Dumb Idols

Please turn to Isaiah 41. Preaching text for today is Isaiah 41 verses 21 through 24. Please stand when you have that. Further reading of God's Word. Isaiah 41 beginning in verse 21. Set forth your case, says the Lord.

Bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. Let them bring them and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome, or declare to us the things to come.

Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods, do good or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified. Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing. An abomination is he who chooses you.

Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we ask that you would help us to understand those spirits that are at work against us. We pray that you would help us to understand false religion, false ideologies, false idols.

We pray that this understanding would give us a great confidence in the true faith that is from above, great confidence in Christ Jesus our Savior. In his name we pray. Amen. Well, Isaiah continues here.

The Courtroom Setting of Isaiah 41

Addressing the.

False religions of the world, the enemy nations of Israel, particularly in a courtroom setting. This has been a theme that has come throughout, that the nations are being called together for judgment before the Lord.

And we see that here in this passage. This passage is supposed to give us confidence regarding the nature of God and regarding the nature of idols, that God is far greater than all idols. While that may seem like a unnecessary truth in a modern age that does not have many idols, there are many cultures, even cultures that we are exposed to, being such a multicultural area, cultures that you are likely exposed to, that do have idolatry of the traditional sense with images that represent false gods.

But yet, idolatry goes far beyond that. And this applies to all false ideologies. And are we not completely surrounded by false ideologies? God would have us to understand these things in the order that we would be prepared to defend against them.

So to understand idols, you must understand that they have no understanding. To understand idols, you must understand they have no understanding. Just to overview this passage for you, in verse 21, he says, "'Set forth your case,' says the Lord, 'bring your proof,' says the King Jacob.'".

This is a continuation of the trial. They must put their case forward. They must bring their proof. He's asking them for evidence that will be submitted into the court so that they will be tried. Now, who is it that is on trial?

It says, "'Let them bring them and tell us what is to happen.'". Verse 23, it says, "'Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods.'". It's idols in particular that are being addressed here.

It's idols, and then on top of that, those human consorts of the idols. Now, in addition to that, we have the notion of a judge. We have also God the King. He is the judge in this situation, and then we likewise have a jury.

It says, "'Let them bring them and tell us.'". Who is the us? There are different theories. This is the Trinity, that this is all the nations who are supposed to observe what is supposed to happen, that this is God and His holy angels.

It seems to make the most sense that this is God and His people, that God and His people are sitting as the jury. And indeed, not only is that indicated by the identification and solidarity of God with His people just in the previous verses, but also you see that in 1 Corinthians 6 and the rest of the New Testament, where it indicates that the saints will judge the world.

The saints will even judge angels. Those demonic spirits that have opposed God, those idols, the saints will, after themselves having undergone judgment, take the bench and judge along with Jesus Christ.

Now, what is the challenge that is placed here before the idols and their human companions? Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome or declare to us the things to come.

It is to explain the past or to predict the future. This is the challenge, to explain the past or predict the future, or to do some great deed that is beyond understanding. Tell us what is to come hereafter that we may know that you are gods, do good or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified.

Now, of course, they are not able to do these things. It says, behold, you are nothing and your work is less than nothing. An abomination is he who chooses you. They are not capable of explaining the past.

They are not capable of predicting the future. And they are not capable of doing some great work that is beyond human understanding. This is the challenge that God gives idols, that God gives false religions.

This is the challenge that is not only to serve as judgment for them, but is also to serve as encouragement for us that we would test the spirits of the world and know that they are false. They cannot explain the past.

They cannot predict the future. And they cannot do anything great beyond human understanding. First, I believe it is important for us to understand the nature of idols. Many people think of idols as being impotent beyond the sense that Isaiah refers to them as being powerless and impotent.

Now, indeed, idols are impotent. There are no real gods, yet there is a sense in which they do have a real power. Consider Paul's clarification on this truth in 1 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul says in verses 4 through 6,.

Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence, and there is no god but one. Now, you notice the translators of the ESV put this in quotation marks, an idol has no real existence, and there is no god but one.

What that is suggesting to you, and I believe is correct, is that Paul is quoting the Corinthians. He's responding to their letter. They have made these statements in defense of eating food sacrificed to idols.

Why is it okay to eat food sacrificed to idols in their mind? Well, because an idol is not a real thing. There's no real threat. So you sacrifice to an idol and it doesn't mean anything. And there's no god but one.

So if there's no god but one, then who cares about any claim about a false god? You can eat food sacrificed to idols. It says, For there are, although there are many, maybe, so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

So he affirms this truth. He starts off by affirming this truth. This is frequently what happens through 1 Corinthians. He quotes the Corinthians as they're saying something in defense of a sinful practice.

He first begins by affirming the thing that they are saying and then later corrects it. So he affirms that, yes, that is true. And on the face, this is correct. There's only one God. Idols have no real existence, yet there is an implication of idols.

Later on in 1 Corinthians 10, 19 through 20, he comes back full circle and he says, What do I imply then that food offered to idols is anything or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God.

I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy?

Are we stronger than he? So he affirms, yes, there are no other gods. Yes, an idol has no real existence, but there are demonic powers behind idols. Demons are very real things. And so it is not nothing to eat food sacrificed to an idol because the demonic is a truly powerful thing, even if it does not compete with God, even if God is greater than the idols.

Now, what kind of things can idols do? They can do false signs. The Bible says that demons, that Satan, is capable of doing false signs. You see that in 2 Thessalonians 2. You see that elsewhere. It talks about all kinds of false signs and wonders.

Now, what does that mean, to be a false sign and wonder? Well, it could be something that's not really a sign at all, but people are deceived into thinking it's a sign. Or it could be something that is truly a supernatural work, but it is not of God and it does not have the character of God.

You see this all throughout the religions of the world. You look at Roman Catholicism and how they have various kinds of false signs, all sorts of supposed miracles. These are false signs and wonders.

And this should be a warning for you. Those people who would interact with spiritual things and think that they are safe because there's no God but one, are misunderstanding the reality that while there is no God but one, demons are real.

Idols do not have the power of being true gods, but there is a demonic force behind them. It is not nothing to go and pay respects to an idol. If you would sacrifice food, an orange, whatever it may be, at one of these statues where that is the customary thing to do in that culture, these are things that involve real demonic realities.

Witchcraft is a real thing. You should not play around with Ouija boards. You shouldn't play with tarot cards and act like, oh, there's no problem here because idols are not real. Well, while an idol has no reality and that there is no all-powerful God behind it, there are demonic forces.

You should not go participate in some ghost tour, thinking that it's just a harmless sightseeing thing. These are things that I have in the past signed up for, thinking, oh, that will be kitschy and fun.

And then about 30 seconds into it, I remember, oh, right, I believe this stuff is real. Not that ghosts are real, but that demonic deception is real, and why would I even be a part of this? There are multiple times that in my younger years where I had begun to participate that and within minutes realized I need to leave.

What was I thinking? And then ideologies. The Bible tells us to test the spirits. If we are to test the spirits, what does that mean? The various ideologies of the world have demonic power behind them.

It is not nothing to go and toy around with false religion, with demonic in their nature. So we are to test the spirit. And this is important, not just because we would not want to elevate the demonic, but because of the real harm it does to ourselves.

Consider the final verse of this passage in Isaiah. It says, Behold, you are nothing and your work is less than nothing. An abomination is he who chooses you. It's not just that the idol is an abomination.

The one who chooses an idol is an abomination. If you've ever heard the saying, which I know you have, you are what you eat, it's not really very true. But it is true that you are what you worship in the sense that you become more like what you worship.

You worship an idol, you pay respect to that which is demonic, you yourself will be transformed to be an abomination like the idol. You worship the Lord God, you will become godly. You worship Christ, you'll be made more in his image.

So this is important to understand these things in order that we not be transformed into abominations, but that we be transformed into the image of the living God. The nature of this trial is important to recognize as well.

Many people think that God is on trial. They say that they are trying to test the truth to see if God is real, etc. You know, they are going and judging the evidence to see whether or not God is true.

What is the court, who is on trial in this courtroom scene? It's not God who is on trial. He is the judge. Idols and their human companions are on trial. So those who would think that God is on trial have this all backwards.

It is they in fact who are on trial and they must go before God with submission rather than going before him with a sense of authority, judging him. That is not to say that there is not a place for evaluating the truth and evaluating evidences, but in submission to God as the Bereans did, for example, going to the scriptures daily to see if these things are true.

Those people who would reject God by judging him or even out of a supposed good nature, as though they are testing God in a sincere way, consider the things of the Bible. These are ultimately disrespectful to God because, as it says in Romans 1, all know that God exists.

All know that he exists. They just refuse to honor him as God. Now I hope that more atheists would go and they would read the Bible and they would taste and see that God is good, but do not suppose to yourself that there is an honest way of judging the Lord.

He has made it clear that he is judge and we are to place ourselves in judgment under him. We are to come to him and be weighed out by him in his word. That is the right way of approaching the word and that is ultimately what happens when a man converts.

It is at that moment that he shifts. He is transformed by the Holy Spirit to shift from judging God to being judged by God, to realize that this word is telling me who I am. I am not deciding whether or not it's true.

It is telling me what is true and exposing truth to me. Notice who the king is here. It says that he is the king of Jacob in verse 21. He is the king of Israel. Now it is one thing to stand before a just judge having committed a crime.

It's another thing to stand before a just judge who is particularly responsible not for defending you and upholding your rights, though a just judge might do that, but particularly for upholding the rights of the defendant.

If you commit a crime in another country and stand before the judge, you would be much more afraid than committing a crime in your own country. That is partially because perhaps this other country wouldn't have the same kind of justice.

Maybe they would have a corrupt system. However, even if they were a perfectly just country, you would recognize that you are in danger being in another country where the primary objective of that judge, his chief purpose, is to defend his own people.

If you know that you are guilty, you will have no chance. There's no way that you could get away from the king of Jacob. The king of Jacob will defend the people of Jacob, the people of Israel. Now this challenge is about the nature of history.

It says, tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome, or declare to us the things that are to come. Now certainly, many people know the past, but they cannot explain the past.

The idea here is that they might have a bunch of data points, but they don't know where the data points are headed. The past is not just a bunch of random brute facts. They are things that are headed to a particular place.

If you have a bunch of dots and you're a data scientist or a statistician, your job might be to figure out where the next data points are going to be. You might draw some kind of best fit line to figure it out.

And if you really understand the nature of the dots on this chart, you would be able to tell where the next dots are going to be. If you don't understand them, you could pretend to have some kind of understanding, but then as it pans out, there would be nothing.

Consider the nature of the polling that happened for presidential elections in the past several years. I think it was 2012, there was the really surprisingly accurate results of the polls from Nate Silver.

I was very impressed by that. When 2016 came around and he was predicting a win for Hillary Clinton, I was just certain. This guy was just so accurate, down to the counties even, knowing how it was going to turn out last time.

Certainly he's going to have it right this time. And it turned out it was way off. It might seem like he knew what was going to happen, but he didn't. And then he didn't the next time either. This is the difference between God and idols or false ideologies.

False ideologies can pretend they know where things are headed, but they do not truly know where things are headed. Consider atheism. Atheism has a certain protology. They claim to know how the world began, and yet they do not truly know.

It does not even make sense in their own worldview. There's a famous quote from one thinker. It says, modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. One free miracle.

Let us take something out of nothing and then the rest will all be natural. That doesn't make sense even in an atheist worldview. That does not make sense. Consider also the anthropology of atheism. The view of mankind and man's religion.

Atheism, typically, the typical atheist anthropology says that man started off as being irreligious, or not irreligious, but I guess a-religious, having no religion. And then adopting some spiritism.

After that, adopting fetishism. Fetishism being like the idea that certain individual objects have spiritual concentration to them. And then from that, morphing into polytheism. And then after that, morphing into monotheism.

Monotheism being the higher part of this evolutionary spectrum of religion. And then maybe beyond that, you go back to no religion. See, even in that worldview, it doesn't make sense because then it comes full cycle and it isn't really the evolutionary thing that they had imagined.

They cannot explain where things are going. And not only that, but there is, those who have actually done the research to figure out what older cultures believe, remember, if we all came from Noah, if we all came from Noah and his family, if you were able to go back and we all came from Babel, if you were able to go back, you would find the oldest religions would be monotheistic, right?

They don't evolve into monotheism. They devolve from monotheism, right? That's the biblical worldview. Those who have done the research to catalog older cultures, et cetera, have found, and you can look this up, some of the best researchers are Wilhelm Schmidt and Winfried Corduan.

They have found that the oldest religions are more monotheistic in nature. And this is something where atheist anthropologists will just assume that it must be going in this direction, when the reality is when you look at the data, it's actually going in the opposite direction, the way the Bible would say.

These false ideologies cannot explain the past. They cannot explain where the future is headed. Consider progressivism. It's always talking about the right side of history, and then it's, people lose their minds when the right side of history isn't where history is going, because they think they know where history is going, and it turns out it's not going there at all.

Consider even other false ideologies within the auspices of Christianity, right, at least in name. You have Arminianism that would propose, the kind of Arminianism that would propose that this world is plan B, that God had in mind that He would create this world in Eden, give man free choice, and maybe man would trust in Him, believe in Him, love Him, and it would turn out good, and it didn't turn out the way that God was hoping, and now we have plan B that wasn't quite as good, but God's doing His best to make up for it.

No, that is, that is, according to this passage, the work of an idol. If you do not know where exactly it's going, and you do not, you are not the one causing great things to happen such that they would be brought about perfectly, the God of the Bible is one who has in mind what His end is.

He has worked the works from the beginning so that He knows where He is taking it. He has worked those things. He knows what the future holds, not just because He can see the future. It's not out of a receptive observation.

It's not out of a deductive knowledge that He is learning about the future. Rather, He intuitively knows about the future, and that's a technical term to mean that it's just knowledge He already has, not knowledge He receives.

He intuitively knows about the future because He is the one who has directed the future from the past. He's the only one who understands these things. The others cannot explain it. Not one religion knew that the cross was coming.

It is something that was planned by God. That is where it was headed, and He brought it about. It was greater than anything anyone could imagine. It is not the good or evil that others could do that would be understandable by man.

Rather, it is something far greater. When it offers this challenge, it says, do good or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified. The idea is you should put this challenge before the idol. It says, okay, if you are all-powerful, do something that is beyond our understanding.

God in the cross did something that was beyond man's understanding. God and man being joined together in the person of Jesus Christ. Sacrifice, resurrection from the dead to accomplish this wonderful end.

All of that is beyond man's understanding. Anything an idol has ever done, even real things, the false signs that are truly real, real demonic deceptions, none of those are beyond the understanding of man.

They could all be explained ultimately. Yet what God has done was beyond man's anticipation, beyond man's understanding, because man does not know where things are headed apart from God's disclosure of where they are headed.

This idea of being dismayed and being terrified is an idea of beyond human understanding, and only God has accomplished something that is so beyond human understanding. You know, some of the best horror, works of horror, or at least the kind that I personally find the most horrific, are those that try to create something that is beyond your understanding, or at least suggest to you that there is something going on beyond your understanding.

I think, like, Lovecraftian horror, right? What's he trying to do in these, you know, cosmic horrors is describe things that are so ancient and so beyond human understanding that it feels like something that is terrifying and dismaying because you don't know, you don't understand what it is.

Only God can truly work something that is beyond human understanding, and he has. He has done so in the cross. He has demonstrated his truth in the cross, and no other idol has done anything similar. We must understand the spiritual nature of idols and idolatry and ideologies.

We must understand the trial that is to be put before them. They cannot explain the past. They cannot predict the future. Only God can do this, and these are challenges that are supposed to be offered to them in order that you would have confidence in this truth.

None of the world can do that, and it's not God who is on trial. If you feel that you need to be defensive about the faith, you do not need to be defensive as though you are on trial, as though God is on trial.

He is not the one on trial. Even if the world acts that way, he is not on trial. It's the ideologies of the world that are on trial, and they are the ones that will be shown false, and you can bring that attitude to every conversation with an unbeliever.

It is the ideologies of the world that are on trial. That's the attitude that is not prideful. It is one that honors God, recognizing that he is above all things and that we are beneath him. It is true humility to approach conversations that way, not treating God as the one on trial, but treating man as the one on trial.

It is by this demonstration of the gospel that he brings about the oasis that he had described in the previous passage. He brought about that oasis by demonstrating his goodness, that he can explain the past.

Where was it going with the fall? What was his purpose in that? Well, it was to bring a human savior to die for man in order that man might more fully know him than he would otherwise. What was his purpose in bringing the people through the wilderness and saving them?

Well, it was to give us an illustration of that salvation in addition to preserving a people that the Messiah might be born. What is his purposes in all these things? It is to reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

This is what God is doing. This is the oasis that he is creating through demonstrating in the great trial that he has put on in the courtrooms of heaven and displayed on earth his greatness and his glory in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this demonstration of who you are in Jesus Christ. We thank you that you have done something more wonderful than anyone could understand. That you have challenged the ideologies of the world to explain where things are going.

None was able to predict the cross. None was able to predict the rise of your kingdom. And none, even now after these things, are even able to explain that past in a way that makes sense, in a way that truly predicts where the future is going.

We ask that you would continue to demonstrate your greatness and that we would serve you with all humility, recognizing that the idols of this world, though they have demonic power behind them, are truly nothing.

And that we may go forward with fearing you and not fearing any man. In Jesus' name, amen.