Sunday, Aug 18, 2024 PM

And we're going to read verses 21 through 26.

Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for the night. We thank you for the opportunity to study your word together. We pray that you would bless us, watch over us, help us to understand your word and to rejoice in its truth.

We pray that you would look upon our needs and our desires, our requests with favor, that you would hear us for the sake of your

Son, and that you would show your favor and grace upon us through the gift of your

Holy Spirit tonight. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Isaiah 1, beginning in verse 21.

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.

Isaiah preaches sermons for a difficult present. He clearly identifies the

Lord as the true redeemer of Israel. These children of woe need this redeemer.

In view of the Assyrian threat without and the ingrained rebellion within, the question of the hour is, what hope is there?

So the Lord by his prophet addresses the rebellious children and exposes their wickedness in its political, religious, and social aspects.

At this point, we are confronted with the nature and horrors of sin in Isaiah 1, verses 21 through 23, that we may hate sin, that we would hope in our

Savior. We've looked at verses 21 and 22, the degrading inversion of the city, the dross and inflation of the city, and now in verse 23, the depraved injustice of the city.

This is a pretty robust verse. You see that there are six lines, six lines of Hebrew poetry speaking to the degree of sinful degeneracy that is obvious in Jerusalem.

That any visitor would be able to notice and pick up on after just a brief amount of time. It is something of a hellscape of depraved injustice.

And you can imagine that there are many invested citizens, members of the society in Jerusalem, who appreciate the temple and have a fondness for the priesthood and can appreciate the cultural richness of the feast days, who would be very bothered to hear this description of their city.

How dare you say this about Jerusalem? How dare you say this about the city? They may say, that's going way too far.

That's not kind. But this verse is accurate and it is startling and it grabs the attention.

Six lines of Hebrew poetry set in classic parallelism. The first two lines,

The princes are rebellious, companions of thieves. A, A.

Next two lines, Everyone loves bribes, follows after rewards.

B, B. And then the final, They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the cause of the widow come before them.

C, C. So a very classic structure of poetry.

But you'll notice that the first line of each of the three couplets states the

Lord's basic complaint, which is then intensified by the second line.

So the first one states the complaint, and the second line intensifies the first line. And that follows a pattern that actually begins in verse 22.

There's actually eight lines. And you see that it starts in verse 22 with the silver and with the wine.

And the second line of each parallel is not so much poetic clarification as it is prophetic exasperation.

Not only this, but even to this. There's a, that's the nature of the intensifying of the poetry.

So I think it'll benefit us to take verse 23 in three parts and hear the Lord's perspective on, first of all, the ruler's character.

The ruler's character is expressed like this. Your princes or your rulers, your magistrates, the ones who have been invested with authority here in the city, your princes are rebellious and companions of thieves.

So if we see that the pattern is eight lines of parallel poetry, then we've begun first with the silver and then the wine, and now the princes.

They're all becoming worthless. That's the idea. The silver is becoming worthless.

The wine is becoming worthless. The magistrates are becoming worthless. All of it's getting inflated.

All of it's becoming worthless. The buildup of the counterfeits really culminates here.

If one were to even ask why the conditions of verse 22 has come about, why is it that all the silver is drossed?

Why is it that all the wine is watered down? How have we gotten to this point? It's really because, well, here's the answer.

It's because of the princes. The princes who are rebellious. The princes who are hanging out with the thieves.

They're thick as thieves. This term prince is broader than the familiar term of chief in the

Hebrew, rosh, meaning head. It's a bit broader than that, but it still specifies the kind of city leader who is responsible to punish evildoers, the kind of city leader who is responsible to render judicial decisions impartially and to praise doers of righteousness in the city so that everyone will know what kind of conduct is appropriate.

They are to sit in the city gates, and they are to there make it clear to the entire population of the city what righteousness is, what wickedness is, and to judge fairly when there are disputes among fellow citizens and to make sure that evildoers are duly punished according to their crimes.

That's their job. That's the job of these princes, these city leaders, these magistrates. That's the number one task that they have.

But there's a problem with them. They are rebellious.

And, in fact, this was something of a saying in Isaiah's day, their version of a meme.

In the Hebrew, it sounds like this, sarayim surayim. That was their saying.

Sarayim surayim, which is translated, princes are rebellious. It was a saying.

It was a pithy way of talking about the problem all at once. And that's what he writes here in the text.

Sarayim surayim, the princes are rebelling. And that had been true for a very long time. If you go back just a few kings, even before the ones that were listed here in Isaiah's day.

And, of course, you see that he begins with, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.

We know that the princes have been rebelling for a long time. But let's consider even one of them that is listed there.

Let's go to 2 Chronicles, verse 24. The trajectory of the kings has been a problem for some time.

Long before Uzziah and Jotham and so on, there was a king named Joash.

And then, after Joash, came another king. And we have, during the reign of Joash, there was a counselor named

Jehoiada who was very influential for Joash. But after Jehoiada grew old and was full of days, he died.

This is verse 15 of 2 Chronicles 24. Jehoiada was 130 years old when he died.

And they buried him in the city of David among the kings because he had done good in Israel both toward God and his house. He wasn't a king, but he was buried with the kings because he was that influential.

And notice what happens in verse 17. Now, after the death of Jehoiada, the leaders of Judah came.

And this translated, the princes of Judah. Same group, same kind of group. They came and bowed down to the king.

The king listened to them. Therefore, they left the house of the Lord God of their fathers and served wooden images and idols.

And wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem because of their trespass. Yet he sent prophets to them to bring them back to the

Lord. And they testified against them, but they would not listen. So, this problem began with Joash.

And then there was Amaziah. And then there was Uzziah, the days of Isaiah. So, just a couple of kings before Isaiah's day, we find the princes of Judah coming before the king and encouraging him to move into idolatry where before he was encouraged by Jehoiada to be faithful to the

Lord. But then they corrupted all of that and sent them astray. They were rebellious. So, this trajectory of rebelling amongst the princes of Judah, of Jerusalem, has been established for quite some time.

And the problem is that it would continue throughout Isaiah's day. In Isaiah 3, verses 4 and 5,

God says, I will give the children to be their princes and babes shall rule over them. The people will be oppressed, everyone by another and everyone his neighbor.

The child will be insolent toward the elder and the babe toward the honorable. In this context, it's going to be bad if you have a bunch of immature, inexperienced, selfish children running everything.

Verse 13, the Lord stands up to plead and stands to judge the people. The Lord will enter judgment with the elders of his people and his princes.

Why is God calling these magistrates to account? For you have eaten up the vineyard.

The plunder of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor, says the

Lord of Hosts. Remember, you weren't supposed to comb through your vineyard twice.

You weren't supposed to beat your fig trees twice. You weren't supposed to harvest to the corners of your field or go back and pick up the gleanings.

But they were doing that. They were grabbing every last scrap of food that they could from their entire agricultural industry, and they brought it all into their houses and left nothing for the poor to go glean and grab.

And this is the magistrates. This is the princes. They're the ones who are supposed to be sitting in the city gates and judging, not giving any kind of weight or credential to either the poor or the rich man, but judging fairly according to the word of God.

The princes are rebelling. That's the problem. This term of rebellious means that the word has the idea of a disorderly retreat, the disorderly retreat of the obligated.

There was somebody who was supposed to stand here and do this thing, but instead they're running away and causing chaos in their wake.

The same word is used about a wife who abandons her husband in Proverbs 7, about a child who flees from their parents in Deuteronomy 21.

The same word is used to describe a beast breaking free from its master.

That's the kind of rebellion that is being described here of these princes. So the prophets are not being heeded.

The princes are rebellious against the Lord. The problem is that they are united with, they are partners with, they are interwoven together with, as one fabric, thieves.

Language is very tight. You can't tell where the weave of magistrate and thief actually parts.

They're so closely associated together. I know we don't have that problem today. You can't tell the difference between where the magistrate ends and the thieves start, where the fundraising ends and the bribery starts.

You can't even see. So clearly interwoven together. They are fellow conspirators with thieves.

The word thieves is very broad. It's used throughout the Old Testament to talk about anything from petty theft to bands of pillagers, stealing anything from crops to people for slaves.

Equal opportunity thieves will steal anything and anyone to get anything done. This is who the magistrates have allied themselves with.

So what do we have here? When we look at the city, we're considering the state of the city.

And verse 23 begins by putting our attention upon rebellious princes and thieves.

In other words, the ungoverned and the ungovernable are governing.

The rebellious princes are ungoverned, the thieves are ungovernable, but these are the ones who are governing.

This is a bad situation for any city to be in. And guess what? Disaster is always the result when such things happen.

Disaster is always the result for those made in God's image when sin reigns where godliness should reign.

Proverbs 29 verse 2 is a famous verse. When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when a wicked man rules, the people groan.

It's the way it always is. So the city is a dumpster fire for everybody because the leaders for justice are in bed with the thieves.

Remember that Solomon, in speaking to his son, took time in the very first chapter of Proverbs to warn his son away from such a life.

My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, Come with us, let us lie in wait to shed blood.

Let us lurk secretly for the innocent without cause. Let us swallow them alive like sheol and whole, like those who go down to the pit.

We shall find all kinds of precious possessions. We shall fill our houses with spoil. Cast your lot in among us, and let us all have one purse.

Solomon says to his son, My son, do not walk in the way with them.

Keep your foot from their path. This is disastrous. He tells them death and disaster are the end for anybody who runs with thieves.

So, God condemns the wicked for thinking that He can mix covenant approval with covenant breaking.

So, there's the idea that these people in Isaiah, that they're very approving of the temple, very approving of the sacrifices, very approving of life as an

Israelite, but they're always engaged in covenant breaking. So, they're very approving of covenant life, but involved in breaking the covenant all the time.

They don't have any problem mixing it together, but God sure does. And he says this in Psalm 50.

Asaph, the psalmist, says in Psalm 50, verse 16, to the wicked, God says,

What right do you have to declare my statutes or take my covenant in your mouth, seeing you hate instruction and cast my words behind you?

But when you saw a thief, you consented with him and have been a partaker with adulterers.

You give your mouth to evil, your tongue frames deceit, you sit and speak against your brother, you slander your own mother's son.

These things you have done, and I kept silent. You thought that I was altogether like you.

Isn't that the main problem? People think that God is altogether like them, very much approval, thinking their ways, fine with their compromises.

But I will rebuke you and set them in order before your eyes. Now consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you in pieces and there be none to deliver.

Whoever offers praise glorifies me, and to him who orders his conduct to right, I will show the salvation of God.

So Asaph is saying God is speaking to those who forget him. Well, that's what the problem is in Isaiah 1.

They've forgotten God. They don't even know God is their father when he has called them his children.

They are saying positive things about the temple, positive things about their religion, but they are engaged in all manner of evil and they think

God is just fine with it, but he's not, so he sends his prophet to warn them.

If we were to survey verses 21 through 23 and even considering the last four lines there in verse 23, it's very interesting, and consider them in light of the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai, essentially expressed by the

Ten Commandments, verses 21 through 23 showcase commandments numbers 5 through 10, all broken.

In a very short amount of poetic space, God says, you have utterly trashed my covenant.

And you can find expressions of each one of those commandments broken in just these few verses.

So, this is emphasizing this question, what hope is there? Well, one cannot look to the well of unfaithfulness to draw out faithfulness.

That's just not going to work. You go to the well of unfaithfulness, you're going to draw up unfaithfulness. So, that's just not going to work.

The well is poison. And that means that they can't go to the princes and the magistrates and say, hey, we're looking to you to fix this.

They're the problem. Princes are rebelling.

And our expectations and plans for a better situation can often be as corrupted as the magistrates that we vie against.

To be clear, there is no, absolutely no political solution that undefiles and recreates the image of God.

There's no political solution. None whatsoever. And the image of God in its individual expression or in its corporate expression, as we see it expressed in terms of the family, the church, and the state, we are not going to have any political solution that touches that, that solves that, that helps that, that heals that.

You can't go to the well of unfaithfulness and draw out faithfulness. Princes are rebelling. There's no political solution.

What we lack is godliness, and you're not going to get godliness from the magistrates. There's no legislation that they can bring to bear that will create godliness.

They are to mandate righteousness. They are to punish wicked and evildoers.

But there's not going to be a recreation renewal of godliness through politics.

What we need is godliness, therefore, you have to look to Jesus Christ. Remember, he did not come to displace Pilate with Presbyterians.

That was not his plan. He did not come to replace the bureaucracy with Baptists.

That was not his plan. In John chapter 18, when

Pilate entered the Praetorium again, he called Jesus and said to him, Are you the king of the Jews? Jesus answered him,

Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you concerning me? I love the way that Jesus will answer questions with a question.

Feel free to do that, by the way. You don't have to answer every question asked of you, because some of them are very badly, sinfully framed.

Just respond with a question, like Jesus does. Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you to me.

What servants would fight? What have you done? Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world.

He didn't say it wasn't in the world. He said it was not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight.

His servants that he prayed for in John 17. Father, do not take them out of this world. They're in this world, but they're not of this world.

If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight that I would not be delivered to the Jews, but now my kingdom is not from here.

He didn't say it wasn't here. He said it was not from here. It's not sourced from men. Power is not in men.

Pilate, therefore, said to him, Are you a king then? Jesus said, You say rightly that I'm a king. Indeed, he is the king.

For this cause I was born. For this cause I have come into the world that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.

So, he does come as the king. He does have a kingdom. It's not of this world. It's in this world.

He is the king. He does rule and reign. He is king of kings. He has all dominion, and he advances his kingdom throughout all of the earth in a transformative fashion.

Revelation 1, 5, and 6, Jesus Christ is described as the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

As sure as he has saved us from our sins, as sure as he has shed his blood for the forgiveness of our sins, so sure he is the ruler of the kings of the earth.

And the praise is to him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood and has made us kings and priests to his

God and Father. To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. This is the present tense glory of our Savior and King Jesus Christ.

So that things have changed, have changed, have forever changed, and continue to change on planet earth because his rule and reign changes things.

Acts 17, 6 -7. When they did not find him, they dragged Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out.

This is in Thessalonica. These who have turned the world upside down have come here too.

Oh, they're giving him too much credit. Jesus is the one who's flipping the world like a pancake. He's the one who's turning things upside down through his gospel.

But they're blaming the Christians. Jason has harbored them, and all these are acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there was another king,

Jesus, because all the Christians are running around saying, Jesus is Lord, Jesus is Lord, Jesus is Lord. We have the gospel of the kingdom.

There's a new king, king of kings. He's even king of Caesar. We're not saying Caesar is Lord. That was what the Jews said when they crucified

Jesus. We're saying Jesus is Lord, and that was transforming the world.

Christ was transforming the world through that. So the princes are rebelling.

Politics is a well of unfaithfulness. We're not going to draw faithfulness out of unfaithfulness.

But when Jesus saves, and he saves. He saves sinners. When Jesus saves, when he saves magistrates, when political leaders are born again, love

Jesus, and rule, then they do not get in bed with thieves.

They commune with Christ. They don't take the bribes and the rewards.

They don't let somebody else define what righteousness is. They don't go out and make excuses for wickedness, but they go out and pursue justice.

It is right and proper for the church to say to the state, thus saith the

Lord. That's our job. In Acts 25,

Paul speaks to the governor and says, I stand at Caesar's judgment seat where I ought to be judged. To the

Jews, I have done no wrong, as you very well know. Paul's talking to the governor and saying, you're an unjust man.

I'm going to appeal to Caesar because I can't get justice from you. Oh, okay, well.

Paul writes to Timothy, 1 Timothy 3 .15. If I'm delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God.

The house of God is the church, which is the church of the living God. Listen, the pillar and the ground of the truth.

The pillar and the ground of the truth. Who's going to tell the magistrate what wickedness is and what evil is?

The church is going to tell them. The church is going to say, thus saith the Lord. Here's what it says in the scriptures. This is what wickedness and evil is.

And by the way, this is what righteousness is. You're supposed to praise righteousness and punish evildoers. That's the categories.

Here's what the Bible says about those two groups. This is so you're well informed that you will be a wise ruler. Thank you very much.

And if the magistrate says, you know, I think maybe you're the problem and you need to be quiet, then we say, along with Peter and John, as they said to their governing body, the

Sanhedrin, whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge. Which is kind of like asking one of those questions that Jesus used to ask.

So when our magistrates rebel against Jesus Christ, who is the ruler of the kings of the earth, and every magistrate from the mayor to the president is accountable to Jesus Christ, who is the ruler.

When our magistrates rebel against Jesus Christ and are intertwined with thieves, the ungodliness should be exposed.

And we are to pray for all kinds of people. We are to pray for kings and to pray for judges and to pray for magistrates that God would get a hold of them and turn them around and they would repent and bow the knee to Jesus Christ and that the judges of the earth would kiss the sun and would not be in rebellion against him and things would be a whole lot better if that happened.

But the well we go to is not politics. We go to our knees in prayer and we continue to preach the word and declare what

Jesus Christ has to say and we watch Jesus transform people and turn the world upside down.

That's the solution. And we see that that's the only hope for Jerusalem, only hope for Jerusalem in Isaiah's day, only hope for our society in our day.

All right, well let's close our time together by singing the doxology.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Praise Him all creatures here below.

Praise Him above ye heavenly host.

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.