Isaiah 9:1-7 + Matthew 4:12-22

Discussion Questions

1. What are some of our deepest longings? Why do we experience this profound sense of yearning? What has gone wrong, and is there any hope?
2. Where are we looking to fulfill our deepest longings? Are we looking toward things of this earth that will never fully satisfy, or toward the God who created and cares for all things?
3. How do we find peace? Are we fixing our eyes on the Prince of Peace who can give us true and lasting peace, or are we simply reaching for fleeting imitations of the real thing?

Transcript

Grace and peace to you. As a regular practice, we study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. This week and for the next three weeks we are going to pause that for a minute as we take a careful look at the truth and the beauty of what it means that God has come to be with us, Emmanuel, God with us. We are going to survey a few different passages of Scripture. So if you want to follow along in a paper copy of the Bible, someone will bring one along to you. And then we have, of course, the wifi on the screen there if you want to follow on your phone or device. Also, glad to welcome all those who are worshiping with us online or down the hall in the family room. I know we had a big room down there earlier.

Emily and I had the joy of visiting England and Wales a few weeks ago for some work and rest. And it was the first time that we had been to Wales and we fell in love with the place, the people, the culture, the food. And there’s so much Christian history in that small little country. It’s just quite amazing. It was meaningful for us to be there around the Advent season.

Now, if you’re familiar at all with the Welsh language, you know that it’s beautiful but very difficult for English hearers and speakers like myself to understand it because it was developed in near isolation, much like Gaelic in Ireland and Gallic in Scotland. It’s a different kind of language altogether, but it is beautiful and there’s been a recent move over the years to bring back that ancient language in that small little country. In Wales, they have a word that we don’t have a great parallel for in the English language, hiraeth. It has connotations of longing and of loss. BBC writer, Lily Crossley-Baxter, defines hiraeth this way (she’s from Wales):

“A blend of homesickness, of nostalgia, of longing, ‘hiraeth’ is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.”
Lily Crossley-Baxter

It’s a word used throughout Welsh literature and poetry. One poet described it as cruel hiraeth. That feeling shows up when we least expect it. And I think there are many here who can identify with that sense of longing of loss in many categories of life.  The Advent season is full of this sense of longing. We prayed about many of those things today. We see it in the pages of Scripture and we see it in the stories our culture tells, especially around this season.

Emily and I watched Home Alone 1 and 2 last week. Anybody watch those yet? All right, a few of you, with our niece and a couple of our nephews. And even in that, I’ll call it zany, but also very painful, especially for the burglars, movie. Even in that zaniness, that movie—those movies—gives us a sense that something is wrong, a broken family that needs to be set right, a longing for home. It’s even in the title, Home Alone, and there’s a theme song. Many of us know it. You know that theme? That theme actually has a title. I didn’t realize that until this week. “Somewhere In My Memory.” That’s the name of that little tune that John Williams, the composer, wrote. And I think that gets at the idea of hiraeth, a longing, a loss.

Throughout history, every philosophy, every worldview, every faith commitment asks similar fundamental questions. Where are we? This place, our universe, our planet? Why is there something here rather than nothing? Who are we? Where do we get our identity? Where do we get our sense of purpose, our sense of meaning? What has gone wrong? It’s self-evident that something is not right. What is the solution? Is it more technological, scientific, medical advances? Is it better politicians? Is it better leaders? Institutions? And then I love this last question, where are we going? Does history have an end? Does it have a telos? And the question really that follows that is, do we have any hope?

And the Christian faith responds to those questions by what’s been revealed in the ancient Scriptures that God has spoken and He speaks. He created, He acted, He governed, and He governs. Even now, He pursues. He calls people to Himself. He calls people home. All out of His great love. And in our longing, in our darkness, in an act that should never cease to boggle my mind, He himself has come in order to make a way so that I can come home so that you can come home to Him. No other major religion makes this kind of claim that God Himself has come. He didn’t send a program. He didn’t send a theology. He didn’t send a manual so that we could rescue ourselves from the ravages of sin. This idea of rebellion, alienation from God. He sent Himself. He came. The baby who was born in a cattle stall 2,000 years ago, is both the hope of a world gone mad and the hope for every single person here today and our struggles and our doubts and our fears and my own as well.

I pray that we see that today as we open up the Scriptures. The good news of the Advent season touches the live wire day-to-day, real time work and rest and play and home, fear, suffering. So this morning we’re going to look briefly at the prophet Isaiah. He was about 700 years before the birth of Christ. It was also a world of deep darkness, of anxiety, of longing. He was a prophetic voice to a people who had largely moved God from the center of their lives to the periphery where they were ignoring him altogether, living as if He didn’t matter. And, naturally, that disposition led them to despair, asking questions like, “Where’s our hope to be found? Where can we find satisfaction for this hunger, this longing inside of us?” And the places they looked were empty wells that went dry and only led to more darkness.

They tried to rid themselves, if you will, of hiraeth. Tried to rid themselves of it on their own with everything but God, and Isaiah cries out in that wilderness to the people in darkness and says, ‘Turn back to God. Turn back to His Word. You don’t have to stumble around in the darkness any longer.’ And he says the same thing to us this morning. So let’s turn together if you would to Isaiah. We’re going to give our focus to Chapter 9, but I actually want you to go just a bit before that if you would to Isaiah 8:16. We’re going to start there today, largely focusing on Chapter 9. But I think it’s good to get a little bit of a background. What a delight it is to open the Scriptures today. Let me pray for us and we’ll get started.

Father, we give thanks that Your presence is already here. Your word is before us. May Your spirit open it to us. May You open our ears that we might hear it and lead us to Jesus. And we all said, Amen.

Isaiah Chapter 8, we’ll start in verse 16. And real quick on the background here, I mentioned this was a time of darkness, of anxiety. Isaiah right before this had just told the people who had left God, who had turned themselves away from God, that an army, the Assyrian army, was impending on them. So there was a lot of fear, a lot of trepidation, a lot of despair going on. And whenever we’re reading a prophetic book, and this is helpful for our Bible study in general, but Isaiah in particular, we have to think about three tracks that a prophet generally goes on. One that sometimes they’re talking about something that’s happened in the past, present, and future. So something in the past, something that’s happening real time, present, or perhaps near in the present or something in the future, something that is to come. And it’s helpful for us to distinguish between those three tracks anytime we’re reading a prophetic book like Isaiah.

So I’ll try to guide us along as we read it. Verse 16, this is Isaiah talking. “Bind up the testimony.” That’s the Word of God. “Seal the teaching among my disciples. I will wait for the Lord.” Remember there’s an army advancing upon them. He’d already warned them of that. And Isaiah says, “I will wait for the Lord who is hiding His face from the House of Jacob and I will hope in Him. Behold I and the children whom the Lord has given me are signs and portents or warnings you could say in Israel from the Lord of hosts who dwells on Mount Zion.” In other words, Isaiah is saying that he and perhaps his actual children and perhaps the community around him are signs and warnings, they are calling out to these people to say, ‘Turn back to God, come back home.’ That’s what Isaiah is saying here in verse 19.

“And when they,” (so these are the people who have turned away from God) “say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?” And here Isaiah is using sarcasm. Appropriate sarcasm in this case. The people of God had turned themselves away from God and they were looking to foreign spiritualties. This was essentially idol worship. They were trying to talk to the dead. They were looking everywhere except to God for the resources they needed. That’s what’s going on here.

In verse 20, Isaiah says this: “To the teaching and to the testimony.” And as a pastor, that’s one of my favorite sentences in all of Isaiah. It’s basically him saying, we study through books of the Bible, here in Judah in this case. “To the teaching and to the testimony, let’s go to the Word of God. If they will not speak according to this word, it’s because they have no dawn.” They have no light because they’re not immersing themselves in the Word of God. Verse 21: “They” (the people who have turned away) “will pass through the land greatly distressed and hungry. And when they’re hungry, they will be enraged.” There’s a spiritual ‘hangriness’ going on here. “And they will speak contemptuously against their King and their God and turn their faces upward.” And Isaiah is actually using a posture kind of language. Literally my face is turned up in contempt to God in His ways.

Verse 22: And I invite you to highlight this or circle it or whatever you do on your device. “And they will look to the earth.” Rather than looking to God for the resources they need, they look to earth alone. “But behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish and they will be thrust into thick darkness.” And Isaiah here is completing this section. He’s talking about something that’s happening real time in his day, but Chapter 9 Verse 1, it switches to track two. He’s talking about something that is to come, about a grace that will come. “But there will be no gloom for her who is in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali. But in the latter time, he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan Galilee of the nations.”

And Zebulun was just west to the Sea of Galilee. If you have the maps in the back of your Bible, west of the sea of Galilee, that’s where Cana is. That’s where Jesus had his first miracle. It’s where Bethlehem is, where he was born, and Naphtali, Capernaum where Jesus’ ministry was largely located. Verse 2: “The people who walked in darkness now have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in the land of deep darkness.” And another word is used for darkness here. It could literally be translated “the shadow of death.” “So those who were once dwelling in darkness and in the shadow of death on them, a light has shone.” It wasn’t a light that had radiated from within them; it was a light that had shown on them. Pure gift, pure grace.

Have you ever been driving on a long road trip and at night, basically, all you can see is right in front of you on the road, but a lightning strike like last night, a lightning strike happens and all of a sudden for a moment you can see a tree over there, you can see a car over here, a building over there. That’s this kind of idea. “Shone” could actually be a flash, dawn, a light that had come on them.

Verse 3: “You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy.” So from death and darkness now to an increase of joy. “They rejoice before you with a joy at the harvest as they are glad when they divide the spoil.” Verse 4: “For the yoke of his burden and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken.”

“Chains, shall he break,” the old hymn says. And here it is as on the day of Midian, verse 5: “For every boot on the tramping warrior in the battle tumult, and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire.” In other words, God will bring full and complete victory over their bondage to this darkness, this spiritual darkness. But how does that happen?

Verse 6, we’re very familiar with this: “For to us, a child is born. To us, a son is given.” It’s grace, He gives himself. “And the government shall be upon his shoulder.”

Let’s pause here for just a minute. Isaiah here, I think, is unpacking for us one of the most hope-giving truths of the gospel. It’s a great reversal. Do you see it? Look with me at verse 4. “The yoke of his burden and the staff for his shoulder.” That’s the people who have turned away from him. That’s me. That’s you. “The staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken.” In other words, the bonds of the tyrants of slavery and sin will no longer rest on our shoulders. How? Because someone mightier has come. Someone who will take the entire government of the universe on His shoulder. That’s what the text is telling us. It’s a great reversal. The sovereign king over all things has come to us to bring freedom. In His name, all oppression shall cease.

Colossians tells us that in Him, in Christ, all things hold together. It’s another way of saying the government of the universe is on His shoulder. This is the great joy that we sing about during the Advent season. The great joy of God with us, Emmanuel. It matters for us today. It matters for us right now. The promises of God are only true to the extent of His power, of course. And Isaiah here is pointing forward to the One who holds everything on His shoulders, who is guiding history towards the day when He will set right all things that are broken. That should give us great hope this morning, genuine hope each morning that we wake up and each night that we rest because there is no square inch of the universe that is not under His watchful eye in providential care, not one square inch. And if it was otherwise, then we would have no hope.

So even the hopes and fears and the doubts and longings that I have are under His watchful eye, under the careful care of His hands, including my own sin, which He bore on His shoulder. He took the rod of the oppressor in my place that I might have life.

Charles Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers said it this way. I love this:

“The sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which the child of God rests his head at night, giving perfect peace.”
Charles Spurgeon

Who wouldn’t want that? Let’s keep reading and I’m actually going to put this next section up on the screen for us because I want us to reflect for just a moment on each of these phrases.

“The government shall be upon his shoulder and His name shall be called….” He’s already been called Emmanuel, “God with us.” And now Isaiah’s going to spread this out. He’s going to untangle it for us. What does this actually mean? “His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor.” You could translate it “beautiful counselor.” One translation called it “an awesome strategist.” Reflect on that for a minute. His name shall be called “Mighty God, Everlasting Father.” And I know we have different perspectives in a room like this of how fatherhood has been experienced. We acknowledge that. And here’s a good father whose love never ends, everlasting. It means forever. “Prince of Peace.” Shalom, this idea of wholeness, perfect right relationship with God and with one another and the rest of creation. “Of the increase of His government and of peace, there will be no end.” It’ll continue to expand into eternity. “On the throne of David and over His kingdom to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness.” I know we need that. “From this time forth and forevermore.” And the last sentence here, highlight it, circle it. “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” We don’t do it. We can’t conjure it up. We can’t make this light shine. “The zeal of the Lord,” you could literally translate this, ‘the red-faced passion of the God of angel armies will accomplish this.’ The Lord will make it so. That’s good news. Amen? That’s good news for us today.

Fleming Rutledge said it this way:

“God is on the move towards us, not the other way around. In the very midst of our confusion and incapacity, we are met by the oncoming Lord.”
Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

And that’s Advent in a nutshell. Can you see how Isaiah here is pointing us to a sturdier hope than the world, the earth, has on offer? Something unshakeable, something lasting to a world of moral, relational, cultural, political, spiritual darkness, the scriptures tell us there’s a light and it’s not hidden. There is genuine hope and it’s found in a person. God himself has broken into history to be with us in the flesh. He’s with us now by His spirit and will come again in the flesh to bring back final lasting justice, righteousness and peace. It’s what Isaiah is saying, and we long for that day, and creation longs for that day.

Remember when Paul tells us that creation groans, creation has its own hiraeth? I think we heard a little bit of that yesterday. Isaiah here is describing for us a comprehensive Savior. Everything I lack is supplied by the provision and the promise and the power of Emmanuel, God with us. What our own sin had taken from us in breaking our communion with God, He himself restores by sheer grace in His coming in the person and work of Jesus. Do you see that in those four names? Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Shalom. Let’s consider a few of them for a minute.

1. Wonderful Counselor. Did you notice in Chapter 8, and you go back and look at it later in verse 20. It’s when the people of God turned away from the Word of God that they no longer had light? The English text tells us they had no dawn. And it was when they turned away from the Word of God, spiritual darkness. They were stumbling around in the dark because they had untethered themselves from the source of light, the source of life. And by its very nature, our sin condition, our rebellion breaks our communion with God. That’s what we see in the garden account and we see all through the pages of scripture and in the mirror in my own heart.

Our sin condition, it stops our ears. So we no longer want to hear the Word of God. We no longer want to hear His truth. And His Word of course brings us instruction, and that brings light to our path like the Proverbs tell us. It also brings truth. It shows us our need. It gives us counsel. It corrects us when we wander from His ways, which leads to joy. We live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Jesus taught us that in the Gospel of Matthew. We live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. It was the Word of God that spoke the universe into existence. And it’s the Word of God that wakes up spiritually dead men and women. It’s a miracle and I’m one of them.

So where do you turn? Where do you turn for counsel, for encouragement, for instruction, for strength? We live in an age, don’t you think of nearly endless counselors at our beck and call, counselors of all kinds of types and they’re vying for our attention and our allegiance. There’s a river of blogs, of books, of podcasts, therapists and teachers. How many have a list in your podcast app of about 100 different ones that you haven’t read yet or listened to yet? Or books in your Kindle library? Just me, I guess.

I found this stat really interesting. The therapeutic industry has grown to a market of $26 billion in the U.S. alone. Online therapy is $6 billion of that just this year. And listen, I’ve benefited from, and I benefit from trained counselors, many who offer good and needed counsel and many are a part of our community here at TVC. But doesn’t this rise of the therapeutic market, I might call it that, doesn’t the rise of the therapeutic market not tell us something, not everything, but it tells us something of the longing that our world is trying to satisfy? Where do you turn for counsel for the eternal things, for the ultimate things? Do you see how Jesus here in the text of Isaiah steps into our darkness as we try to live apart from God when we are looking to the earth alone for wisdom? The beauty of the gospel of grace is that God himself shines His light on us.

Those who are walking in the darkness have seen a great light because it’s come upon them. He himself has come as Wonderful Counselor, pursuing us in our spiritual blindness. We give thanks for that, giving us the word we desperately need. And by the power of His spirit, He can do the miracle of opening our eyes and opening our ears. And I hope He’s doing that this morning. Jesus himself said in the Gospel of John talking about himself, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but have the light of life.” It’s on offer.

2.Mighty God. On our own, apart from God, we are weak. We know this. We fear. We languish. In the condition of sin and rebellion. We have no lasting hope. No hope certainly against death. We have no resources to provide meaning and purpose enough to equip us for suffering. But with the coming of Christ, we are put into union with the one, as Hebrews says, “Holds the universe together by the word of His power.” (Hebrews 1:3) Yet another way of saying that the government is on His shoulder. He holds the universe together by the word of His power and in God’s upside down economy, isn’t it just like him to use weakness to show his strength?

If you look with me at verse 4, at the very end it talks about breaking the yoke, breaking the bonds of slavery. And it says, “As in the day of Midian,” and here the prophet is looking back, I mentioned the three different tracks. He’s looking back to the time of Gideon in the Book of Judges. Do you remember Gideon? He had 32,000 men in his army going up against 120,000. And God decides to whittle it down and whittle it down and whittle it down. And He says, ‘Gideon, you’re going to go against that army of a hundred some thousand with 300.’ With 300, and they defeat the enemies that were against them. And it shows the power of God. The power doesn’t belong to us, but to Him.

And of course Jesus himself comes as a little baby, fully dependent on others, needy. Yet don’t you remember in the Gospel of Matthew that when Jesus is born, it says that, “King Herod, Herod the Great, trembled.” King Herod and all of Jerusalem along with them because of the birth of Jesus were quaking in their boots. All the trappings of earthly strength and might couldn’t compare to the power found in that little one who Isaiah calls mighty God.

And it’s not just a nostalgic story, it’s a reality that meets us here today. The promise of the gospel is that death will not have the last word. And I think there’s somebody in here, there are folks in here who need to hear that, death will not have the last word. Our final enemy. Death is a reality now. We prayed about it earlier, but it has a time limit and one day it’ll be no more. Why? Because the one who holds the universe together or the word of His power has defeated death itself by laying down his own life and defying the power of the evil one by bursting forth from a tomb on the third day. And he’s still reigning. So we can say confidently along with Paul, “O death, where’s your sting? O death, where’s your victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55-57)

Friends, brothers and sisters this morning who are in the throes of suffering, of grief, of loss, of aging because God himself has come, He intends to make good on his promise that He will set all things right. There’s no need for us to fear. There’s no need for us to grieve without hope. Our brother, Sam Allberry, a friend of us here, says this:

“Death is no longer a threat in the way that it was. It has been defeated in Christ. The signs of aging are no longer a threat, but a promise. Gray hair and deepening lines on my face don’t need to speak to me of a past I can’t recover, but a future I can barely conceive. The real glory days are not behind, but ahead.”
Sam Allberry, What God Has To Say About Our Bodies

Have you ever thought about that? The real glory days are not behind but ahead. And that’s what Isaiah is saying here, to establish an uphold with justice and righteousness from this time forth and forevermore.

3. Everlasting Father. In our condition of sin and rebellion, we are alienated from God, separated from Him. And the story of the garden again shows us that the devastation of sin breaks that bond, breaks that intimate relationship that we were intended to have with our God. It’s what we were designed for. And in the coming of Christ, He makes a way for us to be adopted into the family of God. And there’s so much there that we could unpack if we had more time. But we’re given all the privileges and responsibilities of being a child of God and He is a good father. And I hope you hear that qualifier there. He’s a good father, an Everlasting Father, and the care for His children has no end. And that’s a promise we were given in our text today.

And a good father, what does a good father do? He protects His children. He provides, He corrects, He guides, He delights in us. Do you know that? He delights in us. Our greatest need is to be in right relationship to God the Father. It’s also our greatest longing whether we want to admit it or not. The hiraeth etched into every human soul can only begin to be satisfied when that relationship is restored. And it’s not something we can do on our own. It requires outside help. And in the coming of Christ, he gives himself, Isaiah says it, “The Son is given.” He gives himself so that our relationship to God might be set right and that we might no longer have to stumble around in the darkness. And I hope you hear that this morning. I hope I do.

4. Prince of Peace. And this truth, of course, is inextricably linked with the final name Isaiah gives to the Messiah, the Prince of Peace, the King of Shalom, if you will. “The Empire of Grace will never end,” one pastor said. Tim Keller said it this way.

“Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace.”
Tim Keller, Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering

Peace is such a multifaceted word. We long for, don’t we, internal peace? I know I do. We long for relational peace with one another. We long for national or international peace. And I think it’s a great comfort that Isaiah tells us in verse seven that the increase of his government and of peace will have no end. It continues to grow because Christ has come, because He’s given Himself to us, He has made a way so that I, a rebel, can be at peace with God.

Relational. And the fruit—this is so important—the fruit of peace with God is the peace of God. That internal peace that we all are longing for. An internal poise, you might say, a proper confidence in the sovereign King of the Universe who holds the world on His shoulder and who will one day bring lasting justice and righteousness to every corner of the world. Where do you turn for counsel? Where do I turn for strength, for love, for peace this morning?

In the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 4, Jesus begins His earthly ministry. Do you remember this? It’s after He’s in the desert and is tempted by Satan and He defeats that temptation, He defeats Satan. And Matthew tells us that Jesus left the desert and he went into the area of Zebulun and Naphtali. And Matthew inaugurates the ministry of Jesus by quoting from Isaiah Chapter Nine. And he says the same words that Isaiah penned 700 years prior. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. And for those who are dwelling in the shadow of death on them, a light has dawned on them.” On them: that’s you, that’s me, that’s the people Jesus was ministering to. And he begins to heal people immediately. And as soon as Matthew finishes quoting from Isaiah, do you remember the first thing that Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew? He says, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 4:17)

And repentance kind of has a bad reputation nowadays, but repentance is a beautiful word. It’s a turning towards Him and away from the path that we’ve been on, away from looking to the earth alone for what I need, repentance is a coming home. He says, ‘Turn to me. Walk in the light with me. You don’t have to stumble around in the darkness. Walk with me. Come home.’ These were the first words in the ministry of Jesus.

John Stott said this:

“We can never anticipate Him. He always makes the first move. He’s always there in the beginning. Before we existed, God took action. Before we decided to look for God, God had already been looking for us. The Bible isn’t about people trying to discover God, but about God reaching out to find us.” And I pray, we hear that this morning. And he has done just that in the sending of his son Jesus who says, “Come home. That hiraeth that you’re trying to rid yourself of, turn to me. Come home.”
John Stott, Basic Christianity

Let’s pray.

Lord, we come to You. We’re starting this week confessing that we didn’t make ourselves, we can’t keep ourselves, we can’t save ourselves. And so we turn to You, our maker, our keeper, our Savior, and Lord I pray in a room like this, You might meet needs where they are. Some lost in longings, some looking for answers to doubts, looking elsewhere for where do we find hope? Lord, I pray that by Your light, by spirit, through Your word, You might teach us what it means that You are with us and that You have come after us, and that You call us to Yourself to come home. Give us that grace, in the name of Jesus Christ, and we all said, Amen.