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Sunnyside Baptist Church Michael Dirrim, Pastor
All right, let's open our Bibles and let's turn to Isaiah chapter one. We're reading verses 21 through 26 this evening. So we continue thinking about the hope that is proclaimed to us in the word of God and hope for rebellious children.
Start with a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for the day. We thank you for the gift of your word. We thank you for its timeless beauty, power and truth. And we thank you that you direct us to you, to your light.
We may confess our sins and agree with you about the condition that we find ourselves in by your truth. And we would agree with you not only about our sin, but also about the salvation that you have arranged for us and provided for us in your son, Jesus Christ.
I pray that you would help us to rejoice in him tonight, that he would have our affection, he would have our attention. And that in him, we would have our confident hope. We pray these things in Christ's name.
Amen. Isaiah one, beginning in verse twenty one. How the faithful city has become a harlot. It was full of justice, righteousness lodged in it. But now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water.
Your princes are rebellious and companions of thieves. Everyone loves bribes and follows after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the cause of the widow come before them. Therefore, the Lord says, the Lord of hosts, the mighty one of Israel.
Ah, I will rid myself of my adversaries and take vengeance on my enemies. I will turn my hand against you and thoroughly purge away your dross and take away all your alloy. I will restore your judges as at the first and your counselors as at the beginning.
Afterward, you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city. So Isaiah is putting together these six verses that we have here. This is a poem that first three verses showcases the city's ruination.
And then the next three verses talk about the city's restoration. And each of the themes that we find in the first three verses are answered particularly in the following three verses as God lays out the issues and then he lays out the hope of salvation.
As we begin to study the themes here, verse 21 is a lament in which God calls the witnesses of heaven and earth to pay attention to how bad things are in the city, lamenting how things have gotten from, they were good, but now they're awful.
But then he has a direct address to the city in verses 22 and 23. Eight lines of poetry, four stanzas, each of them talking about how everything is counterfeit, vain, falling apart. Each one of the lines states the Lord's complaint.
Each one of the first four lines and then the follow up line of each theme shows how intense the issues are getting. And so we've been looking at verse 23 and taking our time here because we're looking at some themes that have been overly stressed and I think misunderstood in recent years.
It's been the theme to talk about God privileging and favoring the poor. He's on the side of the widow, orphan, the stranger and the poor. And that wherever you find those people listed in the scriptures, God has personal favoritism towards them and he's on their side, so we are to be as well.
We've also been told in the church for many years now that if we don't have this same perspective and heart about these matters that God does, then we don't have all the gospel. And in fact, we are missing part of the gospel unless we have this mindset and we actually have to listen to the oppressed, to receive from them information that we're missing.
We don't have the gospel until the oppressed tell us what the gospel is about. That's been going on for years now. This is liberation theology. It was developed in South America among Roman Catholic theologians where they're mixing Marxism and Christianity.
It headed north and it's infested all of our seminaries for the most part and it's the popular way of teaching. It's the latest fad. And so when we read through these scriptures, I want to take the time to say, okay, look, we're reading about issues that are real issues that we need to talk about and pay attention to, but not in the same categories and themes as has been handed to us for the last 10 or 12 years.
And so last time we were talking about this, it's important because we are to be concerned about issues of justice. We are to be concerned about issues where people who do not have the resources to stand up for themselves and to say, hey, this is a wrong doing against me that we should be concerned when magistrates, when judges, when people in authority are being unjust and just whatever the rich want me to do, that's what I'm going to do and so on.
That is wrong. That is wrong. But at the same time, we should be affirming what the scripture says where God says he does not take partiality. He is not partial to the poor, but he is the defender of those who have no defense.
And so we have to be able to say what the scripture is saying and think God's thoughts after him rather than just kind of repeating the latest fad. Pay attention to what goes on here about the nature of the city and it's all about the corruption of the city.
The problem is the silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water. The princes are rebellious and companions of thieves. So there's no justice, there's no righteousness amongst the magistrates.
So going to the magistrates to make everything right is a pretty bad plan. And then we're talking about this, everyone loves bribes and follows after rewards. The princes, the magistrates, the judges, the chiefs, the people with the political authority and the responsibility to punish evildoers and praise righteousness, they, all of them love bribes and follow after rewards.
And of course we can see how bad of a problem that is. If the princes love bribes, it means they desire them ardently and everybody knows it. Yeah, they're just always on the take. And the only way to get a prince's ear is to fill his hand.
And it's just the way of the world, it's just how it goes. But it's worse than that because it's not a passive thing. It's not simply that the princes are waiting to receive bribes as the cases come up, but they actually follow after, they pursue, they track down rewards.
They're like Gehazi chasing down Naaman. They're looking to get paid, they're marketing themselves. Their magisterial authority is being actively hustled to whatever end the lobbyist desires. They're for sale, the magistrate is for sale.
You know, in our own context, our own parlance, the senators, the congressmen, the judges, the president, the governors, the attorney generals, the district attorneys are all on the take, they're for sale, they're marketing themselves.
And it's a generalization, but we see how it works. We know that there is not a lot of justice in our land. We have seen a lot of corruption and a lot of bribes and a lot of money floating around, and people just say whatever the money tells them to say,.
In general.
Now that's not a unique problem to our country, it's not a unique problem to Israel and their time. This is what happens when people don't fear God. We need more people who fear God. We don't need new politics, we need a new populace, we need people who fear God.
And that's what we should be praying for. But when you see the degeneration of the city, we can relate because we see the degeneration of our own society. But there's a progression here in verses 21 through 23 from adultery to adulteration.
We have theft paired with graft, we have robbery paired with bribery. And the wrongfulness of the princes is built on and moved by the love of money, the pursuit of ill-gotten gain, the old King James term, filthy lucre, which is a great name for a band.
I'm sure it's been used more than once. But this is the problem in Isaiah, it's mentioned more than once. So in Isaiah chapter five, it's still in our first section where we're talking about rebellious children.
But Isaiah chapter five, verses 21 through 24, the theme comes up again. This is a perennial issue in Jerusalem in Judah society. And so verse 21 of Isaiah five, "'Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes "'and prudent in their own sight.'".
They're not being informed by the word of God, they are their own standard, they are their own principle. "'Woe to men mighty at drinking wine, "'woe to men valiant for mixing intoxicating drink.'". Now notice how those are paired together.
So that the person who only abides by their own estimation of whether they are right or wrong is the same as a drunk. How is that? Because they have lost all sense of reality, they don't perceive things appropriately, they're intoxicated by their own pride.
Somebody who only listens to themselves is the same person who drinks and gets intoxicated because they lose all their discernment, you see? Verse 23, what do these people do? "'They justify the wicked for a bribe.'".
There it is, "'And they take away justice from the righteous man.'". And so you see there, there's a continued condemnation of the continuing problem. Now, there's a warning in 1 Timothy chapter six and verse 10, after talking about how the love of money distorts people's discernment and perception.
In verse 10 of 1 Timothy six, it says, "'The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.'". Money isn't the root of evil, it's the love of money that is a root of all kinds of evil. "'For which some have strayed from the faith "'in their greediness and pierced themselves through "'with many sorrows.'".
So when we think about whether it's in the magistrate, whether it's in the church, the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Evil, the term is not referring to some black sticky substance that gets up on the cosmos and we try to wash it off, okay?
God didn't make evil. Evil is the sinful perversion of what is good, okay? It's a twisting of what was already there. This is what Satan did when he lied and tempted in the garden. So it's a perversion of what's already there and the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
So when the Lord is talking about and highlighting someone like the orphan, the fatherless, or highlighting someone like the widow, in this kind of context, what he is stating is, although these people have been forgotten and put aside, their needs not even addressed, the issues of righteousness and justice in the city are never taken care of concerning them.
Why?
Because they don't have the money to pay off the judges. He says, in that case, he says, I see it, I observe it, I say it's wrong, and then God takes action against the magistrates who don't do right.
Every human justice system is going to be full of injustice and there's gonna be partiality and their arms are going to be too short to reach and they're not going to succeed. Even those who do their very, very best, they're going to fall short.
But God has always affirmed that he will bring justice, that he will settle all the accounts. People know today, it doesn't matter what political persuasion you're in, people know today, injustice abounds everywhere and it has for a long time.
And people get very, very burdened about this. They're so burdened about it that they want to raise the dead to lynch them, right? This is why they're tearing down statues. They're destroying statues because they feel there's injustice everywhere, they're probably projecting from their own souls on everything else, and they want to destroy statues because these dead people are awful people.
Why? They have no hope in Jesus Christ. They have no hope in the King of Kings who reigns until all of his enemies are placed to footstool for his feet and then he returns and guess what he does?
He raises the dead.
And has a good old judgment day, doesn't he? And settles all the accounts and makes it all right. But if you don't have that hope, then you're left with all manner of angst and anger. So God is not denying his inherent impartiality when he talks about the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor.
He affirms his impartiality against what was common in the covenant breaking society, which was they were partial. They were partial against the widow, orphan, refugee, and the poor. And so God is saying he's not, and they shouldn't be either.
Alec Moitra was a scholar in Isaiah. He said, when everything is subordinate to self-interest, those who bring needs rather than gifts are dismissed without thought. Now in the church, how are we to handle that?
When people come to our church and they bring needs rather than gifts, how are we supposed to handle that? James 2, verse one, my brethren do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, the Lord of all.
I pray with partiality. For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings and fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, you sit here in a good place, and say to the poor man, you stand there or sit here at my footstool, have you not shown partiality among yourselves to become judges with evil thoughts?
Right?
How are we supposed to treat people when they come to the church and they bring needs rather than bringing gifts? That's an important consideration, correct? It's a test. It's a test of where our attention is.
It's a test of where our confidence is. It's a test about what we're about as a church, isn't it? And our attention should be upon Christ. The point is that for the magistrates in Isaiah or for church members today, that we will be motivated by God, not bribes.
Motivated by God and not bribes. This is a issue that Isaiah would talk about more than once. In Isaiah 31, verse one, he says, woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and horsemen because they are very strong, but who do not look to the Holy One of Israel nor seek the Lord.
So they're looking for bribes or looking for military assistance or whatever, but they're not looking to the Lord and relying upon him. It's an issue of fearing God rather than man. Jesus would not be bribed.
Remember the devil tried to bribe Christ. He would not be bribed to advance himself over and against his father's will, even though Satan offered him the kingdoms, the nations. Satan offering Christ his due inheritance without the cross, without the suffering, without going through his death and resurrection.
And Christ rejected the temptation. Christ receives the nations and judges justly, saving sinners without respect to their, what we call these days, their intersectionals, right? He gives no attention to that.
God saves grace. God saves by grace. He is not one who exercises partiality. And the emphases about these matters that are made so much of today is always for the purpose of de-emphasis. Oh, here's a few passages from the New Testament.
Romans 10, 12. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek for the same Lord is over all is rich to all who call upon him. There's no distinction between Jew and Greek. So why do people talk all the stinking time about Jew and Gentile?
Why are we so fixated on it? First Corinthians 12, 13. For by one spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, all of them made to drink into one spirit. Why do we spend so much time talking about class distinction, class distinction, class?
Why do we spend so much time on it? When the reason why the Bible brings it up is to say we're all one in Christ. Galatians 3, 28. There's neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you all one in Christ Jesus, right?
Why is the standpoint epistemology pushed so hard? Like, well, pastors can't pastor women because they're not women, right? We have to have women on staff, otherwise we can't pastor women, okay? Pretty sure Jesus is a good shepherd and he's not a woman.
Colossians 3, 11. There's neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all. The only reason why these things are brought up is for de-emphasis, not for emphasis, not to make them sacred, not to enshrine them and make them permanent divisions in the church.
So Jesus included,.
But notice he did not venerate all kinds of folks. All right, he included all kinds of folks. He didn't venerate them for their differences. And he warned them all just the same. Told them all the same thing.
Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Everybody got the same message. So when we think about the way we're supposed to respond in general, we notice that we're not supposed to be making a big deal about those differences.
What goes on in Isaiah is the fact that the undefended, those who don't have a defense, the widow with no husband, the child with no father, it's the defenselessness of the undefended is indefensible.
I got it out.
The covenant standard that God gave to Israel was to reflect his character. It was to show up in the life of Israel, and it was to look like the image of God that he had designed from the very beginning from Genesis.
And this living out of the image of God was not the elimination of all the disadvantages that widows and orphans, strangers and poor have. But living out of the image of God is not the elimination of distinctions, the elimination of disadvantages that some people have, but it is the unbiased treatment of them in a society according to God's standards.
God's standards, not Carl's. So that's what the rulers were doing. That's what their crimes were. It was a failure to do the objectively right thing. They were doing the subjectively demanded thing. They were not doing the objectively right thing.
Now, we often think about that and approach the situation from the current hullabaloo that is pushed upon us, the great controversies that we're dealing with in the here and now. But what about in those days?
Yes, the widow was going without food when she needed it. Yes, the orphan was going without food when he needed it. That was going on, but it was deeper and richer than that. The problems were more robust.
A widow or an orphan, a stranger or the poor, all had very special challenges concerning their inclusion and their involvement in the old covenant. Their participation in the old covenant was greatly made more difficult if the widow had no husband and the orphan had no father and the stranger had no family connection and the poor had no land.
You know how hard it was to participate in the old covenant if you were one of those folks?
Oh, it was hard.
It was hard to have any real connection at all.
Without a husband, without a father,.
Without an ethnicity, without a land, well, you start getting the idea of like, well, are they really a part? Are they really a part of the old covenant or not? Do I have to treat them according to the same sins I have to treat somebody else?
You know, here's a man who has been circumcised and has a family and he has a house and he has land and he gets to show up three times a year to the tabernacle or the temple for those special feasts and representation is all there and he gets to be an elder of his city one day and everything's great.
What happens if he's not there? What happens to that widow? What happens to those children? What happens to that daughter all by herself? How are they supposed to be treated? What happens when the family falls into poverty and they lose their land for like 45 years and they're just waiting for the year of jubilee to come around but still, they're still so tired and poor and unable to make anything of it that as soon as the year of jubilee is over, they got to sell the land again to try to get some sort of progress going with their needs.
What about that stranger who's been living among the people of Israel for quite some time but he, no connection to the children of Israel. He's got no ethnicity, no lineage going back to Jacob. How are those folks supposed to be treated in the context of the old covenant?
Well, it'd be real easy to just like, well, they're not really an important part at all but God was making a standard. How faithful are you to my covenant based on how well do you treat those where it's the easiest to mistreat them?
Right, this was a real test case. It was really putting the pressure on like, let's just see how faithful you are to the covenant based on how you treat these people or do you marginalize them and not treat them appropriately.
In Christ, none of these or any other outsider have any lack of full acceptance with God because of Christ's covenant faithfulness, right? Israel had a hard time fully extending the benefits and the rewards and the blessings of the old covenant to every person that was supposed to be a covenant member.
Right, they just had a hard time pulling that off. They were too self-interested, they spent too much time thinking about themselves and they didn't do what they were supposed to. But you know, Christ is perfect in his covenant faithfulness and so from the least of these to the greatest of these, all of them get the fullness of the new covenant, right?
Every covenant member of the new covenant, every Christian, everyone who was in Christ who was born again, you know, they don't get a percentage of the Holy Spirit, they get the whole person of the Holy Spirit.
They don't get a sliver of the righteousness of Christ, they get the whole righteousness of Christ, right? They don't get God as a father for a little bit of the year, they get God as heavenly father every day, all year long.
And the wholeness, the fullness of the new covenant in Christ. And so, as those who are members of the old covenant, we have an obligation made in God's image, serving our King Jesus to whatever degree that we exercise our citizenship or serve as a magistrate to govern in the fear of God, not in the fear of man.
And to consider how we are to treat what is an orphans and strangers and poor. And think about how we do that in the church. How do we do that in the church? There's a lot of scripture passages to talk about that from the way in which they divided up the labor in the church between the elders and the deacons in Acts chapter six, as there were several widows who in their conversion to Jesus Christ and their being baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit, were no longer being cared for by the Jewish compassion benevolent system.
Well, these widows no longer donate to the temple, they no longer offer sacrifices at the temple. And they're saying that Jesus is the Lamb of God, well, then they're not gonna be supported anymore, are they?
So who's gonna help them? Who's gonna support them? Well, the church was trying to pick that up. But it was so much that the apostles couldn't do it. So they had to call the deacons in to help. For a very deep study that I think that would be very, very helpful, but we don't have time tonight, is 1 Timothy 5 verses three through 16.
Very robust, clear, practical instructions to Timothy about who Christian women ought to be, how they ought to live, what widows really are, and when the church is to get involved and to help. And how widows are to respond.
One of the most robust, detailed passages in the New Testament that never gets taught or looked at. James 1, 27, true and undefiled religion is this, visiting the widow and the orphan in their time of need.
So there's a lot of passages in the scripture that talk about, it's a test case, how do we, in light of who Christ is and how we are loved by him and how we are brought into the kingdom without regard to our merits and our station, how then do we live in the light of Christ?
And it matters to Jesus a great deal. In Matthew 25, as we look at the picture of the last day when Jesus Christ returns, raises all the dead and sifts them as tares and wheat, when he talks to the saints, he says to them that, you saw me in prison and visited me, you saw me thirsty, you gave me drink, you saw me hungry, you gave me food, you saw me unclothed, you gave me clothes, you did all these wonderful things for me and the sheep said, oh, it didn't happen, we didn't do that, you're just giving credit to the wrong people here.
And he said, to the degree that you have done it to the least of these, my brethren, you've done it to me. He wasn't talking about the worldwide problems of poverty and corruption and issues throughout the world.
He did say in Mark chapter 14, verse seven, the poor are always with you, you may give to them freely whenever you wish. There's a liberty in that. But what matters most to Christ is, on the last day, what's gonna matter a great deal to Christ is how did we love the least of these his brethren?
How did we love one another as Christians? Galatians 6 .10 says to do good, do not grow weary in doing good, but especially to the household of the faith. Christians are to prioritize benevolence and compassion and mercy and care for people who are in need to Christians first.
Does that sound weird? May sound a little weird, but that's biblical. We are to prioritize our care to Christians first, it matters to Jesus on the last day how we treated the least of these his brethren.
So it's a joy to simply follow Jesus, the keeper of the covenant. And he will transform society by his power and by his provision. But Christian widows are to be cared for by Christian families and be helped by the church.
And orphans are to be adopted by Christian families and supported and loved by the church. And Christian strangers should be welcomed by the church family. And the Christian poor to be helped by the church.
And then in freedom and liberty, genuinely and generosity in the name of Christ, many people outside of Christ may be helped by the benevolence and the compassion of the church becomes the platform for evangelism.
But all of that is in response to who Christ is as our righteousness and our full inclusion into the new covenant. All that as a response to who he is and the grace that we enjoy in Christ, because Christ is our righteousness.
Christ is our righteousness. We don't have to go out and do a bunch of good deeds in order to achieve justice. Christ is our righteousness. There's a lot more there. I've got tons of notes, but we're gonna go ahead and close there.
And we'll do so by singing the doxology together.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow Praise him all creatures here below Praise him above ye heavenly ranks Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
