Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Let's open our Bibles and turn to the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 1,

and we will look again at verses 10 through 20 as we are thinking

about the religious arena of Israel's rebellion

against God.

The first chapter of Isaiah is laying out the problems.

The problems with Israel, with their relationship with God, the internal

decay that Israel is experiencing, as well as the litany

of covenant curses that they are experiencing

because of their unfaithfulness.

They are described as rebellious children,

so rebellious, in fact, that they no longer remember

or know who their father is, and

although the ox knows its master and the donkey knows its owner,

Israel does not know who God is.

That is the condition being portrayed to us here in

Isaiah chapter 1, and so God addresses them as

Sodom and Gomorrah in verse 10 of chapter 1.

That's where we begin.

Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom.

Give ear to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah.

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me, says the Lord?

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle.

I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or goats.

When you come to appear before me, who has required this from your hand to

trample my.

Courts?

Bring no more futile sacrifices.

Incense is an abomination to me, the new moons, the Sabbaths,

and the calling of assemblies.

I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting.

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates.

They are a trouble to me.

I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you.

Even though you make many prayers, I will not hear.

Your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves.

Make yourselves clean.

Put things from before my eyes.

Cease to do evil.

Learn to do good.

Seek justice.

Rebuke the oppressor.

Defend the fatherless.

Plead for the widow.

Come now and 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 be as wool.

If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.

But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Now, we left off at the tail end of an inventory that God is

giving concerning the religious practices of Judah and Jerusalem.

Attention is given to the altar in verse 11, all the sacrifices made at the altar.

And then attention is given to the assembly in verses 12 through 14, when they gather, what they do when

they gather.

And they have a mentality of just getting things done.

When they appear before the face of God, they have no recognition of it.

They simply run around and trample his courts.

They have a heads -down, worker -minded kind of mentality

when they ought to be reverent with eyes up and paying attention to who God is in

reverence.

But they're just going through the routine.

So he calls it trampling his courts.

And in giving his rhetorical rebuke in verse 12, he says, Who has

required this of your hands that you should be trampling my courts?

He then gives his righteous refusal in verses 13 and 14, and that's where we

left off.

Interestingly, in this list of religious terms, which is a very long list that we have, verses

11 through verse 15, barely a repetition exists in

all of the description except for this phrase, new

moons.

The term sacrifice is actually even different in the Hebrew.

The only thing that gets repeated is new moons, and that should catch our attention there in

verse 13 and in verse 14.

The reason being is that the religious calendar of Israel was governed by the

lunar phases.

If they wanted to know when they were supposed to do a particular kind of feast or a particular kind of gathering, they

would keep track of the months by keeping track of the moon.

And by the light of the moon, every time it got dark, they would look at the moon, see what the

moon was doing, and they would know what day of the month it is and when this next

feast would be coming up.

That's how they kept track of things.

Now, I find it interesting that we're in the middle of a discussion already in Isaiah

trying to properly read this book as Christians looking

back at what God was saying to them.

We see that he commanded them to offer these sacrifices.

We know that he commanded them to make these religious observances according to

the lunar calendar, but he's telling them here that he does not

delight in these things.

He doesn't delight in the sacrifices.

He doesn't delight in the blood of bulls and goats and cattle.

He doesn't delight in the assembly.

He doesn't delight in them coming together for these feast days and so on and so forth.

But that we've seen time and again, his delight is in covenant faithfulness.

His delight is in those who obey, those who keep his word, those who seek

to honor him and his word in all that they do.

And so there's a real emphasis here where God

is calling them to a standard of covenant faithfulness that they are

continually failing.

They're missing the mark time and again.

They're putting their attention on rituals rather than on God himself.

They're not really fearing the Lord.

They're walking through procedures.

Later on in the book of Isaiah, they will insist that they fast like they're supposed to, and he says, no

you don't.

Because they're mixing together the religious customs that they've been taught

and continual disobedience, idolatry, injustice,

immorality.

They're not really keeping covenant.

They're just trying to keep themselves covered by going through the routines.

Now, the lunar calendar began with

creation.

You go back to Genesis chapter 1, and the very first thing we

know is that there's a need for light.

So the very beginning of the first creation, God said,

verse 3 of Genesis 1, let there be light.

And there was light.

First thing that happens in the creation is that God creates

light.

And God saw the light, and it was good.

And God divided the light from the darkness.

God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

So the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now, you hear the Hebraism, how they count their days.

The evening and the morning were the first day.

Oh, hey, they got that backwards.

You're supposed to count the morning, then the evening.

That's a day.

But the Hebrews counted evening, then morning as the

day.

And so the day would begin at 6 o 'clock in the evening, if you're keeping a

careful average of the watches.

And so the first watch of the day would begin at 6 o 'clock in the evening and would go

pretty much 24 hours until 6 o 'clock in the afternoon the following day.

And that would be the end of the day.

Now, when they were keeping track of their days, they were also keeping track of their months.

So God created the light, and he had the separation of light and darkness already.

But then in verse 14, God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from

the night, and let them be for signs and

seasons and for days and years.

So God says we're going to be signifying some things, we're going to be communicating some things by the

use of these lights in the firmament of the heavens.

Very carefully, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Moses avoids naming sun, moon,

and stars, names that the Israelites would be probably

prone to worship because sun, moon, and stars were often named with proper names and were worshipped

by the pagans.

But no, they're just greater lights and lesser lights, and they're there for particular reasons, to give glory to

God.

And so God did this, and it was so.

Verse 16,.

Then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule, or govern, the

day, and the lesser light to rule, or to govern, the night.

He made the stars also.

God set them in the firmament of the heavens, and set them on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the

night, and to divide the light from the darkness.

And God saw that it was good.

So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

So God made light, separated light from darkness.

The day begins with darkness and then ends in light.

This is the timeline of a day.

Begins in darkness, ends in light.

The lights are created to govern the evening and the morning.

We have the moon governing the darkness.

It's still light.

You can see a lot by the light of the moon, especially if you don't have city lights around.

You can see a lot by the light of the moon, but not nearly as much as you can see when the sun is out.

And God, in good humor, lets us see very often the sun and the moon in the sky

at the same time.

And when you see them both in the sky at the same time, let's be honest, the moon ain't no big deal.

Now this is helpful to us because when we think about the new

creation, when we think about Jesus Christ risen from the grave,

the very first day of the new creation, fittingly Sunday, the very first thing

that comes of this is light.

Everything begins to make sense.

There's light that is blinding, light that is scary, light that is frightening, light that is hard to believe, and yet there is

light that is revealed about this is why everything took place.

And so then people begin to see for the first time, and the veil is taken away, and the veil is taken away, and people begin to

see.

And in contrast to that which was during the night, we have

that which is during the day.

A whole old covenant was run by the moon.

They did all of their sacrifices and all their feast days according to the moon.

So in other words, they were running by night.

They were running by shadow in the darkness.

Now Colossians 2.

In Colossians 2 in verse 16, as Paul is trying to get

across to the folks at this church that our sufficiency

is in Christ's supremacy, in verse 16 he says, Let no one judge you

in food or in drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or

Sabbaths.

A bunch of those were just listed in Isaiah chapter 1, so it's a relevant passage to ponder,

which are a shadow of things to come.

So they were a shadow of things.

They were in shadow.

They were in the darkness, but they had a purpose.

They were a shadow of things to come.

But the substance is of Christ.

The Greek word for substance is soma, which means body.

Now we could look at it as a body that God's light shines upon and

casts a shadow.

And I like this illustration because it explains the weirdness in the Old Testament.

A shadow will look weird.

When a light shines upon a body, the shadow spreads out this other direction, and you go back to the entire Old

Testament, and the weirdly shaped shadow always leads to the feet of Christ.

And all who believed in God's revelation were truly united to Christ, and thus they were

saved.

But the word for substance here, or soma, or body, is also very often

used to describe a heavenly body, something that is in the heavens, used even to

translate sun or moon.

But this is not the moon shadow.

This is a brilliant light of Jesus Christ.

So there are these things that are in the shadow, but the heavenly body, the brightness, is

of Christ.

Something to keep in mind when we're reading about God saying to the Israelites, look, the main

point is not that you go through all of these feast days and celebrations according to your new

moons and so on and so forth.

And one of the reasons why he's saying that, ultimately, is because these things are

shadow.

The substance belongs to Christ.

Important that we recognize that as we move through.

God is not weary of these new moons and feasts or these sacrifices because

he ordered them, or just simply because they happen again and again.

God loves repetition.

Just look at his creation.

He's weary of them because of the unbelieving, sin -filled people

who are engaging in them, thinking that they're the point.

They're not the point.

So God rebukes the worshipers for their rotten worship, what happens at their

altar, what happens at their assembly, and what happens in their appeals.

Verse 15.

Verse 15 is a chiasm.

You'll hear hands, eyes, prayers,

then God's hearing, and then back to hands.

So we can see that here.

When you spread out your hands, which is a posture of prayer, when you spread out your hands,

the idea is that they're coming before the face of God and they're praying.

He says, I will hide my eyes from you.

You come to me and you lift up your hands to me, and I'm not going to pay attention to you.

I'm not going to hear your prayers, even though you make many prayers, and you can just keep on keeping on, but I'm not going to

hear those.

He says, I will not hear.

Your hands are full of blood.

So we have hands and hands, and they spread out their hands, and they're supposed to be cleansing their hands.

They have ceremonies that they go through, and they're supposed to have purified hands when they bring them before the Lord

to pray to him.

Think about how careful the Levites have to be, the priests have to be, in cleansing their hands,

and before they do any of this sacrificial work and intercede for the people and bring the incense to the altar of

incense and so on.

They've got to have clean hands.

And God says, when you spread out your hands, I'm going to hide my eyes from you.

Even though you make many prayers, I will not hear.

So these two are complementary.

I'm going to hide my eyes from you, I will not hear.

I will not look favorably upon you, and I will not receive your

requests favorably.

It's kind of the opposite of the priestly blessing in Numbers chapter 6.

Why?

Here's the reason why.

Your hands are full of blood.

You're lifting up your hands, but they're full of blood.

You can wash them all you want, but they're full of blood.

And he's going to explain why that is.

In the second half of our text, in verses 16 through 20, he gets to the injustice

that's going on.

He gets to the violence that they are a part of and approving of, and that's why he's

not going to listen to their appeals anymore.

He's not going to listen to their prayers.

Well, if the things that they do at the altar, and if the things that they do in their assembly, and the things they do

in their prayers are all rejected by God, we're back to that big question.

What hope is there for rebellious children?

It certainly isn't going through the motions of more worship services.

It isn't doing more prayers or more assemblies or more sacrifices.

God says he's weary of all of those things.

So he's looking for something else from his rebellious children.

He's looking for repentance.

And he describes that in verses 16 through 20.

Let's look at that passage again, verses 16 through 20.

It begins this way.

Wash yourselves.

Make yourselves clean.

And before they begin to say, well, that's what we're doing.

We've got these jars full of water.

We've got the brazen labor.

Of course we do that.

He explains what he means.

Wash yourselves.

Make yourselves clean.

How?

Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes.

You hear the connection with verse 15?

He says the problem with the hands is that their hands are full of

blood.

It's not that they actually have dried blood on their hands, obviously.

This is because of all the iniquity that they're involved with.

The reason why he won't abide the assembly is because of all the iniquities.

He's already said that.

He says, I'm going to hide my eyes from you because God is too pure to look upon evil with approval,

Habakkuk tells us.

So he's not going to look upon evil with approval.

He's going to hide his eyes from them.

But his eyes really are the standard.

He says, put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes.

Not from before the eyes of the chief priest or before the eyes of certain magistrates or

before the eyes of a prophet.

And keep your iniquities and your sins kind of where they belong, over in the closet

or in certain districts.

And just keep them in their place.

And then we'll have a nice part of the city and then a squalor part of the city where all the sins can be done.

Israel was famous for that.

During the days of Jeremiah, they would exit the city and go down

into the ravine.

And there they would worship Molech.

Keeping it out of sight.

It wasn't in the main square.

So, of course, we're good people.

It's over there in the ravine where people aren't watching it publicly.

But God says, put it away from before my eyes.

So what he's calling for here is a kind of repentance that takes into

account the perspective of God.

We remember in Corinthians that what was called for was godly sorrow.

A sorrow, a brokenness that pertained to who God is on account of how

he thinks of it, how he sees it.

It's his eyes that matter, not the eyes of the people.

Wash yourselves.

Make yourselves clean.

Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes.

Now, this repentance is

something that he's calling all of them to do

according to a standard that's based on who he is.

And so they have to know who he is.

But they've forgotten.

You see the quandary?

They don't know who God is.

They have to relearn who God is.

They're going to have to pay attention all over again to know how

powerful he is, how holy he is.

And so he says

16 and 17 have three sets of three.

The first three fire off this way.

Wash yourselves.

Make yourselves clean.

Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes.

So this is setting the stage of repentance, a

repentance from sin.

But then the next three fire off about a reordering of

each person's life.

The reordering of the self.

He says cease to do evil.

Learn to do good.

Seek justice.

So there's the next three that all go together.

And then there's a final three that go together.

Rebuke the oppressor.

Defend the fatherless.

Plead for the widow.

So God addresses three ways in which Israel

is trying to connect with God and base their relationship with God in.

Hey, look at what we do at the altar.

Hey, look at what we do at the assembly.

Hey, look at what we do when we pray.

And God says I am utterly dissatisfied with all of that.

Here's what needs to happen.

Then he talks about three things.

So he gives an answer in three ways and talks about a very robust and well -rounded type of repentance

that in some ways is particular to Israel, but in other ways is universal

to all who are made in the image of God.

So in this repentance from sin is

followed up by a reordering of the self.

Cease to do evil.

This is what they know.

They are masters of it.

They know it incredibly well.

They are instinctively doing evil.

But what do they need to do?

Cease to do evil.

Rather, what?

Learn to do good.

They don't know how.

This is where their ignorance shows.

They don't know what that is.

They have to learn to do good.

And where is their attention going to be?

Downfield?

They had to seek justice.

In other words, setting things right all across the board.

So in order to learn to do good, they're going to have to pay attention

to what the Lord has to say.

They're going to have to listen to his word, follow his instructions, and let him lead them.

And he's going to talk more about that in the coming verses.

But in seeking justice, they're going to have to turn their attention away from

their own personal routines of, I'm going to offer up all these

sacrifices and then go back to doing whatever I want.

I'll go ahead and put my sacrifices in.

I'll go ahead and put my time into the feast days and everything else.

But I've got to check all those off so I can go back and just do whatever else I was doing.

They're seeking themselves, but they're not seeking justice.

They don't care about God's standards, and they don't care about what happens to those who are around them.

Of course, this is contrary to what God would desire of all those made in his image, but it is increasingly

a problem amongst the people of Israel.

Because God has given them standards to follow, laws to follow, instructions to follow on how to

treat one another.

And if they don't do it, then they're breaking covenant, and then disaster comes upon them all.

So if they're seeking themselves, then they are not going to care about the oppressor.

They're not going to defend the fatherless, and they're not going to plead for the widow.

Now, when these are listed, what is the Old Testament?

What is the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai?

What does it have to say?

The oppressor and the fatherless and the widow.

It's essentially the Hippocratic Oath.

First, do no harm.

And in this sense, the oppressor is the one who is going to try to use

the destitute situation, the powerless situation of widows and

orphans, for their own gain.

They're going to prey on those who don't have a way of naturally pushing back.

So we're going to use these widows and orphans for our own gain.

And in this, the city elders, the magistrates, were told not to show any

partiality whatsoever to those who were powerful and wealthy or to

those who were powerless and poor.

They were to give no favoritism one way or the other.

They don't take a side.

And the very character of God was cited as the reason why they should not

favor either the rich and powerful or either the poor and powerless.

And in this, they would be truly rebuking the oppressor.

One example of rebuking the oppressor came during the ministry of Jeremiah, where they were supposed to release

every seventh year.

And they weren't doing it.

And so he had to confront them that they weren't doing it.

And so they said, OK, OK, OK, fine, we'll do it.

And then they did it, and then they undid it, which, again, back to Corinthians, was the repentance that

people repent from.

It wasn't true godly sorrow.

But their rebuking the oppressor would be things like that, saying, no, you can't

continue on seeking yourself.

Cease to do evil.

Seek justice.

And that would be rebuking the oppressor.

Defending that the fatherless does not have the father, the

widow does not have the husband, who stand in the city gate and contend against evil doings

against them.

So someone has got to do that.

Someone has got to do that.

And if it's the fatherless and the widow, perhaps they don't have enough to eat because they're not letting them glean,

or they're harvesting their fields all the way to the corners, or they're taking a second pass over their vineyard, or the second pass over

their fig trees, or they're not letting the poor come through their orchards and take a handful for

the day, or whatever they're doing to deny God's standards about how they

were to treat one another.

Now, the repentance that God is seeking from

Israel would be one in which it's not simply an internal,

heartfelt sadness that there was sin.

But with this actual turning of the mind from

within comes the fruit of repentance, which looks like the last

six lines.

First three lines, the turning of the heart, the turning around, repenting away from

evil, turning towards the Lord.

But the last six lines are the fruit of repentance.

This is what it looks like.

And what it looks like ultimately is that they would be loving God supremely,

loving others rightly, and stewarding the creation righteously as well.

That's what it looks like.

It looks like the image of God being restored.

Now, that's why in the New Covenant, when we talk about repentance, we're not talking

about us trying to make sure that we don't break the New Covenant.

We can't break the New Covenant.

Jesus is the one who keeps the New Covenant.

He has fulfilled the New Covenant.

But repentance looks like us turning back to Christ.

Repentance looks like us becoming more Christ -like, putting off the old

man and putting on the new man.

The new man in Christ is the language that we have in the New Testament.

And that's why what we look at here, some of it is particularly connected to Israel,

but in general, because of us being made in the image of God, we can apply those very same

principles of repentance.

Now, next time, we're going to be looking at the covenant renewal that God calls for

in verse 18, as well as the requirements that he reminds

Israel of in verses 19 through 20.

All right, let's go ahead and close now with a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the...