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The God of Severity and the Hope for Renewal

Isaiah 63:15-65:12

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of judgment and hope from Isaiah 63:15–65:12.


I am reading this morning from Isaiah 63:15. Isaiah 63:15 to 65. 63:15 to 65:12.

“Look down from heaven and see from your lofty throne, holy and glorious. Where are your zeal and your might? Your tenderness and compassion are withheld from us, but you are our father. Though Abraham does not know us, or Israel acknowledge us. You Lord are our Father. Our redeemer from of old is your name. Why Lord, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you. Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes that are your inheritance. For a while, your people possessed your holy place, but now our enemies have trampled down your sanctuary. We are yours from of old, but you have not ruled over them. They have not been called by your name. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you. As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and to cause the nations to quake before you. For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down and the mountains trembled before you.

Since ancient times, no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you who acts on behalf of those who wait for Him. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways, but when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags. We all shrivel up like a leaf and like the wind, our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you, for you have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins. Yet you Lord are our father. We are the clay, you are the potter. We are all the work of your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, Oh Lord. Do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all your people. Your sacred cities have become a wasteland. Even Zion is a wasteland. Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and glorious temple where our ancestors praised you has been burned with fire and all that we treasured lies in ruins. After all this Lord, will you hold yourself back? Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure? I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me. I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name, I said, here am I. Here am I. All day long I have held out my hands to an obstinate people who walk in ways not good pursuing, their own imaginations, a people who continually provoke me to my very face, offering sacrifices in gardens and burning incense on altars of brick. Who sit among the graves and spend their nights keeping secret vigil. Who eat the flesh of pigs and whose pots hold broth of impure meat. Who say ‘Keep away. Don’t come near me for I am too sacred for you.’ Such people are smoke in my nostrils of fire that keeps burning all day. See, it stands written before me. I will not keep silent but will pay back in full. I will pay it back into their laps, both your sins and the sins of your ancestors, says the Lord. Because they burned sacrifices on the mountain and defied me on the hills, I will measure into their laps the full payment for their former deeds. This is what the Lord says.

As when juice is still found in a cluster of grapes and people say, don’t destroy it, there is still a blessing in it. So will I do on behalf of my servants, I will not destroy them all. I will bring forth descendants from Jacob and from Judah, those who will possess my mountains, my chosen people will inherit them and there will my servants live. Sharon will become a pasture for flocks, and the valley of Achor, a resting place for herds for my people who seek me. But as for you who forsake the Lord and forget my holy mountain, who spread a table for fortune and fill bowls of mixed wine for destiny, I will destine you for the sword and all of you will fall in the slaughter. For I called but you did not answer. I spoke but you did not listen. You did evil in my sight and chose what displeases me. The God of severity and the hope for renewal. This is the word of the Lord.”

Isaiah foresees the calamities of sin and judgment. What will befall the people of God in Jerusalem and the Promised Land after the return from the exile? Of course, we have some inkling as to what took place when we recall the prophecy of Haggai, for example. The prophecy of Malachi, especially the book of Nehemiah. All these promises of a return to the land and yet quite frankly their experience is shatteringly compromised. In the mercy of God, there was a time of great revival led by Ezra and Nehemiah, but like all revivals, it didn’t last. It did a lot of good but it didn’t last. In short, Isaiah sees the city of God in wretched disorder and disarray. He longs for divine intervention to set things straight. Will God always be severe? Don’t we ask that question? These islands have known various periods of genuine reformation and revival, but that’s not our current experience. And precisely because we believe in God’s sovereignty, we sometimes find it hard to understand that God does not come down from the heavens and do it again. That’s exactly the stance that Isaiah takes in this part of his book. So, we begin first with the God of severity, disclosed in the desperate prayers of God’s sinful, shattered people. The God of severity disclosed in the desperate prayers of God’s sinful, shattered people from 63:15 to 64:12, and then we’ll see the hope for renewal in God alone, 65:1-12.

The God of Severity

So, we begin with the God of severity disclosed in the desperate prayers of God’s sinful, shattered people. And essentially this passage is constrained by a series of rhetorical questions that God’s people ask.

First question, where is your love?

63:15, “Look down from heaven and see from your lofty throne, holy and glorious. Where are your zeal and your might? Your tenderness and compassion are withheld from us.” This lofty throne, holy and glorious. In the context, glorious has overtones of beauty. You might almost render this, where is your throne? Holy and beautiful. And clearly in this context he’s talking about the throne of God and the eternal abode, but the same language is then picked up as we’ll see in a few moments in chapter 64:11 regarding the temple, “Our holy and beautiful temple, our glorious temple is burned with fire and shattered.” “You are our father, though Abraham does not know us.” That is, Isaiah recognizes that the people of God, the descendants of Abraham no longer deserve to be called children of Abraham, but though Abraham’s patience might well have run out, you are God, you are our father. Don’t you have more patience than Abraham? You Lord are our father. Our redeemer from of old is your name. That’s the first question. Where is your love?

Second question. Why have you hardened and abandoned us?

Verses 17 and 18. The language is shocking, it’s causal. Why Lord, do you make us wander from your ways? It’s not, why do you put up with us? But, why do you judicially condemn us to our own sin? That theme keeps returning again and again. We’ll think about it theologically in a few minutes. Why do you harden our hearts so we do not revere you? Yes, the biblical texts can say that Pharaoh hardened his heart and that his heart was hardened, but it also says God hardened his heart. And you cannot put them in a sequence to justify your best Arminian aspirations. He hardened his heart, and then as a result his heart was hardened, and so God came along and said, all right then, I’ll harden your heart. That’s the judicial sentence. It would be convenient if it were spread out quite as neatly as that, but in fact the order is all jumbled up. It is simultaneously the case that Pharaoh was hardening his heart and God was hardening pharaoh’s heart. That’s the element that is focused on here. We feel so trapped in our sin, in our carelessness, in our insensitivity to spiritual realities. We feel so hard in our own heart that at the end of the day we acknowledge that living under your sovereignty, you are the one that has hardened us. And of course, there are plenty of texts that confirm this elsewhere. Some people are so determinately separated from God that God does say, I will send them a strong delusion in order that they might believe the lie. At that point, there is no hope. None. So Isaiah is asking the question here, “Is there no hope for us since you have made our hearts hard?”

Number three, where is your covenant faithfulness?

Verse 19, “We are yours from of old but you have not ruled over them.” That is the other nations. God is not of course a tribal God. As Solomon says at the dedication of the temple, “Heaven is your throne.” So how much less can you imagine that the temple becomes a limiting factor, a circumscribing feature of God? As Exodus puts it, He’s the God who rules over all the nations, but He rules over His own covenant community in a special way. That’s the way that Isaiah has in mind here. We are yours from of old, you haven’t ruled over the pagan nations in the same sense that you’ve ruled over us. They have not been called by your name. So where is your covenantal perseverance?

Number four, why have you not acted dramatically to save us?

64:1-2, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down that the mountains would tremble before you as when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you.” The point is that when we become aware of reformations and revivals in the past and recognize that God has on occasion rend the heavens and come down, we know deep down that He could do it again. So why doesn’t He?

To stop and think of some of the great movements of God, the movements of God from 1948 on in China. On the lowest estimates there are 19 million Christian Chinese on the mainland. Well under a million when the missionaries left in ’48 to ’51. Canada has a population of about 33 million. What’s the UK population now? Just under 60 million? We’re talking about minimum 90 million Chinese in 60 years. Or one thinks of the growth under Italian rule of Ethiopia. One thinks of the Welsh revival of 1904, 1905. One thinks of the evangelical awakening in the 18th century, the 1857 New York revival. The movements of God in Korea in the first half of the 20th century, over against Japan where nothing happened. And the two countries in some ways are very similar, but in, one, God rend the heavens and came down. Or in the province of Quebec, where I was brought up, as recently as 1972, there were about 35 evangelical churches in a French population of about six-and-a-half million. And none of them had more than 50 people on a Sunday morning. And then in 8 years, ’72 to ’80, we grew from about 35 churches to just under 500, many with hundreds of people. I remember speaking at prayer meetings that never broke up earlier than midnight. And when people prayed for one another, they weren’t praying for Aunt Mod’s ingrown toenail, or my mother is 96 and apparently, she’s got heart problems, will you not heal her Lord? No, no, no, no. They were praying for the conversion of their mates. So why have you not acted dramatically to save us? Huh? You’ve done it before.

Number five. Why can’t we trust the lessons of history?

Verses four and five. Since ancient times, historical times, no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But the sad fact is when we continue to sin against them, you were angry. So, if we cannot appeal to the lessons of history to see in revival times how you came down, because we are such a sinful people, what hope is there?

Number six. Why is there no hope for us in our filth?

Verses six and seven. “All of us have become like one who is unclean. All our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” We saw earlier in chapter 57:12 how the righteousnesses of the people are condemnable. “The righteousnesses are sinful. The people at their best are idolaters. We all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind, our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you for you have hidden your face from us.” Again, the accusation against God, that God has treated us with such judgment that we can’t find you even if we try to look. And you have given us over to our sins. That of course is what generates the language of the Apostle Paul in Romans 1. God gave them over.

Number seven. Why do you withhold your mercy?

Verses 8 to 12. “You Lord are our father. You are the potter. We’re the clay. Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord. Do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all your people. Your sacred cities have become a wasteland. Even Zion is a wasteland.”

The sacred cities, that is, the cities of Judah were taken down by the Assyrians and then by the Babylonians, one by one, one by one. But Jerusalem was spared against the Assyrians and then Jerusalem was taken down by the Babylonians, even Zion is a wasteland, Jerusalem, a desolation. Our holy and glorious temple. Ah, same description as that used for the throne of God himself. It’s as if the temple is viewed as properly God’s throne on earth as it were. Our glorious and holy temple. Our holy and beautiful temple burned to a crisp. This place where our ancestors praised you, appealing to the history again, burned with fire. All that we treasured lies in ruins, after all this, Lord, will you hold yourself back? Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure? And so, the prayers have ended with notes of desperation and plea and intercession. Ruin is inevitable unless God intervenes. And how will God answer? At one level in the rest of the book of Isaiah, the prophet does not return quite so much to the theme of God, the conqueror. Messiah, the conqueror. At least not initially. He does by the end of the book, but he casts his vision now first of all to his immediate response and then later as we’ll see in the next hour, his vision reaches all the way forward to a new heaven and the new earth. God’s return to Zion. Something that is yet to be. God the conqueror and the climax of all of history. But in the short term, God presents a measure of hope, but it is intertwined with massive threat. That’s the tension that runs right through the entire book.

The Hope for Renewal

So now we come to the hope for renewal in God alone. This is cast in two pairs. Each pair tinged with tension. The first pair, worldwide grace, verse 1, and worldwide justice and penalty verses 2-7.

That’s the first pair. Worldwide grace, I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me.

I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name, I said, here am I. Here am I. Almost certainly, this is looking at God’s self-disclosure to the pagans, to a nation that did not ask. Here you’re asking to find me and I won’t reveal myself to you because there’s so much sin. To the pagan world that did not ask to find me, I have disclosed myself saying, “Here am I. Here am I.” Here is anticipation of the outward movement of the locus of the people of God from the seed of Abraham according to the flesh, to a reach as far as all the diverse tribes of humanity. For on the one hand, to a nation that did not call on my name, I said, here am I. On the other hand, verse 2, all day long I have held up my hands to an obstinate people. So, here is the enlargement of the locus of the people of God that you find in the book of Acts. The experience of the Apostle Paul when he begins in place after place with the synagogue and when he runs into enough trouble there, he moves next door to the school of Tyrannus or someplace else, so that he reaches out first of all to the gentile proselytes and then to pagans on the streets and so on. Until you finally hear him preaching in Lystra and in Athens to complete pagans, polytheists who have no background in the Old Testament, no understanding of the law of Moses, no notion of monotheism. And God is merciful to them, until finally there is a whole theology of how to read the Old Testament in this regard in Romans 9-11. God’s sovereign sway pulling in people by his sovereign grace for his own glory and for their good.

So, although God promises worldwide grace, verse 1, he also promises worldwide justice, worldwide penalty, verses 2-7.

What do we do with these people who continually provoke me to my face? All the categories here are in Old Testament terms as we’ve seen throughout these chapters. Sacrifices in the gardens instead of at the temple, burning incense on altars of brick instead of on stones as prescribed by the law, who sit among the graves, necromancers and the like, spend their nights keeping secret vigil, who eat the flesh of pigs. They don’t follow kosher laws. Whose pots hold broth of impure meat, who actually become hypocritical and superior in their own understanding of their own spirituality. They dare to say to God as it were, “Keep away, don’t come near me. I’m too sacred for you.” Isn’t that characteristic of the religion of our day? The God you’re preaching is too narrow-minded and bigoted. We’re better than that. And sometimes you find this in surprising ways, even within the confessing church, you know. You hear some preachers every once in a while, who will say something like this. In our series on Matthew’s gospel, we come to this passage where Jesus talks about hell. Now, quite frankly, I wish this passage weren’t here, but it’s here and we believe in expository preaching. And this is for us too. So, we’ll work through this passage. I don’t like it very much, but nevertheless Jesus said it, it must be true. What have we really conveyed to the people? We’re kinder than God. If we were in charge, the Bible would be softer. We know better than God.

You see, part of the preacher’s mandate is to make what scripture says, utterly believable to people whose eyes are blind. That’s the mandate. Not to apologize for it. Thinking that you’re faithful because you believe in an errancy after you’ve apologized for the material. Do you see? We’ve become like those who say, “Keep away. Don’t come near me. I’m too sacred for you.” God says, such people are smoke in my nostrils, a constant irritant, a fire that keeps burning all day. “See, it stands written before me, I will not keep silent but will pay back in full. I will pay it back into their laps. Both your sins and the sins of your ancestors.” Says the Lord. “Because they burned sacrifices on the mountains and defied me on the hills. I will measure into their laps the full payment for their former deeds.” And then there’s a second pair. The first pair is worldwide grace, verse 1, followed by images of worldwide justice and penalty. And now the second pair, the remnant, verses 8 to 10, and the damned, verses 11 to 12. Verse 8, this is what the Lord says, “As when juice is still found in a cluster of grapes and people say, ‘Don’t destroy it, there is still a blessing in it.’ So, will I do on behalf of my servants? I will not destroy them all. I will bring forth descendants from Jacob.” That is, here you are finding the seedbed of the remnant theme that drives so much of the latter books of the Old Testament. A remnant is still preserved. A remnant is still preserved. You find it of course as early explicitly as Elijah the prophet. “Yet have I preserved unto my name, 7,000 whose knees have not bowed to Baal.” And so there is promise, promise of return.

The people of God in Sharon, the valley of Achor with their flocks and herds, yet again, still cast you see in Old Testament categories, a blessing that they understand under the revelation that’s been given thus far. And over against that the horrific pictures of 11 and 12. “But as for you who forsake the Lord and forget my holy mountain, who spread a table for fortune and fill bowls of mixed wine for destiny.” I wonder how many of our people govern their lives in part by reading the astrological columns. Under the terms of the old covenant, you could be stoned to death for that. So much do we want control over our lives, we take on false gods. Which really signals we don’t really trust the God who is there. The great God destiny, and God says, “I will destine you for the sword and all of you will fall on the slaughter, for I called but you did not answer. I spoke but you did not listen. You did evil in my sight and chose what displeases me.”

Now, I have two conclusions, one theological and one practical. The theological one is a long one. Sometimes I have an introduction that’s longer than the rest of the sermon. Today I have a conclusion that’s longer than the rest of the…well, not quite, but jolly close. The theological reflection is this.

In the Bible there are two complimentary truths that are everywhere either taught or presupposed, and which have a bearing on how we think about God’s sovereignty.

1. The first truth is this, God is absolutely and utterly sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions to mitigate human responsibility.

That’s the first truth. Let me repeat it. God is absolutely and utterly sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions to mitigate human responsibility.

2. The second truth is this. Human beings are morally accountable before God. Morally responsible to God. By this I mean they believe and disbelieve, they obey and disobey.

They choose a right, they choose a wrong, and they’re accountable for all of these responses before God. They are morally accountable before God, but their human accountability never makes God absolutely contingent. Let me repeat that. Human beings are morally responsible before God, but this does not make God absolutely contingent.

Now, let me direct your attention to three passages. We’ll begin with one from the prophecy of Isaiah.

In fact, it surfaces again and again in Isaiah, but nowhere perhaps more dramatically than Isaiah 10. Isaiah 10 beginning at verse 5. This is in the first part of the book where the political opponents, you’ll recall, are Assyria, at least the dominant political opponents. And God says through the prophet Isaiah in 10:5, “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath?” In other words, God says that the Assyrian regional superpower is His tool, the club of His wrath. “I sent him against a godless nation.” He means He sends him against the Israelites.

The godless nation in the context as we’ll see is His own covenant community. So, God sends the Assyrians to punish His own covenant community. “I dispatch them against the people who anger me to seize, loot and snatch, plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets.” War is never decorous, but this is put in the most blunt, causal terms, the slaughter, the killing, the rape, the destruction. It happens because God sent the Assyrians as His tool against His covenant community. But, verse 7, this is not what he intends. This is not what the Assyrian himself thinks. His purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations. “Are not my commanders all kings,” he says. That is to say even the commanders in his army have the status and power and wealth and perspective of the minor kings and potentates in the smaller arenas around the Middle East. “Is not Hamath like Arpad, and Samaria like Damascus?” Cities he’s already destroyed. “As my hand seizes the kingdoms of the idols.” Kingdoms whose images excel those of Jerusalem and Samaria. “Shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?” That’s what Assyrians say. When the Lord has finished all His work, Isaiah writes, “All his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem.” That is His work of judgment, His work of punishment, His work of using the Assyrians to punish the Israelites.

When the Lord has finished doing all of this, He will then say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and for his haughty look in his eyes.” In other words, the fact that God is using the Assyrians does not mean that the Assyrians are blameless. God’s sovereign sway in these matters does not mean that their human responsibility is thereby mitigated. They are busy saying, “By the strength of my hand, I have done this. And by my wisdom, because I have understanding, I removed the boundaries of nations. I plundered their treasures. Like a mighty one, I subdued their kings. As one reaches into a nest so my hand reached for the wealth of the nations. As people gather abandoned eggs, so I gathered all the countries, no one flapped a wing or opened its mouth to chirp.” I, am a superpower. And God says through the prophet Isaiah, “Does the axe raise itself above the person who swings it?” In other words, who’s the actor and who’s the tool? One person is swinging the axe. The axe is not swinging the person. Or the saw boast against one who uses it. So, on one level the Assyrians are nothing but tools in God’s hands. That’s all they are. As if a rod were to wield to the person who lifts it up or a club brandish to the one who is not wood. Therefore, the Lord, the Lord Almighty will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors and so on and so on. Those two truths spectacularly exemplified in the history of Israel. God is absolutely sovereign, but a sovereignty doesn’t mitigate human responsibility. We human beings are morally responsible creatures, but that reality does not make God contingent.

Second text, Genesis 50:19-20, you’ll remember the context.

The old man, Jacob, has died. And the 10 brothers are afraid that Joseph, now that the old man has died, will take out a certain kind of vendetta, vengeance against them for the fact that they had sold him into slavery decades earlier. So, they concoct a story, it looks fantastical, but in any case, they tell a story, whether they’re telling the truth or not is immaterial, to basically try to get the dead father on side as it were. So that Joseph’s legitimate anger might be curbed. And Joseph, quite frankly is hurt by their distrust. And what he says in effect is this, when you sold me into slavery, you intended it for evil, but God intended it for good. Now, a lot of translations in different languages get that one wrong. They domesticate the text. But most of our English translations get this one right. God had intentions and the brothers had intentions.

One set of intentions were good, one set of intentions were bad. You see the power of this text when you remind yourself what the text does not say. It does not say, your intention was evil. God unfortunately wasn’t paying attention that day. So, you got me down into Egypt, all right? It was a pretty miserable existence, but God is a superb chess player. So, he started moving the pieces around and moving the pieces around, and eventually, eventually it worked out with a happy ending because God is such a good chess player. You can’t outmaneuver God. He’s better at chess than you are. Doesn’t say that. Nor does it say God’s intention was that I be taken down to Egypt in an air-conditioned chauffeured limousine, but sadly, you guys came along and mucked it up and the result was, I went down as a slave, and boy, that went through a lot of trouble. So, it’s not cast as either the brothers taking initiative and God solving it, or God taking initiative and the brothers mucking it up. It’s cast as in the one and same event, God’s intentions were good and your intentions were evil. It’s not cast as, you did this part, and God did this part. For the event to take place, both components had to be added in together. They’re not cast as additives. For me to get down to Egypt, the brothers had to do their stuff. If God had only had his intentions and the brothers had had no intentions, I wouldn’t have got there. You had to add them together. One plus one equals two. It’s not cast that way. Rather in one and the same event, God is utterly sovereign, but that doesn’t mitigate the brothers’ responsibility. And the brothers, well, they’re morally responsible creatures for what they do. Their motive is in all of this. But that doesn’t mean that God is made contingent, not in any absolute sense.

One more passage. There are dozens and dozens of passages like this in the scriptures, of course, but perhaps the one that is most striking for our purposes is Acts 4.

And this brings us, of course, to the gospel of God. The apostles are gradually getting squeezed by the religious and political authorities. In verse 31, Peter and John hear threats. They’re still not beaten up. That comes in chapter 5, but they’re eventually released, warned, and we read 23, “On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people.” That doesn’t mean to their Jewish people. It means to the Christians, their fellow Christians are now established as a unit, as the people of God. The locus of the Messianic community. Went to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. This is what they prayed. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David, why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain, the kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against His Messiah, His anointed one on.” So, in other words, they hear this report and see the threats that are coming, realize that worse is to come, and they don’t say, well, Lord, this is getting out of hand. Are you strong enough to handle this? They begin instead, by confessing God’s sovereignty. He’s still a creator.

And in fact, this pattern of nations raging against the people of God is already established in David’s day in Psalm 2. “Why do the nations rage?” Indeed, verse 27-28, now are two truths coming together. “On the one hand, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.” So why did Jesus go to the cross? Why did Jesus die? Well, if you take verse 27 and delete verse 28, the reason Jesus died on the cross was because it was the result of a two-bit political conspiracy in a small nation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. A bunch of power-hungry, microscopic human beings who think they’re hotshots, corrupting justice. And that’s why Jesus died. They entered into a conspiracy. They were corrupt, a kangaroo court. That’s why Jesus died. Nothing about atoning for sin. Nothing about fulfilling Old Testament prophecies. Then verse 28, “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”

Now if you keep verse 28 and delete verse 27, revise verse 27 so that verse 28 controls everything. Why did Jesus die? Well, it was God’s plan, obviously. I mean, he came as the lamb of God. He came as the fulfillment of Isaiah 53. He came as the ultimate Passover lamb. He came as the sacrifice of God. And in fact, as Revelation puts it in the mind of God, he was the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Of course, this is fulfilling what God’s plan was all the way along the line. And if you put all the emphasis there and say nothing about verse 27, then you sort of feel sorry for dear old Pilate and Herod and the gang, don’t you? I mean, they did what God had prescribed should happen, not their fault. But scripture doesn’t go there. You’re supposed to believe verse 27 and verse 28. If Herod and the gang are not responsible because God is sovereign, then human beings are not responsible for anything where God is sovereign. If there’s no human being who’s responsible for Jesus’ death because they’re all just acting according to God’s plan, then Jesus doesn’t need to die because nobody has sinned. So, you can destroy the significance of the cross of Christ as easily by deleting verse 27 as by deleting verse 28. If you delete verse 28, the reason why he died is merely cheap politics in the first century. If you delete verse 27, you reach a kind of fatalistic determinism in which there is no moral accountability for us human beings because, after all, God made us do it. The text says so. But you put them together and you have one more exemplar of the dramatic combination of those two truths that I’ve mentioned. On the one hand, God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty doesn’t mitigate human responsibility. And on the other hand, we human beings are morally responsible before God, but that doesn’t make God absolutely contingent.

Now, in a place like the Crieff Conference, I’m not saying anything that’s strikingly new. This is standard reform theology, but it’s theology that is often overlooked or not thought through very much. And we need to return to this confession of what philosopher theologians call compatibilism. Compatibilism is the word that is used because we are to believe that God’s utter sovereignty and human responsibility are together mutually compatible. Compatibilism doesn’t tell us exactly how they work together. It doesn’t explain away all mystery, but it insists dogmatically that scripture itself teaches compatibilism and you can push pretty hard. You can go pretty far to seeing how some of the challenges in it are resolvable, but there are numerous elements that are beyond our capacity. They’re tied to such mysteries as the relationship between time and eternity. I barely understand time. I certainly don’t understand eternity or how God’s sovereignty plays out and is mediated through creatures. There are so many things we do not understand, but the compatibilism itself is found not only in Isaiah 10 and Genesis 50, but in the very text that describe the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to save sinners like you and me. I tell you that if you lose compatibilism, recognized or not, you lose the gospel.

Now, once you’ve seen that those two truths are mutually compatible, what do you do with it? It’s not merely a theoretical exercise. As soon as you recognize the truth of both of those propositions, the compatibilistic nature of these twins works out in how we think about suffering and how we think about prayer and how we think about evangelism and how we think about revival and more. So, in suffering, for example, you want to be able to say that everything that happens in suffering is still under God’s sway. It’s not as if he was absent that day taking a little walk in the Trossachs and something slipped by Him. You want to say even when you lose your child at the age of 2 to brain cancer, God is still sovereign. Even while you’re also saying death is outrageous, this is not the way it ought to be. You must say both of those things because both of those stances are taken in scripture. You need to be outraged and you need to thank God that He’s sovereign and good. And the same with prayer. We pray begging God for certain things. Ezekiel, I’ve mentioned earlier, describes God in chapter 2 as the one who rebukes His people for not praying. “I sought for a man to stand in the gap before me for my people, but I found none.” Amos uses some of this same standing-in-the-gap language to say that he stands in the gap because God made him stand in the gap. Even when it comes to evangelism and election. Some of our hymns get it right.

I sought the Lord and afterward I knew He moved my heart to seek Him seeking me.

It was not I that found, O Savior true, no, I was found by thee.

Thou didst reach forth Thy hand and mine enfold, I walked and sank not on the storm-swept sea.

‘Twas not so much that I on Thee took hold as Thou, dear Lord, on me.

That’s why at the end of the day, we come back to grace or we’re damned. And we face precisely the same sorts of tensions when we think about revival. We intercede, we beg with God. We do not become closet fatalists. Who knows that God will raise up an army of prayer warriors in Scotland. I do not cry very easily. I’m one of these boring, flat-lying people. My wife goes up, my wife goes down. I’m flat. But I confess that when I read the two volumes of Arnold Dallimore on George Whitefield, I wept again and again. I found myself praying, do it again. Rend the heavens and come down. But the sad fact remains that if God does not come down to Scotland again in reformation and revival, it’s because Scotland doesn’t deserve it. We’re a damned brood. Those are exactly the tensions Isaiah faces in these chapters. Don’t you see? On the one hand, these passionate pleas, aren’t you our covenant God? What hope do we have but you? You’re more compassionate than Abraham. Rend the heavens and come down. Don’t you see how broken we are? And on the other hand, you’re a people who worships me with your lips, but your heart is far from me. But I do preserve a remnant and I’m going to bring in men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. And we live with those clusters of truths and promises and realities of sins and hope. We eschew fatalism. We espouse confidence in God’s sovereign goodness. We eschew human excuses. We confess our sins. That’s a theological conclusion.

There are practical conclusions that flow out of this. This side of the second advent, this side of Christ’s return. We need to remind ourselves that there are days of small things, small times, as well as days of powerful reformation and revival, and we are called to be faithful in both of them. Revivals don’t last forever. That won’t happen until the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth, when sin will be no more, when flesh will no longer war against spirit, and God will be all in all. Josiah led a great revival, but he made stupid mistakes and was killed on the banks of a river. Hezekiah was a great and holy man. He was also a stupid and selfish man. One of the saddest texts in scripture is the closing line of Isaiah 38. “What the prophet has said, he says is good because he thought I will have peace in my time even if my kids are castrated and raped and torn off and brought into captivity.” I mean, how ghastly is that? This was the man who was a hero and led a national revival. No, we live in the light of the dawning new heaven and new earth that is drawing us to it. That’s our ultimate hope. And meanwhile, we wait for God to rend the heavens and come down.

Let us pray. Forbid, Lord God, we beg of you that we should slink into a vision of a domesticated God. Have mercy upon us, we pray. And enable us to see your sovereignty, your goodness, your holiness, your transcendence, your glory, your beauty with fresh eyes so that we are drawn to you in repentance and faith. Quiet confidence. And in all of this, Lord God, we dare to entreat you. Will you not have patience with the blood-bought church? The community of the Lamb? Did not the master himself say, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. You see how we are despised and crushed. Would you not have mercy upon us and rend the heavens and come down? 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.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.