Comfort, Comfort My People

If you’ve been following God long enough, you know that there are times when everything we believe in can be shaken. There are times on this side of eternity where you just can’t see God’s hand involved at all. It usually in times of pain or suffering that we sense this, for others it may just be silence. And we don’t understand why. We need some help, some wind to blow in our sails to get our boat moving again. We want to ask, hey God are you paying attention? Do you see what’s going on here?

I’ve been there. For the purpose of today’s message I want begin by asking a different question though: When has the comfort of God been most meaningful to you?

I think many of us would say that grace shines the brightest in our lives when we’re most aware of how little we deserve it. I think about times when I have been most emotionally affected during worship and inevitably it’s in those times that I come before God and I’m so aware of my mistakes and my failures and my sin and yet I’m confronted with the love of God that will not let me go. Aren’t those the moments when you feel you know the reality of grace and the fact that you have not earned it, that you have not deserved it and yet God loves you.

Those are the times when we realize that God is merciful and gracious and we’ve not purchased that mercy or that grace by our good deeds and our good works. Those are the moments when God’s Holy Spirit speaks so tenderly to our souls of his redeeming love. Aren’t those the moments when the cross is so precious to us?

Our text today is found in Isaiah chapter 40. The prophet is writing words of comfort to God’s people, but I don’t think we can grasp the significance of these words of comfort until we understand the reason he was writing them. The people of Judah felt they were beyond the reach of God’s kindness. We can’t comprehend the significance of these words of tenderness and comfort until we understand the circumstances that they were facing. They felt they were beyond the reach of God’s love. Beyond the reach of God’s grace. They felt like their lives had been ruined by sin. And I know that some of us have been at that same place, we’ve faced those moments when we look around and all we can see are the consequences of our wrong choices. And we look to our future and it feels like there is nothing but pain, there’s nothing but the reminder of our failures. And it stretches out in front of us. And those are the moments when we feel like, it’s too late for me.

More trouble, more hardship awaits us.

Isaiah was a prophet who lived and ministered over 700 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, and he lived during a time of great social, political, and spiritual decline. It was a time where things were going downhill for the people of God, and God had called Isaiah to a very unique task, he was called to deliver a message of both judgment and comfort.

Two polar opposites, I can’t imagine the struggle Isaiah must have felt having to say all these things… to his family, to his friends, to his neighbors…

If you’ve ever read Isaiah before you can almost feel like you get whiplash as it goes back and forth between the two messages. These messages of doom, these messages of judgment, and then followed by these messages of salvation and restoration and comfort and you want to stop and just say, ‘Isaiah which one is it!?’ What is God saying?

And the answer is: it’s both. We serve a God who judges sin and wickedness, but he’s also a God of mercy who forgives and restores those who turn back to him in faith and repentance. The message of judgment that God brought through Isaiah was judgment over the people’s wickedness and rebellion. The interesting thing though is that people in Isaiah’s day, the people of Judah, they were very, very religious.
They engaged in a lot of religious practice. They made sacrifices and went to the temple, but God saw past it all and saw their hearts. Their hearts were far from him. They said all the right things with their lips, but their hearts were far from Him. In very beginning of the book, God basically says, ‘I’m sick of all your incense and special ceremonies, because I look at the way you are living and you don’t care about the poor, you don’t care about the weakest members of society, you don’t care about justice.” He promised that judgment would come if they didn’t turn away from their wickedness. And we can take that as a warning even for us today… God doesn’t care if we’re in church every week if our hearts are far from him.

Isaiah 1:16 shows this, the promise of judgment and yet the promise of comfort said side by side.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
    remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;

It’s an invitation to repentance.

cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
    correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
    plead the widow's cause.

God is concerned with the content and quality of our lives.

He cares about us. About you.
We can come and we can worship on Sunday, but God cares more than just your Sunday… he cares about your pain on Monday. He cares about your suffering on Tuesday. He cares about your weakness on Wednesday… He cares, he sees all the good things we do throughout the week… but he also cares, he sees the hidden, secret sin we enslave ourselves to as well. Some of us may need reminded of that. God isn’t a God of only wrath watching us, waiting til we slip, but he also isn’t a God who doesn’t care about the stuff in our lives. He cares about all of it. God is in the process of making us his people. God is concerned with the content and quality of our lives.

But Isaiah doesn’t end there, he communicates this gospel centered promise in verses 18-19:
“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
    they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
    they shall become like wool.

If you are willing and obedient,
    you shall eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel,
    you shall be eaten by the sword;
     for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

We want to stop at verse 18. We want to just soak in the promise of our sins being forgiven, and reasoning together. And that’s wonderful, it is the gospel message. The promise has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, his blood shed on the cross washes us clean, his resurrection gives us the hope of our salvation. He makes us white as snow, as the hymn states as well. But the rest of this passage is a calling for sinners to repent… all of us, being called to be faithful to him that turns away from wickedness and evil. It’s a promise of judgment, but there’s also comfort in there side by side. And that really is the message of the gospel to us isn’t it? God is a god of holiness… he punishes evil, and yet he has made a way for us to be forgiven if we will turn and trust in Christ. The question is only what will we do in reaction to that?

A little boy was overheard praying once, “God, if you can’t make me a better boy, don’t worry about it I’m having a real good time like I am.”

The sad news of the story is that like the little boy, the people didn’t want to change, they didn’t listen to Isaiah’s message, they didn’t turn away from their sin, they didn’t turn away from their injustice, and their oppression. Instead of trusting in God, they chose to trust foreign nations. They put their hope in political alliances with other countries, so ultimately God did bring judgment, and he brought that judgment in the form of the nation of Babylon who came and invaded their land and exiled the people. The people of Judah were taken away from the land, away from their heritage.

But here in Isaiah 40 something incredible is taking place. Isaiah is writing to a future generation, he is no longer writing to his contemporaries, he’s not writing to the people living in the city at that time. He is writing prophetically to the people who will one day be living in exile, and you just see the incredible faith of this man. He begins to write to the people who will have to live through this judgment. That is how confident he is in the word of God and the fulfillment of God’s decrees.

He knows that these people are going to believe that God has forgotten them that God has somehow passed them over and so God gives them this word of prophecy, and it’s a word of comfort… it’s amazing. An amazing picture of the grace of God, after judging these people he comes to speak tenderly to them to call them back to himself. He has a simple message, your warfare has ended and your iniquities have been pardoned. Beginning in Isaiah 40 verse 1,

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. 

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
    and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
    that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
    double for all her sins.

A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
     make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
    and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
    and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
    and all flesh shall see it together,
     for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

This is God’s salvation for his people, what a powerful proclamation. He is going to make a highway in the desert! He meets us right in the place of our barrenness, of our deepest need. He will make a way where there is no way, where there never seems to be a way. You see valleys, and you see hills… well I’m going to make it flat and plain. He will smooth things out and bring salvation when you least expect it.
There’s a reason John the Baptist spoke these exact words about himself in the New Testament.
He was the final preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ, he is the one crying out, ‘Get ready, God’s coming!’
Jesus Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of this great promise of salvation, announced all the way back in Isaiah chapter 40.

He’s speaking to the people exiled in Babylon, people feeling all alone, people in the midst of chaos, they don’t know what their future holds, they don’t know what’s waiting for them around the corner, they are stressed on how they are going to continue to provide for their families, they are confused as to how God could let this happen to them, they are distraught over the possibility of never seeing home again.
Isaiah is offering them this promise, that they will receive back to them the Promised Land, but more than that, there is a great savior on his way. Jesus is going to be revealed to the entire world on that final day… All the world is going to see the glory of God in King Jesus. The one that will make things right in this world that are so wrong.
In verse 6 he continues:

A voice says, “Cry!”

    And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All flesh is grass,
    and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades
    when the breath of the Lord blows on it;
    surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
    but the word of our God will stand forever.

Sometimes the promises of God can seem very small in comparison to the power and the might of man. Sometimes the promises of God can seem minute in comparison to the trouble we face on a daily, on a weekly basis. And it must have felt that way to these people. God is speaking a word of comfort to them, a word of salvation to them and they must have been tempted to look around and ask, ‘Are you kidding? God do you not see what we’re going through?’

How many of us have asked that question in our lives? I know I have.

We just want an answer, God who’s going to deal with Babylon? Who is going to intervene and fix the problems in our lives?

God tells Isaiah to cry to the people, "God what do I cry?"

Remind them that man is grass compared to me.

Remind them Isaiah; remind them, I am mighty to save.

The promises of God will stand forever. It’s the same truth today church, the word of the Lord will stand forever.

And it might be in our lives that man is looming above us, the problems of this world seem too harsh, too strong, but we can take comfort… God is larger. God is mightier.
It might be your boss at work, it might be your spouse, it might be your kids and it feels like this person and their choices and their decisions have a control on you and on your future. It feels like someone else has power over us, some leader, some politician, President Obama, John Boehner, it feels like we have lost control, that they are directing our futures. And God’s word says no. They are grass. There’s no human being that has ultimate power over you, but let me tell you this, the word of the Lord will never fail it will stand forever. It will be fulfilled. It will not return to God empty but it will accomplish the task for which he sent it. Church, can we stand in that comfort today?

Though the world is crashing down upon us, our culture is demanding more and more of our time, of our money, they seem to be taking our children one by one. Sin is rampant. Satan is shaking the very fabric of the church in America, but we can stand on the promises of God.

God has made a way for man to be reconciled to himself through Jesus Christ. He is the way in the wilderness, he flattens the mountains and the valleys, he is coming to us.

This is the good news of salvation. This is what we can take comfort in, and I pray that the words of the psalmist will ring true to us today

Praise the LORD, O my soul;
   all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
Praise the LORD, O my soul,
   and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
   and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
   and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things
   so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
The LORD works righteousness
   and justice for all the oppressed.
He made known his ways to Moses,
   his deeds to the people of Israel:
The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
   slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
   nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
   or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
   so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
   so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
   so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
   he remembers that we are dust.
As for man, his days are like grass,
   he flourishes like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
   and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
   the LORD’s love is with those who fear him,
   and his righteousness with their children’s children—
with those who keep his covenant
   and remember to obey his precepts.
The LORD has established his throne in heaven,
   and his kingdom rules over all.
Praise the LORD, you his angels,
   you mighty ones who do his bidding,
   who obey his word.
Praise the LORD, all his heavenly hosts,
   you his servants who do his will.
Praise the LORD, all his works
   everywhere in his dominion.
   Praise the LORD, O my soul.