Rev. Rutledge Etheridge III, professor of Bible at Geneva College, ordained minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA), filling in today for Pastor Ramsey
Sermon: God Come Near
The following are the points from Pastor Etheridge’s 45 minute sermon [square bracketed statements are mine, as is emboldening]:
- Sermon texts: Isaiah 7: 10-14, focus; supplemented by Deuteronomy 6:4ff; and John 19:9ff; and John 5: 1-6
- Deuteronomy 6: 4-16 – words which describe how we are to love the Lord
- John 19: 9-16 The earthly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ culminating, just before his crucifixion; Jesus, the recipient of so many centuries of unfaithfulness, as represented by the words of king Ahaz in Isaiah 7 – all that unfaithfulness culminated in the cry “Crucify Him”
- Isaiah 7: 1-17 Ahaz’s speech honored the Lord, as the speech of Deut. 6; but his heart’s posture and his politics stood with the crowd of John 19, rejecting Him as king
- Prayer
- John 5: 1-8 Jesus asked the paralytic, would you be healed? Jesus’ questions move us to look deeper than the surface. At what for example? In this instance, the paralytic’s comfort in remaining in his condition – his fear of learning a new way to live; his routine of begging and the sufficiency he might have found in it the safety of an addiction [and an affliction]
- In our day, those who have real addictions may be experiencing a similar dynamic: i.e., having a deep physical and emotional desire for something that is destroying them and their family; yet they have a fear that breaking away may be worse
- Maybe you have experienced this inner conflict? Been harmed by your love for something that is destroying you and at the same time, been afraid of what will happen if you break away
- Our sins can cause us that type of ambivalence. We can view them as necessary to our survival; as our idol, our crutch that enables us to get through the crises of life
- As though our cherished sins were our savior, instead of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we trust in them
- Our sins may also be something that defines who we are in our own mind
- With whom are you identifying today, your Lord and Savior, or your favorite sin?
- King Ahaz thought it was a matter of personal and national survival to continue in the sins with which he so deeply identified
- In Isaiah 7, the Holy Spirit shows us the danger of clinging to sin and the cruelty of that
- In this text, we also see the lengths our God has gone to rescue us from sin’s hellish hold
- He calls us to identify with Christ
- In Isaiah 7:2, Ahaz was stressed, and the following verses indicate that he is trusted in his own sinful schemes to get through this national crisis, rather than relying on the Lord
- Ahaz was king of Judah, the southern kingdom; the northern kingdom, was already in alliance with Syria; both wanted to destroy Judah, because Judah would not stand with them against Assyria
- Assyria was the menacing power that was moving west and conquering everything in its path
- The nation of Assyria was known as a brutal, blood thirsty people that pillaged and plundered other nations, as though it were just another mundane, natural activity for them — like when you use a list to purchase groceries…they thought about slaughtering peoples
- So, Assyria was a terrible threat to Ahaz; but he was also troubled by Syria and Israel (northern kingdom) because he refused to align with them against Assyria – so his trouble was compounded
- God sent Isaiah to comfort Ahaz, telling him that the northern kingdom and Syria would not win against him; the Lord told Ahaz to ask for a sign that His promise would come true
- Ahaz refused, pretending humility in saying he dared not ask; but in doing so, he disobeyed a direct order from the Lord
- Ahaz honored the Lord with his lips, but his heart was far from Him: his words were as in Deut. 6; but his actions were as in John 19
- God wanted to confirm His promise to Ahaz; but he rejected God’s promise
- Isaiah and the Lord were getting tired of Ahaz and Judah’s pretended piety; all talk, no trust
- The Lord encouraged Ahaz to ask a sign of the Lord, your (singular) God; meaning, He was Ahaz’s personal God too; Ahaz’s response, “I will not put the Lord to the test.” Instead of saying, I will not put MY God to the test = God came near; but Ahaz wanted to keep a distance
- Ahaz had other plans, he planned to make a deal with Assyria, the killing machine that was moving towards him [that he, Israel and Syria all feared]
- In 2 Kings 16:7ff, note the language of Ahaz’s appeal to the king of Assyria: I am your servant and your son, come and rescue me from the hand of Syria and Israel who are attacking me
- Ahaz’s speech did not reflect that kind of intimacy with the Lord because it wasn’t in his soul
- Ahaz’s heart seemed more in line with the hearts of the Lord’s people in John 19, who called for His crucifixion, which inevitably resulted in their own destruction
- So it will be with us, if we do not heed God’s call to identify with Him
- Today, with whom or what are we most deeply identifying as Lord of our lives?
- We were created in God’s image; He designed humanity to be in relationship with Him; that is the most definitional thing about every human being; as creatures that bear God’s image, we are hard-wired to worship; if we do not worship the true and living God, we will give that worship to someone or something else
- We all have a god/God; our god/God is the answer we supply in our hearts to life’s deepest questions
- What or who do we trust to tell us who we really are, and how we are to live?
- I raise these questions in the context of a culture that has made very clear declarations of loyalty to SELF, as the ultimate definer of truth and life
- Those who say that such questions can’t be answered with certainty, have made quite a religious claim; a claim of faith – that they know enough to say that those answers are unknowable, and that even Jesus, who thinks that there are such answers, is undoubtedly wrong
- So, we all have a god/God
- Ahaz had his god, his religious loyalty, it was not the Lord; he was an idolater – 2 Chronicles 28, describes him as very unfaithful to the Lord; he even burned his own children, in a fiery sacrifice to a false god; rather than looking to the Lord, who loved his people; Ahaz bargained with a nation who wanted to destroy them; rather than trusting the Savior, the king trusted his sin [his self, his ways]
- The Holy Spirit is ever putting that crisis before us: He claims all of us, as our Lord; and He calls us today, to identify with Him as our Savior [instead of our sin, or some other god]
- Even we who are born again, we too, must clarify our loyalty today; our sin will never give us satisfaction if the Spirit of God dwells in us
- Sin will not return the investment that you put into it
- The Lord will put upon you, what we sang in Psalm 32, what He put upon David before David confessed his sin – merciful misery, the inability to be at peace outside the forgiveness and reconciliation that the Lord grants us in Christ
- And if we harden our hearts still further, we will experience what C S Lewis so aptly described as, an ever increasing desire, for an ever diminishing pleasure [that describes addictions well]: you’ll get ever more desperate chasing those images, thoughts, behaviors in which you seek solace, rather than looking to the Lord
- Someone said, whatever a man trusts instead of God will one day turn to devour him, as with Ahaz
- Ahaz wanted freedom from his crisis; but he didn’t want freedom from sin: 2 Chron. 28:20-23; Ahaz gave tribute to the King of Assyria and was betrayed [then he turned to the gods of Syria, because they had defeated Ahaz and Judah, but they ruined him, verse 23]
- Perhaps as a believer you too feel like Ahaz, drawn to continue trying things that haven’t worked out, but that might if you continue to try them; perhaps you don’t want the Lord to come that close to you because you know that He is going to change some things in your heart; things that you’ve learned to depend upon
- Don’t try to keep God at a distance, child of God; honoring Him with your lips, with church attendance, with lots of good things that can cover up the distance that you feel between you and Him, or the disloyalty that you’ve shown Him
- Give up that secret struggle today; return and rest in the resurrection life of your faithful Savior
- What is your sin promising you?
- What do we think our sin is actually providing us; that wouldn’t be out shown a 1000 times over from by true and lasting goodness that comes from the living Christ? And from the Father who loves to give good gifts to His children?
- Why would we choose to take refuge in sin, rather than from the Savior who gave His life to free us from it?
- Thomas Watson: Is not he a fool, that would believe a temptation before a promise
- Your God has promised to see you through; He will literally move heaven and earth to accomplish His promises for you, and His work within you; He’s already done that, see verse 14
- Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call His name Immanuel
- God responded to Ahaz’s unfaithfulness by declaring His faithfulness to His people; to the promise of salvation that God gave immediately upon the heels of our sinful rebellion against Him in the Garden – Isaiah prophecies something here that is as high as heaven
- In verse 14, what is visible in the Hebrew, is that when God says “you” it is in the plural, He is done with Ahaz, the promise picks up the truth that began unfolding in the Garden, and carries it another 7 centuries until it was announced to a virgin, Mary, that she would bring the promised Savior into the world
- Why did God come near to us?
- Again, from Matthew 1, she will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins
- Immanuel, God with us; Jesus, Savior – God with us in order to save us from our sins
- Not only to save us from sin, but from sinning; from living a life dominated by the terrible and tyrannous master
- As we discussed earlier, sometimes the only thing we fear more than being hurt, is being healed
- So the Lord looks to you this morning via His word, with a view towards those particular sins that you and I know so deeply in our hearts, those sins with which we tend to identify, with which we may have come to define our lives, possibly our default sins; our go to in times of stress; those sins that we treat as an exception in our need to follow God’s commands; the ones to which we have yielded time and time again as if they were our Savior, and our Lord
- Hear the Savior’s call to trust Him this morning; hear it on this side of history: after His incarnation; ministry; crucifixion; resurrection; ascension; and His being seated at the Father’s right hand – all these years later, we have even more reason to trust Him, to know and to believe His promises to us and to depend upon them unreservedly
- Here’s what that same Savior promises to you, as you follow Him in faith, forsaking your idols, laying down your false loyalties; as you identify with Him, here is what He promises you from John 14:21; 23
- He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.
- “Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”
- Jesus is herein promising a particular nearness; a particularly sweet fellowship that comes when we walk in faith, and take those difficult steps of obedience away from those sins with which we have been identifying; as in the epistle of James when he says in 4:7,8:
- “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.”
- And regarding the temptation to identify with something other than our Lord who re-created us, we have this promise in 1 Corinthians 10: 13, 14
- “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” “Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.”
- Let us distance ourselves then, from the posture of heart that Ahaz personified, not from the Lord
- Jesus never said that our battle against besetting sin would be easy; He said He would be with us
- It all begins with re-affirming this morning, our foundational allegiance to the Savior, together with our brothers and sisters in Christ; we have such statements throughout scripture: statements of belonging; of identity by which we say in relationship to Jesus Christ, this is who I am; He is the One who defines me, as Paul said in Galatians 2:20
- “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”
- Think of yourselves that way; pray that way; praise God that way, as in Psalm 63 which we will sing in a moment:
- O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;”…
- David was very unlike Ahaz
- In a fallen world, faith is a fight – brothers and sisters in Christ, on the other side of the hardest obedience, lies the greatest freedom
- One more promise: Isaiah 40:28-31
- “Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.” “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.” “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:” “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
- Closing prayer