Sermon Tone Analysis

Sermon Introduction

In the 1930s, London was filled with Government officials that loved Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler was building Autobahns and recovering Germany’s fallen economy.

Ranking members of parliament were in love with Hitler and when Churchill tried to warn them that Adolf Hitler could not be trusted these government officials just smiled because they knew better than Churchill.

They said Churchill was an alarmist, hysterical, and trying to push England into a war.

They said he was walking on a road no one else was traveling on and that he needed to get on the path with the rest of the government officials in England who wanted to appease Adolf Hitler.

You can read all about this in the biography of William Manchester 2nd Volume called the Last Lion.

Part of the problem of the British government at this time is that they just could not believe that the government of Germany had fallen into the hands of criminals.

They couldn’t believe it and would not believe.

They resisted the truth and the convinced themselves of one lie after another.

When German invaded Czechoslovakia the British Prime Minister refused to believe the report of his own ambassador.

His ambassador wired him that Nazis were savaging Jews in the streets.

He refused to believe.

Neville Chambers sent wire back to him and simply said, “Impossible!

If Hitler knew of any suffering of Jews he would put a stop to it at once.”

William Manchester: most men in power…believe what they want to believe, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions while taking out insurance, whenever possible, against the possibility that the truth may lie in their wastebaskets.

It was not just the English Government that refused to accept the truth, most of the nations and their populations stayed in darkness.

They saw the truth and deceived themselves into believing a lie.

All these years later, we are still not so different are we?

Self-deception has not really gone away has it?

Our bad temper is really righteous indignation.

Our Gossip is an information service.

Our High Stress is just the result of love for family.

Our lack of forgiving other is really just enforcing firm boundaries.

We go through our lives and promote our self-righteousnes when we really have none.

That is the height of self-deception.

What is our capacity for self-deception?

The human heart has an almost infinite capacity to hide the truth from itself if that truth is too unpleasant or uncomfortable.

Here is the thing you need to hear today: self-deception is not the worst thing we do, but it’s the reason we can do the worst things.

Self-deception is not the worst thing we do, but it is the reason why we so easily miss God.

Our passage today is about the cure for present and future self-deception.

Grab Your Copy of the Scriptures and Say: Hafoke-Ba

On Screen Bible (, TLV)

Isaiah was a prophet in ancient Judea, southern Israel He prophesied during the days when the confederation of the Northern Ten Tribes were defeated by Assyria and taken into Exile.

During the days when the Lord of Hosts stood with Hezekiah the great King and defeated the great army of Assyria.

He prophesied when Judea was a prosperous and victorious kingdom.

All that prosperity and victory led people to believe things about themselves that were not true.

The believed that their prosperity was a sign of their right-ness with God.

Isaiah had this as his mission to open the eyes and ears of the self-deceived ().

His mission was unique because God showed this prophet the future.

He showed him what the future would be because of their self-deception.

He showed this prophet that self-deception would wall people off from God’s suffering savior, the Messiah.

He also says to future generations: there is a way out of this self-deception.

The Bible: The journey from Self-Deception to the need for a Suffering-Savior: The Facts, The Reasons, and the Cure

1.

The Fact: When You See As God Sees You Will be Shocked

The Fact: We Have an Infinite Capacity to Deceive Ourselves

A. When You See As God Sees You Will be Shocked

Shocked about Self-Deception

Shocked about who the Servant is ( )

The servant is not one of the pagan kings like Cyrus because it is those kings and any kind how is shocked about the Messiah.

The servant is not the nation of Israel because in the servant is acting on behalf of the nation.

The Jewish community has held and still holds to this day (I will show you at the end of the message) that this passage can only refer to God’s Messiah.

Targum Jonathan a 6th century Jewish Aramaic Translation says this:

52.13 Behold, my servant, the Messiah, shall prosper, he shall be exalted and increase, and shall be very strong.

52.14 Just as the house of Israel hoped for him many days...The Aramaic Bible: The Isaiah Targum, trans.

Bruce D. Chilton, vol.

11 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), .

Kevin Cathcart, Michael Maher, and Martin McNamara, eds., The Aramaic Bible: The Isaiah Targum, trans.

Bruce D. Chilton, vol.

11 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), .

Shocked about what the Messiah’s story ()

i (52:15b-c)

Illustration: You use a good reason for your self-deception

We have an infinite capacity to deceive ourselves don’t we.

From the trivial to the very serious.

For example, I just came out of one of these self-deceptions with my wife.

I had a lot of problems believing there was anything wrong with my dishwasher.

Every night we would put the dishes in the dishwasher and then the next morning Lauren would pull out the dishes and say, “See, the dishes are not clean and the water is not draining.”

And of course I would say, “No, it is okay just put some Draino in there and maybe better detergent.”

All the evidence was there that the thing was not working but you know the money, the time, a call to Joe Hollar my arch nemesis, the plumber.

I worked hard to convince Lauren and she played along for a while and then finally she hatched a plan that got a plumber out and a brand new dishwasher.

Then I admitted my self-deception.

Let me go up one more step.

Here’s a young gal.

She’s a beauty and she is smart, and she was sort of raised in a kind of religious home.

She moves out of mom and dad’s house, and now she wants to establish her own life.

The truth is she knows down underneath there is a God and there is a right and wrong and there are moral absolutes, but it’s very painful for somebody who desperately wants to be accepted, to be seen as cool, to get the job she wants, to hang out, to be accepted, and she certainly wants to keep the boyfriend she has, he is a real catch, and he wants to sleep with her.

B. God’s Way of Saving Us Have Never Been Easy to Accept ()

There’s plenty of evidence she does believe there’s a God.

She talks as if racism is wrong.

That shows you believe there’s a God because you know there are moral absolutes, just not for you.

And she hides it with a a good reason for her self-deception.

She says, “Most of the believers I know are all kind of hypocrites anyway.”

And on we go.

Let me get just one more.

It gets worse.

Have you heard about the very famous incident where Eisenhower was liberating Germany at the end of World War II?

He was so tired of people saying the knew nothing about what was going on in the horrible death camp that in a particular town in which Eisenhower got to the boiling point.

He issued a very, very famous command.

He said at gunpoint every man, woman, and child in that town would march into that work camp and would bury the bodies themselves.

And he did it.

Afterwards they filed out, and the mayor and his wife went home that night and hung themselves.

They knew.

You wouldn’t hang yourself unless you knew that you knew but you didn’t want to know, because if it’s really happening …

They saw the Jews being carted off, and they knew something was going wrong.

“But my goodness, it’s too painful to stand up.

If I stand up for that, I might be taken myself, and I don’t want to think of myself as a coward.”

So what do you do?

You use a good reason for your self-deception.

You say, “Those Jews, they’re really the problems we have anyway.”