Sermon Tone Analysis

! Soli Deo Gloria – God’s Glory vs.

Other Religions, Part 3 (Isaiah 40-48)

 

Isaiah 40 (NASB95) \\ 1 “Comfort, O comfort My people,” says your God. 2 “Speak kindly to Jerusalem; And call out to her, that her warfare has ended, That her iniquity has been removed, That she has received of the Lord’s hand Double for all her sins.”

3 A voice is calling, “Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness; Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.

4 “Let every valley be lifted up, And every mountain and hill be made low; And let the rough ground become a plain, And the rugged terrain a broad valley; 5 Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, And all flesh will see /it /together; For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

6 A voice says, “Call out.”

Then he answered, “What shall I call out?”

All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.

7 The grass withers, the flower fades, When the breath of the Lord blows upon it; Surely the people are grass.

8 The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever.

9 Get yourself up on a high mountain, O Zion, bearer of good news, Lift up your voice mightily, O Jerusalem, bearer of good news; Lift /it /up, do not fear.

Say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” 10 Behold, the Lord God will come with might, With His arm ruling for Him.

Behold, His reward is with Him And His recompense before Him.

11 Like a shepherd He will tend His flock, In His arm He will gather the lambs And carry /them /in His bosom; He will gently lead the nursing /ewes./

12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, And marked off the heavens by the span, And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, And weighed the mountains in a balance And the hills in a pair of scales?

13 Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, Or as His counselor has informed Him? 14 With whom did He consult and /who /gave Him understanding?

And /who /taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge And informed Him of the way of understanding? 15 Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, And are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales; Behold, He lifts up the islands like fine dust.

16 Even Lebanon is not enough to burn, Nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering.

17 All the nations are as nothing before Him, They are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless.

18 To whom then will you liken God?

Or what likeness will you compare with Him? 19 /As for /the idol, a craftsman casts it, A goldsmith plates it with gold, And a silversmith /fashions /chains of silver.

20 He who is too impoverished for /such /an offering Selects a tree that does not rot; He seeks out for himself a skillful craftsman To prepare an idol that will not totter.

21 Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

Has it not been declared to you from the beginning?

Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

22 It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

23 He /it is /who reduces rulers to nothing, Who makes the judges of the earth meaningless.

24 Scarcely have they been planted, Scarcely have they been sown, Scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth, But He merely blows on them, and they wither, And the storm carries them away like stubble.

25 “To whom then will you liken Me That I would be /his /equal?” says the Holy One. 26 Lift up your eyes on high And see who has created these /stars,/ The One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; Because of the greatness of His might and the strength of /His /power, Not one /of them /is missing.

27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, And the justice due me escapes the notice of my God”? 28 Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth Does not become weary or tired.

His understanding is inscrutable.

29 He gives strength to the weary, And to /him who /lacks might He increases power.

30 Though youths grow weary and tired, And vigorous young men stumble badly, 31 Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up /with /wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.

PRAY

           

Isaiah 40-48 is a key passage showing how God deals with false religions while at same time uplifting God’s glory and God’s truth

 

These chapters in Isaiah would serve you well to read and re-read on your own and be very familiar with for a number of reasons:

-         demolishes human pride, self-centeredness, self-sufficiency

-         it corrects a lot false doctrines and theologies and cults and “isms” including /anthropocentrism/ (big word for man-centeredness, or in a catch phrase “it’s all about me”)

-         /arminianism/ or /pelagianism/ (or any limiting of God’s absolute sovereignty in saving and keeping saved all that He has called based on His will, not limited by man’s will)

-         /open theism/ (recent view of some evangelical scholars that God doesn’t even exhaustively know the future, much less his absolute control over the future)

-         /deism/ (that God is not actively involved in affairs of men)

-         /Mormonism/ in their multiplicity of gods, along with /Buddhism/, and /Hinduism/ and all other forms of /polytheism/

-         /Catholicism/ with its idols and man-made devices that obscure the sufficiency and supremacy of God and that all glory must go to Him alone, and none to what man does

There’s really nothing new under the sun, and the book of Isaiah was written to Israelites who would also be surrounded by paganism and similar “isms” and false religions both before and after their captivity, and idolatry both inside and outside Israel.

It would be easy to fear or doubt God or be tempted towards pagan thinking or ways of life during such difficult times, and this section of the book in particular re-focuses their attention on the matchless majestic superiority of God against all else and is part of Isaiah's overall warning against idolatry and sinful thoughts of God.

READ Chapter 40:1-2 - this is the hinge on which Isaiah's door turns, after 39 chapters of woes and bad news, the door turns from darkness to light, from condemnation to comfort, from sin to the solution.

READ Verse 11.  Tender picture of loving shepherd, gathering foolish lambs, carrying next to his heart, and gently leading the immature nursing little ones.

After pronouncing bad news and worse news and leaving no hope in humanity in 1-39, Isaiah 40-48 is a section saturated with the sovereignty and supremacy of God as the only hope, comfort, salvation, and true peace.

The last sentence in this section, chapter 48 v. 22 however tells us some will never receive this peace – “there is no peace for the wicked.”

The comfort God gives in Isaiah 40 and following is God-exalting and man-humbling language to help Israel in their exile by focusing them on God and His plan for His people which cannot be thwarted.

*/Note Repentance in v 3ff/*  ... no peace for wicked.

Premise of this series: The “Five Sola’s” of the Reformation Must be the Central Truths of Christianity and Will Always Be the Key Issue With All Other Religions

 

First 4 of these “Sola’s” on note sheet are there for your reference and further reading, but for today we’re going to focus on:

           

*/Soli Deo Gloria/*/ /– To God Alone Be Glory.

Our chief aim is to glorify God, and this starts with knowing the right God in all His attributes -  the One and Only God eternally existing in three Persons (co-equal as Father, Son, and Spirit) -  and to love this God with all our heart, soul, and mind.

In salvation and Christian living, God gets all of the glory; none to human works or merit.

This theme of God’s glory dominates Isaiah 40-48 and it was also in more recent centuries the overarching unifying all-encompassing center of the Protestant Reformation that sought to rescue the gospel from the church of Rome.

See, the big concern was not just about indulgences, it was not merely about purgatory, it was not mainly about the relics and rituals, etc.

There were a lot of things wrong with the medieval Roman church, but those were simply symptoms of a bigger problem: failing to glorify God.

God raised up men like the German Martin Luther and the French John Calvin and the Swiss Ulrich Zwingli and in the UK Knox.

If it’s fair to say Martin Luther was the Reformer most credited with the Reformation motto “faith alone” perhaps it’s also fair to say John Calvin contributed most to the motto “God’s glory alone”

 

/Soli Deo Gloria /was not just a slogan or bumper sticker or cliché to him, it was not just /a/ important issue, it was /the /issue (still is)

 

John Piper tells the story this way:

‘In 1538, the Italian Cardinal Sadolet wrote to the leaders of Geneva trying to win them back to the Catholic Church after they had turned to the Reformed teachings … It was one of his earliest writings and spread his name as a reformer across Europe.

Luther read it and said, "Here is a writing which has hands and feet.

I rejoice that God raises up such men" (see note 3).

Calvin's response to Sadolet is important because it uncovers the root of Calvin's quarrel with Rome that will determine his whole life – as well as the shape of this lecture.

The issue is not, first … priestly abuses or transubstantiation or prayers to saints or papal authority.

All those will come in for discussion.

But beneath all of them, the fundamental issue for John Calvin, from the beginning to the end of his life, was the issue of the centrality and supremacy and majesty of the glory of God … Here's what he said to the Cardinal: "[Your] zeal for heavenly life [is] a zeal which keeps a man entirely devoted to himself, and does not, even by one expression, arouse him to sanctify the name of God."

In other words, even precious truth about eternal life can be so skewed as to displace God as the center and goal.

And this was Calvin's chief contention with Rome.

It comes out in his writings over and over again.

He goes on and says to Sadolet that what he should do – and what Calvin aims to do with all his life – is "set before [man], as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God" (see note 4).

I think this would be a fitting banner over all of John Calvin's life and work – zeal to illustrate the glory of God.

[The rich legacy of the Reformation tradition] “… which served as the key to unlock the rich treasuries of the Scriptures was the preeminence of God's glory in the consideration of all that has been created" (see note 6).

It's this relentless orientation on the glory of God that gives coherence to John Calvin's life and to the Reformed tradition that followed … When Calvin did eventually get to the issue of justification in his response to Sadolet, he said, "You . . .

touch upon justification by faith, the first and keenest subject of controversy between us. . . .

Wherever the knowledge of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished" (see note 8).

So here again you can see what is fundamental.

Justification by faith is crucial.

But there is a deeper root reason why it is crucial.

The glory of Christ is at stake.

Wherever the knowledge of justification is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished.

This is always the root issue for Calvin.

What truth and what behavior will "illustrate the glory of God"?

For Calvin, the need for the Reformation was fundamentally this: Rome had "destroyed the glory of Christ in many ways — by calling upon the saints to intercede, when Jesus Christ is the one mediator between God and man; by adoring the Blessed Virgin, when Christ alone shall be adored; by offering a continual sacrifice in the Mass, when the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross is complete and sufficient" (see note 9), by elevating tradition to the level of Scripture and even making the word of Christ dependent for its authority on the word of man (see note 10).

Calvin asks, in his Commentary on Colossians, "How comes it that we are 'carried about with so many strange doctrines' (Hebrews 13:9)?"

And he answers, "Because the excellence of Christ is not perceived by us" (see note 11).

In other words, the great guardian of Biblical orthodoxy throughout the centuries is a passion for the glory and the excellency of God in Christ.

Where the center shifts from God, everything begins to shift everywhere.

Which does not bode well for doctrinal faithfulness in our own non-God-centered day.’[1]

/We can learn something from history, especially if he was right to be concerned with Catholicism’s root problem as being man-centered and not being focused on God’s glory, because can anyone deny that is a root problem with American Christianity today?

The Reformers were not perfect, but they were right on this, and they would also want us to learn from Israel’s history as well.

/

/Our passage in Isaiah is very much in line with this truth of Soli Deo Gloria.

The Reformation certainly was not the first voice calling for this, in fact it was merely an echo of Isaiah’s plea for God-centeredness to the original people of God, a plea that needs to be echoed in our day again as well.

/

/ /

/On your handout, I want to show you 6 key truths that flow out of this theme in Isaiah 40-48.