29th December 2024

Old Testament Heroes 9 - Isaiah     (Martin Mowat)

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8 & Matthew 28:16-20

In Hebrews 11, the author of Hebrews was making an important point when he was talking about the heroes of the Old Testament.  He started by saying “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.  This is what the ancients were commended for.  By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

After singling out the individuals that we have been talking about over the last few months, people like Adam and Eve, Enoch, Noah, Isaac, Moses, Rahab, Ruth and Boaz, he starts to bundle together many of the judges, and when he gets to the prophets, he doesn’t even mention one of them by name.

These were all commended for their faith, he says, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for US, he’s talking about the early church, so that only together with US (the church) would they be made perfect. We’ll come back to that.

Being a prophet isn’t always a very enviable job, particularly if you’re called upon to prophecy doom and gloom.  That wasn’t the case for all of them, but much of the time it was for the one that I want to talk about this morning – Isaiah.

I love the passage that xxx just read to us.  Not only is it iconic, but I love the way that Isaiah unhesitatingly volunteers to be God’s envoy.  He sees a vision of the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne with the train of his robe filling the temple, and of six winged angelscalling to one another ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’

And then God, the Trinity, because he says “us” ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’, and Isaiah simply says ‘Here am I. Send me!’

The apostle John’s comment about this event is interesting ‘Isaiah said this he says because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke about him”. Isaiah had seen the trinity, in ALL it’s glory, God the Father, Jesus – God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and that was how he reacted. ‘Here am I. Send me!’ What a selfless heroic reaction on Isaiah’s part!  

One of the first things Isaiah had to do was to go and meet King Ahab at the end of the aqueduct that led to the “upper pool”, also known as the Pool of Bethesda, a reservoir that supplied water to the city of Jerusalem.  Ahab was not a nice guy. He was widely criticized for causing moral decline in Israel, but he paled in contrast with his wife, Jezebel. The message that Isaiah had for him that day, however, was friendly and positive, and included those immortal words “the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; he went on, as we heard on Wednesday, on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and for ever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”  This is our inheritance, my friends, but that’s another matter.

Isaiah may not have known it when he initially signed up for the job, but there were indeed times when he was called upon to prophecy doom and gloom. For example:

-       to Babylon, that it would be overthrown like Sodom and Gomorrah, 

-       to Assyria, that it would be crushed, 

-       to Moab, that it would be destroyed in a night, 

-       to Damascus, that it would become a heap of ruins. 

-       and other places like Egypt, Cush, Edom, Arabia, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Ephraim all came for a good dose of it too.

Speaking to Hezekiah, king of Judah, he prophesied about John the Baptist, “A voice of one calling: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Speaking to Israel as a whole, he prophesied, Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. That’s the light that pierces the darkness that I was talking about last week. 

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, he said, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. I delight greatly in the Lord; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness.

I could go on and on quoting Isaiah’s legendary prophecies and relating them to the events that they would one day refer to, but there is something else that occurred to me as I was preparing this. 

Isaiah was a hero because he fearlessly spoke out God’s truth because of, and despite, the political and military scenarios of his times, many of which were orchestrated by autocrats like Ahab. 

At the risk of being accused of preaching politics, can I say that I read this week that, worldwide, authoritarianism and autocracy are on the rise today, while democracy, which upholds values like the rule of law, human rights, transparency, accountability, and integrity, is increasingly under threat.  Democracy, claim the autocrats, is weak, divided and degenerate.

We need to be praying for people like Jinping, Putin, Netanyahu, Trump and so on, on a personal level, and for situations like Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Syria, where we just wish that God would sovereignly intervene.

But more than anything, I thought, we need a new Isaiah, to pierce the darkness of today.  We need a new Isaiah to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, … to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve, bestowing on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendour. That’s Isaiah 61, verses 1 to 3.  

But is this not a description of the church’s role today?  Let me read it again. … to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, … to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve, bestowing on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.

If Isaiah was pointing to Jesus, was he also pointing at his church? Dare I to suggest to you that we, the church, are called to be the Isaiah of our time. We are called to represent Jesus, the light of the world, we are called to pierce the darkness. 

As we heard in our second reading, Jesus final statement to his disciples was this: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’ (Matthew 28:18b-20)

Is the church called is to be today’s Isaiah? I think so, but it needs to clean up its act, if it wants to be as credible as he was.

‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ God is saying again.  Will we, like the heroic prophet Isaiah, simply say ‘Here we are. Send us!’ ?