Text: Isaiah 12:1-6
Date: March 27, 2022
Event: The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C
Isaiah 12:1-6 (EHV)
In that day you will say:
I will give thanks to you, Lord,
for though you were angry with me,
your anger has turned away,
and you comfort me.
2Surely God is my salvation.
I will trust him and will not be afraid,
because Yah, the Lord, is my strength and song,
and he has become my salvation.
3Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
4In that day you will say:
Give thanks to the Lord! Proclaim his name.
Declare among the peoples what he has done.
Proclaim that his name is exalted!
5Sing to the Lord, for he has done amazing things!
Let this be known in all the earth!
6Shout aloud and sing for joy, daughter of Zion,
for the Holy One of Israel is great among you!
God’s Anger Has Turned Away
The last few weeks I’ve been playing a new video game called Elden Ring. It’s a big world with a lot of bizarre things in it. And it’s very, very difficult. I’m also very bad at it, but that’s beside the point. When an enemy creature starts hunting you in the game it’s tense, especially if the enemy is much more powerful than you are. Often times, the best thing to do is just run.
And for as realistic of a game as it may feel in places, it is still a video game, which means it still has some programming logic that doesn’t mesh with real-world logic. For instance if an enemy is chasing you, and you get outside whatever zone the game makers put them in, the enemy will just turn around and go back to where they started, even if you’re technically still visible to them.
It often doesn’t make any sense, but I can’t tell you how relieving it is to have this big, powerful enemy chasing after you and then suddenly turn around and leave you alone. The danger is gone and past. You can breathe for a moment and regroup.
In our First Reading this morning from Isaiah, we have the entirety of chapter 12 before us. A short, but famous, chapter in the book of his prophecy. Those of you who have been working through the early part of Isaiah in Sunday Morning Bible Class know that his book doesn’t always have the happiest tone. Isaiah is constantly addressing unfaithfulness and idolatry in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. There’s talk of chastisement for the people’s unfaithfulness, up to and including the arrival of Assyria to take the Northern Kingdom into captivity and to cause a long list of problems for the Southern Kingdom.
God is truly serious about sin. He doesn’t just laugh it off as if we are silly children who don’t know any better. God demands perfection and he sticks to that. And for those who haven’t been perfect, which would be you, me, and everyone else, that means that God’s anger burns against us. God punishes sin not with temporary, earthly trials but with eternal death in hell. That’s where God’s burning anger leads; that’s the end of the story for sinners like us.
Except, listen to Isaiah’s poetic words: In that day you will say: I will give thanks to you, Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger has turned away, and you comfort me. God’s justified anger that burned against sin and thus against us was very real, but now it has turned away. In a way that makes even less sense than an enemy just stopping the pursuit of a player in a video game, that anger no longer is coming towards us. What happened?
Let’s establish what didn’t happen. God didn’t change his mind about sin; this about-face is not God saying that sin doesn’t matter. We didn’t suddenly become free from sin. We’ve been sinning since conception and that has not stopped. So God didn’t change and we didn’t change, but something obviously happened.
Surely God is my salvation. I will trust him and will not be afraid, because Yah, the Lord, is my strength and song, and he has become my salvation. God is not only the source of righteous, justified anger over sin, but Isaiah said he has also become our salvation. And Isaiah uses the personal names for the true God, Yah and the Lord, or Yah and Yahweh, to point to that. That personal name for God is derived from the name we heard God give to Moses last week in our First Reading from Exodus 3, “I am who I am.” This is God’s name by which he wants to be known. And Yah, or Yahweh, or the all-capital-letters-Lord all communicate the same thing. This is is the God who always has been, always is, and always will be. He is eternal and unchangeable.
Which means that God did not change from the loving God who created us into the vengeful God who punishes us. No, God has always been who he is. He’s always been perfectly consistent. He’s always been the loving God who wants what’s best for us. He’s never wanted to punish people for sin, but sin and his justice made that unavoidable.
But God’s love doesn’t sit idly by while we burn in our sin. No, God the Punisher is at one-in-the-same-time God the Savior. And so God makes clear his anger over sin and his love for us in the body of his Son, Jesus. He’s serious about sin, that it must be eternally punished, because sin is punished with hell; he’s serious about his love for us because Jesus endures hell in our place, so that you and I will never see it or experience it, despite deserving it for our sins against God.
Is it any wonder then that Isaiah says that he will trust in God and not be afraid? Is it any wonder that he says that he will direct his fellow Israelites to rejoice in what God has done for them eternally? Give thanks to the Lord! Proclaim his name. Declare among the peoples what he has done. Proclaim that his name is exalted! Sing to the Lord, for he has done amazing things! Let this be known in all the earth! Shout aloud and sing for joy, daughter of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is great among you!
This should be our response as well. Now, it’s probably good for us to take a step back and see what Isaiah isn’t saying. He’s not saying that we should always feel great, always be doing backflips because God loves us and saves us eternally. The reality is, for a variety of reasons, we will not always feel upbeat and jazzy. Feeling downcast or sullen is not sin, especially when difficulties in this life feel like a vice around you.
But what Isaiah is directing us towards is always valuing and prioritizing God’s forgiveness. Our joy in God may, at times, be a somber joy. When we lose a loved one in Christ, through tears we cling to Christ’s promise of forgiveness and resurrection reunions. In family difficulties, we do our best to attend to our God-given responsibilities and work to improve the problems while at the same time trusting God’s promises to work all things out for our eternal good. When nothing is going right and we grieve the decisions we’ve made or the actions we taken, or the words we’ve spoken, we hold God’s forgiveness fast to our heart and his assurance that he will turn our weeping into rejoicing, and that the present troubles we endure have no comparison to the glory that will be given to us in eternal life.
In all of those cases, the people involved don’t lose track of the big picture. God’s anger has turned away; God is our salvation. May God prevent us from ever taking that for granted or not valuing what he has done for us. May God enable us to share that truth with others, to encourage them in times of guilt and despair, sorrow and grief.
If we revisit Jesus’ parable from the Gospel for just a moment, we see two sons who did what was wrong. One son left and wasted his wealth on sinful living; the other burned with self-righteousness and resentment. Both sons can describe us at various times and in various ways. Sometimes we are doing things to bring God’s anger on us, other times we are taking God’s salvation for granted, not valuing the reality of his mercy, or not seeing our need for it.
But the constant in Jesus’ parable is the Father: always patient, always loving, always forgiving. That is our God, and all that we need depends on him, not on you and not on me. God turned his anger away so you will not be punished for your sin. God is your salvation so you will live with him forever. Whether you’ve spent a great deal of time away abusing his goodness or have let apathy set in, or anything else in between, God continues to be there, ready to embrace, ready to forgive, because that’s what Jesus has given. We are forgiven. We are in our heavenly Father’s arms now will be forever in heaven. Amen.
