WWUTT 2144 There is No Peace for the Wicked (Isaiah 57:1-21)

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You have surely heard the phrase, rest in peace. You've probably seen it inscribed on many tombstones.

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It comes from the Bible. But in addition to saying, rest in peace, it also says something about those who won't rest in peace when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study of God's Word that we may be filled with the knowledge of His will.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. In our Old Testament study, we're back to the book of Isaiah.

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And up to chapter 57 this week. This is going to sound a little different than the last several chapters.

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If you'll remember back to chapter 53, we heard about the Savior. And then in chapters 54 to 56, we've heard about whom he will save, the afflicted from both

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Jews and Gentiles, even from among the nations. Well, here in chapter 57, we're going to hear about the righteous mention in the first couple of verses.

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And remember, it's those who are in the Savior who are the ones who are declared righteous.

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But then there's going to be a rebuke for those who had led them astray or those who had not come to the

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Savior, but had gone about in wickedness and even proclaiming their own righteousness.

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But then we will hear about Yahweh delivering the lowly, those who are humble. And we conclude with this statement.

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You've probably heard it before. It comes up a couple of times in Isaiah. In fact, Isaiah 57, 21, there is no peace, says my

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God, for the wicked. So we see kind of a culmination of things that we've read over the last several chapters.

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We have the deliverance of the righteous, but those who are wicked will find no peace.

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Let me begin reading here in verse one, and I'm going to go through verse 13 out of the

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Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord. The righteous man perishes and no man puts it upon his heart.

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And men of loving kindness are gathered away while no one understands. For the righteous man is gathered away from evil.

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He enters into peace. They rest in their beds, each one who walked in his upright way.

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But draw near, you sons of a soothsayer, seed of an adulterer and a prostitute.

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Against whom do you jest? Against whom do you open wide your mouth and stick out your tongue?

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Are you not children of transgression, seed of lying, who inflame yourselves among the oaks under every green tree, who slaughter the children in the ravines under the clefts of the cliffs?

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Among the smooth stones of the ravine is your portion. They are your lot. Even to them you have poured out a drink offering.

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You have made a grain offering. Shall I relent concerning these things? Upon a mountain lofty and lifted up you have made your bed.

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You also went up there to offer sacrifice. Behind the door and the doorpost you have set up your memorial.

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Indeed, far removed from me you have uncovered yourself, and have gone up and made your bed wide, and you have cut a covenant for yourself with them.

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You have loved their bed. You have looked on their manhood. You have journeyed to the king with oil and increased your perfumes.

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You have sent your envoys a great distance and made them go down to Sheol. You were tired out by the length of your road, yet you did not say it is hopeless.

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You found renewed strength, therefore you did not faint. Of whom were you anxious and fearful when you lied and did not remember me, nor even put me upon your heart?

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Was I not silent even for a long time, so you do not fear me? I will declare your righteousness and your deeds, but they will not profit you.

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When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you. But the wind will lift all of them up, and a breath will take them away.

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But he who takes refuge in me will inherit the land and will possess my holy mountain."

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And the way that we start this particular chapter is also the way that we end. We have this statement about the righteous being gathered to peace when the righteous man dies, and then it's going to be said the same toward the end, and yet a declaration of the wicked that there is no peace for them.

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So you have quite this contrast between the righteous and the wicked. God will deliver the righteous, but the wicked will perish.

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So let's start here in chapter 57, verse 1. Notice that it says the righteous man perishes.

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That's the first statement that we have here. The righteous man perishes, and no man puts it upon his heart.

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And men of loving kindness are gathered away while no one understands. This is a parallelism, so you have the same thing being said twice, only in a slightly different way.

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Now this statement at the start of the righteous man perishes, this isn't the same sense in which we would read in, say,

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John 3 .16. For God so loved the world he gave his only son, and whoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

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If those who believe in Christ will not perish, then why is it said here that the righteous man perishes?

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Well, he perishes from a human vantage point, meaning that he dies. He dies and he goes into the ground.

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Doesn't seem that there's any great benefit for being righteous then, because even the righteous and the wicked both die, and they go back to the same place.

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They go to the dust from which they are formed. This is also talked about in Ecclesiastes chapter 3.

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So here the righteous man perishes, and no man puts it upon his heart. Who misses him?

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And men of loving kindness are gathered away while no one understands. They even try to fathom this.

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Why is it that God would allow good people to die? Surely you've said something like that, maybe asked that question before.

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Why do bad things happen to good people? As R .C. Sproul has responded to that, it only happened once, and he volunteered.

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The only good person who ever lived is Jesus Christ. But yet you have these men who are righteous.

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They do as God has required, and yet they still die, and no one understands why it has to happen this way.

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But it says here, the next statement, this is the last line of verse 1, for the righteous man is gathered away from evil.

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He gets to leave this place and go and be at a place where there is no more wickedness at all.

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No more pain, no more death. Every tear will be wiped away from their eyes, as said in Revelation 21.

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Verse 2, he enters into peace. They rest in their beds, each one who walked in his upright way.

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And by the way, it is from this passage that the famous saying was coined, requiem in pace.

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That's Latin for rest in peace. R .I .P. What you sometimes comically see engraved on tombstones.

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It's like the comic or the illustrated version of a tombstone, you don't put somebody's name on it, you put

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R .I .P. Or when somebody famous dies on social media, everyone is wishing him to rest in peace.

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Well, that comes from Isaiah 57, 1 and 2. But again, this is going to contrast with the statement about the wicked at the end.

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There is no peace for the wicked. So the only ones who enter into peace for eternity are the righteous, those who were made righteous by the

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Savior. Again, that was in chapter 53. And then those who receive that deliverance in chapters 54 to 56, whether they are from the

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Jews or from the nations, those who have received the righteousness of the one who suffered on our behalf.

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We are the ones who will enter into peace for all eternity. But those who persist in their wickedness find no peace.

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They will enjoy their delights and their pleasures for a time, but in eternity, they have only judgment to look forward to, and that forever.

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So let's continue here with the rebuke that is made of them, beginning in verse 3. But draw near, you sons of a soothsayer, seed of an adulterer and a prostitute.

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Yeah, try that one as an insult sometime, you son of a soothsayer. All that to say that these are people who were raised by pagans.

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You learn paganism. You learn to rebel against God and go after your pleasures and delights and worship false gods and serve them.

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That's what you learn. So the statement, you sons of a soothsayer, you were taught by those who were in rebellion against God.

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You were seed of an adulterer and a prostitute. That's pretty insulting.

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That's an incredible insult. In fact, even coming from Isaiah, there's a chapter in Ezekiel 16, which is considered to be one of the most scandalous chapters in all of scripture.

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Won't read it to you now. We will get to Ezekiel eventually. But this one here in Isaiah, this one's pretty bad too, to make these kinds of statements about the wicked, that you're a son of a soothsayer, the seed of an adulterer and a prostitute.

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So your father slept around with all kinds of women, even breaking his own covenant vows to his wife.

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And your mother was a woman who slept around with all kinds of men. This is who you are. Against whom do you jest?

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Verse four. Like, who are you mocking? Who are you boasting in yourself against?

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Against whom do you open wide your mouth and stick out your tongue? Are you not children of transgression, seed of lying?

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And remember what is said about all of us in Ephesians 2, before we came to Christ, we were dead in our transgressions and sins in which we once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by our nature's children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

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That was all of us before we came to Christ. We were children of transgression, seed of lying.

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And it is Christ who has come along and has rescued us out of that and has made us children of God, children of righteousness instead of children of transgression.

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Verse five, who inflame yourselves under the oaks, under every green tree.

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Now, where did a lot of this paganism take place? Where did these pagan practices occur?

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They often happened in the forest. They often happened among trees because it would be the trees that the people would cut down and fashion into idols.

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So they would be worshiping these trees even before they cut them down and made idols out of them. They would do their sacrifices under these trees.

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They would do lewd acts even under these trees. You inflame yourselves among the oaks, under every green tree, who slaughter the children in the ravines, under the clefts of the cliffs.

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This was another place where some of these pagan sacrifices would take place, in the valleys and under cliffs, where these idols would be erected and fires would burn.

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You wouldn't burn the fires under the trees, but you would burn them among the rocks. And it was there that these heathens, these wicked people, would even burn child sacrifices there.

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And this did happen even among the Jews when they were imitating all of the pagan practices of the

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Canaanites that were around them. When they went after their gods, instead of worshiping the one true

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God, they would sacrifice their children to Moloch. Verse 6, among the smooth stones of the ravine is your portion.

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They are your lot. Even to them you have poured out a drink offering.

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So pouring out a drink offering, or what's also referred to as a libation, this was a common practice among the pagans even that they would pour out drink offerings to their false gods.

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Now, even in the law, God demands drink offerings. But here, instead of giving a drink offering to the

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Lord, it's giving a drink offering to a false god, their own invention. They fashion their own god in their image to do the things that they want.

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So this false god will give them all of their passions. So even among the smooth stones, they are your portion, they are your lot.

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They're what you're going to get. Is there any value in stones? No, there are rocks everywhere.

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So you pick up a rock. I've got rocks in my front yard. If I pick up one of those rocks, and I'm not holding any money in my hand,

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I'm not going to be able to sell it for anything. But this is what the Lord is saying, this is what you receive.

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You won't receive any of the eternal treasure that is promised to those who are in Christ.

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And you know the luxurious stones that are described in heaven in the book of Revelation, topaz and jasper and sapphire and pearly gates and streets of gold, right?

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Well, those who are not in Christ, what they receive is nothing. What you're going to get, the stones, the rocks, that's where you'll be buried.

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And you won't get anything of value at all. Even to them, you have poured out a drink offering once again, you have made a grain offering, shall

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I relent concerning these things? Like, are you going to go unpunished for this? Verse seven, upon a mountain lofty and lifted up, you have made your bed.

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You also went up there to offer sacrifice. Now this was where the pagans also would offer sacrifices.

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Their high places were among the hills and among the mountains. Where was the high place of God?

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There was only one place and that was Mount Moriah, where the temple was built. God said every other high place you are to tear down.

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But the Jews would still go up to those pagan high places and offer their sacrifices.

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Verse eight, this is again where it gets pretty descriptive, very scandalous. Behind the door and the doorpost, you have set up your memorial.

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This is though to say, you've done this in your bed chambers. Indeed, far removed from me, you have uncovered yourself, you've exposed yourself and have gone up and made your bed wide, all kinds of partners.

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Now, of course, what the Jews were doing is they were worshiping false gods. So God is saying here, you've played the harlot by uniting yourself with all these false gods.

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And of course, it's more than just worship to these false gods. There's all of these deviant acts that come along with that.

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I mean, paganism is not just you go out and worship the wind. We went frolicking in the daisies in the wind and the wind is our mother and this hill is our father and all this kind of thing.

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No, that's not paganism. That's what we often think of paganism as being. It might start there.

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But true paganism is no, we went out and worship the wind by having sex on an altar and then slaughtering a child to it.

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And that's what's going on in our culture, the rampant sexuality in our culture.

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It is crazy the level of hyper sexuality that is happening in the western world today, the

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United States in particular, because that's where I live. And it is from these promiscuous sex acts that women find themselves with child.

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And what do they do? They go to an abortion clinic and they sacrifice the child and have it slaughtered. It's the same pagan practices from 3000 years ago that are being described here that are still happening in the world.

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Even today, going back to the same practices, those who hate God go to this.

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This is what true paganism is. It's not just somebody who is wearing hippie clothes and says, peace, man, and believes in Mother Earth.

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Earth Day was earlier this week, incidentally, and the guy who founded Earth Day, you know what he did?

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He killed his wife or his girlfriend or something like that. The woman that he was with, he killed her and turned her into compost.

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So again, the paganism is more than just worshiping the earth.

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It's doing incredibly wicked, evil things. And God will judge it and pour out his wrath upon it.

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And maybe a person out there will say, you know, I don't believe in God, but I don't do some of these wicked things that you're talking about, but they are partners with them.

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And as said in Romans 1 32, though, you know, God's righteous decree and that those who do such things deserve to die.

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You not only do them, but you give hearty approval to those who practice them. So maybe these people don't participate in some of the, in some of the worst wicked acts that are happening in our culture, but they would still be approving of it.

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And they'll even vote for the politicians that will allow it. Is God going to let these things go unpunished?

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Shall I relent concerning these things? He asks, of course not. The judgment of God is coming.

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My friends do not let yourselves be carried away by this wicked culture. You will be carried away by the judgment of God.

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When it comes do not continue in sinful wickedness and sexual immorality and think that that is going to go unpunished.

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You have gone up and made your bed wide. You have cut a covenant for yourself with them. You have loved their bed.

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You have looked on their manhood. Again, God is referring to these wicked

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Jews as harlots and saying that they have gone in and yeah, they've looked upon the nakedness of these false gods that they are laying with.

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And when you are engaging in, in lawlessness, in sin, that God has promised that he will judge in sexual promiscuity and all these other things that go along with it.

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That's what you're doing. You're cutting a covenant with false gods, whether or not you acknowledge that that's what's happening, making your bed with them and you will be destroyed with them.

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Verse nine, you have journeyed to the king with oil and increased your perfumes. You have sent your envoys a great distance and made them go down to Sheol.

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In other words, this harlot has prettied herself up so that she would attract the evil.

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She would even attract the wickedness. Those false gods would come to her.

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You were tired out by the length of your road, yet you did not say it is hopeless. You found renewed strength, therefore you did not faint.

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This person was so worn out by their evil and their own wickedness and yet continued to find strength to continue on that they might do more wickedness.

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And I've seen this and perhaps you have before as well. I've witnessed to people who were drug addicts, who were strung out, who were basically at the end of their rope and said,

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I can't do this anymore. I'm so worn out by this and the high is never enough. I just need to get more and more and more.

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And I've tried to rescue them out of there, out of that situation. And for a time, it seems like they're going to go the right way, but then nope, they jump right back into the addiction again.

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They find renewed strength and there's all kinds of evils and temptations and addictions that can go along with that.

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It's not just drugs and alcohol. You found renewed strength because this is a person whose heart is in complete rebellion against God.

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You did not faint. You were not tired of the evil that you were doing. You wanted more of it.

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Of whom were you anxious and fearful when you lied and did not remember me or even put me upon your heart?

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Was I not silent even for a long time? So you do not fear me. I will declare your righteousness and your deeds, but they will not profit you.

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So what that is to say is, is that even those who do wickedly like this, even they know how to do good things.

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And yeah, sure, I'll give you credit for doing those nice things for others or that occasional kindness that you showed, but it won't profit you.

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It's not going to save you because you're not righteous. Your righteousness is not enough to save you.

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We cannot be saved by our own good deeds. We need the works of Christ and the works that he did in his life and in his death and then in his being resurrected from the grave.

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For those who believe in him, his righteousness is imputed to us. That's what we need to enter into the presence of God.

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That's what we need for him to look at us and see us not as worthy of judgment, but worthy of his love and his affection.

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We need the righteousness of Christ. Only his righteousness makes us worthy, not our good deeds, but his good work.

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So turn to the Lord Jesus Christ and live. Verse 13, when you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you, but the wind will lift all of them up and a breath will take them away.

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But he who does, who takes refuge in me will inherit the land and will possess my holy mountain.

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The one who takes refuge in me will inherit the land. Let's finish the rest of this up a little more quickly.

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And it will be said, build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every stumbling block out of the way of my people.

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For thus says the one high and lifted up who dwells forever, whose name is holy. I dwell on a high and holy place and also with the crushed and lowly and spirit in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the crushed.

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For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry for the spirit would grow faint before me and the breath of those whom

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I have made because of the iniquity of his greedy gain. I was angry and struck him.

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I hid my face and was angry and he went on turning away in the way of his heart. I have seen his ways, but I will heal him.

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I will lead him and pay him and his mourners in full with comfort, creating the praise of the lips.

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Peace, peace to him who is far and to him who is near says

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Yahweh and I will heal him. By the way, that's the statement that I will save Jews and Gentiles, the one who is near and the one who is far.

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I've seen their wicked deeds. I've been angry with him for a time, but I will heal him.

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That's the gospel right there. And again, saying that the savior we read about in Isaiah 53 will be for these whom

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God will save, creating praise on their lips. Verse 20, but the wicked are like the tossing sea for it cannot be quiet and its waters toss up refuse and mud.

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There is no peace says my God for the wicked. Peace in death is only if we knew

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Christ in life and those who knew Jesus Christ will live in comfort now.

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We'll be comforted now knowing that our sins are forgiven. They're not being held against us. Is that not peace and comfort in your life to know that to know that your sins are forgiven?

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But for those who are wicked, they won't know that peace in this life. And they most certainly will not know peace in the life that is to come.

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You know, you look among the wicked and the evil, even within our culture, and it might seem to you that they're winning and that their life is even easier than yours.

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Seems like they got no cares in the world and look at all the fun that they get to have. Look a little bit closer and you'll see that they're actually miserable.

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Even in this life, they are utterly miserable. You look at the famous people, whether it's

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Hollywood stars, rock and roll stars, we even call them that anymore. Pop stars, athletes, no matter who, movies, television, no matter who it is, you look at the famous and you see how much money they're making, but you watch their biographies.

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You can even go and see some of their personal lives on social media and you don't have to read between the lines very far to see that they're just messed up and they can't find any peace.

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Even in this life, more money, more fame, nor drugs. It's not doing, it's not doing it for them.

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And for some of them, it will even kill them. They can't find peace in this life. And those who persist in this wickedness and rebellion against God, they most definitely won't find peace in the life to come.

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Those who truly rest in peace are those who rest in Christ.

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That goes well with what we had been reading earlier this week, even in the gospel of Mark, Christ is our rest.

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We cannot attain favor with God by doing great and righteous deeds.

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We have the favor of God because he's merciful, because he's gracious, because he gave us his son to reconcile us to himself.

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Now show that you belong to Christ by living righteously.

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Heavenly father, we thank you for this gift that you have given to us far greater than anything we could have asked for or imagined the gift of your son,

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Jesus Christ, that we might be forgiven our sins and given an inheritance in the eternal kingdom that belongs to Jesus, our savior.

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We're going to continue to kick around in this life for a little while. And God, as we do that, protect us and keep us from temptation.

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Turn our eyes upon Jesus, that we may look full in his wonderful face and the things of this world will look strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

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As we sing in the old hymn, lead us in paths of righteousness for your name's sake.

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It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. For more about our ministry, visit us online at www .utt