D. A. Carson discusses themes from Isaiah 65:13–66:24, addressing the stark contrasts between divine judgment and the hope of renewal. He interprets these passages as reflecting the tension between God’s condemnation of sin and His promise of a new creation where suffering and death are absent, focusing on the ultimate restoration that includes a new heaven and new earth. Carson emphasizes the profound implications of these prophecies for understanding God’s justice and mercy.
This is the last session. Let me take a moment to thank you for the many kindnesses you’ve shown me in these last two or three days. There are many of you I don’t know at all, but a surprising number I’ve met in one place or another, maybe at an earlier Crieff, sometimes at Kezik or one other conference or another. And it’s good to see you again and to hear your stories, to discover what the Lord is doing and something of the needs of Scotland and its potential for the future. It’s a privilege to be here and serve you. We all stand under the word together.
Now, I’ll begin as usual by reading scripture 65:13 to the end of 66, 65:13 to the end of 66:
Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord says, ‘My servants will eat, but you will go hungry. My servants will drink, but you will go thirsty. My servants will rejoice, but you’ll be put to shame. My servants will sing out of the joy of their hearts, but you will cry out from anguish of heart and wail in brokenness of spirit. You will leave your name for my chosen ones to use in their curses. The sovereign Lord will put you to death, but to his servants, he will give another name. Whoever invokes a blessing in the land will do so by the one true God. Whoever takes an oath in the land will swear by the one true God. For the past troubles will be forgotten and hidden from my eyes. See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people, a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people.
The sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years, the one who dies at 100 will be thought a mere child. The one who fails to reach 100 will be considered cursed. They will build houses and to dwell in them, they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people, my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune, for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. Before they call, I will answer. While they’re still speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. And dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy in all my holy mountain,’ says the Lord.”
This is what the Lord says, ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you’ll build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things?” And so they came into being, declares the Lord. ‘These are the ones I look on with favor. Those who are humble and contrite in spirit and who tremble at my word. But whoever sacrifices a bull is like one who kills a person. And whoever offers a lamb is like one who breaks a dog’s neck. Whoever makes a grain offering is like one who presents pig’s blood. And whoever burns memorial incense is like one who worships an idol. They have chosen their own ways and they delight in their abominations. So I also will choose harsh treatment for them and will bring on them what they dread. For when I called, no one answered. When I spoke, no one listened. They did evil in my sight and chose what displeases me.
Hear the word of the Lord, you who tremble at his word. Your own people hate you and exclude you because of my name. Have said, let the Lord be glorified, that we may see your joy. Yet they will be put to shame. Hear that uproar from the city. Hear that noise from the temple. It is the sound of the Lord repaying his enemies all they deserve. Before she goes into labor, she gives birth. Before the pains come upon her, she delivers a son. Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children. Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery?’ says the Lord. ‘Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery?’ says your God. ‘Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her all you who love her, rejoice greatly with her, all you who mourn over her for you will nurse and be satisfied at her comforting breasts. You’ll drink deeply and delight in her overflowing abundance.’
For this is what the Lord says, ‘I will extend peace to her like a river and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream, you will nurse and to be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you and you’ll be comforted over Jerusalem. When you see this, your heart will rejoice and you will flourish like grass. The hand of the Lord will be made known to his servants, but his fury will be shown to his foes. See, the Lord is coming with fire and his chariots are like a whirlwind. He will bring down his anger with fury and his rebuke with flames of fire. For with fire and with his sword, the Lord will execute judgment on all people. And many will be those slain by the Lord. Those who consecrate and purify themselves to go into the gardens following one who is among those who eat the flesh of pigs, rats, and other unclean things, they will meet their end together with the one they follow,’ declares the Lord.
‘And I, because of what they have planned and done am about to come and gather the people of all nations and languages. And they will come and see my glory. I will set a sign among them and I will send some of those who survive to the nations, to Tarshish, to the Libyans and Lydians, famous as archers. To Tubal and Greece and to the distant islands that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory. They will proclaim my glory among the nations and they will bring all your people from all the nations to my holy mountain, to Jerusalem as an offering to the Lord on horses, in chariots and wagons, and on mules and camels,’ says the Lord. ‘They will bring them as the Israelites bring their grain offerings to the temple of the Lord in ceremonially clean vessels. And I will select some of them also to be priests and as Levites,’ says the Lord. ‘As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,’ declares the Lord, ‘so will your name and descendants endure from one new moon to another and from one sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,’ says the Lord, ‘and they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me. The worms that eat them will not die. The fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.’
Thus ends the prophecy of Isaiah.
Now, I want to begin this last address by reminding you of three characteristics of Old Testament prophecy before we plunge into the text.
Number one, sometimes we ignore the perspective of distance, relative distance.
I live now near Chicago, but I was born in Canada. And a number of times I’ve had occasion to drive across the country. When you drive west from Montreal, you run through Ontario and around the Great Lakes, there are two or three different routes, most of them very scenic. And eventually, you get to Winnipeg in the province just west of Ontario, Manitoba. From Winnipeg to the next major city, well, there are a couple of smaller cities on the route, but the next major city is Calgary, it’s 800 miles. About 800 miles of 800 miles. There’s not much to see except 800 miles. That’s farther, of course, than lands end to John of Grove. I’ve driven it quite a number of times, and each time I don’t take more than a day because I couldn’t bear to spend two or three days. But driving west from Calgary, you’re almost instantly in the foothills of the Rockies. And then from Calgary to Vancouver, right through three ranges of mountains, is a spectacular array of scenery. Some of it alpine, some of it different kinds of mountains.
As you approach from Calgary, the foothills of the Rockies, you’re heading toward Banff, great ski country. And if you walk in the hills, you can sometimes see mountain lions and mountain goats, mountain sheep. It’s wild, wooly country. I could tell you some interesting stories, but that’s another time. And one of the things that I’m always reminded of as I approach the mountains is this, it’s virtually impossible as you approach these successive ranges to determine from the eye the distances between them. So I see hills followed by hills, followed by hills, followed by snow-capped alpine peaks. But I’m over here. So to my eyes, they all look flat. I can’t tell how far apart they are. That’s approximately the way Old Testament prophets see the future. They see the return from exile, they see the rebuilding of Jerusalem, they see the struggles, they see even the forms of outreach to the ends of the earth, the bringing in gentiles from all over the world, that from the aisles of the sea as the prophet puts it. And they also see the new heaven and the new Earth, but they’re squashed flat.
So that as you describe your vista from afar, you’re describing what is not separated with neat distances so that you can tell how much time you’ve got between the first coming of Christ and his return. Do you see? That’s typical of Old Testament prophecy. It’s a flattened perspective from the perspective of the seer. And that’s one of the reasons why you sometimes seem from our perspective, from our perspective, which…well, it’s not at the alpine peaks yet, but it can look back and give a pretty good idea of what valleys have brought us to this point. Do you see? We can see distances a little differently than can those who are watching from over here. So it’s helpful to remember that flattened perspective to make sense of the way that these apparently disparate things, disparate from a temporal point of view, are integrated into one grand vision.
But in the second place, that very reality also helps us see one of the ingredients that goes into typology.
Let me explain. Isaiah looks forward to the return from exile and to the rebuilding of the temple. But the rebuilding of the temple, from his point of view, is all bound up with a temple akin to the temple that Solomon built with a sacrificial system and Yom Kippur and the great feasts apart from Yom Kippur and the priestly classes and the Levites and so on. He does not yet see clearly how Jesus comes along and says, “Destroy this temple in three days. I’ll raise it up again.” So just as the temple was the great meeting place between God and human beings. Now Jesus, under the terms of the new covenant is the great meeting place between God and human beings. And he doesn’t see all the way to the new Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem, where we’re told I saw no temple in that city. Why not? Well, it’s because the city is itself a cube. There’s only one cube in the Old Testament. It’s the most holy place. The whole city is the cube, the veil’s gone. All the people of God are in the presence of God. That’s the way the symbolism works. And now you have a typology of temple that brings you all the way to Revelation 21 and 22. But partly that typology is created because of the flattening of the distance from the prophet’s perspective in the first place. Do you see?
There are advantages in putting things together that way. That’s why God has done it. He could have done it another way, but it’s one of the ingredients that helps us see how typologies are created, how they work. And so many, many of the things that the prophet sees that will take place in the future are cast in terms of his own covenantal location. For example, we saw in the morning, the first morning address, Chapter 65:3-4, they offer sacrifices in gardens and burning incense on altars of brick. Now, that’s not the standard idolatry forms that you find in Dundee, for example. Do you see? It’s cast in terms of the forms of idolatry of the day. Or who sit among the graves and spend their nights keeping the secret vigil who eat the flesh of pigs and whose pots hold broth of impure meat? Again, that’s not exactly where the locus of our idolatrous forms is located. -And this leads then to a third observation.
The prophetic language is shaped by sharp contrasts and antithesis.
Now, not all biblical genres function that way. A narrative, for example, usually doesn’t follow that approach. For example, in the narrative history of David, we’re told repeatedly that David is a man after God’s own heart. This man after God’s own heart managed to commit adultery and murder. One wonders what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart. And then this man after God’s own heart who is appraised to the skies, he’s also one dreadful father on more than one occasion. He can have a very bad temper. But narrative does that, doesn’t it? It can paint descriptively and you see good sides and bad sides and so on. You don’t deal in narrative so much with ideals. Whereas very often in Old Testament prophecy, you see the absolutes. The absolutes help us to see in principle what is right and what is wrong and stop ducking. At the narrative level, we’re a pretty mixed-up bunch, aren’t we? Some praiseworthy things and some pretty awful things. But the prophecy itself is pretty antithetical.
Look at 65:13 and following, the opening passage of our section. Just listen to the antitheses. “My servants will eat, but you will go hungry. My servants will drink, but you will go thirsty. My servants will rejoice, but you’ll be put to shame. My servants will sing out of the joy of their hearts, you will cry out from anguish of heart. You’ll leave your name for my chosen ones to use in their curses.” That is, you’ll be so repugnant to the people of God that when they think of you and refer to you and cite you by name, it’s always associated with the disgusting and the damned. But my chosen ones, ah, the sovereign Lord will put you to death, but his servants will be given another name. Whoever invokes a blessing in the land will do so by the one true God. In other words, you always take an oath in the name of that which is highest in your pantheon. That’s why they are commanded in Deuteronomy to take their oaths in the name of Yahweh. If they take their oaths in the names of Baal, then it’s as if Baal is the most important thing to them. Do you see? So even the way they take their oaths testifies to where their hearts are, who their real God is. Sharp, sharp, antithesis.
And then if you saw the last paragraph, 66:22-24, you have this spectacular positive description in verses 22 and 23, and then a depiction of hell in 24. Absolute antithesis. So born along by the spirit of God, Isaiah draws together some of the many strands of his prophecy by highlighting six themes. Themes that drive the running tension between judgment and hope. Judgment and hope. First, the blessed consummation, a new heaven and a new earth, 65:17-25. Observe five things. It’s a new heaven and a new earth. And of course, this lies at the heart of a great deal of Christian eschatology. We’re not thinking of ethereal life or non-material life, but of resurrection life. That becomes all the clearer in 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 21 and 22. Our ultimate hope is resurrection existence on the last day. And that leads, of course, from a biblical theological point of view, to some hard questions to answer, what happens when you die?
I have a friend who recently went home to be with the Lord. He suffered all his life from asthma. By the end of his life, partly from asthma and partly from further respiratory complications, he was fighting for every breath. He was on oxygen and so on. Someone asked him a few days before he died, “What’s the first thing you wanna do in heaven?” He said, “Take a deep breath.” Now, in one sense, that’s quite moving. In one sense, it’s dead wrong. Unless he thinks he’s gonna get his resurrection body as soon as he dies. But most Christians across the sweep of confessionalism speak of the intermediate state where there is non-corporeality until you get the resurrection body at the end. Now, he was, in fact, theologically alert enough that he might’ve been pulling our chains. But it is important for us to recognize there is a difference between the glory of being with Christ non-materially, and what comes only at the end when resurrection, the general resurrection takes place and we gain resurrection bodies on the last day.
That means that the ultimate hope then is not dying now, the ultimate hope is a new heaven and a new earth. And the biblical depictions are spectacular, aren’t they? My mother died 29 years ago. She was a Britt, a Londoner, a Cockney born within the sound of bobells [SP]. And one day the master will return and say, “Elizabeth Margaret Maberry Carson, come forth.” And my mother will come forth. And there will be no more pain, or suffering, or sorrow. No more injustice, no more heartache, no more death. For the old order of things has passed away. Exactly what the relationship will be between our experience of heaven and our experience of earth in the new heavens and the new earth? I have no idea. Well, that’s not quite true. I have lots and lots of ideas, and most of them are mutually conflicting. I can’t figure out how it’s gonna work, but it’s going to reflect embodied existence with a body akin to the resurrection body of the Lord Jesus. It’s a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
Second observation from these opening verses.
Once again, the blessings are cast in terms of old covenant realities, for example, verse 18, “But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight.” We’re still talking about Jerusalem.
And the same symbolism is picked up, of course, in Revelation 21, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth. I saw the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven.” I don’t think that that’s meant to be I saw a new heaven and a new earth. That’s the kind of horizon. And then in this horizon, a new Jerusalem pops out coming down. Rather, they’re contributing visions. I saw a new heaven and a new earth. Or to put it differently again, I saw the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven. Do you see?
We’re not talking about geographical location, we’re talking about fulfillment. You get some anticipation of this when you read in Galatians that we are looking for the heavenly Jerusalem, or especially when we look at some verses in Hebrews, especially Hebrews 12. This is one of my favorite passages on Jerusalem in all of holy writ. We read, “You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly to the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all. To the spirits of the righteous made perfect. To Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. To the sprinkle blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” Do you hear all of these strands that are coming together from Old Testament lines and congregating around what will be on the last day, what we have already begun to participate in, in inaugurated eschatology for which we are awaiting the consummation? There are different ways in which biblical typologies work.
Consider Passover. The historic initial Passover entailed a slaughter of a lamb whose blood was dobbed on the two doorposts and on the lintel, the family met together and all of the meat was to be eaten as the angel of destruction passed over those houses protected by the blood of the lamb. And the next year they were to celebrate with another Passover feast. And the year after that, they were to celebrate with another Passover feast. And they remembered how God passed over their homes in judgment and brought judgments to the homes not protected by the blood of the lamb. And the next year after that, they celebrated Passover again. And the year after that they celebrated Passover again. And 100 years later they celebrated Passover again. And 100 years after that, another celebration feast. And in each case, they’re looking backward and backward and backward and back remembering what God has done. But eventually, Israel lives through enough experiences that they recognize there are other occasions in which God has rescued his people.
In the time of the judges, for example, he rescued them again and again from various Philistines and Midianites and other marauding bands of hooligans. And then eventually he rescues his people from the Assyrians and he rescues his people from the Babylonians and returns them to the land. And what are they looking back to now? Well, yes, they’re looking back to that Passover. But there’s now a pattern of God’s delivering his people until some can’t help but think, where is our ultimate deliverance? And the Passover becomes something that looks back, but looks forward and it begins to change. And Jews themselves begin to ask, what’s next? Next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem. It looks back and it looks forward.
To what celebratory sacrifice does it ultimately look forward? Oh, Paul understands that. He writes to the Corinthians and says, “Christ, our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” So the building of typologies in the Old Testament that reach forward and point to the end is created in a number of different ways, but often on patterns and patterns and patterns that leap forward ahead of themselves and demand that you ask, what’s next? Where’s this heading? What’s it pointing to? Do you see? So that Christ, when you start tracking these things through, he is our temple. Yes. He’s also our priest. Yes. His blood is shed. Yes. And he’s the king. Yes. And he’s the ultimate prophet. Yes. Because all of these lines converge together. And you’re not supposed to look and say, well, it’s pretty strange that Christ can be both a temple and the priest. I mean, give me a break. It’s a bit complicated. But you’re not to put them together in an additive sort of way. Rather, each of these tracks, each of these typological structures, you start discovering how they unfold and point forward and anticipate and have you panting, waiting, chomping at the bit for what the Lord will do. And here at the end of Isaiah, so many of them are coming together.
One of the most challenging depictions in these opening verses is verse 20: “Never again will there be in it that is this new heaven’s, new earth, new Jerusalem, an infant who lives, but a few days or an old man who does not live out his years. The one who dies at 100 will be thought a mere child, the one who fails to reach 100 will be considered a cursed.”
How you understand that verse will depend a wee bit on your entire eschatological schema. What can I say? I’m not gonna resolve that one here, but let me unpack that just a wee bit. If you come from an all-millennial stock, I suspect most in this room, the way that this passage is understood is that it’s not that children manage to survive beyond 100 and still be considered just children, but then eventually they do die. It’s rather that eternal longevity is painted in the temporal categories of life well lived, somewhat hyperbolized. If you’re a historic pre-mill, then you might say the only place this fits into the scheme is in the millennium because, after all, these people still do die.
And we need to remind ourselves, as we exercise patience with one another, that which particular eschatological scheme operates, varies enormously in history. The Puritans, as I’m sure you know, were mostly post-mills. Those that weren’t were mostly pre-mills. I don’t know of a clear all-mill at the time of the Puritans, but today in this country, most Christians are all-mills. And so these things do come in faddish ways, widely accepted things. But what is clear again, is that in any case, you’re appointing to life as opposed to death. So much of the experience of judgment for the Israelites was in terms of life cut off, life cut off prematurely with death and plague and war. Now life is not cut off prematurely.
And ultimately, however your eschatology works, ultimately it points to eternal life itself where there is no more death.
There will be no PTSD. That’s in Hebrew. Verse 17, “See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.” So much of human suffering is grounded on the remembrance of trauma, bad things that we’ve done or that have been done to us. But the former things will not be remembered. I don’t know how that’s going to work. But if you take it at all seriously, it means there’s no PTSD. There’s no destruction of eternity’s happiness grounded in our remembrance of our failures. If God himself doesn’t remember our sins and iniquities anymore, how will we do so? I don’t know exactly what that will look like to preserve continuity of self-awareness. I don’t know. But it’s not as if you’re gonna have nightmares in heaven.
And then, once again, finally, here are the echoes of utter transformation drawn from Chapter 11. Chapter 11, if you recall, is the first great apocalyptic vision of the new heaven and the new earth where the branch from the stump of Jesse comes along and the wolf will lie down with a lamb and so on. And it’s picked up. There are many themes in these last two chapters of Isaiah that are picked up from earlier chapters in Isaiah. What do we read? 24-25, “Before they call, I will answer. While they’re still speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together. The lion will eat straw like the ox. The dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy in all my holy mountains, says the Lord.” And as Isaiah 11 adds, “And the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” So here’s the first step, the blessed consummation, a new heaven and a new earth.
The centrality of God and his word (66:1-6)
Now, I think probably most of us have memorized 66:2b, but it is important to see 66:2 in the light of the flow of the argument. We begin Chapter 66:1, “This is what the Lord says, heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you’ll build for me? Where will my resting place be?” It begins with the sheer centrality of God. The sheer centrality and transcendence of God. God will not be domesticated by true religion. He’s not captured in a temple somewhere so that somehow by offering the right sacrifices, you squeeze appropriate blessings out of him. That’s paganism. In paganism, you offer sacrifices to get stuff. Pagan religion is a tit-for-tat arrangement. You scratch my back, I scratch your back. You want a fat baby, or a true love, or a safe voyage across the Mediterranean, you choose your god, you offer your sacrifice. If you want a safe voyage, make sure it’s Neptune. Do you see? You wanna give a speech, you make sure it’s Mercury in the Roman world, or Hermes in the Greek world, the God of communication. You scratch my back, I scratch your back. So the temple services of the Pagans are all designed to domesticate the gods so that you can get what you want from them.
Now, what do you do with a God who’s not domesticated, who doesn’t need anything? The Puritans like to speak of the God of aseity. We’ve lost that word in a lot of our circles now. Aseity is from a, se, in Latin, from himself. He’s so much from himself that he doesn’t need us. The pagan gods all had needs. That’s why the tit-for-tat barter system works. You scratch my back, say the gods, and I’ll give you what you want. But supposing you have a God who has no needs, what are you gonna offer this God? What have you got to barter? Everything you’ve got to barter, he already owns. He owns you. He has no needs. He’s the transcendent God. So to whom does he look? On whom does he look with favor? Those who offer him the biggest bribe? How does that work with a God who has no needs? No, no, he says, these are the ones I look on with favor. Those who are humble and contrite in spirit and who tremble at my word. We approach this God never with a tit-for-tat arrangement, a barter scheme, a pagan view of religion. We approach with humility, contrition, understanding that God has disclosed himself supremely. This transcendent God, this God beyond words has disclosed himself supremely in words. And we tremble at his word. He cannot be circumscribed. He cannot be domesticated. He cannot be domesticated by temples and ritual.
Verse 3, “Whoever sacrifices a bull is like one who kills a person. Whoever offers a lamb is like one who breaks a dog’s neck. Whoever makes a grain offering is like one who presents pig’s blood. Whoever burns memorial incense is like one who worships an idol.” Do you see? All these things that God has condemned that are found all the time in pagan religion, it’s just not following what the word says. They have chosen their own ways. We have turned everyone to his own way. And they delight in their abominations. No, no, no, no. What must be done instead is, verse 5, “Hear the word of the Lord, you who tremble at his word. So let the Lord be glorified that we may see your joy, yet they will be put to shame. Hear that uproar from the city. Hear that noise from the temple. It is the sound of the Lord repaying his enemies all they deserve.”
Number three.
Vignettes of unqualified blessing and of divine fury.
Again, prophetic absoluteness. Vignettes of unqualified blessing and of divine fury. Verses 7 to 16. We’ll point out just a few details. This maternal depiction is striking. Before she goes into labor, she gives birth. Before the pains come upon her, she delivers a son. In other words, the blessings of this new heaven and new earth come so freely, so quickly, so much without pain that, well, she has a baby, and before she has any pain so comes the baby. No suffering. This is the reverse of the curse. Do you see? It’s the undoing of Genesis 3:15-16, “Who has heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day? But when the master comes, the country is born in a day.” Do you see?
“No sooner is Zion in labor, that is the city of the covenant community, than she gives birth to her children,” verse 8. Can you imagine it any other way? Verse 9, “Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery? I’ve been talking again and again and again of what Zion will bring forth. Don’t you think I’m going to bring it to pass? And ultimately it will come to pass on the last day. In the time of the new heavens and the new earth, without suffering, it’ll happen. There will be great prosperity.” Verse 12, “I will extend peace to her like a river and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream.” People won’t be just getting by, living from paycheck to paycheck, hoping for a good harvest, on the edge of starvation, as most countries were in the ancient world if they had a really bad season.
And the only alternative to all this blessing is at the end of verse 14 and beyond. Verse 14, “When you see this,” that is all this blessing, “your heart will rejoice and you will flourish like grass. The hand of the Lord will be made known to his servants, but his fury will be shown to his foes.” See, “The Lord is coming with fire and his chariots are like a whirlwind. He will bring down his anger with fury and his rebuke with flames of fire for with fire and with his sword, the Lord will execute judgment on all people, and many will be those slain by the Lord.” Do you see the absolute prophetic polarity? So in that context then, see the danger of false gods. Verse 17. Again cast in terms of the idolatries of the day. But when we remember that an idol can be absolutely anything that is more important to you than God. It doesn’t have to be incense or eating the flesh of pigs and rats. It’s anything which finally de-gods God. You can sometimes tell what your gods are by asking where your mind goes when it’s in neutral. You wake up in the middle of the night, you’re not quite awake, you’re not quite asleep, you’re having a nice little daydream. What do you dream about? The glories of the new heaven and the new earth? Gospel evangelism? Your retirement funds? Sex? And still painting with this ever-broadening sweep of polarities. Number five.
The worldwide reach of the glory of God
You want to see missionary texts in the Old Testament. They come to culmination, verses 18 to 21, “And I, because of what they have planned and done, I’m about to come and gather the people of all nations and languages, and they will come and see my glory.” Now, whether they see God’s glory in fear and judgment or see God’s glory in conversion, that varies from text to text. It’s neutral in verse 18. But verse 19, “I will set a sign among them and I will send some of those who survive,” that is of his own people, “the remnant to the nations, to Tarshish, Spain, to the Libyans and Lydians, famous as archers. To Tubal and to Greece and to the distant islands,” that means all over the world, “that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory.” This is Acts. We’ve seen hints of it again and again and again. The promise that God’s people will become priests and ministers to the very pagans who attacked them and destroyed them. “They will proclaim my glory among the nations and they will bring all your people from all nations to my holy mountain in Jerusalem as an offering to the Lord on horses and chariots and wagons.”
So you’re still thinking of the culmination of the last day in terms of returning to Jerusalem from the exile. So at one level, you see with this flattening of perspective, you’re dealing with return from exile, from another perspective, this is returning to a Jerusalem that outstrips the earthly Jerusalem to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. And they won’t be staggering in. They’ll be driven in air-conditioned limousines. Well, read horses, chariots, wagons, camels. “They will bring them as the Israelites bring their grain offerings to the temple of the Lord in ceremonially clean vessels.” You’re still still talking ceremonial cleanness. It’s, at the end of the day, part of the typology. “And I will select some of them.” Almost certainly what it means is some of these gentiles who have come in to be priests and Levites.
Well, I guess it’s not gonna depend quite so much on race after all, is it? You begin to understand why Paul in Romans 15 can say that he’s discharging his priestly ministry as he goes about evangelism. Paul is meditated on Isaiah. He’s not a Levite, he’s a Benjamite. Doesn’t matter. He’s made a Levite. He’s a priestly minister, as are all evangelists today. Here is the worldwide reach of the glory of God. And finally, judgment and hope. The new heaven and the new earth on the one hand, and hell. 22, “‘As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,’ declares the Lord, ‘so will your name and descendants endure. From one new moon to another and from one sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,’ says the Lord.” What’s the climax? What’s the greatest thing? The sheer grace and glory of the centrality of God.
I remember when I worked as a curate, an assistant minister in Winnipeg many, many moons ago. One of our tasks every week was to hold a church service, as it were, a kind of service at a downtown city mission. And this city mission in those days, the way they did it was to invite folks in and we usually had between 200 and 300. And there was a service that you tried to make simple and interesting, but some singing and then the preaching of the word, not too long. And then they had a soup supper and arrangements were ready for those who wanted to stay overnight and so on. And sometimes the chap who led it would ask what number they would like. In those days, there were no words up on screens, but there was a hymn book at every place. What would you like to sing? And there was one duffer there. If ever people asked which one they would like to sing, he would say 222, and 222 was,
If the world from you withholds of its silver and its gold,
and you have to get along with meager fare,
just remember God above will see you in his love.
Take your burdens to the Lord and leave them there.
Now, in one sense, it was lovely to hear this man exercising a certain kind of simple faith, but on the other hand, I think he had visions of a Jerusalem whose streets were paid with gold, and it was the gold he wanted. But the ultimate good, the sum bonum is the glory of God. Let me put this another way. I’ve been doing university missions for more than 40 years now, and I have observed changes in the questions that students ask. Starting about 15 years ago, I started hearing a question that I had never heard before. And now if you have enough Q&A times in the university mission, I’m doing one in next month at Queens University, Belfast. And I guarantee the question will come up somewhere. We run after a lot of the talks a Q&A session that we sometimes call Roast a Christian, which goes down really well. And the question that will inevitably come up somewhere is something like this.
The God of the Bible that you talk about always wants to be praised. We don’t like people who wanna be praised all the time. You know, you got a bunch of college students together and one always has to be the center of attention and so on. Why has God to be got to be the center of attention? The God of the Bible seems to us to be morally defective. He’s always got to be number one at the center of everything. How do you answer that? Well, the easy answer…but it’s only the first part. The easy answer is yeah, but when you’re with a bunch of your college friends, the reason you don’t like one person to be above everybody else is because you’re all college students. You don’t have the right to Lord it over everybody else. It’s arrogant, but there’s only one God.
But there’s a deeper answer, isn’t there? The point is God does not demand that he be praised because he needs to be flattered. He’s not a pagan deity with some deep psychological needs that can be met only by being stroked. In eternity past, God was already completely content. The Father loved the son, and the son loved the Father. There was perfect unity and perfect amity and no loneliness. There was perfection on every sphere of God’s multitudinous attributes. He doesn’t need us. It’s not as if God arrives at Thursday afternoon and starts saying, “Boy, I can hardly wait until Sunday when they break out those guitars and start telling me how wonderful I am.” He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need our praise.
Now, that’s different from saying he doesn’t demand our praise. But if God demands our praise, it’s not because he’s psychologically needy and we can meet him and may arrange a certain swap. You know. We scratch him and tell him how wonderful he is and he says, oh, that feels good. And he pours in another blessing. That’s not what’s going on. The reason he wants to be praised, the reason he wants to be worshiped, the reason he wants people to see his glory is because that’s the way the universe is built. He demands our praise for our good, not his. In fact, when you stop to think about it, it’s an act of incredible mercy and condescension that he should actually explain that and demand that he be worshiped. Imagine having to explain to the God who made us and who sustains us that we’re supposed to say thank you now and then and worship him as God instead of pretending that we’re really God and don’t really need him very much. Thank you.
“All mankind will come and bow down before me,” says the Lord. That’s not the satisfaction of an egomaniac. It’s the spectacular fulfillment of all of his goodness. That human beings drawn from every tongue and tribe, and people in the nation will bow before him and find him wonderful. And as for judgment, they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me. The worms that eat them will not die. The fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind. In other words, justice will not only be done, it will be seen to be done.
I don’t think you can build a stable local church, let alone a denomination, I don’t think you can construct a faithful gospel, a transforming message unless at its heart you’re preparing people to live for eternity. So much of what has gone wrong with the gospel in the Western world is not so much that it is entirely off base. It’s just so ridiculously shortsighted. We spend lots and lots of time on how to bring up your children. How to be fruitful at work. How to find yourself. What’s your identity? How to be happy though married. I’ve seen seminars on all of those topics in Christian churches, evangelical so-called churches. But how many churches have sermons on how to get ready for death?
If I have students in, we’ve had thousands of them over the years, and they sit around the table and I lob questions, you know. “What do you guys think of homosexual marriage?” Boy, we’ve got a hot discussion going and we can bring up all kinds of things in science and the Bible and what Christian faithfulness looks like. Everybody’s got an opinion and away we go, we’ve finally dig out a Bible and see what the Bible says and so on. But if I say, “I’d like to tell you how my dad died,” you can cut the air with a knife. Everybody’s embarrassed. You can talk about sex until the cows come home. Don’t talk about death. That’s the last taboo. But the Christian Church must talk about death. That human beings will meet their maker and they will give an account of everything they do in the flesh, and there’s only one way they’re going to escape the wrath to come. Otherwise, the Church of the Living God has no reason for existing. Small wonder then that Christians across the ages have said, the best Old Testament gospel book is the prophecy of Isaiah.
Let us pray. And who is sufficient for these things? Lord God, have mercy. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear your transcendent greatness as disclosed through the word. For we are told you. Look to those who are contrite, humble in spirit, and who tremble at your word. Make us to tremble at your word, we pray, and then learn the more faithfully to proclaim it in our needy generation. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
