The Only Savior

Go ahead and turn to Isaiah chapter 43. Preaching will be particularly on verse 11.

I will read 8 -13 for context. Isaiah 43. When you have that, go ahead and stand for the reading of God's Word.

Bring out the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears. All the nations gather together, and the people assemble.

Who among them can declare this and show us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to prove them right.

And let them hear and say, it is true. You are my witnesses, declares the

Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me, and understand that I am he.

Before me, no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the

Lord, and besides me there is no Savior. I declare, and saved, and proclaimed.

And when there was no strange God among you, and you are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and I am

God. Also, henceforth, I am he. There is none who can deliver from my hand.

I work, and who can turn it back? Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank

You today for Your Word. We thank You for our precious Savior, Jesus Christ. He is indeed our only

Savior, and we ask that You would help us as we meditate upon this truth. In Jesus' name, amen. So here in this context, we have the continuation of that courtroom scene in this section of Isaiah, where God has called together the nations for judgment, and He is demonstrating that He is greater than all the other gods, and He is more powerful than all the nations.

And He is doing so by His blind and deaf witnesses. That is, those who have eyes, and those who have ears, and so have been able to observe things, but not understand them and interpret them.

And so, as they are witnesses to these truths of what God has done, by their own testimony, demonstrate that God is greater than all.

We are indeed those blind witnesses who were saved by means that we did not anticipate.

The church as a whole, saved by a means it did not anticipate. God's people, in no way anticipating the incarnation,

Christ becoming flesh, in no way anticipating the cross, the resurrection. And all of this demonstrating that God is a

Savior, unlike any other. That He is a God, and there is no other

God. No God formed before Him. No God formed after Him. Here, it speaks of Him as being the only

Savior. Now on one hand, the term God and Savior are in a sense synonyms.

If you call someone your God, in particular, it means that you trust in them as a

Savior. Right, that is what we see throughout Scripture, where it talks about my God, your God, et cetera.

These are not statements about which gods exist, they're statements about which gods are being trusted in for salvation.

Yet, when we distinguish these concepts between a God and a Savior, we can think about the difference between power and power applied to the betterment or to the well -being of someone.

Right, and so there is no other God, there is no other God formed before Him or after Him. He is the only one.

He is the only true and ultimate power, but He is also the only one whom you can trust in for true and ultimate power to be applied to you.

And so, last week as we've looked at God being the only ultimate power, this week we look at Him being the only ultimate power that can be trusted in, particularly, for salvation.

So when we speak of salvation, what we're talking about is that source of well -being, that source of well -being.

We might talk about salvation in different senses. This is not just talking about spiritual salvation the way that you might be thinking about it.

God is the only Savior in any sense. There's no political Savior that can last forever.

Men and horses all die out. God is the only Savior of the individual as He comes before Him for well -being, but then, ultimately, of course, the only

Savior of the soul. Jesus is our only

Savior. In this passage, where it speaks of a

Savior, it has in mind salvation from Babylon. The people are going to go off into Babylon, they're gonna be saved out of Babylon.

But in context, to illustrate that, it also speaks of salvation from Egypt. We saw statements earlier that alluded to Egypt and later on, we're going to see in verses 16 and 17, thus says the

Lord who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings forth chariot and horse, army and warrior, they lie down and cannot rise.

They are extinguished and quenched like a wick. So he's saying that same God, that same

Savior who saved from Egypt will save from Babylon. Who is the one who saved from Egypt?

Jude, verse five says, now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.

Who is the one who saved them out of Egypt? It is Jesus, Jesus Christ, is the one who saved out of Egypt.

Even here, when it talks about saving out of Babylon, that is the one whom we speak. He is

Savior in every sense. There is not any kind of ultimate salvation that can come from any, except for from Jesus Christ.

And of course, that is made most known in that salvation he grants to the soul.

If you consider the various parts of that salvation, he is an effectual Savior in justifying us.

He makes us right before God. He imputes his righteousness to us, granting us faith by his

Spirit. Through that faith, us being imputed, that means credited, with his righteousness.

There's no one else that does this, and this is effectual, it's perfect. It does not rely on any power in ourselves.

Rather, it is by his power that we are made right with God. And then beyond that, our adoption as sons.

How is it that one can be adopted? Is it by acting like a son that you can be adopted? No, it is only by being in the only begotten son,

Jesus Christ, that you may be counted a son of God. And so he is perfectly effectual as a

Savior, making all of his people sons of God. But then likewise, he is the only one who can sanctify.

It is not you by your efforts and works that you become more holy before God.

What is sanctification? Sanctification, the saving grace. It is a work of the

Spirit of God. It is a work of Christ in you through his Spirit.

To be more holy, and as you grow in the holiness that he himself is providing, it works itself out in your actions.

Sanctification is not a work that you do. It is a work that God does in you. It's a work that Christ does in you.

And then likewise, on that last day, when you are glorified, you who trust in Christ Jesus, who will be raised from the dead to glory, why is it that that will happen?

Well, it is because your body, as we heard about in the catechism question this morning, is united to Christ along with your whole self.

Union with Christ is not something that is simply the soul.

It is the whole person who is united to Christ, your body being a part of your whole person.

And so, your body will be raised. Why? Because Christ is a perfect Savior. There's none other that can do any of these things, and he is perfect at this work.

Those who he predestines, he also justifies, he also justifies those who he justifies, he glorifies.

Every step implies the next, and he completes the work. Some people think that it is a higher thing to speak of Jesus as a

Savior of all people in a way that Scripture does not intend. There is verse that speaks about Jesus being

Savior of all, especially those who believe. The idea there is not speaking of Jesus being the actual personal

Savior of each and every individual. It is saying that he is the only Savior, and it is specifically the

Savior, he is specifically the Savior of those who believe. If you were to say that Jesus is the

Savior of all, you are denying that he is an effectual Savior, because there are many who will not be saved.

The Bible makes it very clear that not all will be raised to a glorious resurrection, some will be raised to a resurrection of judgment.

Some will have their bodies stitched back just as much as necessary in order that they can stand before Christ in judgment, and then be cast into the lake of fire.

For those, if you were to call him the Savior of every individual, including those, he is not an effectual

Savior for them. But Christ is an effectual Savior. Every single person whom he intends to save, he saves perfectly, and he is the only one.

The fact that there was an absence of any clear answer to the problem of sin demonstrates how glorious a

Savior he is. God could have decided that rather than having the people wait 4 ,000 years from the beginning of the world to receive such a

Savior, he could have given Christ much sooner. Part of his purposes in delaying in giving a

Savior is to demonstrate that there is no other true Savior.

He gave mankind and all the false deities 4 ,000 years to come up with some answer, and they were not able.

There's none other that can justifies, there's none other that sanctifies, there's none that came up with the idea of the incarnation, there's no other that came up with the idea of the cross to be a means of salvation.

No other came up with that idea. And this is the point here in this passage. When he says,

I declared, and saved, and proclaim, and there is no strange God among you, you are my witnesses, et cetera, he is describing a salvation that has happened apart from the understanding of any who have come before.

No one else before had been able to come up with such a plan of salvation. All the plans of salvation are all just variations on the same theme, variations on self -righteousness, variations on trusting created things.

But God alone gives a salvation that is unanticipated and unlike anything anyone had experienced before.

And not only that, but even in your personal life, if you are one who has trusted in Jesus Christ, even in your personal life, was certainly a salvation that was unanticipated.

Who is it that understands the peace of God before receiving it?

You can read these words, but the experience of being saved by Christ is something that is unanticipated and demonstrates in the fact that it is unanticipated that Christ is the only

Savior, there is none other. Think about the various saviors that the world has to offer.

There are, of course, as we see in this passage, false gods, false idols, none of these can save.

It is not just like the modern man might imagine that these are such inert objects, wood and stone, that of course they can't save.

Now, Isaiah does mock them in that sense, but 1

Corinthians 10 lets us know that there are demonic powers at work in idolatry. There are real powers, it is not just complete inertness, but even those demonic powers, if you think about how powerful an angel or even a fallen angel is, those are not powerful enough to save.

They cannot produce any real salvation. There might be some, as you go and you serve a different pastor, there might be some temporary comforts you could receive, but they are not lasting.

You cannot receive any kind of right standing before God. You cannot receive any kind of hope, any kind of real hope of a resurrection.

None of those things. And then, of course, there are men. People trust in men as their saviors, people trust in kings.

Psalm 146 .3 says, put not your trust in princes and the son of man in whom there is no salvation.

When his breath departs, he returns to the earth. On that very day, his plans perish. Men do not last, they are not capable of saving.

God may provide a temporary relief through a good king, but they cannot last, they cannot ultimately save you.

A lot of people get very worked up about political leaders, about all kinds of different things. These are not real saviors.

Then beyond that, people trust in ideologies. There's all kinds of ideologies that promise some sort of utopia.

A lot of people think that you could come to something like communism or socialism, and if everybody works together and we all just share our things, that'll lead to bright and happy days.

Of course, as is revealed time and time again, anytime people reject

God's truth about the reality of property that is a real thing and the way that he has created man to have dominion, dominion meaning ownership, implying that property is a real thing, anytime people have rejected that, it has just led to destitution.

There are other false ideologies. People imagine that if they just have a lot of positive thinking that they can manifest things into existence, and they might get some temporary wins as they focus on accomplishing goals and ways that they hadn't before, but ultimately, these cannot give real happiness.

They cannot give any kind of permanent lasting salvation, any permanent lasting accomplishment.

Now, there are also false ideologies that come from materialist worldviews, where people think that by the power of humanity working together, we can solve the world's problems.

A lot of people trust in science as this ultimate thing that will, some people trust it to the point where they believe it will give man immortality, that doctors save to a point where man can just keep on living, or maybe they think that they can continue on as computers become more intelligent.

None of these things can provide an ultimate salvation. People trust therapists similarly, therapists and psychologists, but many of these ideas are just founded on materialistic notions, the idea that, well, there's not a soul, and so we can address all the problems of mankind by ignoring that and just focusing on the body and just good approaches to life.

These are false ideologies, and they will not provide any real lasting comfort. There are also true ideologies that you could trust in wrongly as a

Savior. Think about the various ways that the various spheres that exist in the world, right?

There's government, there's your home, there's your individual life, there's just society in general. You could adopt a right philosophy about any one of these things, justice and truth and rightly ordered home, et cetera, but none of those can save you.

A lot of people get very worked up about such things in such a way where they're putting their trust in that, and they think, if I just do all the right things, this will provide a real salvation.

At the end of their life, they have a well -ordered home, but they don't have a real peace before God.

And you can even trust true things that come not just from natural revelation, but also from special revelation.

You can trust in the church. This is what Roman Catholicism does. They offer you a

Savior that is found in the church rather than in the church's Savior, Jesus Christ. Try to point you to men.

You can trust in baptism and think that baptism is going to save you in a way beyond what

Scripture means, not the water, but the appeal to God for a good conscience, essentially pointing you to Christ as Savior.

None of those things save. And then, of course, you can trust in yourself. You can trust in your own wealth that by working very hard, by applying yourself, by whatever wisdom and wealth that you've come across, you can grant yourself comfort, that you can save yourself from the difficulties that are coming, and maybe you will avoid many of the difficulties, but ultimately, everyone will have to stand before their

Maker. Ultimately, these things do not last. You can also trust in yourself for your own righteousness, and this is the most devious kind of false

Savior, imagining that you, by your own self -righteousness, can stand before God and offer your holiness to Him, which is no holiness at all, which is just filthy rags, as is described in Isaiah.

Your own righteousness is worth nothing before God. What need has

He of it? Do you think that God, who has all things, is any want of your righteousness?

You have nothing to offer Him. And people will say things to suggest they understand the

Gospel by saying that I understand grace is necessary, but what happens when you say that grace is necessary, and that's really just what you mean in a very limited sense, is that you're saying it's not sufficient, that I will bring,

Christ does that 99%, and I offer that 1 % before God, or maybe it's far, far less, but if you are latching on to anything of yourself, your humility before God, your wisdom in choosing, in being able to discern what true and false is, whatever it may be, if you are relying on yourself, you cannot bring that before God and expect

Him to be able to favorably look upon you as one who is trusted only in the

Savior, Jesus Christ. It is only Christ who saves, not Him mostly and us in part. It is

Him completely who is the only Savior. Or you could say that it's

Christ's power that is necessary, and if you imagine that it's because of His power in you that you are doing the right things, that God then smiles upon you because of that, you're still mistaken.

God does approve of our good works as they're done by Christ's power, but that is not the righteousness by which we stand before Him in order to be welcomed into His kingdom.

It is still only by Christ's righteousness that we would be welcomed in. Any of these other things are not meritorious in such way.

He will look on them favorably, but they are not the means by which we stand before Him. It is only

Christ, it is only Christ in His righteousness. I have one caveat here.

I want to be able to preach strongly against trusting in anything else. At the same time, I do not mean to denigrate those means that God would give for ordered life.

Don't mean to, of course, denigrate taking political involvement seriously where God does call us to care for our nation.

I don't mean to denigrate any kind of right ordering of the home, et cetera. All these things are good, but none of them are saviors.

Do not trust in princes, do not trust in horses. Those things may be means that God uses, they may be things that we ought to support, but ultimately we cannot find our source of peace from them.

We can only have peace from God. And this demands an exclusivity.

Jesus Christ is, of course, the Savior that is spoken of here. I am the Lord, besides me there is no

Savior. If you look at the word Lord there, verse 11, it's an all caps Lord, that's the divine name,

Yahweh. I am Yahweh, and besides me there is no Savior. And as I've already demonstrated from Jude 5, this is speaking of Jesus.

Jesus Christ himself is the Savior God. I don't know if you've ever thought about making this argument to one who rejects the

Trinity, who says that Jesus is the Savior, but will not acknowledge him as God. I think this is one of the clearest ways to do it, and I have used passages like this before.

You put someone between a rock and a hard place where they either have to say, they have to say that Jesus either isn't

Savior, or they have to admit that he must be God. There's really no options here.

You'd have to say that he's, if you're going to deny his deity, that he is God, that he is one of the three persons of the

Trinity. You have to say that he is only a

Savior in some kind of secondary sense, and denigrate his Saviorhood. But almost all these cults speak of his

Saviorhood in such unqualified terms on a regular basis that one of their members would have a hard time denying that, and yet they will ultimately if they want to latch on to their falsehood.

This demonstrates that Christ is God. He is the only God. None formed before him, none formed after him.

He is the only Savior. John 14, six says, he said to him,

I'm the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. Christ is the only way.

There is no other way. People are happy to call Jesus Savior so long as he is not an exclusive Savior.

There are many people who will say, well, that's fine if he's a Savior for you, just as long as other people can have their own

Saviors. There are people who will say that, well, that's fine if he's in part a

Savior, but I'm gonna do my part too, right? Don't wanna take that, people don't want to take that away from themselves.

Kind of as James said earlier about the gospel being difficult because it demands that we sacrifice any kind of claim that we would have to our own standing before God, any kind of self -righteousness that we would bring before him.

None of that has any place with Christ being the way, the truth, and the life.

He is the way, the truth, the life. He's not 99 % of the way, and we're that other 1%.

He is the only way, the only truth, the only life. And this requires a wholehearted devotion to him.

Clearly, by the things that I'm saying, it's not a devotion that earns any kind of righteousness before the

Lord, but it's a devotion that is necessary because if you were to trust him alone as Savior, how could you follow after any other king?

How could you follow after yourself as being the king of your life? How could you follow after something else?

If he is the one who is the only one who can save, it requires a wholehearted giving of yourself to him, trusting in him.

Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in him completely. Pray to him, cast your cares before him, knowing that there's going to be no other answer.

Any answer that comes is ultimately going to be from Christ. Anything else is going to be short -lived.

Any other comfort you receive is going to have limited fruit. But Christ is the only one who can truly answer prayer, he being the means by which we go to the

Father. And as you cast your cares upon him, you can measure your anxiety to say, are my anxieties being taken care of as I bring things to him?

If you want to know whether or not you're trusting the Lord, it's a very simple question you could ask. It's who do you fear? What do you fear?

If your answer is, I only fear the Lord, then clearly you are trusting in Jesus Christ.

If you are concerned about the various things going on in your life in a way where those are dominating you, if you are concerned about the secrets that others might know about you, if you're concerned about how you would appear before others as you proclaim the gospel or how you would appear before others to say, no more of you, these are things that are, that demonstrate an anxiety that is not a trusting in Jesus Christ.

Trust in Jesus Christ so that it does not matter what the world thinks of you. It does not matter what anyone thinks of you because Christ himself is the only one who can give life.

He is the only one whose opinion matters. It's not the opinion of any other man.

It's only Jesus Christ as he saves. And speak of him as one that you trust in.

Speak of him as the only savior privately and publicly as you speak to yourself in thankfulness of how he has saved you, not just in the grand scheme but likewise in the small salvations he gives us every day as he continues to sanctify you, as he continues to uphold you.

And trust in him likewise as you express that to others that they may know

Christ, the only savior. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the Lord and besides him, there is no savior.

Amen. Amen. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the savior that you have given us.

We thank you for Jesus Christ. We pray that you would answer our anxieties with him.

We pray that we would not fear any other, that we would be willing to be, to have all of our concerns placed on his shoulders, that we would not keep any of these for ourselves, that we would not trust any other.

We pray that as princes come along, that as various advancements in mankind come along, various ideologies, that none of those would receive our trust but that our trust would ultimately be in the