WWUTT 2069 I Am Yahweh and there Is No Other (Isaiah 45:11-25)

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Over and over in Isaiah 45, God says, I am Yahweh and there is no other.

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I am the one who saves, no other can save. I am the one who has declared the end from the beginning when we understand the text.

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This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ. For he is before all things and in him, all things hold together.

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Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com. And once again, it's Pastor Gabe.

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Thank you, Becky. In our study of the book of Isaiah, we've been in chapter 45. Last week, just looked at verses one through 10.

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So today, picking up where we left off, I'm gonna start reading in verse 11 and go through verse 17 out of the

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Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord. Thus says Yahweh, the

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Holy One of Israel and his maker, ask me about the things that are to come concerning my sons and you shall commit to me the work of my hands.

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It is I who made the earth and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with my hands and I commanded all their host.

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I have awakened him in righteousness and I will make all his ways smooth.

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He will build my city and will let my exiles go without any payment or reward, says

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Yahweh of hosts. Thus says Yahweh, the fruit of the labor of Egypt and the prophet of Ethiopia and the

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Sabaeans, men of stature, will come over to you and will be yours. They will walk behind you.

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They will come over in chains and they will bow down to you. They will make supplication to you.

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Surely God is with you and there is none else, no other God. Truly you are a

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God who hides himself, O God of Israel, savior. They will be put to shame and even dishonored.

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All of them, the craftsmen of idols will go away together in dishonor. Israel has been saved by Yahweh with an everlasting salvation.

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You will not be put to shame or dishonored to all eternity. Now, this is the second part of this chapter.

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The third begins in verse 18 and goes to verse 25. But if you'll remember the way that we kind of broke this down last week, the first section is in verses one through 10.

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And that was the section that we looked at last week. God is saying through the prophet

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Isaiah that he has appointed a man, a king named Cyrus, who's not even been born yet, but God even gives his name.

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And he has already foreordained from before the foundation of the world that all of these events would transpire that would eventually lead to Israel being exiled out of their land into Babylonian captivity.

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And then the Babylonians are gonna be overthrown by the Medes and the Persians. And it is gonna be the Persian King Cyrus whom

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God has appointed would rise up and free the people of Israel out of their captivity back into their land and even supply for them everything that they will need to rebuild the temple and Jerusalem, its walls and so forth.

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As said in this particular section that we read here, the second part, that Cyrus will even do this though he has nothing to gain by it.

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And this will be done so that all will know that Yahweh is the one true

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God and there is no other God but Yahweh. As we considered in verses six and seven last week, that they may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides me.

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I am Yahweh and there is no other. The one forming light and creating darkness, producing peace and creating calamity.

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I am Yahweh who does all of this. Even the chaos that happens that leads to the great deliverance.

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God is the one who has ordained all of this so that you will know as articulated in this second section that God is savior.

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He is the one who saves. There is no one else who saves but Yahweh. And then we go on in verses 18 and 19 to read, thus says

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Yahweh who created the heavens. I am Yahweh, there is none else. I have not spoken in secret in some dark land.

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I did not say to the seed of Jacob, seek me in a formless place. I, Yahweh, speak righteousness, declaring things that are upright.

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And really those two verses there can go with the second section. So 11 to 19 is really part two.

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Is really part two. So then, and then that last section verses 20 to 25, which we'll get to today as well.

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This is God gathering his people and will send them to a place where they may exalt

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God and they will declare his praise, knowing that it is he who has done this from the beginning to the end.

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Only in Yahweh are righteousness and strength and men will come to him and all who were angry with him will be put to shame.

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So we come back to the start here of verse 11. Thus says Yahweh, the Holy one of Israel and his maker, ask me about the things that are to come concerning my sons and you shall commit to me the work of my hands.

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Now, it said that he is the Holy one of Israel and his maker. He is the one who makes Israel.

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So this reference to his sons, that would be the children of Israel. Ask me about the things that are to come concerning my sons.

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And you might put the emphasis on the me. Ask me about the things that are to come concerning my sons.

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Because you might remember going back to chapter eight that God told Isaiah, don't call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy.

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Don't fear what they fear, nor be in dread. And God had also said that they should be running to the word and to the testimony, but instead they go to the soothsayers and the necromancers and the fortune tellers trying to understand what it is that's going on.

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They don't come to Yahweh. They don't come before him humbly, certainly to say,

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God, we've sinned against you. We've worshiped these false gods, which gets confronted in this chapter as well here in chapter 45.

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Forgive us, forgive us and restore us to this land. That was not the attitude of Israel at all. So instead of coming to God, they went to the spiritists.

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And so here in verse 11, back to chapter 45, verse 11, God says, ask me about the things that are to come.

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Why didn't you ask me what is transpiring? And I would have told you through a prophet.

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You shall commit to me the work of my hands, he says. Verse 12, it is

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I who made the earth and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with my hands and I commanded all their host.

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By the way, in case you're unaware, I had just started this year, an entire read through the

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Bible on the What YouTube channel. So if you go to youtube .com slash WWUTT, I'm reading through the

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Bible there and including like three to four chapters a day, text and audio in these slides.

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It's got a scrolling text that goes up as I read chapter by chapter through scripture. Of course, by this point, I've only been through, you know what,

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Genesis 11 or 15 or something like that. I can't remember what reading I'm on at this point.

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But anyway, so we've just finished up the very beginning of Genesis. If you've done some sort of Bible reading plan and you began at the start of the

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Bible at the beginning of 2024, then you've been through the creation story. God is the one who has made heaven and created man upon it, stretched out the heavens with my hands and I commanded all their host.

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Have you done that? Is there any other God that can claim to have done this? Verse 13,

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I have awakened him in righteousness and I will make all his ways smooth. Talking about Cyrus once again.

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He will build my city and will let my exiles go without any payment or reward says

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Yahweh of hosts. And that's certainly quite the contrast from Pharaoh when the Israelites had been enslaved and were in Egyptian captivity,

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Pharaoh would not let those people go. But here the statement is being made of Cyrus. He will let my exiles go.

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He will let them go without any payment or reward because God is the one who has done this.

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He would ordain that it would happen. What reason would a pagan king have to let his servants, his slaves go like this?

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Because God had ordained it. God had turned his heart that he would do it.

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As said in Proverbs 21, one, the king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of Yahweh.

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He turns it wherever he will. And so we go on in verse 14, thus says

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Yahweh, the fruit of the labor of Egypt and the prophet of Ethiopia, and the Sabaeans men of stature will come over to you and they will be yours.

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They will walk behind you. They will come over in chains and will bow down to you. They will make supplication to you.

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Surely God is with you and there is none else, no other God. So these are the peoples that will be given over into the hands of the king of Persia.

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He'll let the Hebrews go, but he will gain all these other nations. And that's been said previously in this section of Isaiah and even referring to them as being a kind of a ransom, a payment, they would be given to Assyria in exchange for the

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Hebrews that would be set free. That wasn't a formal exchange that would happen. Not like, hey,

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I'll give you these people if you'll let the Hebrews go, but that's just the way that God had arranged this.

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So the Egyptians would be put in the place of the Hebrews that Cyrus would let the

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Hebrews be released. Verse 15, truly you are a God who hides himself, oh

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God of Israel, savior. Because see, none of this could have been known that God was going to do this because he hides himself and his intentions are not known to us until they happen.

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Unless God is speaking through a prophet such as this. Of course, this was written down by Isaiah, but the people still did not pay any attention to it.

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God who has hidden himself from them and even hidden his intentions. So that when they are written down like this, he still has the power to either open the mind to hear it or close the heart from receiving it.

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They will be put to shame and even dishonored, all of them, it says in verse 16, the craftsmen of idols will go away together in dishonor.

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Israel has been saved by Yahweh with an everlasting salvation. You will not be put to shame or dishonored to all eternity.

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So these false gods have been put to shame. Those who worship the false gods have been put to shame, but God has a plan for Israel and he will rescue them and whom he saves, they are saved forever.

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And that's a lesson that we can certainly apply to our own salvation. When we are saved in Christ Jesus, when we trust in him for the forgiveness of our sins, knowing that by his death on the cross, he became our ransom, an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

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When we put our trust in him, we are saved. And if we are saved, we are saved with an everlasting salvation because this is the way

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Yahweh saves. He doesn't save temporarily, he saves forever. Israel has been saved by Yahweh with an everlasting salvation.

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And we will not be put to shame or dishonored to all eternity. As said in Romans 8, if God is for us, who can be against us?

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What can man do to me if God is on my side? And so in verse 18, thus says

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Yahweh who created the heavens. Then we have this parenthetical reference, which

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I didn't read earlier. He is the God who formed the earth and made it. He established it and did not create it a formless place, but formed it to be inhabited.

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Remember that we have at the beginning of Genesis one, one and two, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was formless and void.

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Remember that? Well, God didn't create the earth to be formless and void. So what happens next in Genesis one is the description of God creating forms and filling the void.

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You have the heavens that are created. You have the light and the darkness that precede even the creation of the sun, moon and stars.

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And then God fills those voids with something, the sun, moon and stars. He creates the sky and the sea.

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He fills the forms with birds in the heavens and fish in the sea. He creates the land, which is the form, then he fills it.

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He fills the void with animals and with mankind. So we have the creation of forms on days one, two and three, and then

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God fills those forms, fills the void in verses four, five and six. God did not create these things to be formless and void.

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All of these things have intention and time itself is not formless and void.

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God has a plan to be fulfilled in the fullness of time.

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I am Yahweh and there is no one else. We have repeated again. I have not spoken in secret in some dark land.

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Again, these things are being proclaimed a hundred years before they happen. I did not say to the seed of Jacob, seek me in a formless place.

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I, Yahweh, speak righteousness, declaring things that are upright.

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Now, a couple of ways that this applies. Number one is that everything that God does is good.

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Even when we go back to verse seven, I am the one forming light and creating darkness, producing peace and creating calamity.

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I am Yahweh who does all of these things. Even the calamity that God causes is good because he is working it out to some ultimate good.

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Think of Genesis 50, 20, where Joseph said to his brothers, what you did to me, you intended evil against me, but God meant it for good, that many would be saved because of what had happened to Joseph.

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So the intention of the brother's hearts were evil, but God, who had purpose that this was going to happen, intended it for good.

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Everything that he does, all the things that he has declared are upright. So that's the first application to that.

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The second application is that I, Yahweh, speak righteousness, declaring things that are upright.

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So therefore, we must do what he says. It's not just whatever Yahweh declares is good in its happening, it's also good in its application, that we would do what it is that God tells us to do.

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His ways are righteous, and if we walk in those ways, we walk upright. Verse 20, gather yourselves and come, drawn near together, you who have escaped from the nations, they do not know, who carry about their graven image of wood and pray to a

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God who cannot save. Again, this is going back to talking about those who had gone after the soothsayers and the spiritists rather than coming and seeking

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God, rather than running to the truth and to the testimony. They pray to a God who cannot save.

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Verse 21, declare and draw near with your case. This is referring to those who have made these false gods and even saying to the false gods themselves, hey, tell me something.

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Can you make your case? Can you declare those things from of old? And surely this would have looked hilarious if God had taken a human form and had walked up to an idol and had started having a conversation with it.

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Hey, make your case, consult together, get together with your other idol buddies.

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You guys can even share intelligence. Maybe between you guys, you can come up with an answer.

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Who has made this heard from of old? Can you predict these things from of old? Can you speak of them because you are the one that has ordained and arranged them?

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Now, if God were to have done such a thing, if he were to step into a body and walk up to one of those idols and ask questions in this way, it would surely have been an embarrassment to the people there who had made those idols.

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As Jesus is talking to that, even they know, well, of course they're not gonna respond to you, they're an idol.

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And that's the point. God in asking these questions is putting to shame those people who have trusted in idols, who have made them and trusted them and thought that the idols could deliver them.

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It's as if God is right there putting these idols on trial and the people who have made these idols are really sheepishly putting their heads down, recognizing, okay, yeah, suddenly

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I feel really quite foolish. Who has made this heard from of old, Yahweh says.

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Who has long since declared it? Is it not I, Yahweh?

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And there is no other God besides me, a righteous God and a savior. There is none except me.

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And here we have that declaration again. In all three parts of this chapter, there is that statement of there's none besides me.

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I am the only one. Turn to me and be saved. All the ends of the earth.

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So this is an invitation, not just to Israel, an invitation is really a command.

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It's not commanded just to Israel, it's commanded to the whole earth. Anyone who is gonna be saved must come to me.

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I have sworn by myself, God says, the word has gone forth from my mouth in righteousness and will not turn back.

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That to me, every knee will bow. Every tongue will swear allegiance.

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That sounds familiar, doesn't it? They will say to me, only in Yahweh, our righteousness and strength, men will come to him.

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And all who were angry at him will be put to shame. In Yahweh, all the seed of Israel will be justified and will boast, boasting in Yahweh, not in themselves, but in the

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Lord. Going back to that last line in verse 23, to me, every knee will bow.

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Every tongue will swear allegiance. Where have we heard that? That is in Philippians chapter two.

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Remember, this is Yahweh speaking. I am Yahweh and there is no other.

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And then what's the statement there in Philippians two, verses five through 11, to Jesus Christ, every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue will confess, will swear allegiance that Jesus Christ is

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Lord to the glory of God the Father. By the way, that very statement right there in Philippians two, 10 and 11 is to say that Jesus Christ is

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Yahweh. To me, every knee will bow and every tongue will swear allegiance that Jesus Christ is

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Lord. Jesus Christ is Yahweh. And only in Yahweh, it goes on to say in verse 24, our righteousness and strength, men will come to him and all who were angry at him will be put to shame.

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So come to the Lord and be saved. Rejoice in him for the salvation that he has given to you in Jesus Christ.

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There is no other way, by no other name under heaven can we be saved, but through Jesus Christ, who is

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Yahweh, I am who I am. Heavenly Father, we thank you for what we've read here.

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And I pray that this really fills up with hope and comfort today.

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We know that God who stretched out the heavens by his hands, who has declared the end from the beginning, who is in control of all,

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God is on our side through Jesus Christ, our savior. And what a comfort and a good word that is.

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And may we continue in our steps today, pursuing righteousness and holiness in your name, because we know that you have given much to save us and given much, guaranteed much for us, forever, for our eternity.

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Give us boldness to even share the good word of the gospel with somebody else so that they too, men from all over the earth, may come to the

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Lord God and be saved. It is in Jesus' name that we pray, amen. This has been,

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When We Understand The Text with Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt

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.com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast, or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com

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and let your friends know about our ministry. Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's word,