Our scripture today comes from Isaiah chapter 43. If you’ll turn with me now in your Bibles, beginning at the first verse:
‘But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you. I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you. I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, ‘Give up,’ and to the south, ‘Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.’ Bring out the people who are blind yet have eyes, who are deaf yet have ears. All the nations gather together, and the peoples assemble; who among them can declare this and show us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to prove them right, and let them hear and say, ‘It is true.’
You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me, no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I am the Lord, and besides me, there is no Savior. I declared and saved and proclaimed when there was no strange god among you, and you are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and I am God. And henceforth, I am he; there is none who can deliver from my hand. I work, and who can turn it back?’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Sovereign Lord, you have given us such wonderful promises, promises to be with us through the fire, through the waters, even in the depths. We pray that you continue to remain faithful as you will, that you continue to preserve us and walk with us in all things. That you give us comfort knowing that you are with us, that you will never leave us, and you will never abandon us. That you have promised us this great redemption that you have told us will come, has come, and that we wait for the fulfillment of when your son returns. In his name we pray. Amen.
Continuing to study Isaiah’s prophecies about the servant of the Lord, two things become apparent. They’re not really about Jesus, even though he is that same servant; instead, they are truly about the sovereignty of God and about God’s people.
These prophecies concern what the Lord has done, is doing, and will do for his people on behalf of his children, all of his children, through the agency of his servant, Jesus Christ, and by our union with him. Isaiah describes here in detail what we witness and interpret throughout the scriptures: the cooperative work of the only triune God. This is a work we see from the very start when, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. Or from John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.’ You see, the Lord God spoke the Word, and thus all creation came into being by the power of his Holy Spirit.
Within the triunity of the Godhead, we could say that the Father willed and decreed, the Son ordered and designed, and the Spirit acted and empowered this great miracle. But that limited idea cannot capture the whole understanding of what our God has done. The Lord is one God alone, of one substance or being, yet still three persons. All three persons are always together, united, present, and participating in all things—their will, purpose, and activity—even while we may, on occasion, describe each of the three individually by means of their different roles and relationships: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
More simply, we might say that the three persons of the Trinity describe who the Lord is in persona, and their unity describes what the Lord is in essentia. But the only sovereign Lord is the one who, in the beginning, chose to create everything. We did not choose to be created or even to exist. Everything that is, was, or ever will be is because of God and not because of us.
This same sovereign Lord chose for himself a particular group of people before we could ever have possibly chosen him. The only thing we chose, through our forebear Adam, was disobedience and sin, thereby destroying any capability or desire that we might have ever had for God. That’s the only thing we can continue to choose: further disobedience and sin. We broke creation; we ourselves are broken in our sinfulness.
It is in this—and to this circumstance—that Isaiah writes the servant songs. He writes concerning what the Lord will do through his servant Jesus Christ, the greater Jacob and head of the true Israel.
However, we do need to discuss something about our relationship with him. Last week, we heard about the different interpretations held by Jews and Christians regarding the identity of the servant, as either the whole people of Israel or Jesus. A challenge that may be raised to our Christian interpretation is that Isaiah will often switch his prophetic language between that of a singular servant and a whole people of Israel.
We understand this language as being both distinct and a united whole, the people’s representative and the people themselves. The concept of one serving as a representative on behalf of many is very old and very common in the ancient Near East. Pharaoh represented Egypt, and the will of Pharaoh was Egypt’s will. King David represented the united Israel, and David’s will was the will of Israel. Caesar represented Rome, and Caesar’s will was Rome’s will.
A person could speak of Pharaoh as either the man himself or his Egypt, just as you might speak of Caesar himself and of him as being Rome or the empire as a whole. This idea and application continue in common use today as we speak of Vladimir Putin but mean the Russian Federation, or as others may speak of Joe Biden in regards to the United States as a whole, or even of Donald Trump as being the Republican political party.
The consequential effects from the actions or decisions of the one clearly affect the whole, while the attitudes, decisions, and actions of the many will also reflect directly upon the one. All you need to do is watch the mainstream news channels, and you will witness this kind of relationship playing out in real time every day.
Please remember that this manner of regarding relationships—our relationship between Christ and his people, the one representing the whole—is only a partial and imperfect expression of our union with him.
Shortly before today’s text, Isaiah also writes: ‘Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see. Who is blind but my servant, or deaf as my messenger whom I sent? Who is blind as my dedicated one or blind as the servant of the Lord? He sees many things but does not observe them; his ears are open, but he does not hear.’
The servant whom he writes of here is plainly meant as the rebellious and disobedient Israel, the Jewish people of earlier times. But we interpretively expand this to include all the peoples of the world in our later times.
He speaks about the Jews’ possession of God’s holy law, the Torah, and their failure to keep it, which we apply to our possession of the completed revelation about God in the Bible and our disobedience and disbelief, which we and all others continue to have despite having it.
We have God’s commandments, his moral law. We have the testimony of the wonders that he has done, yet we do not believe them; we do not follow him. We have eyes that are blind and ears that are deaf because of our sinful human nature, because of our natural, fleshly union in Adam.
So interpretively, Isaiah cannot mean Jesus Christ as he writes these negative things about the servant’s blindness, deafness, and disobedience because, out of all humanity, Jesus is the only one to have seen the Father, the only one to be fully obedient to the law’s demands, and the only one without sin. Or does Isaiah?
It is through the united dual natures of Christ, as fully God and fully man, that God’s people may be justified according to our supernatural union with him by his sovereign election, through his righteous works on our behalf. Thus, our covenant mediator is also condemned and damned according to our supernatural union with him, by his sovereign election through our wickedness and sinful actions. This is the divine transaction of double imputation: the righteousness of Christ being imputed to the sinful elect of God, and the sins of the elect being imputed to the righteous person of Jesus Christ, God the Son, on that Roman cross.
For as the Apostle Paul writes, ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ Thereby, the blindness, deafness, and disobedience of all God’s chosen Israel are accounted to their representative and mediator, as if he is directly and personally responsible.
This understanding is really not as foreign or strange as it may sound to us, although we don’t think about it very often. Consider for a moment all of the all too many atrocities and horrors that we know occurred throughout the 20th century. To whom do we attribute the blame for and the guilt of them? To the leaders like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden—instead of all the many willing participants who personally did all of those things.
To whom do we attribute all the blame, the guilt, and anger against for the current conflict in Ukraine? Vladimir Putin—instead of the Russian people, the Russian soldiers who are fighting there.
Isaiah makes clear the plight and present circumstances of God’s people and our need for the servant’s missive mission. We are a people plundered and looted; they are all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons. They have become plunder, with none to rescue, spoil with none to say restore.
The same human condition into which God the Son enters by his incarnation, through him taking on our human nature and joining us in our miserable state, yet without our same sinfulness, brings us into the circumstance as punishment for our sins and by the just judgment of God who gave up Jacob to the looter and Israel to the plunderers.
Was it not the Lord against whom we have sinned, in whose ways they would not walk and whose law they would not obey? The Lord gave his people over to experience all that we suffer in this life in the world as a form of grace and mercy, like life imprisonment rather than the immediate finality of death that we deserve.
We, like Adam and Eve before us, were exiled from God’s presence to continue to live in the state of misery, which is our life in the wilderness, as compared to the comfortable state of life in the garden. We are totally separated from God by our sin, a wall that we can neither breach nor climb over.
As Isaiah has said before, this is the mission of the servant: to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. We are the blind; we are the prisoners; we are the ones trapped in darkness. This is what the servant comes to redeem us from—his chosen elect.
Isaiah writes of the Lord’s promise that he who created a people for himself will also preserve them and rescue them in his mercy from the sorry state that they willfully entered so that they would fulfill their God-given purpose for his glory.
So our Sovereign Creator, our Sovereign Elector, speaks to us saying, ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’ We who have every reason to fear—to fear God, to fear the world, to fear our sinfulness—are commanded to not be afraid of anything because of this, the most comforting of reasons: the Lord is the one who has redeemed us.
He has chosen us individually and personally. He knows us and calls us by name, claiming his right of ownership over us and declaring us to be his treasured possession.
But what is this redemption? What does scripture mean for us to be redeemed? The Hebrew word used here is ‘gaal,’ a word which has been preserved for us through the Babel of European languages to become the Old English ‘gale,’ and transformed into the modern English as ‘jail.’
The word’s intended purpose is to describe such a place as this. You know jail is meant to be a place of redemption. Redemption we understand in the penal sense is the repayment of one’s debt to society, or in an ordinary sense, the repayment of a debt owed, or to recover one’s collateral— as in a person might take a gold watch to a pawnshop, giving it over to them for a sum of say fifty dollars, and then later return with the fifty dollars and some interest, and thus redeeming their golden watch.
Furthermore, the Greek word ‘lutro’ used carries the additional weight and understanding of ransom. Redemption is at a costly price; for, as Paul says, this of all believers: ‘You are not your own; you were bought with a price.’
So we should not, we must not fear, because of God’s promises. He has promised us here that when you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you, for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
God promises two very important things. He promises us that we are going to go through trials; we are going to suffer tribulations. Things will not always be sunshine and rainbows for us, proving the lie of the whole health and wealth prosperity gospel.
But during those times of trouble, we may hold tightly onto this promise that the Lord will always be with us. He will never leave us, he will never forsake us, and he will never give us up. Jesus repeated this very same promise to his disciples when he said, ‘I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.’
God promises to be our savior; he is our rescuer, rescuing us from the state of misery that we have driven ourselves to, promising us that even though we have made our bed, he will not make us lie in it forever.
We have the greatest need for rescue. So not only does the Lord promise to rescue us, but he also promises to be with us, even in our suffering and misery—to comfort us and preserve us through those times.
Next, we see the price which he is willing to pay for our redemption: ‘Because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you. Since we are precious to him, since he loves us, he will give Egypt as our ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for us. He will give men in return for us, peoples in exchange for our lives.’
Now do not think for a moment that this is a literal price tag for our souls, but instead it shows the unimaginable greatness of the cost. However, this also shows that redemption by the atoning work of Jesus’s death on the cross is a finite atonement, a definite atonement, a limited atonement.
By the Lord claiming this specific chosen people through his gracious sovereignty, he is also forsaking and giving up all other peoples. They are being left to their misery and suffering, the results of their own devices, allowing them to receive divine justice while his elect received divine mercy and grace.
God here promises us a servant savior for his elect, which is the very essence of Paul’s gospel message: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be all the glory forever and ever. Amen.
Then the Lord continues his promise, saying, ‘I will bring out your offspring from the east and from the west; I will gather you. I will say to the north, ‘Give up,’ and to the south, ‘Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth.”
‘Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.’ We shall not fear because all of God’s chosen will be redeemed. All will be rescued in all times and from all places. Redemption is eternal in its application and in effect; some of us just take longer to recognize and understand that we have been saved by God.
So all of God’s elect have been saved from eternity past for eternity future according to God’s will and all for his glory alone. But how does the Lord receive glory? By our salvation—through our redemption. Before whom is he glorified, and how?
He commands, ‘Bring out the peoples who are blind yet have eyes, who are deaf yet have ears.’ All the nations gather together, and the peoples assemble. ‘Who among them can declare this and show us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to prove them right, and let them hear and say, ‘It is true.”
Who are these blind but still having eyes and deaf but still possessing ears? All of humanity who are found in Adam, blinded and deafened by their sinfulness, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to save themselves, dead in their sins and trespasses, in desperate need for the birth from above—needing to be born again to have their hearts of stone transformed into hearts of flesh.
They’re like zombies, the dead who walk—the living dead, alive in the flesh but dead in their spirit. These are the children of wrath, the vessels prepared for destruction, the deniers of God, the self-righteous and self-justifiers, those who are the synagogue of Satan, the children of the devil, the atheists, the humanists, and all of the many varied forms of satanic pagans.
They are the nations who will gather together and stand and accuse the only sovereign Lord. They shall say we do not need a God any longer. We are now so wise and so powerful; we can fly through the air faster than the speed of sound. We can travel to distant worlds through outer space; we can generate electricity, harnessing the lightning bolt for our own purposes. We can split the atom, and we can create new elements. We can even resurrect the dead through the miracle of cloning!
To them, the Lord shall respond: ‘Let us then prove who is right. Which of us shall be judged true? And so, sinful man will answer God, saying, ‘A competition then? Let us both create life. You may go first.”
Then the Lord shall reach down, scoop up some earth, molding it into the form of a man, breathe into its nostrils, giving it life, just as he did with the first man Adam so very long ago. And after that, sinful man will reach down, scoop up some earth, at which moment the Lord shall interrupt him, saying, ‘First make your own dirt!’
Man cannot truly create anything; we only use what already exists! We did not stretch out the heavens; we have done nothing; we possess nothing that we have not been first given.
Sinful man cannot stand upon his works before the holy God. Sinful man’s boasting is of no account and no value. Then the Lord’s glory will be made manifest before all creation, with him saying, ‘You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.’
Those who await regeneration by the Holy Spirit, those who await the spiritual resurrection to new life in Jesus Christ will then be separated apart from the rest of mankind as Christ’s elect, the Lord’s chosen people, and raised unto true life. They will be given the necessary ears with which to hear and the eyes with which to see by God’s sovereign power and will. All of his people will turn to him in the repentance of faith which comes from the knowledge of our sin and our hope in his promises.
During the days of the prophets of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and so on, this is how the called ethnic people of God, the people of Judea, were often described by God as being deaf and blind. And when Jesus taught in parables, he ended many of these stories with: ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’ Yet even still, the disciples needed to ask him what he meant, to which he answered them, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God. But for others, they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’
You see, even the twelve needed to wait until they were fully regenerated by the Holy Spirit in truth, even as they were walking with Jesus in person. Now, after the day of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit was poured out onto all of God’s people, we know that we are witnesses to all creation.
We are his witnesses to all creation. We know that we are united into Jesus Christ, God’s agent, the servant of the Lord, and who is the Lord himself.
‘I am the Lord, and beside me there is no other Savior.’ The Lord God saves, has saved, and will save his people. Jesus, whose Hebrew name ‘Yahushua’ means ‘the Lord Yahweh is salvation.’ Jesus, whose father by human adoption, Joseph, was instructed by the angel to name him such, saying, ‘And you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’
Jesus, God the Son, is party to the eternal covenant of redemption for his people. He is the mediator of that covenant, and he inaugurated it, establishing it on that Passover evening before his arrest and crucifixion. The Lord says, ‘I declared and saved and proclaimed.’
God our Father has declared his promises of salvation, speaking to us through the prophets. God the Son has affected our salvation through his death of atonement on the cross, giving himself as a sacrifice of propitiation, bringing the grace and favor of the Lord to us and expiating our sin and guilt from our souls.
Then raising himself from the tomb thereby confirming our hope in his promises. Through our union with Christ, we are no longer blind, no longer deaf. Now we testify to and proclaim before all creation the greatness of our Lord and Savior.
The Lord declares, ‘And I am God, and henceforth I am he; there is none who can deliver from my hand. I work, and who can turn it back?’
The Lord is God alone, the only creator, the only sovereign king, the righteous judge. Mankind, men—all people—are sinners justly deserving of wrath. There is no one, no man, who can save us from God’s hand, his judgment, his punishment, his wrath—no one except God himself can save us.
Sadly, when we speak of our salvation in Jesus Christ, we often forget to ask or answer the question, ‘Saved from what?’ This is part of why society laughs at us Christians, holding us in derision for our antiquated notions of morality; for they do not understand anything about any need for salvation at all because they do not believe there’s anything for which they need to be saved.
Yes, Jesus saved us from our sins, and yes, Jesus has saved us from our bondage to Satan. Yes, Jesus saved us from death and the power of the grave, and yes, Jesus has brought us and is bringing us into his eternal kingdom.
But those are not what we are saved from; that is not who we are saved from. Jesus has saved us from himself. Jesus has saved us from the Lord God Almighty and his justice.
We forget this and misunderstand this at our eternal peril, for this is truly what his grace is and why we may only receive it by faith. The mercy of God our Father is granting us a pardon for our offenses against him, against his holy law—all because God the Son has satisfied the moral debt we earn under the law.
God the Son, Jesus Christ, the servant of the Lord, suffered our justice so that we would experience his mercy. The wrath of God will surely burn against the wicked, for aside from Christ, there is no one left to save them. But we, who hold on to our faith in Jesus Christ alone, knowing that we have received this by the grace of God according to the sacred scriptures alone, for God’s glory, have the comfort and the confidence that just as there is no other deliverer from God, those who are rescued by God are truly and completely delivered.
Indeed, who can thwart the will and power of God? If one could, then they would, therefore, be greater than he, and then God wouldn’t be God by definition and plain reason. Those whom the Lord calls and chooses to save are surely saved.
Just as no single person can demand grace and mercy and truly expect that salvation would be given him by their free choice, so take comfort that we have such a savior in Jesus Christ, God the Son. Fear not, for the Lord who created us has redeemed us.
Those whom he has called by name—all of us whom he calls—he calls you by name because he knows us, all of our faults, our sins, and our guilt. Yet knowing all of that, he loves us just the same. He calls you by name, by his own name, staking claim to us for his own—his precious and treasured possession.
We are redeemed by the Lord’s servant. We are not our own, for we are bought with a price—the highest price imaginable: the blood and life of Jesus. So fear not, for the Lord is with you through all things. Always. Amen.