Scripture reading: Mark 1:1-8.

Sermon text: Isaiah 40:1-11.

Devotional

Comfort. Who here doesn’t like it? Who here doesn’t like the thought of taking it easy every once in a while?

Unfortunately, true comfort doesn’t come as easily as we’d like. There’s more to comfort than a glass of tea in front of the TV, watching a football game.

For the Jews, “comfort” meant more than mere ease. Comfort for the Jews meant their sins had been forgiven, that God’s steadfast love was protecting them even as they endured exile and shame. Comfort for the Jews meant that regardless of their circumstances, they knew God was in control of every situation and could work good things in the worst of times. Comfort for the Jews meant that in His time, God would return them to their land.

Unfortunately, true comfort would not come with their return to the land. The Greeks and Romans would subjugate the Jews for another 400 years, after which the Jews would suffer exile again and face constant peril and danger for the centuries to come. In the process, the call of salvation would be extended to the Gentiles. For true comfort isn’t ease, and it isn’t in going home. True comfort comes with a relationship with God — a relationship possible only through the birth of God’s Son into a people desperately seeking comfort in their relationship with God.

Sermon

“Help is on the way.” If you’re in trouble, those words can send your heart lofting to the skies. It really helps to know the person coming to help you can actually solve the problem and lift you from trouble into triumph.

The Jews to whom Isaiah prophesied in the eighth century B.C. needed help, and they knew it. The political and military uncertainties surrounding their nation kept Jerusalem in tension for decades, especially when the Assyrian Empire destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. Even worse, the Assyrians threatened to obliterate Jerusalem in 701 B.C. Only God’s direct intervention saved Jerusalem from Sennacherib and the Assyrian hordes.

Israel’s sin would eventually lead God to judge even Jerusalem, allowing the Babylonian Empire to destroy the city in 586 B.C. Jerusalem’s destruction swept the Jewish nation into even greater uncertainty. Had God forgotten His people? If God would allow His Temple to fall to the pagans, what would He do to the descendants of Abraham He had chosen as His people?

All reputable scholars recognize a dramatic shift in the book of Isaiah between chapters 39 and 40. In chapter 40, Isaiah began prophesying more to the Jews who would return from exile in 539 B.C. than to those who lived in His time. Isaiah promised hope to the Jews. God would not forget His people, nor would He abandon those to whom He had given promises of grace, forgiveness, and hope. The prophecies of chapter 40 reminded Jews in exile of God’s protection and His covenant promises.

Isaiah opened this prophecy of God with words of joy: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” The word “comfort” reminds us of a mother’s actions when her child experiences pain and suffering. God continued by telling Isaiah, “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.” Ironically, the name “Jerusalem” means “city of peace.” The city would suffer complete destruction by the Babylonians for the sins committed by the Jews. These sins included idolatry, adultery, murder, theft, slavery, and even infanticide. Isaiah’s words meant peace would come to a troubled nation that would receive pardon for the sins that compelled God to destroy the city. Even more, through His grace, God would purify His people, even through severe punishment.

The prophecy continued by promising a return for God’s people: “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” The road back to Jerusalem from exile in Mesopotamia would take the Jews around the Arabian Desert, but God promised the people that He would prepare the land to receive them again. The Jews would see their return as if God had traveled through the forbidding desert to arrive ahead of them, preparing a joyous reception for His people.

God would not forget the Jews who traveled back from exile: “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” The journey back to Judea would take the Jews through hills and valleys between Mesopotamia and their homeland, but in God’s protection and provision, it would seem as if He had prepared a highway for them, easing their travel.

It would do no good for the Jews to return to a ruined nation for no reason; the massive work of rebuilding their country would take decades. However, God would use the nation’s return and rebuilding to reveal His glory to the Gentiles around Judea. “The mouth of the LORD has spoken” that God’s glory would appear to all nations; “all flesh shall see it together.”

Following this prophecy, Isaiah prophesied further regarding the God Israel had worshiped and, following their exile would worship again. “Cry,” said a “voice.” When Isaiah asked, “What shall I cry?” he heard a poetic declaration regarding the God who could return His people from defeat to their ancestral inheritance. Of all the nations carried in captivity by the superpowers of the time, only Israel would reemerge as a distinct nation. Nations would rise and fall, but God is eternal. Let’s read the poetry of Isaiah’s prophecy:

    “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.

    “The grass withers, the flower fades

        when the breath of the LORD blows on it;

        surely the people are grass.

    “The grass withers, the flower fades,

        but the word of our God will stand forever.”

In Israel, the barren land of one day will bloom with beautiful flowers the moment the rain hits the soil. The wildflowers will vanish overnight when the fierce eastern winds from the desert sweep across the land.

As Isaiah reminds us, even the longest lifespan of humanity resembles the brief span of the wildflowers of the field. While people may wither, “the word of our God stands forever.” God had decreed comfort to His people, and He had declared that His people would return from captivity and again live in the land He had promised them. The eternal word of God would be fulfilled in spite of the brevity of human life.

When the people returned from captivity, they would proclaim from the highest mountains, “Behold your God!” God would act “with might” to return His people from the captivity. God would gather the Jews “like a shepherd” and care for them both during the long trip from Mesopotamia and the difficult task of rebuilding their broken nation. No one who saw the rebirth of Judea would doubt the might of the God who had sustained them and returned them to power.

When you read this passage, you can obviously think of a fulfillment of Israel’s return. Some of our congregation vividly remembers the rebirth of Israel as a nation in 1948. God gathered His people from nations around the world and brought them back to the land He had promised their ancestor Abraham nearly 4,000 years before. No other ethnic group has maintained their distinct identity for so long without a national presence. Israel had suffered nearly 1,900 years without a nation before its rebirth.

Today, in Advent, we also think of a more powerful fulfillment of this passage, a fulfillment that carried eternal consequences for all Christians today.

As our Gospel passage reminds us today, John the Baptist also fulfilled this passage as he emerged from the wilderness crying for Israel’s repentance: “I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” John prepared “the way of the LORD” as the Jews repented of their sins in anticipation of the coming of their Messiah.

Then, like a Shepherd returning to His flock, the Son of God, Jesus the Christ, appeared from Galilee. Suddenly, the glory of the LORD appeared as the fully human and fully divine Son of God. Unfortunately, God’s people missed it; they refused to recognize Jesus as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies regarding the Messiah. Like the flowers of the field, Jesus’ brief life was snuffed out by the winds of Jewish betrayal and Roman imperial might.

At this point, Jesus’ fulfillment of these prophecies appear at their most powerful. Standing next to a battered Jesus, Pilate had cried to the people, “Behold your king!” Pilate didn’t know that he could as well have cried, “Behold your God!” From the “high mountain” of Mt. Moriah, the home of the Jewish Temple, one could look to the west past the wall of Jerusalem and see Mount Golgotha, where Jesus hung on a cross for our sins. Golgotha proclaimed the greatest “good news” humanity had ever heard.

Then, like God taking a “highway” in the desert, Jesus paved a way through death itself, a way of victory over sin and death. The Word of God, Jesus His Son, has promised that whoever believes in Him will “not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). When anyone believes in Jesus’ promise, accepting His payment of the penalty of our sins, he can take comfort in knowing that he can follow Jesus through death and into eternal life.

This passage carries an Advent message as well. Since Isaiah’s lifetime in the eighth century B.C., Jerusalem has been attacked or destroyed by the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Turks, and the British, to name only a few of her attackers. The “city of peace” remains one of the most contentious places on the planet. Jerusalem, it appears, will always live under the threat of destruction. However, St. John the Evangelist saw a “new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2) as capital of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1). In this Jerusalem, Jesus will reign for all eternity (Revelation 11:15).

In this new creation, we will never again experience sin or death; we will never again experience the trials of this life. We will experience life as God desires for His people, a life of relationship with our God and with one another in complete fellowship.

Do you face trials today? I can confidently proclaim that the God who overcame exile in the sixth century B.C. and death in A.D. 33 can bring you through the trials you face, bringing comfort to all who believe in Jesus, confessing Him as Lord and believing in His resurrection (Romans 10:9-10). Christians, we can proclaim comfort to a sin-cursed world because of the comfort we receive from Jesus, the Head of the Church and the Lord of All. Our Lord, Jesus Christ, has paved a path in the desert of death; His return in glory will signal the end of death and the beginning of eternal life.