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Isaiah 1:1-9
IN HIS HOLY COURT GOD LAMENTS HIS PEOPLE TURNING FROM HIM BUT OFFERS HOPE

INTRODUCTION The book of Isaiah is normally referred to as the Gospel of the Old Testament. This is so because in it the sin of the people is exposed, Gods promised judgment upon their sin is pronounced, the people are called to repentance, and God promises to deliver and restore them. That being the case, doing a study of this book will be very helpful to us. The sins of Gods chosen nation will be set before us and seeing their errors, we will be careful not to repeat them. We will see Gods patience but we will also understand that it will not last forever. There comes a time when He judges and punishes rebellion against Him. We will see that God punished the wicked, forgives the repentant, and rewards the righteous. We will also see the promise of final and absolute redemption to be performed by God alone and that He alone will be exalted. We will see those things repeated over and over throughout this book of Isaiah. The book is divided into two major sections. The first is from chapter one to thirty nine and the second is from chapter forty to sixty six. Those two sections are further divided into smaller sections and the first of those is chapters one to five. These five chapters are like an introduction or a summary of all that would be dealt with in the rest of the book. In other words, Isaiah, who is a prophet called by God and who is the person that wrote this book, gives, in these five chapters, a foretaste of his entire ministry and all that God called upon him to deal with in that ministry. Beginning from today the prophet Isaiah will be our main preacher on Sunday mornings; just as Pastor James, the brother of our Lord Jesus Christ had been over the last few months. Today we will consider the first nine verses of chapter one and trust that God would speak to us through Isaiah, His appointed prophet and preacher of His Gospel.

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Isaiah 1:1-9 (NASB) The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem, which he saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. From verse one we can see that Isaiah was a prophet sent to Judah which was the southern kingdom of Israel. This was the section of the divided kingdom that was being ruled by the descendents of King David and the capital city was Jerusalem. We can also see that he prophesied during the reign of four kings. COURT CONVENES AND THE CHARGE ARE READ 2 Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth; For the Lord speaks, "Sons I have reared and brought up, But they have revolted against Me. In verse two Isaiah makes a call to listen but the call is not to Judah or to Jerusalem, it is to the heavens and to the earth. By this it will appear as if he was prophesying to much more than Judah and Jerusalem but that is not the case. What is set before us here is a court scene and his words are actually calling a court in session. Isaiah is the crown prosecutor and he is about to read the charges against the accused, who is Judah. God is the Judge, it is His court, and the charges are being read on His behalf. For us to properly grasp whats happening here, we need to remember the study we recently completed on Gods gracious covenant during our Wednesday nights bible study. In those studies we saw that the book of Deuteronomy, is a vassal treaty agreement that God made with Israel as they were about to enter the

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Promised Land. Coming to the end of that agreement witnesses to it were called and we see this in Deut 30:19-20, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, 20 by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them." The same witnesses are here being called by Isaiah as Judah, the accused, is brought into Gods court to answer charges of breaking the covenant that He made with them. That is why he says Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth. They are witnesses for the prosecution. The court is then called to order when he says For the Lord speaks. The charges are then read out and the first is this; "Sons I have reared and brought up, but they have revolted against Me. You will note that He did not refer to them as a nation I have created or as citizens I have made, He called them sons and referred to them as those whom He raised and brought up. This is to say that God considered this people to be as His own descendents whom He brought into the world and viewed His interactions with them as that of raising and bringing up His own children. This must say to us that in Gods mind this was a very close, intimate, fatherly, loving, compassionate and nurturing relationship. It must say to us that as such a Father, He gave them His best and that they owe their existence, all that they had become and all that they had to Him. This is the charge that God brings; You, My sons, have rebelled against Me. To impress upon them the seriousness of the offence God presents the faithfulness of dumb animals to their master as a contrast to what His sons has done. He says in verse three: 3 "An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master's manger, But Israel does not know,

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My people do not understand."

God says a dumb ox and a dumb donkey know their master, they know the shelter that their master has provided for them and they know to whom they must look to receive their food and they remain loyal to their master; but, says God, My sensible people whom I have raised and brought up they do not know. They do not know that they are not being loyal to their God. And worse than that, they do not even understand that they do not know that they are being unfaithful. In verse four God goes on to state what they have become, He says: 4 Alas, sinful nation, People weighed down with iniquity, Offspring of evildoers, Sons who act corruptly! They have abandoned the Lord, They have despised the Holy One of Israel, They have turned away from Him. The point is that God did not call them to be a sinful nation. He called them to be a holy nation. They were being weighed down by their sins but God had calld them to be exalted. They were behaving like the offspring of evil doers but God had called them to be children of righteousness and to behave as children of righteousness, instead all their actions were corrupt. They obviously did not learn those things from God who brought them up. They practice those things because they abandoned Him. That is to say that they rejected Him as their Lord and took to themselves a different master. They did

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not only reject Him says God, but they went further than that to despise Him, the Holy One of Israel. When God says that they despised Him He means that they hatred and scorn Him and looked down upon Him as something dirty and repulsive. That should also say to us that if they despised the Holy One, then they have also despised and rejected holiness. God goes further to say that they have turned away from Him. This is the final rejection. This is like throwing some dirty and useless thing on the garbage heap and turning away from it. By turning from God they turned away from the covenant agreement which He made with them. In so doing they made themselves strangers and aliens therefore they put themselves outside Gods covenant agreement.

CONTINUOUS REBELLION IS LAMENTED The next two verses tell us that there were consequences to the people for rejecting God, that they were being disciplined by Him, that the discipline was severe and it affected the whole nation but in spite of their suffering they continued in their rebellion. The verse says: 5 Where will you be stricken again, As you continue in your rebellion? The whole head is sick And the whole heart is faint. 6 From the sole of the foot even to the head There is nothing sound in it, Only bruises, welts and raw wounds, Not pressed out or bandaged, Nor softened with oil.

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Sin has immediate consequences and the first is that it hardens our heart against God, the second is that it hardens our heart against His word so that we have no desire for it and that even when we hear it, it has no effect on us and the third is that God uses the sin and its results to punish us. By this I mean that the very wrong thing that we do is made into a whip on our backs. An example of this is where a Christian may have a problem and instead of going to God and using His word to solve it they go to alcohol which will make the matter worse and destroy them with every drink that they take. God says, where will you be stricken again as you continue in your rebellion? And we must understand that it is God who will be doing the striking. The whole head is sick; and this could mean the rulers of the people or it could mean the way the people as a whole were now thinking and planning and deciding what they would do. The heart is faint; meaning they have no strength or ability to do that which is right anymore. The entire body, that is to say, the entire nation is sick from the least among them to the greatest. Their bruises and welts and raw wounds are from the blows that God, as their Father, had inflected upon them. They had gotten so much licks that there was no other area for God to punish, but that did not stop their rebellion. In addition, they did not even stop and take time off to attend to their wounds. They just continued in their rebellion because they had hardened their hearts and stiffen their necks against God. The thing about this is that it doesnt suddenly happen to the people of God. It happens gradually over time. It begins with a small sin; a little compromise, and once we do not take stock of ourselves and get back to God, things just get worse until God gives us over to the error of our ways. And the sad thing about this is that at that stage we would not even know who God is. We would continue to say that we live and serve Him but He would be saying you are not serving Me

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ABSOLUTE DESOLATION The next two verses tell us about absolute desolation and the loss of all Gods protection and security. 7 Your land is desolate, Your cities are burned with fire, Your fieldsstrangers are devouring them in your presence; It is desolation, as overthrown by strangers. 8 The daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, Like a watchman's hut in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.

Gods people had rebelled against Him and none of His disciplinary actions had worked to turn them around, they had rejected Him totally and they were receiving the just punishment for their action. This is frightening and we must ask the question, can we be as stubborn and stiff-necked, as His people, can we resist God to that extent? Can we be so blinded by our sins that we cannot see how it is destroying us or see Gods discipline and call to repentance? We may read this and judge Judah and Jerusalem and ask ourselves how could they have been so blind? But even as we do that, let us ask ourselves; have we learnt anything from their error or are we repeating the same thing? What we have seen here is God dealing with a people with whom He had entered into a covenant that was marked by the circumcision of the flesh. And what we need to understand is that the circumcision of the flesh does not automatically result in the circumcision of the heart. And so if we are to make an application to ourselves we need to ask is my relationship with God merely a relationship of the flesh or is it a relationship of the heart.

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If that relationship is merely of the flesh we will rebel against God, we will pretend to serve Him when we are not and we will finally be destroyed.

GOD PRESERVES A REMNANT Fortunately, God also enters into covenants agreements with people that results in a transformation of the heart, so that in the midst of His covenant people He preserves a remnant who remains true to Him. This is what we read of in verse nine. 9 Unless the Lord of hosts Had left us a few survivors, We would be like Sodom, We would be like Gomorrah. God is the One who preserves a people onto Himself in the midst of rebellion. He always keeps a remnant and it is the remnant that is the true people of God. In this we must rejoice, for God reveals to us that there is hope and that hope is in Him alone. We must keep looking to Him and to no one else. This last verse also tells us that God is faithful and He will keep His promises. When He spoke to Joshua as he was about to lead the nation Israel into the Promised Lane, He made this commitment to Joshua and to the people; I will never leave you nor forsake you and He remained faithful to His commitment in spite of the fact that His people rejected Him. CONCLUSION AND GOSPEL APPEAL The question that we must ask ourselves is; are we of the remnant? Have we taken the time to make our calling and election sure? The Bible teaches us that God the Father sent Jesus into the world to die in the place of His brethren whom He came to save. It also teaches us that we must

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come to Him in true repentance begging forgiveness for our sinful rebellion against Him, and the promise is given that all such will be forgiven and redeemed and will be brought back to God. Will you do that this morning? Will you turn from your pride, and arrogance and pretense and self-righteousness and false view of God? Will you come to Him in true and sincere confession and ask Him to make you one of His true covenant children by transforming your heart? Will you allow His word and His Spirit to speak to you this morning? Turn from your sinful ways, for why would you be stricken again, why would you die in your sins when there is live in Jesus Christ? Oh! Sinner man! Sinner man! Come to Christ, in Him there is peace, there is love there is full forgiveness, and there is eternal life. Come to Him and live and let God be glorified in all of it.