The prophet Isaiah and the good Doctor Luke lived some 700 years apart, but the Holy Spirit weaves a thread and connects them to each other. Join us this Sunday as Pastor Matt leads us through two brief passages from Isaiah and Luke and points us to the steadfast and tenacious love of the God who is not only with us, but is also for us.
“God became man; the Divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child… the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.”
J.I. Packer
“A God who was only holy would not have come down to us in Jesus Christ. He would have simply demanded that we pull ourselves together, that we be moral and holy enough to merit a relationship with Him. A deity that was an ‘all-accepting God of love’ would not have needed to come to Earth either. This God of the modern imagination would have just overlooked sin and evil and embraced us. Neither the God of moralism nor the God of relativism would have bothered with Christmas.”
Tim Keller, Hidden Christmas
“This story is so miraculous in every way that it could have only come out of the mind of God in eternity before the foundations of the earth were laid down by His mighty hand… This story is itself an argument for the existence of God and is a portrait of His holy character.”
Paul David Tripp, Come Let Us Adore Him
“The cumulative testimony of the four Gospels is that when Jesus Christ sees the fallenness of the world all about Him, His deepest impulse, His most natural instinct, is to move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it. And if the actions of Jesus are reflective of who He most deeply is, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is the very fallenness which He came to undo that is most irresistibly attractive to Him.”
Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers
“For God so loved that world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:16
“If God is for us, who can be against us?”
Romans 8:31b
“You rescued me because you delighted in me.”
Psalm 18:19
“You can know the glories of God from the Old Testament, so overwhelming and daunting, but in Jesus Christ they come near. He becomes graspable, palpable. He becomes above all personal, someone with whom to have a relationship. Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make Himself one whom we can know personally.”
Tim Keller, Hidden Christmas
“How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.”
Phillip Brooks, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”
“He comes, and all our
Words though wide as worlds, and all our songs
Though voiced in grandest composition
Can never carry the incomparable weight
Of this one who comes, whose incarnation
Is our hope, our joy, heaven’s confirmation
That though light from us was long withheld
God has shattered the sin that was our hell
He comes, he has come, Immanuel.”
Andrew Roycroft, “He Has Come”
Well, while we regularly study through books of the Bible here at the Village Chapel, we have shifted during Advent. Today we are going to take a really brief look at a couple of short passages, one from Isaiah, one from Luke, and we will get you on your way so you can get some more wrapping done, or bake some cookies, or just have a little joy then hopefully come back tonight for our Christmas Eve Candlelight Service, which is just going to be awesome, 4:00 and 5:30. As always, I encourage you to get here early because it will be pretty nutty, but we are so excited about it.
If you would like a paper copy of the Bible to follow along with, we have got some here. Jeremy is walking around. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Christie. Hold up your hand and someone will get you a copy. And as always, if you want to hop on our Wi-Fi, there is the information and the password you can follow on your device, and then you can download the QR code and get notes and quotes.
And if this is your first time here, if you are visiting family for the holidays, boy, we are thrilled that you are joining us today to worship and to just get a glimpse of the truth, the true meaning of Christmas. We are glad you are here. We want nothing from you and everything for you.
Before we dive in and start reading our passage, I’d like to read this JI Packer quote, and I have got to say, boy, if the account of the incarnation was a book, this would be the most perfect preface. So, JI Packer says,
“Yes, God became man, the Divine Son became a Jew. The Almighty appeared on Earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The babyhood of the Son of God was of reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.”
And friends, I know we have been on this theme for four weeks now, but can we just stop and marvel again at what an amazing account this is, that the creator of the universe, in order to save us, would unzip the veil and step into physical reality, to become one of us? And why would He do this? Because He was determined to set things right, He was determined not to let sin have the last word, and He was determined to pull us up out of that miry pit of quicksand that we had run into of our own free will. This is why He came, no matter what the cost. I just love that. Let’s pray, church, and then we will read our passages.
*Show us your ways, oh Lord. Teach us your paths. Guide us in your truth and teach us for you, our God, our Savior, and our hope is in you all this day long. Amen.*
Alrighty, so if you will turn with me to Isaiah chapter eleven, we are just going to read the first five verses. Here is verse one, “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.” Well, remember that Isaiah was written around 740 BC, about twenty years before Israel was carried into exile by the Assyrians. And this first verse, man, this gives us a picture of the utter devastation that is on its way to Israel. It is like a stand of trees that is clear cut and there are just stumps and roots remaining. Apparently, there is nothing physically left here of David’s line, and yet we know that there is something that remains, this righteous branch, which is the Messiah. It is going to grow out of the ruins here. This is the greater David, the greater Solomon, as Pastor Jim says, “The king that we have always really wanted and really needed.”
Let’s go on to verse two and verse three. “And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge in the fear of the Lord and His delight. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.” Look at how active the Holy Spirit is here in the Old Testament. Isaiah is telling us that the coming Messiah is going to be full of the spirit of the Lord, full of the Holy Spirit. And the last little bit that I read, “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord,” we know that this is an accurate picture of Jesus’ character and personality while He walked the earth in human form. He was ever and only seeking to do the will of the Father. He was walking in unbroken fellowship and communion with the Father all the way up until the cross where that fellowship was broken as Jesus bore the punishment for our sin and our brokenness. The Holy Spirit, Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit.
Well, let’s continue on with verses four and five. I will start at the back half of verse three. “He shall not judge by what His eyes see or decide disputes by what His ears hear. But with righteousness He shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth and He shall strike the Earth with the rod of His mouth and with the breath of His lips He shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of His waist and faithfulness the belt of His loins.”
Well, wait a minute. You might be saying, “What’s all this about judgment and striking the earth? What part of the Advent story is that?” Well, in a sense, man, it is truly the best part of the story, because Jesus comes not only to rescue us, but to make things right. And that is what judgment and justice is all about. He comes not only to restore us, to rescue us, but to make things right, to right all that is wrong with the world. And I would suggest, whether you are Baptist or Buddhist or atheist, we all can see that things are not as they ought to be and they need fixing. No matter who you vote for, no matter what you think about politics and policy, we can all tell that things are broken and need fixing.
Well, in order to trust someone to judge fairly, we have to trust that they are fair, that they are impartial, that they are unable to be swayed or corrupted. And Fleming Rutledge addresses this in her book on Advent. [This is not a slide, Tim]. She points out that the word in both Hebrew and Greek, both Old and New Testament, the word for “justice”, “judgment”, and for “righteousness”, they are basically the same word, and they can be referred to as a noun and a verb. Therefore, all references to justice and judgment in the Bible, they need to be understood in the context of God’s righteousness. He is not only righteous as a noun, He is also seeking righteousness. He is seeking to make things right.
Well, how does this holy God respond to us, and what does that have to do with Christmas? And I love this quote from Tim Keller in his book, “Hidden Christmas”. He says,
“Okay, a God who was only holy would not have come down to us in Jesus Christ. He would have just demanded that we pull ourselves together, that we be moral and holy enough to merit a relationship with Him. [Good luck, kid. You are on your own. But then on the flip side], A deity that was an all-accepting God of love, He would not have needed to come to Earth either because this God of the modern imagination would have just overlooked sin and evil and embraced us. Neither the God of moralism nor the God of relativism would have bothered with Christmas.”
Tim Keller
And as we often say, I love how the Bible tells it like it is, does not sugar-coat anything, but it also tells us how the problem is going to be taken care of. Jesus is coming to make things right.
Okay, well, let’s fast-forward some 700 years from Isaiah. Israel has been battered and bruised and there has been apparent silence from God and the prophets for over 400 years. Not a word. And so, Israel has been groaning under the weight of oppression of foreign power after foreign power, after foreign power. And they are looking, groaning, crying out for the Lord’s Messiah. You get this sense that they are saying, “God, are you even there? God, do you care?” Which, frankly, a lot of times that is our feeling too. When things are going desperately wrong, “God, are you even there? Do you even care?” So, turn with me to the right, turn to the right, to Luke, to the Book of Luke chapter two. We are going to start with verse twenty-five, and this section is often called the “Song of Simeon”. And I think another title for this passage could be “The Extraordinary Ordinary”.
One of the most extraordinary things about the incarnation is how God has chosen humble and ordinary everyday ways to accomplish this grand plan of rescue and redemption. So, let’s look and read verse twenty-five. “Now, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him.” We do not know much at all about Simeon. He is just ordinary. He is just a dude. But we are told that he was righteous and devout. He is waiting for the consolation, the rescue, the healing, the redemption of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. Look, 700 years later, here is the Holy Spirit showing up again in the life of a very ordinary man in Jerusalem.
I’d like to suggest that we know our salvation does not rest in our works or our performance. It only rests in Jesus alone, but there is something to be said for living a life of devotion and righteousness, living a life that makes space for the Holy Spirit to work in our lives. Can I get a Christmas Eve amen? Yes. Well, let’s continue with verse twenty-six. So, “it had been revealed to him, by the Holy Spirit, that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God.”
So here he is going about his extraordinary ordinary day. Simeon is led by the Spirit to the temple where he just happens to meet up with Mary and Joseph and Jesus who are also going about their very own extraordinary ordinary day. They are just bringing Jesus to the temple to do for Him according to the custom of the law. And look what happens. The Holy Spirit reveals to Simeon who this baby is, that they all meet, they all connect, and the Holy Spirit is there amongst all of them. And let’s read the last four verses of this. So, “Simeon takes Jesus up in his arms, he blessed God, and said, ‘Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel’.” Wow. “My eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples.” Just love that. Not just some select few, but all peoples. And that is such a good reminder that this free gift of God, this salvation through Jesus, it is meant for all peoples, including your nosy neighbor, including your irritating Aunt Betty, (fictitious Aunt Betty, by the way).
These two passages, some 700 years apart, they are connected by the Holy Spirit, which is found in the Bible from Genesis all the way through to Revelation. I have got three short thoughts on these two little passages, and I’d like to share them, and the first is what I was just talking about with the Holy Spirit. God is weaving a tapestry throughout redemption history. We see specifically here with the Holy Spirit. Gosh, we see the Holy Spirit present at the very beginning. Genesis chapter one, verse two, the Spirit was brooding over the waters as God begins the creation act. And we see Him, fast forwarding to what we read in Isaiah eleven today, we see the spirit present there foretelling how Jesus the Messiah would Himself be filled with the Holy Spirit. He was present when the angel told Mary that she would carry God’s child. He was present here with Simeon. And then we will see Him descend on Jesus in the form of a dove at His baptism.
Each one of us is a threat in this tapestry too. So, if you zoom out, you see just this magnificent tapestry that God is creating. It is like seeing pictures of the Earth from outer space. But then, as you zoom in, you begin to see these pictures of individual threads and individual pictures and stories that each make up a part of this grand tapestry. And I’d like to suggest, because of our brokenness, those individual threads are severed and afraid and not connected to one another. And the amazing thing is, Jesus came for each and every one of those individual threads in that tapestry to find those loose and frayed ends to weave and knot them back together and then continue weaving them into a story. That is the magnificent story of the incarnation, Jesus coming to grab our loose threads, bind and weave, and connect them back together.
Paul Tripp says it like this in his Advent devotional book, “Come Let Us Adore Him”,
“This story is so miraculous in every way that it could have only come out of the mind of God in eternity before the foundation of the earth were laid down by his mighty hand. This story is itself an argument for the existence of God and it is a portrait of his holy character.”
Paul Tripp
Don’t you love that? Psalm 136 says, “The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever” which launches us into our second point, which is that God never gives up on us. This amazing, steadfast, tenacious love of the Lord never gives up on us.
Thinking back to Isaiah, verse one, about the stump in the root, out at our farm, I am sure a lot of you do, we have these locust trees that are native trees, and, boy, they are prolific. In the summer, if I do not mow the lawn for a week and a half, I have these little, tiny seedlings sprouting and growing up. Well, under the very bottom steps of our deck several years ago, some of those little seed pods blew underneath there. And then next summer, we start seeing these shoots of this locust tree grow up through the step boards, the treads of our deck. And so, I keep lopping those things off at the root and it kept coming back. And one year it was frankly so bad, and we were so busy, and I did not lop them off, they got so big they started pushing the deck board up. So finally, I just had to rip the deck board up and dig down and dig the root out. But that tenacious, tenacious life of that tree reminds me of the tenacious love of God that will not let us go.
And it reminds me of that root, that stump in verse one of chapter eleven of Isaiah where God says, “I know it looks like all is lost, but trust me, there is a little tiny branch growing that may seem like the smallest, most ordinary human child ever, and this is going to be the savior of the world.” God not only looks for us in our brokenness, He, also looks for us in our hiding place. As I was thinking about this idea of God’s tenacious love, I was thinking back to Genesis chapter three, right after Adam and Eve take of the fruit from the serpent, they realize they have sinned. Do they respond by running to God and saying, “Forgive us. We messed up”? No, they do not do that. Instead, they hide from God, as if you can really hide from God. But that is their response.
The Bible constantly compares us to sheep, which frankly is not a very flattering comparison because sheep are dumb, but we are compared to sheep and Jesus is the good shepherd. And the beauty of Jesus, He comes looking for us when we are lost, but not only when we are lost, He comes looking for us when we are running away from Him. He comes looking for us when we are hiding from Him. Malcolm Guite, in his book, “David’s Crown”, says, [this is not a slide either, Tim],
“I trace once more the story of His steadfast love. He sought me even when I turned my face away from Him, descended from above, and found me in my hiding place.”
Malcolm Guite
It is just amazing to me that God runs after us. Even when we are running from Him, when we do not want anything to do with Him, even when we are hiding from Him, He runs towards us, steps into creation, runs towards us when we least deserve it, and when we are in fact still running from Him.
In his book, “Gentle and Lowly”, Dane Ortlund, says it like this,
“The cumulative testimony of the four Gospels is that when Jesus sees the fallenness of the world all about Him, His deepest impulse, His most natural instinct is to move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it. And if the actions of Jesus are reflective of who He most deeply is, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is the very fallenness which He came to undo that is most irresistibly attractive to Him.”
Dane Ortlund
That is just an unbelievable bit of good news, that in our very worst, Jesus runs towards us and not away from us. We cannot push Him away by our actions. Only by our will.
As Ms. Jamie teaches us, our kids about baptism, she talks about the idea that sin and brokenness is both global and personal. She teaches our kids that sin is out there, but it is also in here, and so it needs to be dealt with in here as well as out there. The beauty of the Gospels is that very thing, that redemption is both global and personal. John 3:16 tells us that, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” So, salvation is global right, but it is also personal. God so loved you that He gave his only son, and my apologies to those of us here who are introverts, but I’d like to ask if you would turn to your neighbor and say that very thing. Turn to your neighbor and say, “God so loved you that He gave His only Son.” God so loved you. “See, that was not so hard, was it?” Says the extrovert.
Lastly, okay, I think that these passages and Advent point to the fact that the God who is with us is the God who is for us. Not only is God with us, which is hard enough to comprehend because we cannot even fully comprehend who God is, because we are finite and He is infinite, but the fact that not only is He with us, He is for us. No matter what happens in this life, the creator of the universe is actively for you.
The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Man, that is something I have got to remember Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays, in between Sundays, that if God is for us, who can be against us? And it is a bit of a rhetorical question, isn’t it? No one. No one. And this Advent message, it continues to funnel down.
Look at this statement from Psalm eighteen. I just love this. “You rescued me because you delighted in me.” Man, that is another stunning statement, isn’t it? God does not hate you. God is not angry with you. He is angry with the sin that does us harm. And He intends to make things right. God does not merely tolerate you. God delights in you. That is amazing news. Friends, to relieve us of performance anxiety, there is nothing that we can do to make God love us any more because He already delights in us. And by the same token, there is nothing that we can do that will make Him love us any less. Because He loves us and delights in us, He was willing to do whatever it took to rescue us, to right all wrongs. He was willing to make himself known to us personally.
Tim Keller says this in “Hidden Christmas”,
“You can know the glories of God from the Old Testament, so overwhelming and daunting, but in Jesus Christ, they come near. He becomes graspable, palpable. He becomes above all personal, someone with whom to have a relationship. Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make himself one whom we can know personally.”
Tim Keller
That is just amazing, isn’t it? The fact that the creator of the universe is willing to make Himself known. I’d like to say, friends, if you are here this morning and life is really hard right now, and I know for many of us, this time of year, it is just every time this part of the year comes around, it is just excruciating, but if you are feeling helpless or hopeless, adrift or battling something, I hope you hear that Jesus has gone to infinite lengths to make himself known to you personally. You are not alone, He is with you, and He is for you.
I will close with these last two slides. Here is a verse from, “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”.
“How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given! So, God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven. No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
Boy, that is really good news, even today. And then, lastly, this is from the Irish poet Andrew Roycroft, and this is just a snippet of this poem, which is fantastic.
“He comes and all our words, though wide as worlds, and all our songs though voiced in grandest composition, can never carry the incomparable weight of this one who comes, whose incarnation is our hope, our joy, heaven’s confirmation that though light from us was long withheld, God has shattered the sin that was our hell. He comes, He has come, Immanuel.”
Andrew Roycroft
Amen. Let’s pray, church.
*God, this is stunningly good news that you exist, that you are not just some force in the universe. You have a name, you are personal, you are writing this grand story, and you have written us into the story. And when we just go off the tracks, you have put yourself into our story to come rescue us and make things right. Lord, I pray that for each one of us here in all of our various places in life where we are journeying right now, meet us right where we are. Be with us and be for us. We are so grateful that you chose us and chose this path. So grateful that you came for us. We lift this up in Jesus’ name. Amen.*
