Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Gospel and Response

Our text is gospel and response. We’ll actually be looking at the last few verses of chapter 52 of Isaiah that we didn’t talk about last week that belongs with the section in Isaiah 53 and 54. So the last few verses of Isaiah 52, I’ll read those. But our text is gospel and response. Gospel is found in the end of chapter 52 and chapter 53 which we just read responsively and then a sevenfold response from that in Isaiah 54.

So I’m going to be reading Isaiah 52:13 through 15. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. There are 15 verses in Isaiah 52. “Behold, my servant shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. Just as many were astonished at you, so his visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of man. So shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at him. For what had not been told them they shall see, and what they had not heard, they shall consider.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your scriptures. Bless them to our use. We thank you for the indwelling Holy Spirit amongst us. May he write these words upon our heart, transform us by the wonderful gospel here, and may our response be informed by Isaiah 54, your word. Bless us, Lord God, as we seek to know Jesus. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. We’re going to be looking at kind of a survey of these texts, looking first at the gospel as presented in Isaiah 52, the verses we just read through 53, and then at the response in 54 as I said. And one of the things we’re going to be doing is looking at how these texts, many of them are actually quoted in the New Testament. Let me give you an example.

Isaiah 53:7-8 that we just read says this: “He was oppressed and he was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearers is silent. So he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment. And who will declare his generation? For he was cut off from the land of the living. For the transgressions of my people he was stricken.”

This is quoted in Acts 8:31 and following. And this is the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. He’s addressed by one of the disciples of Christ and in verse 31 he says, “How can I unless someone guides me?” In other words, how can I understand? And he asks Philip—that’s the disciple—to come up and sit with him. So he’s traveling along out of Jerusalem and Philip comes across him and he says, “Can you explain these things to me?” And then the place in the scripture, the text tells us which he would read was this: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter and as a lamb before its shearer is silent. So he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation his justice was taken away. And who will declare his generation? For his life is taken from the earth.”

So the eunuch answered Philip and said, “I ask you of whom does the prophet say this? Of himself or some other man?” Then Philip opened his mouth and beginning at this scripture preached Jesus to him. We can preach Jesus from the text we just read.

Preaching Jesus is the gospel. It is the revelation of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the work of the second person, the Son, taking on human flesh in the incarnation, becoming Jesus as it were, a new name, Savior. And we preach Jesus through the text here, just as Philip did. So we want to look at these first few verses, the first half of this, to preach Jesus. What does it mean? What does it tell us about him?

And then we want to look at the second half of this in chapter 54 and see what should our response be to these things. Now the bookends of the gospel part—52 beginning at verse 13 that we read down through the end of 53 which we just read—the bookends are that Jesus is the savior of the world. That doesn’t mean every last person in the world but the world has been saved through Christ. He will increasingly manifest his kingdom.

This is the section of Isaiah that is preeminently known as the suffering servant for all the reasons that we just read in Isaiah 53. It describes the life of Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection. And it describes him as having been a man of sorrows, his suffering. But we sometimes forget that both at the beginning of this text and at the end of the text, it talks about the worldwide impact of what he has done.

We just read in these few verses at the end of 52, “My servant.” So now we have this servant section. He’s going to deal prudently and it says he’ll be exalted and extolled and be very high. And then it says, “Just as many were astonished at you.” Now I think this is a reference to the Jews in captivity in Babylon, the original audience of this stuff. The world was astonished at your suffering. So his visage—what he looks like—was marred more than any man.

And we see this as fulfilled in his beating and his mutilation at the hands of Pilate’s soldiers. You know, depicted visually, I suppose, best in that Mel Gibson movie on Christ. But his visage is scarred. So it talks about his suffering here in the middle of these three verses. But then it goes on to say, “He shall sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at him. For what had not been told them they shall see, and what they had not heard, they shall consider.”

So that’s victory stuff. Victory. And at the end of Isaiah 53, you know, it talks again about the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ, which we’ll see as we get to that. So we’ll look at this suffering in the middle of chapter 53, or what most of what chapter 53 is about. But understand that the bookends of it tell us the first thing about preaching Jesus. And the first thing about preaching Jesus from the context of what the Ethiopian eunuch was reading, you know, on his road away from Jerusalem.

The context is victory. The context is the purpose for which he suffered, not just the suffering. The context is the purpose.

All right. So let’s look at Isaiah 53 and look about what we find out here about Jesus Christ. Very first verse then, dealing now with the middle section after the first few verses of 52 and we’ll conclude in the last few verses of 53. This middle section then is about the suffering servant. And what do we find out about him? Well, the first thing we find out is given to us in verse one.

“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

Well, that’s a little enigmatic. Need to unpack it just a little bit. What does that mean? Well, first of all, what it means is that what we’re going to be shown here is a revelation of who Jesus is. To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We can look at the rest of this text and say this is about preaching Jesus. This is about getting to know who Jesus is. And we can say secondly that some people didn’t believe that report and some people will.

What’s going on in this text? Well, if we look, I said we would do this at some of the New Testament citations of the text, we find something out. This particular verse is quoted in John 12:38. Give you a little bit of context. Listen:

“But although he had done so many signs before them they did not believe in him. So now we’re talking about the life of Jesus 2,000 years ago. He did a bunch of things to show who he was. Yet they, the Jewish people and leaders, exemplified by their leaders, they didn’t believe in him. That the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled which he spoke, ‘Lord, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?’ Therefore, they could not believe because Isaiah says this—” He goes on to quote another citation from Isaiah. “He has blinded and hardened their hearts lest they should see with their eyes lest they should understand with their hearts and turn.”

Jesus is sovereign first of all. Now it’s not as if they wanted to believe and couldn’t. When the text tells us they could not believe—the Jews that rejected him—it means that they also didn’t want to believe. We will always not want to unless God moves in us to enable us to do it. So it certainly tells us we preach Jesus by saying that Jesus is the sovereign control of everything. Okay, that’s what this text begins with.

You know, I’m going to talk today as I go through this sermon about having a personal relationship with Jesus as opposed to religion. And you know, I know that last week I, you know, took on a few evangelical iconic sort of expressions and phrases, and I’m going to do the same thing in spades today. I kind of like, and you know, I know that is sort of little bit of shock value, but I mean it to wake you up. I like religion as opposed to a personal relationship with Jesus. And I’m going to be explaining why I say that. And it’s not probably not what you think right now, but it’s as if a personal relationship with Jesus is optional. It is not optional. He is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. He created this world and everything in it.

He made you for a purpose: to be thankful to him for the very gift of life. My wife was telling me a week ago, and I was feeling pretty down. She said, “Look, we could have been dust. Just the fact that God made us and gave us life and we feel wind on our faces. What a beautiful thing. Life is beautiful. Jesus gave us that life and all he’s telling us to do is be thankful. Obey him. He’s the master. He loves us.”

You cannot avoid a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Or actually, that in itself is kind of goofy. It’s really with the Father through Jesus, right? So that’s another problem with the phrase—it reduces the Triune God to Jesus. And by the way, it drops his last name or his last title, Christ, which means king or anointed one. And so right away we have a reductionistic view of salvation that severs us from the historic Trinity.

Not unintentionally. I understand these things are but I’m telling you that’s what the emphasis seems to be. And it severs us from the knowledge of his being sovereign and thinking we can have an optional relationship. We cannot. Every created person in the world and in history has a relationship with the Triune God that is intensely personal whether they know it or not and usually they don’t. Their rebellion against the God who made them is personal.

They don’t want it. They don’t want him personally. And his judgment of them and finding them sinful. That’s personal, too. You abide under the wrath of God until you turn away from your sins, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as your savior. Now, that’s what people mean by a personal relationship. But do you see what I’m saying? Everybody’s got a personal relationship. This tells us whether we like it or not, whether it offends our sensibilities or not, it doesn’t make any difference.

This text is interpreted by the New Testament in the preaching of the gospel of Jesus in the book of John as indicating that he is sovereign, that he will reveal himself to some and not to others. Now, this—that’s not the end. There’s a reason why they rejected him in the providence of God.

The other thing this text tells us is that Jesus, when we preach Jesus, we preach the one who is in the process of uniting fractured humanity. He’s a uniter. Paul understood what happened here and he understood that the rejection of this Messiah meant that he was then—and he quotes one of these texts from Isaiah—to say “I’m going to go to the Gentiles” because he knew that the Jew-Gentile distinction was being done away with the coming of Jesus Christ and we would have one new humanity.

You know, I feel kind of bad that I had all the young people read Leviticus 19 last week without a little bit of explanation. You know, I got Facebook posts like, “Well, I like blood in my meat, you know.” So, yeah. You know, some of the things in Leviticus 19—while the principle or truth behind them are real—they refer to the separation of a nation of Jews and priests, a priestly nation to the world, from the world. Sin ruptured humanity—men and women, husband and wife—began to fight soon as they sinned. Adam and Eve—it wasn’t good. It broke apart the beautiful relationship between people because God says you can’t have a beautiful relationship with someone unless its foundation is me because otherwise you’re spending your whole life trying to deny reality.

I’m reality, he says. And when you sin against me, when you reject me, then you see, you may try, but you’re not going to really have the best of relationships. And what do we see in this country as the country has turned away from being disciples of Jesus Christ? What’s happened? The break up of culture, the disintegration of families, the disintegration of communities, the disintegration of the body politic. Everything gets divided.

Jesus is a uniter. And the plan of what was going to happen when he came and the Jews rejected him was the gospel would go to the Gentiles. That would produce a reaction on the part of the Jews that would bring a lot of them into the kingdom. There was a tremendous evangelistic movement among the Jews after 30 years of preaching of the gospel of Christ to the Gentiles and to the Jews. And what happened was Jesus created a new body. We’re not Jew or Gentile. We’re one now. Jesus is a uniter.

Now, why did God leave the world divided until Jesus came? In fact, he set up rules for division because he wanted us to know that the only source of unity, the only source of true friendship, the only source for good marriages, the only source for a good community, the only source for peaceful relationships among human beings who are image-bearers of God is on the foundation of Jesus Christ. And that was, you know, the Jews were still supposed to preach to the Gentiles in the Old Testament. God didn’t just leave him, you know, with no knowledge. But the division between Jew and Gentile was there to tell people the Messiah hasn’t come yet. The one who will fix all the brokenness of the world, exemplified in the Mosaic law that kept people apart, you know, provided some degree of relationship but kept them apart still.

That would be done away when Jesus Christ came. We preach Jesus from Isaiah and the first thing we preach—first verse as interpreted in the New Testament—is that number one, he’s sovereign and number two, his sovereignty is toward the end of the well-being of humanity because he’s a uniter. Okay, let’s go on. Probably never get to that response till next week. That’s okay.

Verse two: “He shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness that we should see him. He has no beauty that we should desire him.”

And so what’s going to happen here in Isaiah 53 is the preaching of Jesus begins with the preaching of his life. It’s not talking yet about his death or his suffering. It’s talking about the way he lives his life. Okay? So he’s got no form or comeliness. He’s, you know, he is a man of sorrows. Not because—and it’s not talking about him being at the cross at this point. Rather, it’s talking about his life.

He was living amidst a bunch of people who really didn’t love God, who were either self-righteous hypocrites on the one hand or complete libertines on the other. He suffered because he saw that all around him people broke God’s law. They didn’t want to follow God. And there’s suffering on the part of the righteous when that happens. He was a man of sorrows and it says in this—that he, in verse four, going on to talk about his life—it says that he, in verse three, “was chastised rejected by men. That’s in his life. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We hid as it were our faces from him. He was despised and we didn’t esteem him.” We didn’t esteem him. This is kind of important to understand what this is talking about.

And let me just again, let’s let the New Testament tell us how to preach this part of Jesus. So this verse 4: “He has borne our grief, carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.”

Is that talking about the crucifixion? No. Matthew 8:16 says this: “When evening had come, they brought to him many who were demon-possessed, and he cast out the spirits at the word and healed all who were sick.” Verse 17: “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet saying, ‘He himself took our infirmities and bore our sickness.’”

You see, these verses are talking about his life and specifically his ministry of healing people. What’s going on? He’s taking our illnesses. Now, ultimately that will be accomplished through his death and resurrection for all of us. But, you know, the trailer for Jesus taking away our sins on the cross was him healing the diseases of the people.

Jesus to preach Jesus from this text is that Jesus is the source of wholeness, mental wholeness, physical wholeness. Now, he still has reasons why we suffer. You know, God is sovereign. It’s not about, you know, health and wealth and prosperity being the gospel. But the gospel is certainly that Jesus Christ processes our difficulties. He’s the one who takes our griefs. And the text specifically applies this to his life.

So, up to now, all these verses are talking about the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the response of fallen mankind to a life of holiness is rejection. We don’t esteem him very highly. He doesn’t got, you know, the good looks. He doesn’t have the money. He doesn’t have the smooth speech. He’s none of that stuff that would cause us by walking by sight to follow him. No. What he’s got is integrity. What he’s got is honesty, sometimes to the point of being offensive to people that don’t want to hear the truth. What he’s got is serving, which in the context of the times in which he lived was seen as being horrible by the Romans.

That was the worst thing he could be—as a servant. Preaching Jesus means we’re preaching a servant whose service is to the end of healing everybody and making everybody well. And because of that, people blow him off the same way sinful people today blow off people on the basis of external appearances. That’s what this text instructs us.

So we preach Jesus first as a uniter and sovereign and secondly as the one who takes upon himself our griefs, not just on the cross but his life demonstrates that what he is about, the world he’s going to create, is a world of soundness and fitness, of peace, the blessing of Jesus in the context of his people. Okay, let’s move on if I can find my notes.

Then in verse five, we begin to move into his sufferings. “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon him and by his stripes we are healed.”

Now, we’re getting into the suffering of Jesus. His stripes, you know, weren’t received on the cross primarily. He was beaten beforehand. He suffered beforehand at the hands, as I said before, of Pilate’s soldiers.

Jesus here is wounded for our transgressions. Now remember these words are important. Transgression means that we decided we wanted to do what we wanted to do rather than what God wanted to do. So we break his law. He says do this and we decide to do this and everybody does it. Everybody sins. A transgression means to transgress, to break a specific command of God. So that’s the word that we normally think of as sin. We all sin. We all do what God says we shouldn’t be doing or we don’t do what he says we should be doing. That’s a transgression.

The end result of transgression is iniquity. Well, you know, we Christians have our own vocabulary. And half the stuff we don’t even understand what we’re saying, right? What’s the difference between transgression and iniquity? You’re starting to find out here, but you know, most people—well, it’s all the same kind of blurred up thing. But it’s very important when the scriptures make these distinctions, we have to, too.

Iniquity means liability for punishment. We break God’s word. And that makes us liable. It produces a fear because we know that we’re liable to receive punishment from God for what we’ve done. Now, we cover it over. We paste it over. We try to convince ourselves that everything is okay. We whistle past the graveyard. We put on the brave face and all that stuff. But iniquity means that when you don’t do what your Creator and one who loves you more than anybody else you can ever imagine, when you don’t do what he wants you to do, you’re going to be fearful for punishment because you are justly in a state of punishment.

But what’s beautiful about Jesus is that he himself takes upon himself. We don’t end up paying for our sins. We don’t end up receiving the punishment for our doing what we want to do. He does. Now, how does he do it? I don’t know. You know, we can get into various theories of the atonement and what happened on the cross and the relationship of the Trinity and hell and all that stuff. I don’t know. But what the text wants us to know is to preach Jesus.

We don’t need to get into an extended discussion of the mechanics. What we need to understand is that Jesus is the one who pays the price, who accepts upon himself in his being beaten and scourged and whipped and all that stuff and then dying on the cross. He does that for us, for you. For you who broke God’s word and who need a way back. That’s who Jesus is. Jesus loves you so much he was willing to be beaten nearly to death and then to actually suffer death on that cross.

And what the text tells us to preach Jesus is we preach the one who has suffered, taking your punishment which you know you deserve. We all know it. Everybody knows it. As Leonard Cohen says, we all know it. Jesus took that upon himself in his sufferings.

This text also is quoted in the New Testament, 1 Peter 2. “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but committed himself to him who judges righteously, who himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we having died to sins might live for righteousness, by whose stripes we are healed.”

There it is. So, the allusion to this text in Isaiah is “by his stripes we are healed.” And what that tells us is that we as a result of that are supposed to live for righteousness. He committed himself to God the Father. He bore our sins in his body on the tree, that is on the cross, that we having died to sins, because Jesus suffered that death for us, might live to righteousness.

So there’s a response that the New Testament text picks up from verse 5. But Jesus is the one who suffers for you. We preach Jesus by saying he’s a uniter. We preach Jesus by saying that he’s sovereign. How could he be anything but, since he created all this and is control of all of this? Obviously. We preach Jesus that he comes to take away the illnesses that are rampant in the world, the divisions, the breaking up, the problems we go through.

And we preach that the way he did this was to suffer as our substitute.

Now, this is really interesting, the next verse, because this tells us why this was all necessary. “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

So, why did Jesus have to suffer? What created this liability for punishment on us? Sin did. What sort of sin? Right? Murder, incest, theft, killing of parents, beating your parent. What is it? Well, the statement here in this section preaching Jesus and the necessity for Jesus suffering for you makes it real simple what sin is.

“All we like sheep have gone astray. How? We have turned everyone to his own way.” That’s it. Sin, disobedience to God that brings shame, right? It requires purifying. That brings true guilt, that brings fear.

The sin that does all of that is as simple as saying, “Well, yeah, he wants me to do this, but I’m going to go my own way.” The summation here is from some people’s perspective, the American way is what sin is. American way, individualism. I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m going to do it my way. As Paul Anka wrote and as Frank Sinatra said. This is simple as that.

If you’re deciding right now, this afternoon, tomorrow, you know, to turn everyone—turn to your own way. Rely upon your own understanding instead of God’s. Rely upon your own desires instead of submitting to God and his desires. Number one, you’re sinning against yourself. You should be punished just for that because you’re taking somebody that God created and you’re making your life and living miserable because you’re not obeying the order—the owner’s manual. You know, young people going into the military, they got to learn the general orders, right? They got to memorize those general orders. Well, here’s the general order. Number one, do things my way. And the general order says, “If you do things your own way, unless you respond when I call you back to get into rank and to do what I tell you to do, I’m going to shoot you.”

Now, you know, he comes after us in our sin. He’s more gracious. We’ll see that goes on to talk about his graciousness and mercy here. But that’s the idea. Sin is as simple as doing our own way. And that’s what I don’t like about personal relationship with Jesus. Because a personal relationship with Jesus just says, “Well, you know, I’m going to follow Jesus my way.” You know, religion gets a bad name. Had a bad name for a long time in evangelicalism. That’s too bad. It’s a perfectly good word. It’s in the New Testament. The English word religion, though, all it means is to tie things back together. Re, right? Like read something, do it again. Ligio, you know, a ligature is a rope that you use to tie things with. Religion means to tie people back together. That’s Jesus. Jesus’s religion. He’s the one that came to tie the world back together. He came to bring us together.

And Satan came to drive us apart, to split Eve off from God and to split Eve off from the husband and then to work on the husband and split him off from God and his wife. Satan comes to affect American individualism. Now, I know there’s—when we say that there’s a really good thing about American individualism. You know, it means that you’re responsible and all that stuff, but I’m saying taken when it goes to seed, as it is in this country, when individualism goes to seed, the proper individualism—it becomes autonomy and it becomes everybody being broken up and that’s what we’ve got going on.

We turn away from Jesus the uniter. We turn away from religion and we end up with personal relationships with Jesus as if it was an option, as if it wasn’t with the Father through Jesus. As if it had something to do with just how I feel as opposed to the objective truths of religion. That’s another problem with the phrase—when we hear religion, it’s associated with dead formalism.

Well, you know what the response we probably will not get to it today, but the response to Isaiah 53 begins with corporate singing. Sing O Zion, sing Jerusalem. The mother of the church, the mother who is the church is exhorted to sing forth the beauty of this Jesus that Isaiah 53 preaches. It’s a corporate activity. It’s a religious activity that binds people together in praise and thanksgiving and good attitudes. That’s religion. It’s gotten a bad rap in our day and age, but that’s what it is. Religion is corporate and personal relationship with Jesus is totally privatized. It’s cut off from the Old Testament. Whatever that Jesus is, he’s not very discernable in terms of what we learn from Isaiah, for instance, which is where Philip began to preach Jesus from. It’s a whole New Testament touchy-feely. I don’t know if the Bible’s inspired, but that’s got nothing to do. I’m, you know, it’s really not the Bible. I don’t want to be an idolater toward the Bible. I want a personal relationship with Jesus.

Now, I know that there’s a perfectly good use of the term. Please, if I offend you, just, you know, throw away the husk of whatever I’m telling you and look for what might be truth in the center of it. And the truth that I’m trying to drive home is that what our—what we want to do in our sinful state is to do what we want to do. It’s as simple as that. And you know, if the old man can’t get away with it externally and he wants to be something like a Christian, then he just turns Christianity into another way of doing what he wants to do. Right? That’s what we are in our sinful state.

And Jesus comes—the very purpose for the manifest of him taking our wrongs or taking our punishment, dying for us on the cross. The very purpose of all of that is to put us back on the way of following him. And when we hear Jesus preached and then decide, I’m going to make up my own mind on stuff still, that’s not good. I don’t know if I’m right or wrong on the gambling casino thing. I don’t know if I’m right or wrong, you know, on the debt obligation raising. I think I’ve tried to think it through, but you know, people are—I went to a meeting, political meeting on Wednesday and know I’m a pastor. They know that we do things from a biblical perspective. They ask if there’s anything new with us. Yeah, I put my voter guide comments up on our Facebook page. And by the way, I’m a yes on Measure 75 at this point.

What? Gasps. You know, that’s not the conservative way. Somehow the conservative way in the casino—funded by Indian tribes, by the way—is that the state should control this. I had—I’m off on a little tangent here, but that’s okay. That’s okay. It’s to a point.

So they had a presenter at this meeting, nice guy named Whan, head of an econ or ECO Northwest, a consulting firm, an economic consulting firm, and he gave his economic analysis and urges to vote no on the casino. You know why? Because if we vote yes and if this private casino is allowed to go in out here at Gresham, it’s going to dry up all the state video lottery proceeds from all the bars surrounding the casino. You know. And I said, “Well, you mean it’s like a Walmart as opposed to a mom and pop store?” I really don’t like it when they keep Walmarts out, but I didn’t tell him that. It’s not really—it’s really more like a Hyatt Regency as opposed to a Red Lion.

So, we want to keep the Hyatt Regency out because it’s too nice a hotel and it’ll drive out the Red Lions. And he’s speaking to a group of free market anti-tax, freedom-loving guys and women. I’m—what is going on here? And the real problem with drying up all of that revenue is the schools will get more—less money. That was his second big point. His analysis shows reduced revenues for the schools. Well, I’ve got two more reasons to support this thing. Okay.

So, he didn’t—and then the kicker was his research was funded by the Indian tribes who don’t want the competition over here. You know, you’ve seen on my Facebook page this link to the no casino in the gorge group. You know what that is? That’s two Indian tribes fighting. That’s all that is. How about no part of it? The conservatives have jumped on board getting paid by one Indian tribe to keep another Indian tribe out of having a gorge casino. That’s what goes on. Okay. What’s the point of all that in terms of the sermon?

I’m trying to go God’s way. I’m not trying to determine my way. And if the end result of figuring this out—and I’m not saying I know what it is, I’m going to listen to more and more, you know, before I finalize this thing. Maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t see any place in the Bible that says that all gambling is sin. And I don’t see any place in the Bible that says it should be a civil crime to gamble. I just don’t see it. I don’t care what I feel like. I care what the word of God says. That’s the whole point of that biblical ballot measure voters guide.

Now, I may have it wrong. Maybe you can convince me. And I don’t want to be overly simplistic. I know I have a tendency to be reductionistic in these things. But do you see my heart? Sin is—well, yeah, but I just don’t like it. Oh, there’s enough gambling casinos around. What? You can tell somebody else what they can do? Is there enough Big Macs around so we don’t want Burger Kings in town? What? What is going on here? I don’t get it.

So, so the point is, well, our job is Jesus came to forgive us our sins, to take our punishment, to take away our guilt and shame, so that we would do things the way he would want us to do them. Now, it’s not easy to figure out sometimes, you know. Obviously, our brains are involved with this. But Jesus wants us to forsake turning away to our way. That’s the essence of sin and to turn back to him. That’s who Jesus is. He’s got our best in mind. He knows it’s not good for us to disobey what he wants us to do because he’s telling us these are the general orders that are for your welfare and for the welfare of the world. For the welfare of the world.

All right.

So God has laid on Jesus the iniquities of us all. “He was oppressed and he was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearers is silent. He opened not his mouth.”

And now here Jesus comes and in part what he’s giving us is a moral example. You know, there’s some theories about what Jesus did on the cross. It’s just an example. Well, it’s not just that. He affected a real atonement. He really suffered for us. He took our punishment so that we don’t have to die for that stuff. Okay. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This text is quoted in First Peter again as saying he’s an example. You got a rotten husband. You got a bad boss at work. You got Caesar who got into office through killing the Caesar before him. These are all the illustrations that Peter uses to urge us to be submissive to the governing authorities.

Not if they’re telling us to sin, of course, but God says in general, authority is a good thing. What’s the beginning of holiness? According to Leviticus 19, reverencing your parents properly, fearing them and respecting them. Reverencing authority. That’s a good thing. God wants things in order. Now, he wants those rulers converted and all that stuff. But the way we’re going to get there is being like Jesus.

Jesus was oppressed and he didn’t revile in return. And First Peter tells us that the reason he didn’t was he was committing himself. He was trusting the Father. So if you want to be like Jesus, what would Jesus do when you suffer? You know, you don’t fight it the way you would want to fight it. There’s a lot of—what we end up doing is trusting God to work through our parents even though it ticks us off, to work through the civil government, to work through the rulers in the church when we don’t know what’s going on.

This example of Jesus not reviling in return to people that were nasty to him. Specifically, Peter quotes this text and says he leaves us an example so that we would be the same way. We’re going to have problems and we have to have an attitude like Jesus’s when we respond to him.

And then it tells us, “He was taken from prison and from judgment. Who will declare his generation? He was cut off from the land of the living for the transgressions, the violations of the people. He was stricken and they made his grave with the wicked. Okay.

So we’ve moved from his life. Preaching Jesus is his life of bringing health to people. We’ve moved through his suffering. He’s willing to suffer for righteousness the way that we don’t want to a lot of times. He’s willing to take upon himself the sufferings for our sin. He’s willing to—he—we’re preaching Jesus by saying his healing of us. He’s sovereign. He’s a uniter. He’s healing the whole world. Okay? And now we move through his life and we went to his sufferings pre-cross and now it’s talking about him being killed on the cross. He dies. He lays it all down. Everything he gives up his life for you. You decided to soldier off doing your own way—like sheep we’ve gone astray. That’s your sin. And rightfully, you know, God can just leave you to your devices. You end up, you know, in some ravine attacked by some wolf or whatever it is.

But that’s not what God does. Preaching Jesus is a Jesus who loves you so much that in spite of your rebellion against him, he not only suffered for you. He died on the cross for you. He laid his life on the line for people who hated him. He brings us to love him, but we hated him in our sin. And that’s Jesus. He dies on the cross for us.

“They made his grave with the wicked, but with the rich at his death, because he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.”

Okay, so now we’re talking about his burial. You know, he was buried in Nicodemus’s plot with the rich men. Why the rich men? Well, the text tells us it’s to remind us, you know, that he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Oh, you know, you could spend a couple of sermons just on that phrase—no deceit in his mouth.

What does the world need? It needs a savior who has zero, none, no deceit in his mouth. When we go astray, do our own thing, we end up being deceitful people, you know. And Jesus—preaching Jesus is someone in whom there is no deceit. He is honest. He is forthright. He doesn’t try to deceive. He doesn’t lie. Because who’s the father of lies? Satan. Satan told the first lie. He’s the father of lies. The scriptures tell us.

I’ve told my kids—they’re this high—to varying effect. You know, when you tell a lie, you’re worshiping Satan because he’s the father of lies. That’s what he wants the world to do is to lie to each other and for relationships to break apart. And when you tell the truth, the simple act of being honest, not having deceit, you’re worshiping Jesus. You’re doing what he wants. He’s like—to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? That’s what this text begins with. Who’s the arm of the Lord?

Did we find out from Isaiah in the 40s? The arm of the Lord. Yeah, it’s Jesus. But it’s you, right? That’s what’s referred to. You’re referred to as the arm of the Lord. When we understand that what Christians are simply people who are united to Christ and are part of him, now what’s being revealed to us here is Jesus. First of all, we preach Jesus, but we also preach who we’re to be—Christians, little anointed ones, little Jesus, as we can say. We’re supposed to be people in whom there is no deceit, in whom there is no deceit in our mouths.

“Yet it pleased the Lord to punish him. He has put him to grief when he made his soul an offering for sin. He shall see his seed. He shall prolong his days. The pleasure of the Lord shall rest in his hand. He shall see the labor of his soul and be satisfied.”

Okay. So, as we get to a climax of what preaching Jesus is, where Jesus is the one who brings satisfaction to the Father, he sees Jesus who makes a real atonement, a real [one who] takes upon himself the punishment for our sins. It’s over, done with 2,000 years ago on the cross because God sees the faithfulness of his Son. Sees him doing that. Because of his love and mercy and tenderness and love for us, the Father is satisfied. Peace is affected. Jesus is the one who brings peace and satisfaction to the Father and blessing to the world. His soul is an offering for sin. Impurity. So Jesus died to remove not just our fear for the punishment that was due.

He died to take away our guilt, our shame. And that’s what sin refers to—a purification from shame. Jesus takes away our shame by making his soul an offering for sin. All the offerings of the Old Testament are little pictures of what Jesus would do 2,000 years ago. And he does it. And when he does it, the Lord God says he shall see his seed. Even though he’s dead, God will raise him up. And not only will he raise him up, he will prolong his days. The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

It’s the same with us. Do the right thing. Suffer if need be to death and God will raise you up in life. He’ll raise you up because of Jesus Christ and what he has done. He shall see the labor of Jesus’s soul and be satisfied. “By his knowledge my righteous servant, my faithful to the covenant servant, the covenant that said that I will affect peace amongst the peoples of the world by taking upon myself—”

God says the punishments for the sins of humanity. He shall see that Jesus is the righteous servant. He keeps the covenant. “He shall justify many. He shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a place with the great. He shall divide the spoil with the strong because he has poured out his soul unto death, was numbered with the transgressors, bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

And so as we end this picture, preaching Jesus, we preach of Jesus whom the Father will raise. Raised back up, put to the right hand of the Father in heaven. His reign will be manifest in all the world. History is now the motion of the growth of the Christian church. The body of Jesus Christ is growing to fill the world. All the kings and nations will be baptized and brought into relationship with Christ.

And that’s what’s happened. We’re in some kind of downturn right now. But what’s happened? You’re here because of the Christian church. You’re here because a handful of people meeting after his resurrection was built into a worldwide expression of the body of Jesus Christ, his church, that created all of Western culture and civilization. Now we want the fruit, but we don’t want the root. We try to take Western civilization and make it secular and make it outside of Jesus.

And what’s happening? Western civilization is falling apart in front of our eyes. It is the fruit, the root of which is Jesus Christ. And it is the fulfillment of this prophecy that having done what he did, when we preach Jesus, we preach a conquering, a victorious suffering servant, one who suffered to bring unity, to bring the reconciliation of the world, to create a worldwide global church who would exemplify his love, his sacrifice, his concern for others, his self-sacrificial life. Not going our own way, but going in a way that benefits those that God calls us to serve.

We preach Jesus. I wanted to preach on Isaiah 54 today, and I thought, how in the world can I get to the response without talking about the gospel? There’s a response. As I said, it’ll begin with singing. We’ll talk about it next week. But praise God, history found its culmination 2,000 years ago on the cross. And everything that’s happened since then is the playing out of this text.

Believe the gospel today. Understand that you’ve sinned by going your own way. Jesus died for that very sin. He took upon himself your guilt, your shame, your fear. And he says, “Believe in me. Follow me. Don’t go your way. Go my way.” And the end result isn’t just a good life for you. It’s that the end result is the flowering of the world, the beauty of the world in submission once more to the very one who created it for a purpose.

That purpose is joy, singing in faith and in confidence, that the world itself would be covered with the gospel the way the waters cover the sea. That the world would be brought to joy once more, having been plunged into the darkness by sin of just deciding to go our own way. The world is being redeemed through the work of the Lord, Jesus Christ. Praise God. Praise him for yourself, for this church, for the history of the church for the last 2,000 years.

And look forward with bright anticipation to the continuing revelation of Jesus Christ, that he’d be revealed continually in history. That’s what the text says it will be. As this Savior, the one who died, that we and the world might live in joy.

Let’s pray.