Sermon Tone Analysis

Isaiah 6:1-13

 

! Introduction

            After Carla and I had been married for one year, we went on a summer mission trip.

After a week or two of orientation, we were sent to Northern Saskatchewan where we spent two weeks at a camp and then a month in Isle a la Crosse.

It was our task, in that community, to be a witness for Jesus.

During the month that we were there, I felt that we accomplished very little.

We did not have a good handle on how we were supposed to witness.

We tried several things and made a few contacts but really didn’t know how we were to go about the task.

At the end of the summer, we determined that we were not missionary material.

Since that time, I have wondered if that was really the right response.

I think we came to that conclusion because we focused on our inabilities.

Have you ever felt totally inadequate to do God’s work?

Perhaps you have been asked to teach a class or been challenged to witness to a neighbour or you have an opportunity to serve God on a mission trip and you have a sense that you really can’t do it.

Where does the power to serve God come from?

This morning we want to begin a series of messages on Isaiah which will take us to the middle of September.

With 66 chapters, it is obvious that we will not be able to cover it all, so the approach that I have chosen is to take 12 passages which represent 12 major themes which we find in Isaiah.

As we look at these passages, we will learn what God had for Isaiah to say to Israel, but, we will also hear God speaking to us.

Isaiah is a wonderful book containing strong words of judgement, but also full of the good news of salvation.

It will encourage us and call us to faithfulness.

There will be 5 of us handling the different passages and I trust that you will grow in your faith and in your love for the Lord as we look at God’s word in the book of Isaiah.

This morning, we will look at Isaiah 6 and will get an introduction to Isaiah and His message.

As we examine an encounter Isaiah had with God, we will learn where the power to proclaim God’s word comes from.

!

I.

The Message   Isaiah 6:9-13

!! A. The Message Of Isaiah

            In Isaiah 6:9-13, God tells Isaiah about the message he is to proclaim to the people.

What we will see is that Isaiah was up against a difficult task.

!!! 1.

The History Of Isaiah

            Before we look at the message of Isaiah, however, I think it will be important for us to understand where it fits into the history of Israel.

Therefore, I would like to remind you of God’s plan for his people by giving you a brief overview and where Isaiah fits.

After people fell into sin and the sin of the people became so great that God had to destroy people in the flood, the descendants of Noah once again populated the earth.

It was God’s desire to create a people for himself and he began to do that through one man who trusted God and that man was Abraham.

Abraham’s family grew and eventually ended up in the land of Egypt and there became a great nation, but also a slave nation.

When they cried to the Lord, God heard them and with a powerful hand, brought them out of Egypt and into a land of their own and made them his special people.

Later in their history, they wanted to be ruled by a king and Saul became their first king.

He was not a man who followed the Lord and so God made David king.

During the time of David, Israel was in its golden years.

It became a great nation and prospered.

Solomon followed David as king and the nation continued to prosper, but at the end of his life, he began to drift away from following God faithfully.

As a result, the kingdom was divided in two and Rehoboam became the king of Judah(the two southern tribes), whereas Jeroboam became the king of Israel(the ten northern tribes.)

In the years that followed each of the two parts of the kingdom of Israel had a succession of kings.

Some were faithful to God and others were not.

During this time many of the prophets proclaimed God’s judgement on the people of Israel and warned them that if they did not turn from their faithless ways, God would destroy them.

God began to do this when in 722 he sent the Assyrians to destroy the northern 10 tribes which were known as Israel.

The Assyrians came right to Jerusalem and even began to lay siege to Jerusalem, but God spared the southern part of the nation, which was known as Judah.

But the people of Judah, with some notable exceptions, did not turn around and follow the Lord and so eventually Babylon came and destroyed the nation in 587 BC at which time they were sent into exile for 70 years.

Isaiah 1:1 tells us that the work of Isaiah took place during the reigns of the kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah.

This is the approximately 40 year period preceding the time when the Assyrians came to Jerusalem and tried to take it but failed.

The prophecies are warnings to the people of Judah to turn around and follow the Lord and they pertain to the period when the Assyrians were a threat, but also into the time when the Babylonians were beginning to make their appearance.

!!! 2. The Message of Isaiah

            To this historical situation, Isaiah was to proclaim God’s message.

What a powerful, but also difficult message it was!

God’s message is outlined in Isaiah 6:9-13.

There we find that it is first of all a message calling for repentance.

He is to call the people away from their sin and their wandering ways.

Many prophetic words like this appear in the book and in three messages, we will examine them.

The sins of Israel are the same in many ways today and for the next three weeks, we will hear that God hates false religion, dependence on things other than him and the many other ways we disobey him.

Isaiah has many such messages of warning and calling the people to turn from their sin.

But God also tells Isaiah that the message he proclaims will not be well received.

There is an interesting pattern that takes place in verse 10.

There is a literary device called chiasm which is kind of an A-B-C-C-B-A pattern.

It takes place here in verse 10 where he talks about their hearts, then ears, then eyes and then reverses it and talks about their eyes, then their ears and then their hearts.

The thrust of the message is that as Isaiah preaches and the more he preaches, the people will not listen and eventually as they refuse to listen, they will become incapable of listening.

The preaching of Isaiah, because it will be refused, will result in hearts that are dull or as the Hebrew actually says, “fat.”

That is, hearts that are so insensitive to the voice of God that the fat of disobedience will prevent the word of God from penetrating them.

Their ears will become dull.

Like our ears can become dull if they become too full of wax, so their ears will become dull because they are filled with the din of their disobedience.

Their eyes will become smeared over.

You know how sometimes at night your eyes become so full of gunk that you have a hard time opening them in the morning?

That is what will happen to them as they refuse to listen to the word of God.

This warning was given to the prophet to let him know that the refusal of the people to listen was not a sign of the prophets failure nor an indication that God was mean.

It was a warning to reveal what is in their hearts.

And it will reveal that they do not want to hear from God.

This passage from Isaiah is repeated by Jesus in the New Testament to explain his use of parables which obscure the truth from those who have hard hearts.

It is also used by Paul, in Acts 28, to explain to the Jews why he was turning to the Gentiles, because the Jews did not listen to the words of God.

(Matt 13:14,15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:40; Acts 28:26,27.)

These verses are worth listening to today especially by people like us who have heard so much of the word of God.

If we have not obeyed that word, it is possible for our hearts to become fat, our ears dull and our eyes smeared over because we are not open to God’s word for us.

It is, however, written to Isaiah to help him know that all his 40 years of preaching, calling people to repentance would result in very little change.

He had a hard message to proclaim and there would be few who would listen to it.

When Isaiah then asked in verse 11, how long he would have to preach this hard message, God had more bad news for him.

The hardness of people’s hearts will result in the destruction of the nation.

In fact, the passage warns not only of destruction once, but twice.

If the bulk of the nation was destroyed in the Assyrian attack and only a small part, perhaps a tenth remained in the land, the warning is that even that tenth would be destroyed, which is what happened when Judah was also destroyed.

Can you imagine if someone came to proclaim a message to us that more torrential rains would destroy our crops and after that an early frost would destroy anything that did grow and after that the price was going to drop even lower?

Can you imagine if someone came and prophesied that all our houses would be destroyed and we would have to flee for our lives because of war?

How popular would such a prophet be?

But that was the message that Isaiah had to proclaim.

Yet in the midst of that message there was also a glimmer of hope.

When we moved into our house, there was a large elm tree in our yard that was dead.

That fall, I cut it down and only the stump was left.

This spring, I noticed that a little elm tree was growing out of that stump.

It is truly amazing that out of something that was dead two or more years ago, life should now come forth.

That is the message to Isaiah in verse 13 that out of the dead stump of a nation destroyed twice over, a remnant would grow up once again.

That prophecy, is of course fulfilled in the church that has come out of the dead root of Israel because of the work of Jesus.

As we examine Isaiah, we will also hear the wonderful message of God’s restoration.

Except for this little glimmer of hope, a message which finds its way into a number of places in Isaiah, most of the message of Isaiah is a message of warning, repentance and judgement.

It is a hard message, but the message which Isaiah was to proclaim to his people.

!! B. The Message We Proclaim

Although our situation is different, there is this similarity that we also often proclaim a message to unhearing people.