Sermon Text: Isaiah 40:27–31
Date: February 4, 2023
Event: The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B
Isaiah 40:27–31 (EHV)
Why do you speak, O Jacob?
O Israel, why do you say,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and justice for me is ignored by my God”?
28Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the eternal God.
He is the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired, and he will not become weary.
No one can find a limit to his understanding.
29He is the one who gives strength to the weak,
and he increases the strength of those who lack power.
30Young men grow tired and become weary.
Even strong men stumble and fall.
31But those who wait for the Lord will receive new strength.
They will lift up their wings and soar like eagles.
They will run and not become weary.
They will walk and not become tired.
Do You Not Know? Have You Not Heard?
He sat there on the side of the road, tears streaming down his face. He thought he could make it through what had happened, but now he wasn’t so sure. The guilt was overwhelming, and the consequences of his actions felt like an impossible weight. Others’ reactions to his situation hadn’t made things any better. He considered, ever so briefly, that he was truly alone in his life, and perhaps it just made sense to act on that and be done with what felt like a God-forsaken existence.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Another fight, another impossibly bull-headed person. How could she keep this up? Work was a mess, home was a mess, she was a mess. Didn’t God promise not to give her more than she could handle? Didn’t he promise a way out of temptation and testing? She was just so done. She’d given everything she had, and now she had nothing left to give. It sure felt like God was ignoring her prayers and not paying attention to the difficult path she was walking.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Failed. He had failed to live up to every single expectation that someone had for him. He had done his best, at least he thought he had, but he had disappointed so many people so many times. Where was the support from God to change his ways? Where was the relief he was supposed to feel from these failures and these sins? If God truly loved him and cared about him, why couldn’t he feel it or see it? Where was God hiding himself? Why did he not care?
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Have you been there? Have you been where those people are? Overcome by the sadness and difficulties of this life? Overcome by the sin of others poured out against you? Overcome by your own sin where you fail to be who and what you should be, over and over again? Guilt presses down hard. We might be able to sympathize with King David, who described the torment of guilt as his bones wasting away inside of him.
Perhaps the worst part about guilt is not the phyiscal manifestations that it can have, but rather the loneliness. You failed those people—those important people in your life!—and now, will they ever want to have anything to do with you again? But the even more intolerable loneliness is the separation from God.
Because that’s what sin does: it divides us from God. He demands perfection, and we are far, far from perfect. So sin causes that division, and the ultimate expression of that division is hell, an eternity of separation from God for failing to be the perfect people that God requires. Hell, as awful as it is, is exactly the punishment we deserve for the sins we’ve committed against God. Even those sins that feel smaller than other people’s sins; even those sins that we have convinced ourselves are not so bad or not hurting anyone; even those sins we try to hide from the world but can never hide from God.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Let’s take just the first verse of our first reading in isolation for a moment. Removed from its context, let’s hear these questions from God, as perhaps many people have heard it, as a rebuke: Why do you speak, O Jacob? O Israel, why do you say, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and justice for me is ignored by my God”? Depending on your perspective, you might hear God saying in this verse, “Why are you wasting your breath with these statements? Of course your way is hidden from me, of course I’m ignoring your calls for so-called ‘justice.’ You’ve done the exact things that I told you not to. You knew that this was what was going to happen. Adam and Eve knew that their sin would lead to death, so also your sins lead to death. Save your breath and save your whining; you’ve brought this on yourself.”
And it’s not just the unfaithful Southern Kingdom of Judah nearly 2800 years ago that such a rebuke could be leveled at, right? This finds application and hits home for us today. Consider those feelings that God is far, far away from you. Of course he is! You’ve sinned against the perfect God and he hates it. Nothing you can do will ever change that. Why is God so far away from me? Because I have utterly failed to be the person he expects me to be. I have failed as a husband, father, son, and friend; I have failed as a pastor and leader; I have failed as a member of our community and as a representative for God among the people around us. I have spat on God’s expectations in every area of my life! And so have you. We have separated ourselves from God with our sin, and we cannot bridge that gap or heal that divide.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Taking a single verse out of its context in isolation is not a particularly good way to interpret and understand God’s Word. In fact, this “rebuke” is exactly what Satan would want you to hear in these words. While nothing we’ve heard here this morning was false, those things are not at all what God is communicating here. Yet, this hopeless abandonment by God is exactly what Satan wants you to feel and believe. The very one who tries to get you to rebel against God in sin is the first in line to look at you, after you’ve sinned, and say with mock-horror, “What have you done?”
See Satan’s goal is not that we worship or serve him. He doesn’t care about religions dedicated to him or people debating if he exists. All he wants to do is preserve, and perhaps widen, that gap between you and God. He wants to distract and discourage you from thinking there’s any possibility of healing between you and God. He can approach that in many different ways: he can sow apathy in the heart formerly dedicated to God; he can cause the hardships of this life to be too overwhelming for us to believe that God cares anything for us; he can even use great riches and fun to make us behave as if this life is the only life that exists and nothing else matters—especially not the eternal. So whether you are separated from God by despair or fun, grief or greed, Satan doesn’t care as long as you are separated. Then, that prowling lion has found his prey and devoured it.
So, if this guilt and grieving are the work of Satan that must mean that they are not trustworthy, and they’re not. Except while Satan’s native language is lying, the most insidious of those lies are the half-truths. There is no denying it when he accuses you and me of sin. We have not been the perfect people God expects and demands we be. No one is at fault for my sins except me. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We’ve plunged into the sewer of sin and reek with the stench of rebellion.
But the lie comes when Satan says to you, “See, now God could never love you or care about you because of what you’ve done.” He even sits here in a worship service, as the forgiveness of sins is repeatedly announced, and each time whispers to you, “Yeah… for them, not for you. He’s not talking about you. You’re too far gone. You’ve done too much wrong.”
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Let’s revisit God’s words through Isaiah in our first reading as a whole: Why do you speak, O Jacob? O Israel, why do you say, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and justice for me is ignored by my God”? Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the eternal God. He is the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired, and he will not become weary. No one can find a limit to his understanding. He is the one who gives strength to the weak, and he increases the strength of those who lack power. Young men grow tired and become weary. Even strong men stumble and fall. But those who wait for the Lord will receive new strength. They will lift up their wings and soar like eagles. They will run and not become weary. They will walk and not become tired.
What is God’s point in asking those questions at the beginning of this reading? They are silly and ridiculous, but not for the reason Satan would want us to think that they are. Is your way hidden from the Lord? Is God ignoring justice for you? No! Far from it!
This morning, we had the opportunity to see God’s protective work in clear, visible action. In baptism, God made Nysha part of his family, just as he has adopted you and me into his family through that same washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Are you separated from God? Is he ignoring you? No! You are his dearly loved child!
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The proof of God’s care for you is seen most clearly in Jesus. Not only has God not abandoned you, not only has he not ignored you, but he actually took your burdens and sorrows on himself. As we’ve seen throughout this Epiphany season, God himself took on our human nature. We saw him lying in Bethlehem’s manger; he saw the beginning of his ministry at his baptism by John the Baptist. As we get closer to the season of Lent, we will see again the enormous pains and disaster that Jesus took on himself, a disaster that will culminate on dark Friday when the creator of the heavens and the earth was suspended between the sky and the ground, nailed to a cross.
But all of this is not a tragedy of a helpless man suffering and dying for crimes he did not commit. Nor is the account of Jesus’ death a model for us to follow in humility and putting others ahead of ourselves. No, Satan doesn’t want you to see this scene or at least not understand what’s going on here. Because there, at the cross, the one who had the power to drive out demons with a single word is crushing Satan’s head. Here is the forgiveness of our sins, not because of anything we can or have done, but because of God’s great mercy and love for us. There at the cross, he bemoans the abandonment from God, not in a misguided way like Israel or you and I might have done, but bemoaning the literal abandonment from God. There on the cross, Jesus suffers hell and is separated from God in the most gruesome and confusing scene, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Why did he do it? For you. For me. Because that’s what our sins deserve, and neither the Father nor Jesus nor the Holy Spirit was willing that you and I suffer hell, suffer the punishment we deserved, and so Jesus did it for us, in our place, to rescue us from our sins. He died so that we could live. His death counted for us all, as if we were all nailed to that cross, and our sins are gone.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
And God, in his mercy doesn’t just leave it there. Jesus’ body was laid in a tomb after he commended his spirit to a brief respite with his heavenly Father. Then, on Sunday morning, it was back to work. An earthquake! A rolling away of the stone! More questions: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? Do you not know? Have you not heard? He is risen, just as he said!”
When Satan has his claws in us, when we are weighed down by the guilt that is so real because the sins we’ve committed are so very real, journey once again to see this tomb empty. Remember that water paired with the Word that adopted you into God’s family. Come, take, eat, and drink the true body and blood of your Savior in, with, and under the bread and wine for the forgiveness of your sins.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Don’t let Satan’s lies and half-truths deceive and distract you. You are a dearly loved child of God. He will never grow weary of protecting you or forgiving you. So take those burdens and those sins and bring them to Jesus. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you (1 Peter 5:7). And there, when you leave these hardships with your Savior who lived, died, and rose for you, you find relief from all those terrible things. There you are lifted up on the wings of eagles. There, you find the spiritual strength not to be tired or weary because you know what your God thinks of you and has done for you. There, in God’s forgiveness, you receive his new strength, strength that doesn’t come from within you but comes as a direct work of God for you.
All of this is sufficient until the day that God ends any notion of separation from himself when we will not be cast into hell but welcomed into the perfect courts of heaven for Jesus’ sake. Then, we will not need to go through this cycle of being wearied and finding strength in God’s forgiveness. Then, we will not need to seek God out in his Word or the sacraments where he gives us himself. No, then, in that day, we will see God face to face. We will see our Savior scared with those marks of his crucifixion yet alive and well. Then there will be no more night; we will live in the protection of our God forever.
My dear sisters, my dear brothers, Do you not know? Have you not heard? Your sin separates you from God, but God has separated you from your sin in the body of Jesus. You are forgiven. You have peace with God now and forever! Amen.
