God Will Still Be On His Throne Wednesday

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I want to invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to the 45th chapter of the book of Isaiah.
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We were just there as we're reading consecutively, chapter by chapter, through the
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Old Testament prophets this year and we're, well, reading consecutively, Isaiah is going to take us all year.
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So we're reading consecutively through the Old Testament prophets one at a time and sometimes taking us a whole year to do so.
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But I did say to Brother Mike, I wish this was four weeks from now because it would be great if I could preach this sermon on the day that we read this text.
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So you'll hear this text today preached and then in four weeks you'll hear it read again as Brother Mike comes and reads to us from this text.
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And if it was possible, I would love to preach the entire chapter, but for the sake of time and for the sake of all that I have to say,
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I'm limiting myself only to the first few verses of Isaiah 45.
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And I also want to note that if you are a person who has been in this church for many years, you may think to yourself as I'm preaching, this sounds familiar.
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Well, it is familiar because this is, here's a new word I learned this morning, this is our quadrennial sermon, meaning it is something
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I do every four years. And it has been this way ever since I began.
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This is now the fifth time I will be preaching this sermon in this church. I preached it first in 2008, then again in 2012, again in 2016, then in 2020, and now in 2024.
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And it's not just because I wanted a week where I had to prepare less, it's actually more preparation when you're repeating so you don't repeat yourself or so that you can consider more of what the text says.
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But this is such an important text when we face as a nation what we do every four years and that is the election of the president.
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Not many other times caused so much investment of our minds and hearts into what's going on in the political process.
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And I do want to say before I even begin, if you came today and you're a visitor or maybe you're a member or a guest who's been with us for a while and you say to yourself, well,
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I just, I didn't come to church today to hear politics, okay, that's fair. I'm not preaching politics,
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I'm preaching the word of God. But I will show you today from the text that it is
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God who governs the nations and it is God who is sovereign over the nations.
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So while we have a political program, a political system that we live in and under and participate in, we must step back from the process and say,
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God is still in charge, Christ is still king and he rules on high.
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He is enthroned on high, as we sang earlier, the Lord Almighty reigns.
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Do we believe that? Do we trust that? Are we going to go into this week wringing our hands and then if it doesn't go the way that many of us hope it goes, will we be dejected and feel depressed and defeated?
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That's my concern. Because I will tell you every four years, without fail, on the weeks leading up to the election, someone, either within the church or without, will say to me,
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I'm really scared about the results of this election.
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I'm really scared about what's going to happen if this person is in office.
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I'm scared how it's going to affect my livelihood. I'm scared how it's going to affect my freedoms.
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I'm scared how it's going to affect my ability to provide and to save and to, by God's grace, even give an inheritance to my children.
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These things I'm scared of and I look to those people and I say, I understand your concern. I understand why we're concerned.
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But the Bible says, fear not, for I'm with you. To the end of the earth.
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We can stand with confidence, even the world stand against us.
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You know, I'm teaching through early church history right now and eventually I'm going to get to talk about Athanasius.
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And Athanasius is one of my favorite of the early church teachers. He stood against the
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Aryans and the Aryan controversy at Nicaea. He stood for truth. And at one point, it came to be that it was almost like it was
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Athanasius Contramundum, which means Athanasius against the world.
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It was almost like he was standing by himself. And yet he still stood. And God's truth prevailed.
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Beloved, we can still stand because we know God's truth will prevail. Let's stand and read the word of God.
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Isaiah chapter 45, beginning at verse 1 says, Thus says the
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Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and to loosen the belt of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.
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I will go before you and level the exalted places. I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron.
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I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hordes and secret places that you may know that it is
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I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. For the sake of my servant
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Jacob and Israel, my chosen, I call you by your name. I name you, though you do not know me.
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I am the Lord, and there is no other. Beside me, there is no God. I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none besides me.
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I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness.
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I make well -being and create calamity. I am the
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Lord who does all these things. Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
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As we come to you, Lord, we come to you in and through the name of Jesus Christ. For there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
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And Lord, as we consider today the profundity of what we will learn and the onus that it puts upon us to live it out,
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I pray, O God, that you would open our eyes, open our ears, strengthen our hearts to hear your word.
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And I pray, Lord, that you keep me from error. I pray that you would protect your people from error.
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Protect us from words which do not align with your word. Protect us from doctrines and dogmas which would repudiate your word.
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And Lord, help us to trust what your word says. And I do pray,
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O God, I pray that as we consider the sovereignty of God this morning, that we will also see,
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Lord, the beauty of Christ in whom we trust, who rules on high. And we know that now there are those who rebel against him, but one day every knee will bow.
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So I pray, Lord, that if there are those today in the sound of my voice who are rebelling against Christ, who have not yet bowed the knee to Christ, who continue to reject faith in Christ and have placed their hope and faith in something else, in someone else,
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I pray, O God, that by your mercy you would grant them repentance unto life and give them the faith that only you can provide.
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We pray this in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.
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Anytime we talk about a doctrine, it's important that that doctrine be defined.
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For many people use words, but they have different definitions for those words.
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So, for instance, there are churches that would use the word trinity, but they would have a completely different definition than the historic doctrine of the trinity.
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One that would actually repudiate the historic doctrine of the trinity. And so they're using the same words, but a different dictionary.
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And I find this to be the case often when we're discussing the subject of God's sovereignty.
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Because I've never yet met a Christian who would say,
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I don't believe in God's sovereignty. In fact, I would be surprised if one were so bold as to say,
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I don't believe in God's sovereignty. I guess there are some who might, but if you ask a person, okay, you believe in God's sovereignty, what do you mean by that?
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That's where you begin to really find out whether they believe in the sovereignty of God. So it's important,
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I think, as we begin today to discuss what it means when we say God is sovereign.
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I've always liked A .W. Pink's definition. If you're unfamiliar with Arthur Pink, he was a writer in the last century.
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He wrote many wonderful books on the subject of God and his attributes. He is not liked by everyone because he was unabashedly
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Calvinistic in his view of what he taught about God. But I find his work to be very compelling and very rich.
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And Brother Andy, who runs the book table in the Narthex, has some of his works out there for anyone who might be interested in the other.
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If you're so inclined, you can also get some of his works online for free.
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Most of his works you can just download the PDF if you want to have a copy on your device.
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It's worth reading. But this was Arthur Pink's definition of the sovereignty of God.
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He said the sovereignty of God, what do we mean by this expression? We mean the supremacy of God, the kingship of God, the
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Godhood of God. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that God is
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God. If God is not sovereign, He is not God. By saying that God is sovereign, we're simply saying that He is who
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He says that He is. He is the Lord of the universe. This is the title often ascribed to God.
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It is the word Lord. In fact, that is the way the word Yahweh, which is the very sacred name of God, is translated in our
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Bibles. It's translated in most English Bibles as Lord. And then Adonai, the descriptive name of God, is often translated also as Lord.
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He is Lord. It means that there is nothing in the universe that is outside of His control.
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W. Bingham Hunter says this. He says, from a biblical perspective, your world history books should be prefaced with 2
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Kings 19 .25. And this is what it says. Have you not heard, long ago
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I ordained it, in the days of old I planned it, now I have brought it to pass. That's history.
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God ordains it and He brings it to pass. He establishes it by His decree and His decrees are worked out in time through the actions of men.
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From the rain that falls to the earth that rotates, even to the beating of our hearts, God undergirds it all.
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God is the commander of the universe. God answers to no one. There is no standard above Him that is higher than Him that He must live up to.
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He is the standard. 1 Chronicles 29 says, Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty, and all that is in the heaven and in the earth is
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Yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and You are exalted as head, meaning the authority, above all.
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This is the sovereignty of God. And throughout the Bible we see
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God's sovereignty displayed to us in multiple different ways. Last night as I was preparing for bed, sometimes
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I'll bring my laptop in, especially on Saturday nights as I'm sitting there next to Jennifer and we're talking about our day and I was talking about I'd been away on a trip this week so we're talking about my trip and I'm sitting there and I pull out my laptop and I just begin to sort of write out thoughts to add to my notes about how
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God's sovereignty is displayed throughout the scriptures. And it's displayed in multiple different ways.
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It's displayed through His creationary acts that we see in the earliest part of Genesis and then in His providential acts which work their way out through the lives of His people.
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God is sovereign throughout it all. He's sovereign when He's able to speak the world into existence.
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He says, let there be, and there was. He doesn't need permission.
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He doesn't call out to the God of wind and say, may I have some wind. He doesn't call out to the
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God of earth and say, may I have some dry ground. God does not negotiate with any other gods.
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He sits not upon a council of gods but He Himself is the only God and He speaks from His throne and says, let there be and there is.
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This is God. This is Him. He is the one who proclaims and the world responds.
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I was reading, again, some of Arthur Pink's writings, reading through a portion of the sovereignty of God and he brought up something
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I hadn't thought about because in his section on how God administrates His sovereignty or, if you will, how
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He providentially controls the workings out of the things, he says,
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God is certainly at work through the hearts and wills of men, but He's also at work in things that we don't think about that He's at work in.
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For instance, how did those animals get on the ark? Now, that may seem like an odd question, but the point is, do you think
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Noah was running around chasing the zebras? I don't think there were zebras at that time.
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I think there was sort of like a horse kind, if you go back to answers in Genesis, it'll talk more about that, but he weren't out there with a lasso and a whip.
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The Bible says he made the ark and God brought the animals.
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Two by two, they came in under the authority of Almighty God. Noah doesn't have to go out and become a cowboy.
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Noah can simply trust that God is going to work His will because He said 120 years and this is going to take place and this is what's going to happen.
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Here, it will happen and the animals make their way into the ark, not under the authority of Noah, but under the authority of Almighty God.
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You walk through the Bible and you see over and over men trying to thwart the will of God.
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Joseph has a dream. He tells his brothers about that dream.
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Probably not the best idea because his brothers were not pleased with the obvious meaning of the dream.
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You are going to bow down to me. Who do you think you are? So they become indignant with their brother and they decide it would be best if he weren't even alive.
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But you know what? A dead man doesn't bring a good price, we will sell him into slavery.
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So they did. But Joseph's dream was from God and Joseph's dream was not subject to the will of men.
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God brings Joseph through his brother's evil actions and they were evil. Can God use evil men to accomplish
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His good purpose? God brings
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His good purpose in the life of Joseph through his evil brother so that at the very end of his life he could look at his brothers and he could say to them one of the most important passages of Scripture, Genesis chapter 50 verse 20, what you meant for evil,
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God meant for good. It's interesting, it's the same verb, the
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Hebrew, what you did, God did, but with entirely different motivation.
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What was accomplished through you was accomplished for the purpose of evil because that was your heart. But God had a greater and better and good purpose that He accomplished through your evil actions.
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This is not just God taking lemons and making lemonade. This is
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God exercising His sovereignty over the earth and even over the hearts of men to bring about His will even in the evil desires of men.
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This is why when we talk about the sovereignty of God, we say God is not just sovereign over the good.
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If God were only sovereign when things were good, then that would mean
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He's not sovereign most of the time because most of the time things aren't good.
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Who could come right here and stand next to me and testify that you've had a hard week? I will wait till next week.
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We don't know what's going to happen this week. You might have had an even worse week next week. It's interesting when you think about the sovereignty of God.
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I like this quote from Piper. I put a few quotes up on the screen. John Piper said this. He said, God is always doing 10 ,000 things in your life and you may be aware of three of them.
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God is always working in your life in so many different ways that you have no idea.
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You might be aware of three of them. And so, this morning as I, and I could continue outlining,
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I mean we could walk through Abraham's life, we could walk through Isaac's life, we could walk through Jacob's life, we could walk through the life of Moses.
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Think about Moses' life. Moses came into the world at a time where there was the murder of babies was being commanded and yet God saved him from murder by putting him in an ark, floating him downstream.
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Where he was then pulled out of that water, by the way, the word Moses means to draw out interestingly enough.
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He drew his people out. He was drawn out. There's a lot of interesting connections to names and how they work in scripture, but Moses was taken up out of the water, became the daughter or the son of the daughter of the
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Pharaoh so that God could raise him up. And use him for his purpose.
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God had a purpose for him. He had a sovereign will. You say, but all the, all the rebellion.
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Yes men rebel and God does take those things into account, but God is never out of control.
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As R .C. Sproul is most famous for having said, probably not the first to say it, but he said if there was one rogue molecule in the universe, one, one molecule that was not subject to the command of almighty
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God, that could be the molecule that undoes everything else. And so we see
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God's work throughout the Bible. I mean, again, I, I just like to do this all day.
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Couldn't we just walk through every street, Jesus and his life. The very product of the promises of God born exactly where they said he would be born because a decree went forth from Caesar.
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Remember that? How the gospel begins. I was talking to Mike about this the other day because one of my favorite
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Christmas messages to preach, and I don't often preach a special Christmas message, but every once in a while I'll do a special message around the time of the celebration.
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And by the way, Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation. It's worthy of celebration. And so when we get to that season, oftentimes
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I will point out that a decree went out from Caesar. That's how the gospel begins.
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It doesn't begin, but when it starts telling the story of the nativity, the decree went out from Caesar that all the earth should be under a census.
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All should be counted. But do you realize that a decree went out from Caesar because in eternity past a decree went out from God?
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A decree went out from Caesar because a decree went out from God that my son would be born in Bethlehem.
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How are we going to get him there? That's not where he's from. He's not called Jesus of Bethlehem. He's called
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Jesus of Nazareth. But he was born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy that he would be born there because a decree went out from Caesar, because a decree went out from God.
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This is how God works. He is bringing about his will, sometimes even through our sinful choices.
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It's hard to understand. It's hard to reconcile, but it is something the
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Bible is not at all unclear about. And one of the ways,
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I know you're wondering, well when are we getting to Isaiah? We're getting there. This is where we're going. Because one of the ways
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God shows that he is governing the affairs of men is when he makes a prophetic utterance.
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God gives a prophecy through his prophet. And it's not merely the foreseeing of an event.
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God speaks through the prophet and says, this is what I will do.
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Not merely, I see this happening and I'm going to tell you what's going to happen. He says, no, this is what
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I will do and no one will thwart it. That was,
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Mike read a part of it this morning, that's what the idols, they didn't have the power to do that. Idols can't predict.
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Idols can't command and idols can certainly not bring something to pass. Idols are impotent statues or imaginative gods, things that come from our minds.
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They're not real. God demonstrates his reality by saying, this will happen and it does.
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He announces his plans for the future and how he will bring those plans to be.
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It is proof of his sovereignty. Because God can say,
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I will do it, no one will stop it. Going back to the story of Joseph, he gave
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Joseph that dream, that was a prophetic dream. That dream came true, nothing could stop it. Nothing could stop it.
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By the way, and this is an aside, this is why when we look at the people today who claim to be prophets, it's often very easy to come to the conclusion that they are not simply based on the fact that their prophecies often do fail.
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I had a conversation with one of them a couple months ago. There's this young man and he's making waves all over the internet by his prophecies.
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People are flocking to his church, they're coming forward, he's touching them, they're falling over and flopping like fish, it's a big deal.
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This group called Bible Dingers, it's a website, they reached out to me and they said, would you have a conversation with this young man?
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And because you don't believe he's true, and I don't, would you at least challenge him?
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Sure, I only had 10 minutes, so it wasn't a debate. But I asked him,
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I said, do you get this wrong all the time, like he was proud?
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You're often wrong, oh yeah, God's prophets don't have to be right. Well, what about God's word, where it says very specifically, if a prophet says he speaks from God and what he says has not come to pass, do not fear that man, for he is not from God.
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What do you do with that? Oh well, that's not talking about all the time.
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Beloved, God is never wrong, and when
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God spoke through his prophets, what they said came to pass, or they weren't his prophets.
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God gives a prophecy in our text today. And this prophecy is an amazing prophecy on so many different levels,
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I've thought about this in so many different like lanes, because it's one, this prophecy could very well be the very thing that proves
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God exists, not that we're wondering if God exists, we know God exists, Romans 1 says all the evidence of the world shows us that God exists, but if you wonder if God exists, this could be the very thing that tells you.
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You say, how is that? This is the most explicit prophecy of which I am aware of something that was stated by God 150 years before it took place, and it was so specific down to the very name of the man who wasn't even born yet, that the answer is either
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Isaiah got this incredibly right, like better than any powerball lottery, he nailed this, or this was from God, which means
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God actually does exist, and two, his prophecies are absolutely true.
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The word of God is true. All three of those things, God exists, his prophetic utterance proves his existence, and it proves the tenacity and veracity and truthfulness of his word.
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All wrapped up in just this one short passage, because here's the timeline. The exile, the
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Babylonian exile is the subject that this prophecy revolves around.
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Now you'll remember prior to the exile, there were the prophets who prophesied that the exile was coming.
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If you've taken the Old Testament history class, Brother Mike, Brother Bert taught it last time, they were called the pre -exilic prophets.
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That's a fancy big theological word, it simply means those who came before the exile, pre -exilic prophets.
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Most of the prophets prophesied before the exile. During the exile, you have the exilic prophets,
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Daniel and Ezekiel, then you have the post -exilic prophets, those who prophesied after, only a few prophesied after the exile.
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So that's the timeline. Isaiah is a pre -exilic prophet, he's prophesying about the exile.
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This is coming. In our prophecy today, he's not prophesying about the exile, but he's prophesying about the man who would take them out of the exile, the man who would set them free.
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Guess what he has to get right? He has to get right that they're going into exile, because they haven't gone yet, and he has to get right that it's this guy who's going to take them out, and he calls him by his name.
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You realize that we don't even have a messianic prophecy of Jesus that's that specific?
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There's no prophecy in the Old Testament that says, oh, and his name is going to be Jesus. Isn't that interesting?
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We have over 100 prophecies in the Old Testament about Jesus, certainly I believe Jesus is probably the most testified to character of the
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Old Testament in history, because most of the Old Testament points to him. But none of it ever says, oh yeah, and his name is
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Jesus. But this prophecy was about 150 years before the event.
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Not 20 years, not 50 years, but 150 years before the event, and God says his name is
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Cyrus. This is so specific that if you go home and you
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Google this, and you look up what the textual critics say, and those are those who try to look at the
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Bible through more of a naturalistic view and try to come up with explanations, the only explanation that they can give is that the last 27 chapters of Isaiah were written by somebody else.
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It's called the Deutero -Isaiah thesis or theory.
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So the idea is the first 39 chapters are written by Isaiah, but then at chapter 40, all the way through 66, it's written after the exile.
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And I understand why they would come to that conclusion, because if you don't have a supernatural worldview, if you don't believe that God is speaking into history through his men doing these things, you would look at this text and you would conclude, you would have to conclude this could not possibly have happened by accident.
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I don't believe that there was a second Isaiah. I don't believe that the last 27 chapters were written by someone else.
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One, there is no evidence of this. There is no historic evidence, no textual evidence that the text was ever divided.
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I believe the oldest version of Isaiah that we have was written, found in the
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Dead Sea Scrolls, so it would have been written 200 to 300 years prior to Christ's coming and it was completed. It was all the book of Isaiah together, was not separated.
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In fact, it's the longest scroll, Mike's seen it. It's in a, it's over in Israel and it's in a scriptorium and it's, you can walk around and look at it.
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It's unrolled. You can see pictures of it online. There's no evidence that Isaiah was ever divided.
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But also, Jesus quotes Isaiah at a certain portion in his teaching and he quotes from the first 39 chapters and from the last 27 chapters and he attributes it to the same person.
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So, if I'm going to ask anyone who wrote this and accept their answer without question, it's going to be
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Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ quotes it all. He says it's all from Isaiah, so I'm going to believe it's all from Isaiah.
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That being said, let's now walk through the text and let's see what he actually says because again it's so amazing.
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First, and this is the outline of the text, we see the appointing of Cyrus. Verse 1, it says, thus says the
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Lord to his anointed, stop right there, that's the Hebrew word Messiah, but it's
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Messiah. You say, oh, wait a minute, Keith, are you saying
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Cyrus was the Messiah? Not like Jesus, not like Jesus, Jesus is uniquely
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Messiah, but the term Messiah means the one who is anointed or the anointed one and that title was applied to several people in the
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Old Testament. It's actually used 39 times in the Old Testament, sometimes to apply to the priests, sometimes to the king, and sometimes to prophets.
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So the title Mashiach can be applied not only to Christ, Christ is the
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Mashiach, the Messiah, the final one, the total one, the perfect one, the true prophet, priest, and king, but Cyrus would function like a
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Messiah because he would liberate God's people. He would be used of God, even though he didn't know
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God, he would be used of God to liberate the people. And so, yes, he is called
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Mashiach. Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand
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I have held, right hand is the hand of power, hand of strength, sorry lefties,
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I've held his right hand,
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I've given him power, to do what? To subdue nations before him, to loose the armor of kings, to open before him the double doors so that the gates will not be shut.
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Interestingly enough, there is, the story of Cyrus comes as, we can learn about it in the
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Old Testament, there's writings about it in our Bible, there's also extra biblical writings about Cyrus, there's what's called the
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Cyrus Cylinder, there's also something called the writings of Herodotus, the histories of Herodotus, which talk about Cyrus, and they talk about some of the things that he was able to do when he was coming in, stories say that he was able to reroute the
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Euphrates so that he could go in on the dry river bed and be unexpected to come that direction, and that when he came, the story goes, when he came to the gate, it wasn't even locked, he just went right in, so it says here, to open the doors for him, to basically, to walk before him and give him the strength to do this very thing, beginning in verse 2, we have the promise to Cyrus, these are the promises of almighty
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God to Cyrus, I will go before you and make the crooked places straight,
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I will break in pieces the gates of bronze and cut down the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places that you may know that I, the
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Lord, who call you by name, am the
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God of Israel, for Jacob, my servant's sake, and Israel, my elect,
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I have called you by your name, I have named you, though you have not known me,
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I knew you, I'm using you, you don't know me, you will, but Cyrus is not a
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Jew, Cyrus is not a worshipper of Yahweh, but he will know who this
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God is, who called him by name, when
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I, when I was in Arkansas last month, I preached on this text, because I was preaching on the sovereignty of God conference, and I said in that message,
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I said think about the very reality that his mama didn't name him
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Leroy, or Alexander, or John, or whatever, his name is
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Cyrus, because God said, I name you, verse 5 needs to sit in your heart all week long,
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I am the Lord, and there is no other, there is no
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God beside me, I will gird you, though you have not known me, that you will know, from the rising of the sun to its setting, that there is none beside me,
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I am the Lord, and there is no other, and that moves to the purpose, why did
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God give the promises to Cyrus, what was the purpose for it, so that he may know the
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God who is sovereign, so that he may know the God who is doing these things, so that the world may know, that there is one
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God who sits in heaven, who governs the affairs of men, who is sovereign over the rising of the nations, and their fall,
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God says these things to Cyrus, Isaiah writes these things, and they are passed down to us, for our instruction, that we may know, that he is
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God, and there is no other, and then the last verse we'll look at, and then
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I have a few additional comments to make, but the last verse is verse 7, probably one of the most difficult verses in the
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Bible, especially if people have no mindset regarding the sovereignty of God, because it says,
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I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity,
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I the Lord do all these things, if you have a
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King James Bible, it says I create evil, and that has led to a lot of confusion in the minds of people, because they think that what that means is somehow that God is the author of moral transgression, or the author of moral evil, the author of sin, that's not what this text is referring to,
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God is sovereign over all things, but God, the Bible says does not tempt us to sin, we need to keep that in mind, and also what is sin, sin is a negation of God's righteousness, it is not a created thing, it's not created like God created the wind and the waves and the water and the seas and the air and all those things, those are creations, we are creations, and God's righteousness is a standard, moral evil is a negation of the standard, it's not a created thing, it's an action that goes against that which is the standard,
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God is not saying I create that, He's sovereign over it and He providentially uses it, we've addressed that, but evil is not created like an apple or a tree or a stream, but calamity,
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I think the ESV, and what does it say in the New American, is it calamity? I think calamity gets the point across a little better than the word evil, because evil has a moral attachment, calamity is saying that God is actually the one who is bringing about those things which we say are positives and those things that are negatives, because God is working in this world both with the good and with the bad to bring about His will, so when someone suffers a calamity like years ago when
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Hurricane Katrina hit and many people were asking, many preachers were saying
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God had nothing to do with this, and then of course just a few months ago the storms hit
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North Carolina and saw people's homes washed away, dozens of people were killed, at this point maybe more, well
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God had nothing to do with that, no God is sovereign even over that, if God is only sovereign in the good,
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He's not sovereign in the bad, then He's not sovereign, that's what we have to conclude, and that's
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Isaiah's point, Isaiah's point in this is when
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I give this prophecy regarding Cyrus, when I say I'm going to raise up Cyrus for this purpose,
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I am demonstrating my sovereignty over all things, the good and the bad, and so with those things in our mind,
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I want to try as best I can to draw an application out of this, first I want to subdue some arguments, because anytime
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I preach on the sovereignty of God, I get people responding with, well what if, well what,
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I'm not sure I agree because of this and so, the first argument is, well
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God is not sovereign over Cyrus raising up, He just saw the future,
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God can see the future, that doesn't mean He's causing it, I say go back and read,
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God doesn't say I saw you Cyrus rise up, no He says I will rise you up,
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I will call you by name, I will do these things, in fact there's a series of I will, I will,
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I will, I will do this, God is not a fortune teller sitting in front of a crystal ball,
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God's knowledge of the future does not come from mere reception of information, but by the decree of His will,
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I will do this, and it will come to pass, and the second thing that people often argue, and this one probably more so, is they'll say, well if what you're saying is true, and God is sovereign over the affairs of men, then what
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I do really doesn't matter, and beloved if that's what you think
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I'm saying, it's not, because God is working out
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His will through the actions of men and women, and He calls
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His people to go into His world and make change in His name,
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He actually calls us to be a part and do that, so if you think hearing this sermon about Cyrus is me saying to you, you know you don't need to participate, you don't need, you just need to sit at home and just know that God's going to do what
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He's going to do, that's not what I'm saying, in the same way that people don't come to faith without evangelism, and that's why we evangelize, even though God is sovereign over who is saved,
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God's sovereign over who He opens the heart, but people don't get, people don't get saved without hearing the word, Romans chapter 10, how shall they hear without a preacher, and how will they hear unless someone preaches to them, and how will he preach unless he is sent, and so beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news, right, there is a means to an end, a process by which
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God is bringing about His will, and so we send the preachers, we send the evangelists, we go with them, we encourage them, and we go ourselves, because we are means to God's end, well the same is true in other areas as well, beloved, should we care that babies are murdered, and should we voice against it, yes, should we care that people's livelihoods are robbed and stolen through hyperinflation and mismanagement, yes, so we speak out against it, and we say this is ungodly, and you will face the
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God of the universe for what you do, I absolutely believe we should, the government is a deacon of God according to scripture, it is called the minister of God to reward the righteous and to punish the wicked, and when the government gets that turned around, and it has, it has rewarded the wicked and punished the righteous, you are to call her to repentance, and if that means that punishment comes, we take the punishment, but we don't shut up, we stand and proclaim the truth, you will face
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God for what you do, as a
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Baptist, I believe in the separation of church and state, because I don't believe the government has the right to manage the church, but I do not believe in the separation of God and government, because the government is subject to almighty
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God, and so I go, I vote, I pray that those who I vote for will be subject to almighty
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God, and I pray that you would as well, because every man will face his maker, so will you, and you will give an account for everything we do, so my encouragement to you today, trust that God is sovereign, and don't believe that because he is sovereign that he is not using us to bring about his will, he is, he calls us to follow him, to do what he tells us to do, to trust in him as we go, and if you came this morning, and maybe you're that person who doesn't yet trust in him, maybe you're that person who has not yet bowed the knee to Christ, I hope that hearing the prophecy of Cyrus would remind you that God exists, that his prophetic utterance is certain, and that his word is true, and I want to remind you something else that his word says, his word says that at the name of Jesus Christ, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is
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Lord to the glory of God the Father, you will either bow the knee to Christ here, or you'll bow the knee to Christ when he comes, here it will be done in joy, there it will be done in terror, so I encourage you today to turn from your unbelief, trust in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, bow the knee to him who is Lord and Savior of all who trust, your sins have separated you from your
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God, but Christ through his atoning sacrifice provides you salvation, trust in the
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Lord, and let us pray, Father, thank you for your word, thank you for the opportunity to again preach the truth of this text, oh what a powerful text it is, and I pray
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Lord as we see you raising up Cyrus, we know Lord that you are still in control today, and I trust
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Lord that you are working out your will, help us to know you'll still be on your throne Wednesday, and your people are still your people even when they are in exile, so I pray,
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Lord give us confidence to trust in you no matter what comes, and for the ones who don't trust in you today, open their hearts to believe in Jesus name,