Cry Out and Sing!

We are quickly approaching the start of the new church year. Next week is the last Sunday of what we call “Ordinary Time,” which ends with the feast day called Christ the King. After that comes the start of the new year with the season of Advent.

This year during Advent and Christmas, we will be spending time in the Book of Isaiah.

If you want to have a good grasp on the big picture of Old Testament theology, you will want to have a good grasp on Isaiah.

For 6 of the next 7 weeks, we will be looking at various excerpts from the prophet Isaiah, so you can turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 12 this morning. That’s on page 389 of the white pew Bible, a little to the right of the center of your Bible, most likely.

We’re going to look at one of the songs of Isaiah today. In fact, in the lectionary, Isaiah 12 is the Psalm reading of the week. And in this Psalm of Isaiah, we’re going to focus on the magnificence of God’s glorious grace.

And here’s our Big Idea from Isaiah 12:

Big Idea

Our experience of God’s salvation should lead us to praise, thanksgiving, and proclamation.

When we experience the grace-fueled redemption of God, our hearts are changed and we ought to respond first with praise and thanksgiving for the greatness of the Lord and his compassion and mercy toward. Then the natural response — if we have truly understood and experienced the grace of God toward sinful people like us — is to tell others about the grace and mercy.

Let’s read our text this morning, Isaiah 12.

Isaiah 12 CSB

On that day you will say: “I will give thanks to you, Lord, although you were angry with me. Your anger has turned away, and you have comforted me. Indeed, God is my salvation; I will trust him and not be afraid, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation.” You will joyfully draw water from the springs of salvation, and on that day you will say, “Give thanks to the Lord; proclaim his name! Make his works known among the peoples. Declare that his name is exalted. Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things. Let this be known throughout the earth. Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is among you in his greatness.”

Divine Spirit, illumine to me the words of the Lord.

Show me the wealth of glory that lies beneath the old familiar stories.

Teach me the depths of meaning hidden in the songs of Zion.

Raise me to the heights of aspiration that is reached by the wings of the prophet.

Lift me to the summit of faith that is trod by the feet of the apostle.

Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Amen.

For the Praise of His Glorious Grace

Up to this point in His book, Isaiah has traced out the path of the foul river of wickedness that flows from our hearts as a result of our sinful natures. When Adam rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, the hearts and nature of every human was plunged into sin, because Adam was our representative. He stood in our place with the opportunity to fulfill the covenant that God made with him, thereby securing our place in communal relationship with God forever. But, because Adam chose to follow his own desires rather than the perfect decree of God, Adam fell from that state and brought us with him, as Paul says in Romans 5.

Isaiah takes hold of that truth about our sinfulness and catalogs it in the opening chapters of his book. In chapter 1, he points out our tendency to approach God on our own terms through cold-hearted religious tradition and mechanical ritual — if I do this but don’t do this, I can be accepted by God. Isaiah says God does not accept that type of religious formula as worship.

Isaiah 2 revealed God’s hatred for the arrogance of idolatry. He speaks to the sin of searching for satisfaction in anything other than the one, true, God.

Chapter 3 exposes the filth of bad leadership: corrupt judges, magistrates, and kings.

Isaiah 5 recounts God’s revulsion at greed, excess, mockery of God, redefining of truth, false wisdom, and a corrupt justice system.

Isaiah 6 showed that even the best of us, a prophet like Isaiah, feels completely undone by an unclean life under the gaze of such a holy Lord. To try and approach God in our sinfulness would be our end.

Chapters 7 through 10 describe God’s righteous devastation of Israel and Judah by invading forces because of that unrepentant sin.

The first chapters of Isaiah are a veritable catalog of human depravity. And by the time we get to the magnificent vision of the messianic kingdom in Isaiah 11 — a shoot growing from the stump of Jesse, the wolf lying down with the lamb, the Lord extending His hand to recover the remnant — we may rightly wonder how a holy God could give an unholy and wicked people such a majestic and beautiful Savior as that chapter describes. Isaiah 12 contains both the how and the only appropriate reaction of the people of God to such “glorious grace.”

Verses 1 and 2 of Isaiah’s psalm pull from the language of Exodus, Moses’ song about the deliverance of the Israelites at the Red Sea. Just like they once sang the praises of God for deliverance from Egypt, so now do his people sing a song of praise for his wonderful redemption.

And Isaiah does something interesting grammatically here. In verse 1, he's speaking about the entirety of God’s people, yet he uses the singular you. On that day, you will say. He’s writing as though the entire people of God are one singular person.

The people of God are united in their praise to God for his salvation. Like Paul says in Romans 15:

Romans 15:5–6 CSB

Now may the God who gives endurance and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, according to Christ Jesus, so that you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with one mind and one voice.

We, the holy catholic and apostolic church, the entirety of believers across time and space, every individual that has placed their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ is united in one voice acknowledging the worth and greatness of the redeeming God.

How tragic it is that while we are united by such a powerful bond, we let such unimportant, weak, and temporal things divide us.

I grow so weary of the constant categorizations and determinations of value based on opinions that are, at most, secondary issues. Most of them, honestly are not even tertiary issues: conservative-progressive, complementarian-egalitarian, Democrat-Republican, capitalist-socialist…one day all of those things will not exist and the only thing that will matter is if one says in faith that Jesus is Lord. If that is the case, then why do we put such value on those labels now?

Why are our church buildings divided by skin color when in the universal church is made up of people from every ethnicity, tribe, and language?

Why did I have to read another study this week that showed people are more likely to go to a church that shares their political preferences than their theological convictions?

The redemption of God unites his people in one song. Cry out and sing!

But what is it about the redemption that brings joy? Or better, what exactly is redemption? What happened that God would extend his grace to the wicked people shown forth in Isaiah 1-11 and throughout human history?

What occured that brings forth the praise of God’s people?

The end of verse 1:

Your anger has turned away, and you have comforted me.

Where there was once wrath toward the wicked, God chose to turn His wrath aside and show comfort instead.

And it is important for us to understand exactly what is going on here, because the Bible does not teach that the wrath of God is simply turned into love. God is wrathful against sin, and God’s wrath must be poured out upon sin. All have sinned and all are under the condemnation of sin and God’s wrath rests upon them.

So, how then, can the people of God sing that there is no anger but God showed comfort instead?

Because, the wrath of God was not turned into comfort. The wrath of God, Isaiah says, was turned away, and comfort was given. The wrath of God will fall upon the guilty one and he will be punished for his sin. But, if the wrath of God is removed from a sinful man and instead placed upon One who bears the guilt in the place of the sinful man, then God may justly show comfort to the one upon whom that wrath formerly rested.

And there lies the heart of redemption and the heart of the gospel. The redeemed of the Lord sing his praise because although God had indeed been angry and rightly angry, His anger had turned. God’s just wrath had turned from the sinner to the Savior. God’s anger has turned from me to Jesus, the Christ. And I who deserved the anger of God to be poured out upon me have received His comfort instead.

And so, I can sing with the people of God,

Isaiah 12:2 CSB

Indeed, God is my salvation; I will trust him and not be afraid, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation.”

In that truth the brightness of the face of the Lord shines forth! The long-awaited deliverance has arrived.

My salvation is God himself. And if God is my salvation, there there is no need of fearing, only trusting.

Now, what does it mean when we say, “God is my salvation?”

God is in the business of saving sinners. So when it says God is our salvation, Edward Young put it as such, “It means that God is the author, the cause, the agent, the accomplisher of that salvation. Salvation apart from God is unthinkable.”

As Paul says in his letter to the church at Ephesus:

Ephesians 1:3–6 CSB

Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ. For he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before him. He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One.

So, Paul says before the foundation of the world, God the Father ordained His people to life and salvation according to His good pleasure — God desired to save people, so He did. At the right time, God the Son wrought that salvation by His death upon Calvary’s cross, because God was pleased accept His life as a sacrifice for the sin of His people.

Also in time God the Holy Spirit applies to the hearts of His own the blessings which Christ has obtained for them by His death.

The Triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, distinct in relation but coeternal and coequal in essence — the Trinity in Unity is the active agent of our salvation.

In that salvation we are delivered from the guilt and the pollution of our sins, and we are credited with the wondrous and blessed righteousness of the eternal Christ. God is our Father, and by an act of His omnipotent grace adopts us as His own children. In the fullest and deepest sense, we receive God. He is our salvation, and therefore what ought we to fear?

If God were not our salvation — if our salvation depended on the strength of our faith, the sincerity of our repentance, the response of our will — we would have everything to fear. But because God and God alone is the agent of salvation, we can say boldly, I will trust Him and not be afraid.

And we need not be afraid when God is our salvation because He is our strength and our song. In order to live, everyone must have strength and find some joy. Unless there is something upon which we can base our life and in which we find purpose and fulfillment, our lives will be in pieces.

Some lean on their own will-power, some on prestige and power, some on substances. Some lean on over-the-top displays of manliness, some lean on religious tradition; everyone leans on something and with a single exception, everyone leans on something of this world.

That single exception is those who find their strength and their joy in the God who is revealed in Jesus the Christ. The Big Man Upstairs is not the God who saves. A generic understanding of a God who created the world and expects us to do the best we can is not the God who saves. God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, the Holy One who will not and cannot abide sin, but made provision for His people in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the God who saves.

Yahweh, the covenant God who has redeemed His people through the blood of the Messiah, is the strength and the joy of His people, because He is the only might and joy which gives true purpose and assurance. All other strength is merely a show and all other joy is and empty song.

For those whose salvation is Yahweh, there is no reason to fear and every reason to trust. He is our ongoing strength and joy for the journey. He is the song for the sojourn.

Isaiah goes on in verse 3 to say in that day we will joyfully draw water from the springs of salvation. Isaiah is filled with images of cool, satisfying streams in the wasteland from which thirsty wanderers drink and are refreshed.

It’s no coincidence that these images are consistently applied to Jesus in the New Testament, because He and He alone is the source of the water for which our soul longs.

When he was speaking to the Samaritan woman in John 4, he said:

John 4:14 CSB

But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”

At the Feast of Booths:

John 7:37–38 CSB

On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.”

When Paul writes about Israel wandering in the wilderness and God provided water for them from a rock, he writes:

1 Corinthians 10:3–4 CSB

They all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.

Christian, as we make our toilsome way through the wilderness of this world, we are free to drink from Jesus at any moment through the Holy Spirit and have our souls filled with refreshment.

Now, how does the knowledge and praise of God’s glorious grace translate to our everyday?

Verses 4-6 of the psalm cover what we should be doing for the rest of our lives on earth: giving thanks to our Lord, proclaiming his name among the nations, making his works known among the peoples.

This is the mission of the church — making disciples by exalting the achievements of God the Father through the perfect work of his Son, Jesus Christ.

Our call as the church is to declare to all peoples that God’s triune name is exalted and that everyone who calls on that name will be saved. Each “citizen of Zion” (v. 6) will do this worship-filled mission work, and we will experience the greatness of God in our midst both for now and all eternity.

I have been absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of the gospel as I’ve been reading and rereading this chapter over the week. It is full of rich worship and praise to God for his amazing grace in turning away his wrath and pouring out compassion on us, His people.

So the call to us is to fill our mouths with praise and thanksgiving — to worship him in spirit and in truth, to live every moment of our lives in thankful praise to the God of our salvation. And it’s a call for us to be passionately and fruitfully engaged in evangelism and missions, making disciples, declaring among the nations of the earth the greatness of Jesus’s achievements at the cross and empty tomb.

It’s time for us to to decide if we are serious about the gospel or not, church. It’s time for us to decide if we are willing to do whatever is necessary for the salvation of God to be declared in our community, to our neighbors, by our local gathering of the church. This church, us here, we have been given this mission by the risen Christ and we will sit on it no more. Today is the day to say, the gospel and it’s mission means something to me.

Let God’s glorious grace sink down into your soul then get out there and declare the glorious things he has done with excitement and passion.

Isaiah 12:6 CSB

Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is among you in his greatness.”

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