"Forgetting God" Sermon: Isaiah 17:1-14

“Forgetting God”

[Isaiah 17:1-14]

October 14, 2018, Second Reformed Church

            The fourth oracle against the nations is quite short and only takes the first three verses of our text – this is the oracle against Damascus.  Damascus was the capital city of Syria – just north of Israel.

            Now, we need to think back to Isaiah chapter seven, and we will remember King Ahaz of Judah had gotten word that Israel and Syria had formed an alliance and planned to attack Judah.  God told Ahaz through Isaiah, all he had to do was trust, and God would take care of them, but Ahaz formed an alliance with the Assyrians, which ended up with the Assyrian dominating Judah.

            God promises that Syria and Israel will be punished for their treachery.

            And we see, first, God punishes sin against His people.

“An oracle concerning Damascus. Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city and will become a heap of ruins. The cities of Aroer are deserted; they will be for flocks, which will lie down, and none will make them afraid.”

By 732 B.C., the Assyrians don’t merely conquer Syria, the decimate it.  The cities are reduced to rubble, Damascus and Aroer – another major city – don’t exist anymore – they are rocks and rubble.  And the people are mostly dead, though a remnant is taken into captivity.

There are so few people left alive in Syria that the flocks take the city for their own and they are not afraid – there is no one to startle them – they are all gone – the flocks are at peace, reigning as kings and princes over the land formerly known as Syria.

But notice what is said next:

 “The fortress will disappear from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus; and the remnant of Syria will be like the glory of the children of Israel, declares the LORD of hosts.”

The Assyrians also decimate Israel.  Their fortresses disappear as the Assyrians come through the land and slaughter and destroy as God’s hand against them for their sin against God and God’s people.  God’s people are not exempt from punishment if we sin against God’s people.  God does not just think of us as kids who need to learn.  Our sin will be punished – the debt will be collected.

And God says when it is all over – in 732 B.C. – Syria and Israel will be equally glorious.  God is being sarcastic.  In the end, these nations are leveled, their people are largely dead, and a remnant is taken into captivity.  Syria and Israel are the lands of the flocks.

God does not tolerate sin against His people – even if it is His people sinning against His people.  For example, if I stole all of Trevor’s dj equipment, God would be angry with me, both for stealing and for stealing from a fellow Christian – and though I am forgiven through Christ – if I repent and return the equipment – this is a heavier debt to be paid since Trevor is a Christian. 

And even though we are forgiven for our sin through Jesus if we repent and savingly believe in Him, we still may suffer on earth for our sins on earth.  We can’t say that every time we suffer it is due to our sin, but we may suffer from time to time for our sin so we will repent and grow in faith and obedience and in becoming like Jesus.

            Second, God disciplines His people for their sin.

“And in that day the glory of Jacob will be brought low, and the fat of his flesh will grow lean. And it shall be as when the reaper gathers standing grain and his arm harvests the ears, and as when one gleans the ears of grain in the Valley of Rephaim.”

At the time that the war began, Israel was wealthy and ate well.  They were “fat.”  But God tells them that through this discipline, they will face starvation and become very lean – they will be thin.  God will not kill off everyone – but there will be very little food – it will be like the fields after the reaper goes through (and by reaper, we simply mean the men and women who harvest the food) and there is only the small amount of grain left that is commanded for the stranger and others who do not have a way to feed themselves.

As God explains:

“Gleanings will be left in it, as when an olive tree is beaten— two or three berries in the top of the highest bough, four or five on the branches of a fruit tree, declares the LORD God of Israel.”

The gleanings will be left.  There will be a few olives on the highest branches and a few pieces of fruit on the fruit trees.  That is what you will have to eat – so you will starve to the point of becoming lean.

Do you hear the hope?  Do you hear the good news?

God will save a remnant!  The few that God saves will suffer greatly – for a time – but they will live.  Israel will continue as a people of God.

This is the hope that we continue to hear throughout the book of Isaiah:  God will save a remnant – out of Israel, out of Judah, out of all the nations of the world.  God has chosen a people for Himself out of all the peoples in existence, and God will save them through His Son, Jesus.

Nothing can take away that good news.

            Having the good news of the remnant of the people chosen by God saved by His Son, how ought we to react when God’s Hand of Discipline comes down on us?

God tells Israel and us, how we ought to respond – how we will respond, if we are true believers:

            Third, God’s discipline causes us to turn to right worship.

“In that day man will look to his Maker, and his eyes will look on the Holy One of Israel. He will not look to the altars, the work of his hands, and he will not look on what his own fingers have made, either the Asherim or the altars of incense.”

We talked about this last week – John Calvin says, “The human heart is a factory of idols” – due to our original sin and the sin that remains in us after we have been saved – we have a tendency to turn to the Ouija Board, and to Tarot cards, and the horoscope in the newspaper, and to not step on that crack in the sidewalk, and to worry about ladders and black cats, and we hold on to our rabbit’s foot, and our lucky penny, and play the numbers when the stock market seems to reflect our birthday – you can’t lose!

God says that after we have sat under His Hand of Discipline, we will be like the prodigal son – after he parties and whores away his inheritance and is left alone, slopping and eating with the pigs, as we read, “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants”’ (Luke 15:17-19, ESV).

God says, on that day, Israel – and all of us who sin and stray away – will put away our idols – we will give up on all those things that God has forbidden and all those things that diminish who we are in Christ, and we will turn back to our Marker, our God and Savior, and we will worship Him and follow Him.

What is the right way to worship?  In the Reformed tradition, we believe in something called, “the regulative principle of worship.”  What that means is that we are to do everything that God commands in His Word to do in worship, and we are not to do anything that God does not command to do in worship.  We are to do everything that God commands in His Word to do in worship, and we are not to do anything that God does not command us to do in worship.  (More on that in another sermon.)

We are to do what God commands us to do in worship.  That is what pleases Him.  And we are to worship Him Alone – in Three Persons – as we see in the Word of God.

When we are disciplined by God, we ought to turn to God and repent and worship Him.  Because He has saved us – a remnant – and we are His forever – and His discipline comes to us out of love.

.           But, they’re not there yet as this oracle is given.  At this point, Israel and Syria are plotting, and Judah and Assyria are plotting, and war is about to break out.

            Fourth, it is monstrous to be unfaithful to God.

            “In that day their strong cities will be like the deserted places of the wooded heights and the hilltops, which they deserted because of the children of Israel, and there will be desolation.”

            God lays the blame of His destruction at the door of Israel, because they knew better than the pagan nation they were allying with.  As believers, we are held to a higher standard by God than the unbelievers.  God expects more from His people than those who reject Him.

“For you have forgotten the God of your salvation and have not remembered the Rock of your refuge;”

At the time of Isaiah, they had about 1,500 years of history going back to Abraham and God’s choosing of the people who would be Israel.  They had grown, been disciplined in Egypt, gone out and received the written Law of God and taken a portion of the Promised Land.

Yet, at this point, they had forgotten the God of their salvation.  They had forgotten Who God is and how He had loved them and chosen them to be a people for Him.  They had forgotten how He had saved them from one enemy after another, telling them to just trust in Him, for the battle is the Lord’s.  They had forgotten that God, the One God, brought them out of the land of Egypt and gave all who would believe eternal salvation.  They had forgotten that God will not be worshipped alongside of false gods.  They had forgotten to guard the Lord’s Name and to keep the Sabbath holy.  They had forgotten to honor their parents.  They murdered.  They committed every type of sexual sin.  They stole, lied about their neighbors, and thought they deserved the blessings that God had given their neighbors.

They had forgotten that God is dependable and keeps His promises.  They forgot that everything is God’s and all we have is on loan from Him.  They began to believe that the Bible says, “God helps those who help themselves,” when it does not – it says the exact opposite.

The monstrousness of the crime of forgetting God in this way merited much more, but God’s Hand of loving discipline came down on them with great severity.

“therefore, though you plant pleasant plants and sow the vine-branch of a stranger, though you make them grow on the day that you plant them, and make them blossom in the morning that you sow, yet the harvest will flee away in a day of grief and incurable pain.”

God tells them that for the monstrous sin of forgetting God – Who He is and what He has done and responding rightly to that knowledge – God would allow them to plant their crops, but then severe grief and incurable pain would come down on them from God and they would not harvest.

When I was a kid, a certain well-known Christian died in a horrific way, and some people said that God might have killed him as a mercy to him, because he was starting to depart from biblical teaching.  Perhaps, rather than allow him to teach something that was not true – which many people would hear due to his popularity, maybe God ended his life.

I don’t know if that is what really happened, but it might be.  God, in His Fatherly Love, killed off most of Israel.  Were they believers or unbelievers – what was the mix?  What we are told is that they called themselves believers, but God and His Word had no reality in their life.  Except for saying they believed, they were no different from anyone else – the pagans.

Many people call themselves Christians.  Many people go to church.

Have we forgotten God?

Do we know Who God has revealed Himself to be and what He has commanded?

Have we taken our favorite sin and recategorized it so we can keep doing it?  Or have we forgotten that God ever called it sin in the first place?  And have we unrepentantly continued in it?

That’s an important distinction, because we all sin as Christians – we shouldn’t, but until Jesus comes, we will.  We should sin less and less – we are to be striving towards holiness.  So, if we sin and repent, we are on the right track.  But, if we sin and don’t care, we may find ourselves having forgotten God.

            Fifth, the nations will be crushed.

“Ah, the thunder of many peoples; they thunder like the thundering of the sea! Ah, the roar of nations; they roar like the roaring of mighty waters! The nations roar like the roaring of many waters, but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far away, chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind and whirling dust before the storm. At evening time, behold, terror! Before morning, they are no more! This is the portion of those who loot us, and the lot of those who plunder us.”

I have not experienced being there when armies approach, marching, firing their guns – maybe you have or you know people who have.  I imagine it is a terrifying sight – a terrifying sound.

Yet, God says, with all their roaring and roaring and roaring – with all the discipline and judgment God has charged them to bring against Syria and Israel – God will rebuke them and they will fly away like bit of chaff – that fine, papery covering of the grain.  God says, “Done,” and the breath of His speaking causes them to fly away.

The slaughter will be quick – terror in the evening, and they are gone in the morning.  God is sovereignly in control of the nations and He builds them up and tears them down as it glorifies Him.

And God will bring all those nations to an end that attack His people.

Again, what is the real hope here:  a remnant will remain.

John Calvin writes, “"From this passage all the godly ought to draw wonderful consolation, whenever they see that everything is in disorder, and when dreadful changes are at hand; for what is it but a sudden storm which the Lord will allay?  Tyrants rush upon us like storms and whirlwinds, but the Lord will easily dispel their rage. Let us therefore patiently wait for his assistance; for though he permits us to be tossed about, yet through the midst of tempest he will at length conduct us 'to the haven' (Psalm cvii.30)" -- John Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, vol. 2, 33.

So, let us not forget God.

Let us know God through all He has revealed in His Word.

Let us not be distracted and look for God in some other place than His Word.

And let us have hope, that in judgment, and discipline, and the general results of sin in the world, God has chosen a remnant and brought us into salvation through Jesus, and He is now our refuge and our hope for the future.  So, let us know what He commands and strive to follow after each one of them.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, You have revealed Yourself and Your Will for us and Your Savior in Your Word, yet, we find the world and all its trinkets to be more alluring and more satisfying, so we begin to forget You.  Draw us to Yourself, let us feast with joy on Your Word, desiring to know You and obey You more every day   Let us be so thankful for Your Son coming to earth to be our salvation that we run to the Holy Spirit for strength and wisdom to show ourselves Yours.  For it is in Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.