The Bible in 16 Verses: 9. "The Suffering Servant"

The Story So Far: Creation, Fall, Promise, and the Need for a Substitute

So, we're up to session number nine, which means we're on the second half of the study. So, we're going through the time is coming, the Old Testament. We've gone through creation, human beings, the fall, redemption promised Abraham, Judah the king, the Passover lamb, King David, that was last week.

Today we're going over the suffering servant. Following week we'll hit the resurrection promised and the new creation. Then, once we get to the New Testament, this will be called the time fulfilled. All the Old Testament prophecies that were pointing forward were fulfilled in Christ, so we're going to see the fulfillment, the cross, resurrection, justification, and ultimately.

Glory.

Last week the key biblical theological theme was kingdom and covenant and the offspring, the seed of David. So, we saw in Genesis 3 .15, the seed of the woman will be at enmity with the seed of the.

Serpent.

That was the first seed. Then, God promised that that seed would come through Abraham and bless the entire earth. Then it will come through the tribe of Judah, then through King David, and one will always sit on his throne.

So, as you can see, the scope of God's plan is narrowing in, it's focusing, it's getting closer and closer and closer, pointing to that one person, which we'll get through in a little bit. So, the story so far, God created a very good kingdom of which he is the king.

He created human beings, his children to represent him in that kingdom, and they were responsible to expand it. Just to let you know, when Adam and Eve were created, they were his children. We are not God's children until we're born again.

We are all God's creation. We are not God's children until we repent of our sins and trust in Jesus, and we are adopted back into the family of God. We are all born from below. We need to be born from above to be God's children.

Through their sin, Adam and Eve rejected God's commission and rebelled against their father and creator. Yet, God proved his covenant love toward them despite their unfaithfulness. Very good did not turn into very bad, it just proved the character of who was always very.

Good.

There will be ongoing enmity between the offspring, the seed of the serpent, and the seed of the woman from now on, but God promised a redeemer who will crush the head of the enemy and secure God's victory.

With this promise, very bad turned into very hopeful. Next, God chose Abraham, an idolater, to bring the seed through whom the covenant blessings would come to all the families of the world. Despite the sinful lineage of Abraham's family and specifically Judah's royal seed through David, God is still faithful to bring the covenant blessings to the world which would be ruled by a faithful king.

Because all people were guilty and deserved death, the blood sacrifices of the Mosaic Law revealed more clearly their guilt and ongoing need for a substitute. So that's where we are up to today. Our verse for the day is Isaiah 53 .6.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray, each has turned to his own way, but the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all. Quote by Dwight Eisenhower, the search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.

Easy to find a scapegoat when you need one. Solomon's increasing infidelity sowed seeds of division throughout the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Solomon's constant consumption of Israel's resources allowed him to build a great kingdom, but at a heavy price to God's people.

His son, like the sons of many tyrants, found it easy to imitate his father's harshness, but not so easy to grasp the political wisdom or cunning that would enable him to maintain power. So we know Solomon is the wisest man on earth up until Jesus.

His son, which is Rehoboam, not Jeroboam, Jeroboam was son of Nebat, these two men end up taking over Israel. Rehoboam gets the southern tribe of Judah, Jeroboam gets the northern tribes. We're going to see that in a minute.

As a result, Rehoboam, which is Solomon's son, reaps a bitter harvest of division as he leads the kingdom of Israel into the chaos and dissolution of civil war. David's kingdom is rent asunder by the third generation, and from that point on, it will be a kingdom divided.

With no enemies left in the land, Israel turns upon itself, raising the question, will peace ever reign over the land where Abraham sojourned? So we see man's depravity throughout the scriptures to the point where even the nation of Israel, even without being attacked by intruders from the outside, fall on each other.

They end up infighting. The sin is so prevalent that they just cannot get along with one another. It just reminds me of all these Hollywood elites that come on, who make political statements and say, why can't we get along with these other countries?

I would just wish to be in the audience one time and say, why can't you stay married for more than seven months? You're lecturing us on world peace, yet you can't get along with one person for any length of time.

It's hypocritical. I hate when they do that. Anyway, enough of that. The period of the divided kingdom is recounted in three acts, the division of the kingdom, the resulting northern kingdom, and the resulting southern kingdom.

In Act 1, Solomon's son Rehoboam is made the new king of Israel. But rather than easing the people's burdens, Rehoboam increases the yoke placed upon them and the weight splits the kingdom in half. So again, this is the timeline that I used, and right now we're up to here.

So we went through creation. God created all things. He created Adam and Eve. Then we get to Noah, God's judgment upon the entire earth. Then the covenant with Abraham, he promises to bring a seed through Abraham that's going to bless the entire world.

Abraham has Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob becomes the father of 12 tribes. God calls him Israel. Joseph, his favorite son, gets thrown into a pit, ends up becoming the number two man in all of Egypt, and ends up saving his brothers who were sons of Jacob.

Now we get to the exodus where the new pharaoh doesn't know who Joseph is, forgets about him, enslaves the Israelites. God comes to Moses, tells him to tell Pharaoh to let my people go. You know the whole story.

They finally let go. They're wandering around in the desert. They come to the promised land. Moses doesn't get into the promised land because he struck the rock twice. Moses represents what in the scriptures?

The law.

Right?

And what is that? How is that significant for us? It's because the law will never get us into the promised land. The law doesn't bring us to heaven. The law points out our sin. What brings us to heaven is the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ on our behalf.

So Joshua goes in. He obeys God, conquers the land. Now we get into the period of Judges where everyone did what was evil in their sight. They were looking for a king. There was no king but God. They rejected him.

They did evil. This is where we get Ruth. We saw Saul. David became the king. We went through that last week. David's son Solomon. Now he built the temple for God's presence. Here's where his sons get divided.

You have Jeroboam, the northern kingdom. That's not Solomon's son. And then you have Rehoboam who is David's son. He's going to rule the southern kingdom. So the northern kingdom is going to fall first.

This is when Assyria, and we went through this when we went through Nahum, Assyria is gaining power and conquers the ten northern tribes of Israel. That's why they're called the lost tribes of Israel.

And Jonah, Hosea, and Amos were the prophets that were speaking to the northern tribes. The southern tribes, beginning, not beginning with Isaiah, Isaiah is one of the major prophets. Isaiah, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Nahum are talking to the southern tribes.

Because now Assyria sets its sight on the southern tribes. Because that's the easiest way into Egypt. So God is telling the southern tribes to be faithful, be obedient. God was the one who sent Assyria in to conquer the northern tribes.

If you read Isaiah chapter 10, this is God's sovereignty to the extreme. So in an act of mercy, God sends Babylon in to conquer Assyria and give Judah time. So that's where we're at now. He's giving Judah time to repent.

Ultimately, Judah would be conquered by Babylon and deported and brought back. So as you can see, this whole plan was not by accident. This is God's sovereign plan, his hand guiding the future, narrowing the scope to finally get to the fulfillment of it, which is Jesus.

Any questions? So real quick, first, we started with a couple. Sin broke it. Then we started with the family. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Sin broke it. Then we ended up with a clan, Noah and his family.

Sin broke it. Then that clan grew, became a tribe. Sin broke it. Then we get those tribes gathering together to become a nation. Sin broke that. Then we get David, who becomes the king. We have a kingdom.

Sin broke that. We see sin dividing, dividing, dividing, dividing constantly. There needs to be one who comes who brings peace and who brings things together. Sin scatters everything apart. It breaks it.

Again, someone asked me a while ago, if you had one sentence to describe the entire Bible, it would be God is restoring everything that sin has broken through Jesus Christ. God is restoring everything that sin has broken through Jesus Christ.

The Divided Kingdom and Israel’s Idolatry

So Act II, which is where we are at, follows the story of the northern 10 tribes who make up the northern kingdom and retain the name Israel. Tragically, the northern kingdom breaks away, not simply from the political rule of the Davidic kingdom, but also from worship in Jerusalem's temple.

The northern kingdom's creation of its own cult in direct opposition to God's law in the Torah points the kingdom in the direction of downfall right from its outset. Jeroboam established two competing sites for ritual worship.

Is that legal under God's law?

No.

One at Dan, at the kingdom's northern edge, and another at Bethel, near the southern border. After seeking advice, the king made two golden calves. He said to the people, it is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem.

Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. One he set up in Bethel, the other in Dan. So he's compounding the error made by Aaron when he created a golden calf. This guy creates two golden calves and sets up two places of worship, and neither one of them are in Jerusalem where it's supposed to be.

Act three follows the story of the remaining southern kingdom, which takes the name Judah. Unlike the northern kingdom, whose kings all prove unfaithful, the southern kingdom will have several heroic kings who prove faithful to God's.

Law.

This is where we get the term Jews. I always wondered, why do they call Jews? Aren't they Israelites? Well, the 10 northern tribes of Israel are gone. The one that survived is Judah. We also have Ephraim and Manasseh and the tribe of Levi, but it's known as Judah.

That's where we get the term Jews. That's why we call them the Jews. Eventually, however, the wickedness of the unfaithful kings will lead God's people to exile and the loss of the promised land. But even at this dark moment in Israel's history, the prophets will kindle a light of hope.

It's at this point in our story, it might seem that we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. A couple of chapters back, we saw the need for the Passover lambs and the sacrifices required by the Mosaic law.

In our quick overview of the covenant with David and the failure of any king to obey perfectly, we saw that those sacrifices were needed as much as ever. But it also seemed that those sacrifices were not solving the problem.

So, this highlights the depravity of the heart of man, his inability to keep the.

Law.

They should have continued to make sacrifices in the temple, which they ended up neglecting, even though Jeroboam set up two different places where they can offer sacrifices. The sacrifices themselves pointed to the fact that we could never be righteous in and of ourself.

That's the whole point of the old covenant, to point us to the savior, the one at Genesis 3 .15, who would crush the head of the serpent. That's what we're waiting for. Well, that's what they were waiting for.

That's what we know, thankfully. The cloud of sin continued to loom large over Israel, as well as the surrounding nations. The Philistines, the Moabites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, to mention a few, kept leading Judah, Israel, and their kings away from the faithfulness to God.

The kings of Judah and Israel continued to lead the people deeper and deeper into idolatry. The people still needed the sacrifices, but the sacrifices were not solving the problem. Something had to change.

Now, we can even look back at the history of our country, right? We started this country built on biblical principles, right? And it started out strong. Over the course of time, people were led astray by different sins, and here we are.

Now.

We see the chaos, and the confusion, and the corruption, and all the different things that are happening within the government. This brings me right back to Psalm 2. There are many kings, right? There are many kings.

Why are they railing against the Lord and His anointed? Because we want to be ruled by a king. The problem is we think we're him, right? We need one king who knows all, powerful enough to rule over us, and who's righteous and just.

That's King Jesus. Not only did the kings of Judah in the south, and Israel in the north continue to sin, turn their backs on God, and lead the people astray, but they also stopped following the very instructions that God had given them to address their sin in the law of Moses.

So not only did they continue to sin, they stopped the sacrifices for sin. Soon after the 10 tribes in the north broke away from Judah, King Jeroboam built two idolatrous altars, one at Dan in the northern part of the nation, and one at Bethel in the south.

He was afraid... That's funny, because Bethel Church, it's like a foreign thing. Okay. Just did a little quick diversion, sorry. He was afraid if its subjects continue to offer sacrifices and visit the temple in Jerusalem as God commanded, their loyalty would soon swing back to the kings of Judah.

In short, he chose political power over the fidelity to God. How many political leaders do we have today that pledge faithfulness to God, yet are beholden to the special interest groups that are paying them?

They've fallen victim to Mammon. They cannot serve both God and Mammon. And unfortunately, most of the people in our government are serving Mammon. That's why the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

Do not let yourselves get caught up in the love of money. That will ruin you. You tell your money what to do, it doesn't tell you what to do. Listen. Pull out a dollar bill, a $5 bill, a $10 bill, a $100 bill, it's got faces on it and those talk to you.

Ooh, spend me here.

Do this. Do that.

You tell it what to do. That money is looking to talk to you. Don't listen. Yeah, it's all his, right? We're stewards of what he gives us, right? But stuff like that doesn't happen anymore, right? We don't see anything like this happening in our society today.

No, no.

We're good.

Sure.

Surely, the kings of Judah would do better. You must be thinking. After all, the temple was right in their backyard and they had the priests around them all the.

Time.

So the southern tribe of Judah, oh, we have the real temple. We have Jerusalem. This is great. We're not going to be like those tribes in the north. But the sad reality is that the kings of Judah hardly did any better when it came to keeping the law.

While we don't know all of the details of what they did and did not do, at a minimum, Judah failed to keep the Sabbath regulations God gave for the land in Leviticus 25, at least 70 times, 2 Chronicles 36, 21.

Since they were required to let the land rest once every seven years, this is 490 years of disobedience. And it was not just the Sabbath instructions they failed to keep. For at least a couple of centuries, they didn't even have the entire law, let alone keep it.

When Josiah was king, more than 300 years after David died, he commissioned a series of renovations to the temple. Hey, let's fix this thing. Let's spruce it up, right? And while they did that, they stumbled upon the book of the law.

Oh, what's this? Like, that's what every king was supposed to read and write out himself. He was not only supposed to command it to read the law and keep it, he was supposed to write out a copy for himself.

And now, they don't even have it in their possession. The king doesn't even have it in his possession. They stumble across it in the attic, right? It wasn't an attic. You're supposed to laugh at that.

Oh, lighten up, guys. That's three in a row. It's me, isn't it?

All right.

So, they stumble across the book of the law, and now, they read it out loud to everyone, and everybody starts to feel the conviction. As near as we can tell, the last time they had heard the law read in public was during the reign of Jehoshaphat.

That's about 250 years earlier. Now, let me ask you something. I'm not going to have you raise your hand, but do you read your Bible every day? Have you stuck it under your bed? Have you put it on a shelf and not pulled it off?

You need to read that every single day, not just a verse that pops up on your little cell phone thing. Oh, the verse of the day. That's nice.

Great.

You need to read the word of God. Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word of the mouth of God. It is imperative that you read God's word, lest 250 years go by. You'll be dead, but 250 years go by, and nobody's reading God's word.

They forgot God's covenant. Now, what is a prophet? A prophet is someone who speaks to people on behalf of God, and the prophet doesn't tell you what you want to hear. He tells you what you need to hear.

So God's prophet is telling you today, read God's word. You need to be in God's word, absorbing that, letting that shape your mind and your heart. Not TV, not newspaper, not internet, not social media.

This has to be your steady diet, all right, to conform you to the image of Christ. It's not as if God's people were trying and failing to keep the law. No, they were not trying at all because they didn't even have it.

They still needed sacrifices and substitutes for their sins, and neglecting the sacrificial system only made things worse. Because they did not keep the law, God's judgment came on them just as it always does when a covenant is broken.

Assyria conquered Israel in the north about 722 BC, and 250 years later, the Babylonians conquered Judah and led the people into captivity where they remained for about 70 years. That's where we get the verse in Jeremiah, I know the plans that I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you.

When somebody tries to claim that promise today, say you realize you've got about 70 more years of enslavement before that's going to take place, right, I'm going to tell you something and you're going to be like, is he crazy?

Never read a Bible verse. Never read a Bible verse. Read the 10 verses before and read the 10 verses after. Read it in context. You can pull any of those verses out and come up with a bevy of different wonderful things for yourself.

If you don't read it in context, you're going to apply a verse that doesn't apply to you to something that it doesn't promise. This is partly why our country is in the place that it is, because the church has abandoned the sovereignty of God and God-centeredness with man-centeredness.

Read your Bible. But it is not as if when the Israelites tried to keep the law, they finally got rid of sin. After they returned from their exile in Babylon, the people were fairly committed to trying to obey the law, at least as they interpreted it.

But the law and its sacrifices were still not enough to remove sin once and for all. The people still needed a permanent, long-term solution. Now all of that background finally brings us to our next point.

Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and the Meaning of Isaiah 53

About 150 years before Judah went into exile, God gave the prophet Isaiah a vision that pointed forward to the definitive solution to the sin problem. It doesn't take long to realize that both Israel and the surrounding nations had sinned.

Greatly.

Like lost sheep, they had gone astray, even as we have. Therefore, to finally defeat sin, God would not send an animal sacrifice. Instead, God would send a suffering servant. And the Lord would lay on this servant the iniquity of his people.

All we like sheep have gone astray, each has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all. That's what Isaiah wrote to the southern tribes. So now what happens is, chapter 49 is particularly helpful in our understanding of who the servant is because there's going to be Israelites, Jews, who say, that's not one person.

That's the whole nation. So who is the servant? At the beginning of Isaiah 49, God says, you are my servant, Israel. So it's pretty clear that the nation as a whole is the servant, right? That's what they're going to want you to believe.

But keep reading, never read a Bible verse. In verse 5, God says the servant will bring Jacob back to him, that Israel might be gathered to him. So here, it seems the servant is someone else who will bring the nation as a whole back to God.

So which is it? In verse 3, God can say that Israel is the servant because in verse 5, the servant is shown to be the single representative of the nation. The servant can say, I am Israel, in the same kind of way that King Louis of France could say, I am the state.

If we go back to Isaiah 53 now and unpack verse 6, I think we'll have a better understanding of the way this prophecy fits into our story. As we walk through this chapter, we get a stark picture of the horrible task that God set before His servant.

What I want to do is I just want to read Isaiah 53 to you because it's so important, it's so powerful, it's so impactful. So Isaiah 53, who has believed what He has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For He grew up before Him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire.

Him.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And as one from whom men hid their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.

But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, each has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that is before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away, and as for His generation who considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of My people.

And they made His grave with the wicked and with the rich man and his death, although He had done no violence and there was no deceit in His mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him. He has put Him to grief.

When a soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.

By his knowledge shall the righteous one, My servant, make many to be accounted righteousness, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoiled with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors.

Yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors.". That is impactful. Now, ask a Jew, read this to a Jewish person, right? And ask them, say, where is this? Now, I've seen many YouTube videos and had personal experience.

You read this and they say, oh, that's about Jesus. Say, yeah, where is it? Well, that's the new covenant. That's not what we hold to. And you say, no, that's your side of the book. This is Isaiah the prophet.

This is really important, because you recognize that this is about Jesus, yet you don't trust in him.

Right?

Jesus would later say, the scriptures point to me, yet you refuse to come to me for eternal life. Now, back in the day I used to do Evangelism Explosion, and I loved the illustrations that they used. And they used a quote from Isaiah to do this one.

So let's say your life is like this book. There's a record being kept of your life and my life. And everything you've done is contained on the pages of this book. The good, the bad, and the ugly. So the cover of the book represents your birth certificate.

The back cover of the book represents your death certificate. And everything in between is everything that you've done in your life. Now this book, with all of its sin, sits on you. So when God looks down from heaven, what does he see?

He sees your sinfulness. God can't have fellowship with you because of your sin. And your sin separates you from God. So God, in his love and mercy, sends his son Jesus into the earth. And the prophet Isaiah says, we all like sheep have gone astray.

Each has turned to his own way. But the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all. Now where's your sin? It's on Jesus. Now God can have fellowship with you because of what the suffering servant did.

Don't ever forget the great cost at which your salvation was purchased. Always be in awe and wonder of your own salvation. It is a miracle of God. Thank God for this. He is the substitute, the suffering servant, who takes our place, who takes upon our sins, and redeems us from them.

Now that's a spoiler alert. But I don't care, because it's worth proclaiming again and again and again. He was to be despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows acquainted.

With grief.

It was his calling to be stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But in verse 5, we discover where this was heading. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with his wounds, we are healed.

The first time the term Israel is used in scripture is in Genesis 32, 28. Then God said, your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.

So the term Israel was a name for one person.

Jesus is true Israel.

He says, I am the vine. Isaiah says, Israel is the vine. Out of Egypt, I have called my son. This is out of Egypt, God called Israel. Jesus fulfills all of these prophecies.

He is true Israel.

He's the only true Israelite we'll ever encounter, because he's the only one who's kept the law. How many people does God call Israel in this verse? Only one. There's only one Jesus. He's Israel. You are grafted into not Israel the nation.

If you're a Christian, you are grafted into Israel the person. If we'll go all the way back to God's covenant with Abraham, and then look at the other two major covenants that are built on it, we see that something was always required on the human side.

Abraham, Israel, and David all had to keep certain conditions. But they and their descendants all failed to keep the conditions perfectly, so they all had to deal with God's judgment. The sacrifices of the law helped them see what was necessary to escape that judgment.

You needed a substitute. But the sacrifices themselves were never enough. The blood of bulls and goats will never take away your sin. Back in Isaiah 53, all of the covenant penalties come to a head in verse 6.

The Lord has laid upon him the iniquity, or the sin, of us all. So here it is, the suffering of the servant, as the representative of God's people, turns out to be a substitutionary suffering. He would take the punishment that they deserved, and we'll see that in verse 10.

It tells us that he would make an offering for guilt. As the representative of the nation, he would step in and do what all of the other sacrifices could never do. He would bring peace and healing. He would absorb the sin and guilt of the nation, and he would bear the sin of many.

If the suffering servant was one man who represented the entire nation, and his role was to finally and fully deal with the problem of sin and guilt, then he sounds a lot like the seed of the woman way back in Genesis 3.

The seed of the woman will crush the head of the seed of the serpent. The seed's job was to reverse the effects of the fall. The problem that the fall brought was the problem of sin and guilt. So it seems that Isaiah's prophecy connects very closely with the seed promises.

Maybe, just maybe, the seed of the woman, the seed of Abraham, and the seed of Judah were all one, and the same with the suffering servant. If so, then the Mosaic law and its sacrifices were reminders that when the seed finally came, he would take the covenant penalty on himself and remove sin once and for all.

It was all because of the serpent. But take heart, he's a defeated foe. There's one problem with this picture. To reverse the effects of the curse, it was not just sin that needed to be defeated. Death was still the great enemy lurking in the background.

And it seems that for the seed of the woman, the suffering servant, and it seems that for the seed of the woman, the suffering servant, to complete his mission, death needed to be vanquished. As well, that problem leads us to our next stop in Ezekiel 37, which will be next week.

Oh, we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all. You may deny that you're a sinner. You may say, no, not me. The search for a scapegoat is the easiest hunting expedition of all hunting expeditions.

So what did we learn this week? We learned federal headship and substitution. Jesus, the suffering servant, will be the one who suffers for the entire nation. The church has called a priest a holy nation.

So he's our federal head, and he's our substitute. He's the one who goes to the cross in our place. He takes on death when he didn't deserve it because he was innocent. The wages of sin is death. Jesus never sinned, yet he took on death for us.

Here's our story up until this point. God created a very good kingdom of which he is the king. He created human beings, his children, to represent him in that kingdom, and they were responsible to expand it.

Through their sin, Adam and Eve rejected God's commission and rebelled against their father and creator. Yet God proved his covenant love toward them despite their unfaithfulness. Very good did not turn into very bad.