. The very terminology and phraseology and verbiage that he uses allows the reader to understand that although these are events or yet future, he is absolutely convinced under the guidance of the Holy Spirit that what will be is in some realistic sense already the reality. And the people, he says, that have been walking in darkness have seen a great light. This metaphor of darkness and light runs all the way through the Bible. And the picture of darkness is a picture not only of the circumstances of the people here in Isaiah's day, centuries before Christ, but it is a fitting picture of the circumstances of each of us by nature as men and women, either rebellious by nature or passively just indifferent to God himself. And the Bible explains that we find ourselves in the dominion of darkness by our very nature, and the only way that we would ever be in the kingdom of light is a result of our coming to trust in the one who is himself the light.

But we run ahead. The darkness into which the light has come is aptly described at the end of chapter 8. You will remember there from verse 19 and on that the people in Isaiah's day were looking for answers in all the wrong places. Verse 19, when men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists who whisper and mutter—which is, of course, what men and women are told to do today.

This is not something that is a way six hundred years before Jesus. It's as up-to-date as your newspaper this morning, where some of you may be tempted to read your horoscope and look to those who may be able to whisper and mutter to you, or read your palm or go up the stairs in a darkened room and look at a crystal ball and so on. All that has been going on for ages.

And the people were engaged in it. They were looking for answers in all the wrong places. It was indicative of their darkness.

They were intrigued by information, but they ignored revelation. That's verse 20, to the law and to the testimony. He's pointing to that. He's saying, This is where we should go, to God's revelation of himself. And he says, If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.

This is the only source of light. All the rest is darkness. And instead of looking where they ought to look, they look either to those who are blind guides, or they look in upon the earth as if the earth itself would produce the answers. And in verse 21 and 22, we find them as distressed and hungry and despairing and angry. And it is into the shadowlands, as it were, of oppression and of arrogance and of despair that this light shines.

And the thing that is so wonderful about it—and I hope this has come across to us, it certainly struck me this year with renewed forcefulness—lies in this. That when the individuals then, subsequent to then and now, look for this source of deliverance, look for the one who is able to liberate, to break the bar of oppression, to set them free, to burn their warfare weaponry and the clothes of the soldiers, the uniforms of arrogance and tyranny—when they go looking for that answer, they find the face of a child peering back at them. And when you read through here and come to verse 6, it is only our familiarity with it that stops us from being completely bowled over. The Midian circumstance gives indication of the defeat that follows, the burning of the boots and the garments, and so on.

And why is this? Well, he says, for to us a child is born. That the answer to oppression, to warfare, to despair, to all the darkness and all of the sin is not found in a concept that the Bible urges us to understand but is found in a Christ that the Bible urges us to trust.

And in this Christ, in this Messiah, is light, and that light was the life of man. Now, the child with four names, as we've considered him—and his names are there in verse 6—is a child who's born to be king. His kingdom is different from any other kingdom. He's going to establish his government in peace.

His principles will be the principles, verse 7b, of righteousness. His procedures will be marked by justice, so that he's not going to establish a kingdom by the force of imperialism or the force of tyranny. He's not going to beat back oppression with oppression.

He's not going to overturn the coercive arrogance of the proud dictators of the world by, as it were, taking them on at his own game. But actually, this king is going to come meek and lowly and hard, riding not on a white charger but actually on a donkey, on the colt of a donkey into Jerusalem. And the peace that he brings is lasting, and the kingdom that he establishes will never come to an end.

That, you see, what makes this so enigmatic and so profound. Where has there ever been a government that has established peace that will not end, search in vain through the annals of history? Where might we look for a king who will emerge and reign in justice and righteousness from this time, the beginning of his reign, and then forever?

There is no king that reigns forever that we can find in the history. There is no establishment of peace that is everlasting and eternal in its significance, save this peace and this king. Now, all that by way of introduction, I have three words to gather our thoughts. The first word is expectation, the second word is fulfillment, and the third word is application.

Expectation. These verses that we have become familiar with, some of us, almost knowing them off by heart now, are in keeping with the rest of the Bible. They're in keeping with the rest of the Old Testament.

And I know that to go where I'm about to go is to go down pathways over which some of us have trod routinely, and I certainly don't want to weary you by this, but I also want to remind myself what it is I'm supposed to be doing. And this is what the Bible expositor is supposed to be doing, at least in part—opening up what for others is closed, making plain what is obscure, unraveling what is knotted, and unfolding what is tightly packed. Of course, we all read the Bible by ourselves.

Of course, we go to home Bible study groups, and we can help one another, and we can read concordances. And indeed, if that were God's purpose, there would be no one like me, and I would be out of a job, and so would my colleagues. But the Bible tells us that the ascended King Jesus has given to the church gifts that he has given to the church. And in that collection of gifts, he has provided pastor-teachers—those who would be the shepherds under the shepherding role of Jesus, those who would be the teachers, not of their own ideas but of the Bible—so that the people taught by them would become people who learned the Bible so well that they would know at any point when their teachers began to deviate from the truth.

That's the objective. It is an easy thing to take what is clear in the Bible and for the person in my position to make it very unclear for everybody in the pew. That's not a spiritual gift.

That's a grave concern. And what we need to be praying about is that God would give us increasingly the ability, in our study and in our proclamation, in our listening, in our understanding, in our trusting and in our believing, to come to it possessed of a clarity which the Bible itself owns. So, let me just give you a little background, a quick rush through the history of the Old Testament, on this matter of expectation.

I'm not going to turn to all the references, because it will be tedious. But the first book of the Bible, Genesis, ends with this expectation. At the end of the—and indeed, in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis, where the blessings of Jacob are extended to his sons—he says concerning Judah that the scepter will not depart from Judah nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, then there's not a full stop but a comma. And he says, This will not happen until he comes to whom it belongs. So the reader knows that there is going to come somebody to whom belongs this scepter and this rule and this reign.

But we don't know who it is at this point. You turn into the next book of the Bible and into Exodus. You go fifteen chapters to the song of Moses after the great deliverance. Miriam, his sister, is playing the tambourine, and Moses is singing, and he gets a jumpstart on the Hallelujah chorus. And in the fifteenth verse of Exodus, fifteen, you find that Moses is singing, The LORD will reign forever and ever. And you can see him saying to Miriam, his sister, Hey, play the tambourine a little louder on this.

This is terrific. His sister puts down the tambourine and says, What does it mean, Moses, that the LORD will reign forever and ever? He says, You know, I really frankly don't have much of a clue, but I do know that he will reign forever and ever. We'll just have to wait and see.

But that is our expectation. You remember that the book of Judges ends. The very end of the book of Judges ends, In those days Israel had no king, and everybody did what they wanted.

Everybody did what was right in their own eyes. And the inferences and the expectation of the people was, If we could get a king, maybe we could fix this. We'd like to have a king. And despite the fact that it was a lack of faith, because they already had a king in God, God acceded to their request and gave them kings. But even the best of their kings weren't that good. Saul was magnificent, but he failed politically. David was incredible, but he failed morally. Solomon was the wisest man who had ever lived, and yet he failed religiously.

His many wives turned his heart away from God. So now the people who wanted a king and got the king and have had the best of kings find themselves saying, We don't just need a good king, we need a perfect king. And someone said to his friend, Well, where do you think you're going to get a perfect king?

And they said, Well, I don't know. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there might be one, because there has to be something better than this. And what you find when you read the Old Testament is that the expectations of the people finally outgrew the ability of any mere mortal to fulfill them. When they conceived of the kind of king that they would need, they realized that when they put together the profile, if you like, the job description, the character requirements, and they looked around, they said, There has never been.

There is not. And there is apparently not going to be anyone that will fulfill our expectations. And that consistent expectation of the Old Testament became an urgent expectation. And the closer you get to the end of the Old Testament, especially since the people by this time are aware of the promise that God has made to David, that through his line there will be an eternal and universal king who will come—a strange and enigmatic statement in 2 Samuel 7. You can read it on your own for homework. But the people said, Apparently, God spoke to King David, and he said that there would be somebody come from the line of David, and the king that would come as the son of David would reign universally and eternally.

How is that going to happen? You see this expectation? You see why it's important to be students of the Bible and not students of the New Testament, of the whole Bible? Because, you see, if you come in on the second act of the drama, you don't know who the characters are in the play.

If you stay in the first act, you know the characters, but you don't know the end. That's why we need to read our Bibles. And the Old Testament closes with this unanswered question. And then there's the silence of four hundred years in the intertestamental period. What was going on then?

Well, of course, we don't know, because we have nothing written down. But we know from secular history that people went about their business. Babies were born, and people got married. Religious people did their religious things.

Pagans worshiped the earth. Life went on, people came, people went. People died. Generations come, generations go. And there would be those who were devout, waiting, expecting a king. They would tell their children, who were aware of the fact that life was not all that it might be, Listen, Reuben, listen, Levi, listen, Ruth. God has promised.

He promised King David that he will send a king who will rule and reign and free us from oppression and tyranny and all these things. And the children said, And when will that be? And the father said, I don't know.

And the father died, and the boy became the man, and the man became the father, and then the grandfather and the grandchildren asked the grandpa, and the grandpa gave them the same story, and the grandchildren became the grandfather, and the generations passed. And all of that pulsing, urgent expectation builds virtually to a fever pitch until you find yourself in 63 B.C. with the overthrow of all of the Jewish world and the Roman occupation holding these folks in absolute subjection. And as a result of that, the buzz in the air is, Perhaps our king will come. Perhaps the one who is to come, the Messiah, will come.

Perhaps he will come even today. That takes us to fulfillment. Because when you read on in the Bible and you get to the beginning of the New Testament, you find exactly what you would expect. Now, it comes out in Luke's gospel in a very helpful way—not that it doesn't in the other gospels—but I have always been struck by Luke chapter 2.

And many of you, like me, have known this since you were a small boy. In the days of Caesar Augustus, in those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree. That's not how it was in the King James Version. It was more grand than that.

In the days of Caesar Augustus, a decree went out into all the earth that all the world should be taxed, and each one came to his own city or whatever it was. And I always—even as a small boy—I thought, You know, this is not something that happened away in a corner. This is not some speculative philosophical notion. This Christian thing has roots. This Christian thing is verifiable in relationship to secular history itself. Because Caesar Augustus has got nothing to do with the unfolding drama of redemption. He doesn't lie there, as it were, in the lineage of David. But he's a marker, and Quirinius is a marker. And so the Luke who sets out to carefully investigate, to talk to the eyewitnesses, to write down the story, he earths it in history. This was the first census that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to register. Mary probably said, You know, Joseph, you know, I don't know why you can't just do a census here in Nazareth.

What are you on about? No, no, Mary, we have to go up to Bethlehem. Well, why do we have to go to Bethlehem, for goodness sake? I'm gonna have a baby. I mean, this is no time for going to Bethlehem.

Couldn't you fill it out here and just send it up there? No, we must go to Bethlehem. Well, that doesn't mean anything to anybody who hasn't been reading the Old Testament, does it? You say, Well, that's interesting.

I wonder what that's about. Bethlehem! But anyone who reads the Old Testament goes, Bethlehem, da-ding! Bethlehem, that's where Ruth was, wasn't it? That's where she was in the fields of barley.

To take a walk among the fields of barley. That was Ruth. And that's when Boaz fancied her. And that's right around where he married her. And that's when they became the great-grandfather of David. That was where David looked after the sheep. The same fields where the shepherds are now found.

Now you read, So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and the line of David. See? It's just building.

We're putting in the background music now. It's beginning to build, a sense of expectation. And is it any surprise, then, that when the angels make their announcement to the shepherds in those same fields, they don't simply say, Today a Savior has been born to you, but they say, Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you. Increasing the sense of expectation even in the muddied ears of the shepherds, who with their heritage would have caught something of this. Here, then, is the fulfillment, which gives rise to my favorite Christmas carol—not that you care, but it is—once in royal David's city stood a lowly cattle shed, where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed. And Mary was that mother mild, and Jesus Christ her little child. And then it advances.

Do you remember where it finishes? And our eyes at last shall see him through his own redeeming love, for that child so meek and gentle is the Lord in heaven above. That expectation—fulfillment. It was a long-awaited announcement. A Savior has been born.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg with part one of a message titled, He Will Reign Forever. Alistair concludes this message tomorrow. We were reminded today that the answer to the darkness we face in our lives is found in Jesus.

He is the light of the world. It's this message that fuels our mission at Truth for Life. We want to teach the Bible clearly so God's word can do God's work in the hearts of those who listen. We also intentionally select books to help you and your family grow in your faith. And today we're recommending a book that will help deepen your prayer life. The book is titled, Piercing Heaven—Prayers of the Puritans. It's a collection of prayers written by men like Jeremiah Burrows, Matthew Henry. The prayers have been slightly updated for easier reading. There are more than 200 prayers in this book, and they make a great resource for you to enhance your own prayer time. In fact, this is a book you may want to give as a gift to a friend to start the new year or a book you'll donate to your church's library. Request your copy of Piercing Heaven when you give to Truth for Life.

You'll find it online at truthforlife.org slash donate or tap the book image in the mobile app. I'm Bob Lapine. Our offices are closed today so our team can spend Christmas weekend with their families, but Alistair returns tomorrow to conclude today's message. If Jesus is the eternal king, why don't we see the effects of his reign now? Find out more tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.