Isaiah 35:4-7
Say to those who have an anxious heart,
“Be strong; fear not!
Behold, your God
will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you.”
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.
For waters break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
Mercy and peace to you from God, our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ, Amen, Our Old Testament reading has some words in it that may well we don't normally associate with God, and may make us a little uncomfortable the words vengeance and recompense. Let's take a look. It says, Say to those who have an anxious heart, be strong. Fear not behold your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God, He will come and save you. Those words are not words that we typically like to associate with God, especially when we're talking about salvation. That is what's going on here, right? It's vengeance and recompense, those things he will come to save when I saw that, I thought for a moment. I figured it would be a good idea to dive deep into those words and see what they actually mean. So I pulled out the old dictionary and looked up all the Hebrew and found out, yep, that translation is pretty good. Vengeance means vengeance paying back for a harm. Somebody has harmed you. You harm them. Recompense is paying back what is owed. It is evening the scales. If an injustice has been done, justice is done right. These words exact mean exactly what you think they mean. One of the ways that we're used to seeing them, well, we used to see them in the old westerns, right vengeance and recompense when things are set right. In the end, these old westerns, you always knew who the bad guys were and the good guys were, because one would wear the black hats and the other would wear the white hats. And the white hat guys were the good guys and the black hat guys were the bad guys, and the white hat guys would always shoot the black hat guys. In the end, things were made right. Justice happened. Vengeance was done. This is the vengeance, the recompense that this is talking about. An injustice has occurred and things are made right. We don't usually associate that with God. We like For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. There's no vengeance in that, no recompense. We're used to hearing things about love and salvation and forgiveness. How do these words from Isaiah fit into into our faith. Well, first we need to look at the situation in isaiah's day. Isaiah, chapter 35 is right in the middle of of a couple of things that are very important in the passage. Right before this, Isaiah has just finished doing an Oracle against all of the nations. He is telling the people of Israel and especially the nation of Judah, those nations do not have power, not Egypt, not Assyria, not Babylon, not Nineveh, not Syria, none of the none of the Big Bad guys around have any power. God is the one who will win in the end. Then we have this section about God coming and making things right. And the very next chapter is a story about King Hezekiah, and the story opens with Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, coming down with his massive armies. Assyria is the really big bad guy of the age. They have been going around, conquering empires, taken down countries, and they are expanding the largest empire in the region. And they keep going, and Hezekiah has made the mighty error of trusting that God will protect Judah, at least according to what Sennacherib thinks. He thinks that it is a huge. Error. So what you get sennacheribs armies have destroyed the fortified cities of Judah. They have come against everybody, and now they are just outside the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see Hezekiah looking out over a field filled with hundreds of 1000s of soldiers, and Sennacherib sends a messenger, and the message is this, hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria. Thus says the king, do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for He will not be able to deliver you. Do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord by saying, Surely, the Lord will deliver us, for this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Do not listen to Hezekiah, For thus says the king of Assyria, make your peace with me and come out to me. Then each one of you will eat his own vine and each one of his own fig tree, and each one of you will drink the water in his own cistern until I come and take you away to a land like your own, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah mislead you by saying, The Lord will deliver us. Has any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of sepharvaim? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who, among all the gods of these lands had delivered their lands out of my hand that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand? Do you hear what he is saying. He's saying, I am stronger than your God, Jerusalem, none of the gods of the nations have prevented that. Prevented me from conquering. None of the gods have stopped me before. Why should your God be any different if you trust Him, you trust someone who can't save you. In response to this, Isaiah comes to King Hezekiah and tells him that the king is going to leave. He will hear a rumor and go off and fight elsewhere. And this is what happens. He goes off, fights elsewhere, and as he is getting ready to return, this story happens in Isaiah 37 and the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians, and when the people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Can you imagine what that would be like to be in the camp of the Assyrians? You go to bed an army, you wake up a graveyard. God was defending his people. But it doesn't stop there. Then Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, departed and returned home and lived at Nineveh and as he was worshiping in the house of NIS rock his God, adramalek and sharizar, his sons struck him down with the sword, and after they escaped into the land of Ararat s hardan, his son reigned in his place. Where was he when he died as he was worshiping his false god in nizrok, it's funny, Sennacherib came against the city of Jerusalem, insulted the one true God, said he could never save and what happened? Well, the opposite God defended his people by striking the enemy down, and he killed the king while he was worshiping his God. It's pretty easy to see the vengeance and recompense of God here as he defends his people from an army and keeps them safe from the mockery of this king and shows them that He is the one and true God. They were defended by God's mighty power, saved by this recompense and.
But for us, we're in a different situation. We don't have a Sennacherib coming at the doors of our church with spears or swords or guns or anything like that. None of us are fighting a military that is out to conquer the church. There is no messenger that is saying the things that the messenger of the king of Assyria came to say. How does this work in the life of the church today? One of the places that is most like that is Revelation chapter six, and we can see it rather clearly. Revelation six says, When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the Word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete who were to be killed, as they themselves had been,
for the martyrs, those who had been killed, hearing About the salvation of God as recompense, writing injustice, this would certainly make them feel better, strengthen their anxious heart. For those who were walking into an arena in the Roman days hearing the roar of the lions that would eat them and the crowds that would jeer at them, the recompense of God was good news. Things would be made right. They would be raised from the dead, and those who are on the side of the enemy would be judged. Good news, the same is true for those who face persecution today. If you go to the underground churches in China that get bulldozed to the Christians in places like Iran, the recompense of God, the vengeance of God, is their defense. They cling to the idea that when Christ returns, He will make all things right, the suffering, the face, the pain they see. That is not the last word. They can trust in the might and power of God. He will come and save them. He will pay what is owed, and then on the last day, all things will be made right. The people who trust in the Lord for their salvation will be saved. But what about us? We're not in a situation like that. Are we our congregation? This building has been standing here for 60 years with no threat of bulldozers coming from the government. No one is coming in to kill us, but many of us, we are in a world where sometimes our God gets insulted. I talk with you and I hear you tell stories about this. We see it on the news. We see it on TV commentators. We hear it on our radios or podcasts or whatever, all sorts of people will say things about our God that is well, sometimes insulting sometimes they'll even say it to our face. Just the other day, I was going over to do a nursing home visit, and I walked past the door of an elderly gentleman, and he saw me in my clerical collar. I walked up, I said hi, and his face scrunched up in anger, and he started shouting all sorts of crazy things at me. I think he thought I was a Catholic. So he started telling me about how the how wicked and horrible the people were there, how they were like doing terrible things to other people, just so that he would shock me and. Then finally I as I was leaving, he said, you know, there is no God. And what did I say? You'll find out, right? That's what this says. Well, you'll find out the recompense of God, salvation that Christ promises us, means that we don't need to fight guys like that, right? I didn't need to challenge him or tear him down, or say, ah, you've insulted my God. God can take care of himself, right? He can handle it all on his own. He will take care of his own name, just as He will take care of you when he comes. He will make all things right so we don't have to fight when our God is insulted or get our hackles up or be angry. We can do what the apostles did when they were arrested or imprisoned. They didn't go out and shout or yell. They just served, preached the gospel, proclaimed it to the very people who hurt them. And we can do the same because we're actually no different than the people who shout the insults. Right? We're not chosen by God because we're extra good, or because we did faithful actions of love and service, or because we're better people. The only thing that makes us different is that we are Christians, that we have faith in Jesus, Christ and His death and resurrection, that his work on the cross rescues us from sin and makes us right with God, and because of that, we know that They can just as easily become one of us, so we leave it up to God to defend himself, to protect his name, to bring about the vengeance that he calls for on the last day, and make all things right. Because we know he's better at it than we are, isn't he? So we can just keep our heads down and love and serve, knowing that Christ is coming and that he will do all the things that he promised to do in Jesus name, amen. Amen.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Find us on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.