Bible Talks - Family Church (9:45am)
Series: From Darkness to Dawn · Talk No. 2
20/20 Spiritual Vision
Sunday, 25 September 2005
Isaiah 42 ESV or NIV
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Today we’re continuing our sermon series from Isaiah and today’s sermon is titled “20/20 Spiritual Vision.” Have you ever wondered what having 20/20 vision means? I always thought it meant that 20 represented perfect eye-sight and so 20/20 meant that both eyes are perfect. But when I looked it up on the web on a marvelous site called “How stuff Works” I discovered that having 20/20 vision means that you can see at 20 feet what a normal person can see at 20 feet or if you prefer metric the equivalent is 6/6 which is near enough to 20 feet in meters. So one eye can be 20/20 while the other could be 20/200. If both eyes are 20/200 you are legally blind. It is possible to be something like 40/20 which means you can see at 40 feet what a normal person can see at 20. Eagles, hawks and owls have 200/20 vision they can see at 200 feet what us human can see at 20.
Now lets apply this interesting knowledge to the bible.
Sometimes we get so focused on our difficulties that we are blind to the real issues. Sometimes the problems run much deeper. For example the inability to pay your bills may be due to some underlying problem such as a gambling habit, chronic unemployment, the inability to budget, or a wife addicted to shopping.
The scene for the nation of Israel is that about 80 years previously the Babylonians have come and conquered them. The cream of Israel society was been carted off to captivity in Babylon. In due course the Medes and Persians have taken over Babylon and now the time of Israel’s exile is drawing to an end. In due course the Persian emperor, Cyrus, allows the exiled Israelites to return home. The books of Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah cover a lot of this period.
Last week Neil showed that Isaiah 40 marks a turning point in the book but more importantly in God's dealings with Israel. God was going to do a whole new thing. The former things had taken place and God was announcing something new. Up until that point the message of Isaiah was of judgment, now the message is one of hope. The return is drawing near. Chapter 40 started off with God saying through the prophet Isaiah “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for.”
Now in Chapter 42 Isaiah elaborates on what the new thing that God is doing comprises: It is ushered in by the Servant of the Lord called in verse 1 “My servant” and includes a new gospel and a new promise or covenant.
In the second half of Isaiah there are a number of passages which are called the “Servant Songs” and these Songs, or more particularly the Servant they refer to lies right at the heart of Isaiah’s message in this second half of the book.
In Chapter 41, which we didn’t look at, Israel itself, is called God's Servant but these songs move beyond the nation of Israel and all its failings to a figure who is far too ideal to be Israel, not even the remnant of the captives who later return home from exile. They are far too pathetic.
The servant Isaiah refers to fills God with delight, he is quiet and gentle, faithful and persevering; he doesn’t falter or become discouraged. Israel by contrast is resentful, complaining, fearful, dismayed, blind , deaf and disobedient. Isaiah calls Israel a bruised reed and a smoldering wick. The servant on the other hand embodies everything that Israel was meant to be but wasn’t. He was God's perfect servant.
So Isaiah announces to Israel that God is going to send his servant in the first of the Servant Songs that we find in Chapter 42 verses 1 to 9.
The first bit is addressed to Israel.
“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him
and he will bring justice to the nations.
2 He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
3 A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;
4 he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his law the islands will put their hope.”
Three times it mentions that the servant is going to bring justice. He will bring justice to the nations, he will do it in faithfulness and he will establish it on earth.
Now justice is something we all long for. The exiled Israelites were crying out to God that they receive justice. They saw themselves as hardly done by. After all the mighty Babylonians had conquered their country, looted and destroyed their temple and broken down their city walls. The trouble was that in their spiritual blindness they didn’t see that justice was what they were already receiving.
Time and time again God had sent them prophets to warn them that if they didn’t return to God, return to their side of the covenant promises made to them by God at Mt Sinai during the Exodus then they would be punished. God showed remarkable forebearance but eventually he used the Babylonians to punish his people.
We all call out for justice. One of the first things we learn to say is “That’s not fair” usually meaning “There’s no advantage in it for me. The trouble with justice is that if we demand it we might just get it. For justice means getting what we deserve for what we’ve done. Too often when it comes to examining ourselves we have 20/200 vision. We just don’t see our own shortcomings, our own sin.
When we realize the truth about ourselves the last thing we want from God is justice. What we want is mercy and forgiveness.
The Israelites wanted justice, they wanted to go home, to have their nation restored. They thought about justice purely as their 20/200 eyes saw it, but God’s perfect justice was much bigger than that. In Chapter 40 we saw that God's justice has to do with the order God has given the whole universe by his creative acts. God’s justice has to do with Israel occupying a special place in the world as God's chosen people to bring God's light to the world. God's justice has to do with the false gods of the nations being silenced and the truth about God's total sovereignty over history being established. In other words God's justice is God's plans for his people Israel and for the world being put fully in effect.
Israel as a nation was being punished particularly because they had enjoyed most favoured nation status with God but had failed in their task but now Isaiah announces that God is sending his servant who will bring justice.
In verses 5-7 God addresses the servant and, through Isaiah, the nation of Israel overhears what is being said,
This is what God the LORD says—
he who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it,
who gives breath to its people,
and life to those who walk on it:
6 “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness;
I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles,
7 to open eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.
God identifies himself as the creator of the universe and the author of life and he tells the Servant that he has called him righteousness and that he will be a covenant or promise to his people and a light for the gentiles.
AHA! We say. Now we’re starting to get a glimpse of just who this servant is. In the beginning of Luke’s gospel we have that incident when Jesus was 8 days old and his parents took him to the temple to present him to God as was the custom. A prophet by the name of Simeon, whom God had promised that he wouldn’t die until he’d seen the Messiah, saw Jesus and taking him in his arms quoted these verses from Isaiah and said that he could now die happy.
Later on Jesus was in the synagogue in Nazareth, his home town, and was asked to read the bible. He opened it at Isaiah 61 and read from another of the Servant Songs that contains some of the same stuff as this passage and then said, “Today this prophesy has come true in your sight.” In other words Jesus was claiming to be the Servant that Isaiah had spoken about.
Isaiah says that the Servant in this passage is going to undo all the horrendous and degrading effects that sin has had on the human race and restore people to their true freedom and dignity as the sons and daughters of God.
God’s ideas of justice are much bigger than the captive Israelites could see with their limited vision. Anf God’s ideas of justice are much larger than our limited perspective even taking into account that we live on the other side of God’s great redemptive act in sending the Servant, Jesus to die for us and rise again.
In verses 8 and 9 the Israelites are again addressed directly:
“I am the LORD; that is my name!
I will not give my glory to another
or my praise to idols.
9 See, the former things have taken place,
and new things I declare;
before they spring into being
I announce them to you.”
What Isaiah is saying is that the prophesies, the former things, have already taken place as God promised and now the new things that God declares are about to happen.
Yes, as the people hoped, they would be released from captivity by Cyrus the Persian, but more importantly the Servant would release them from spiritual captivity, from bitterness, blindness and spiritual darkness. Their deepest need was not to go home to Israel but to return to their God.
After this tremendous announcement of the Servant there is a hymn of praise to God. Isaiah calls on all the world to join him in praising God emphasizing the effort and the cost of God keeping his promises but even in this hymn of praise there is a warning. In vers17 we read:
But those who trust in idols,
who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’
will be turned back in utter shame.
Back in Isaiah’s time people either worshipped the true God, our God or they worshipped other gods through the use of idols which were metal or stone or wooden representations of their gods. These days we’re much more sophisticated. If we don’t worship God like we should, instead of worshipping idols made out of wood or stone or metal we tend to worship intangibles or ideas; things like wealth or prestige or comfort or pleasure. Or perhaps we worship a philosophy like materialism, or post modernism or secularism. We claim a sort of moral superiority because we’re not like those ancient pagans but we’re just as wrong because we give our allegiance to something other than God. And then of course there’s always sporting idols and pop idols.
Many people today have 20/200 spiritual blindness just like the Israelites of Isaiah’s time. In the last bit of chapter 42 Isaiah contrasts the true servant of God that he has been describing with the Israelites image of themselves as servants of God. Instead of praising God for all the wonderful things he’d done they were full of bitterness and unbelief. They are blind and deaf just like the previous generations whose disobedience to God had lead to the nation’s defeat and captivity.
Isaiah knows that the people, even though God is going to bring them home, he knows that they’ll never know the comfort that God had declared in Chapter 40 until they face up to their sinfulness and repent of it.
And the same sort of spiritual blindness still afflicts people today. In 2 Corinthians 4:4-6 the Apostle Paul says: “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”
In Romans Paul says, speaking of unbelievers “Although they claimed to be wise they became fools.”
One of the great tragedies of our present society is that so many people have convinced themselves that God is not real, or if he is real, he has no relevance to our modern world. They have become blind but they don’t realize it. If you saw a blind person about to step in front of a bus, would you not rescue them? What are you doing to rescue all the spiritually blind people around you that are equally headed for destruction.
Let us pray.
