Amen. And then let us turn our text the text concerning the New Heavens and the New Earth, Isaiah chapter 65. And we'll be reading verses 17 to 25. That's page 793 in most of the Bibles under the seats. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel. And We'll be reading and considering this text which teaches us of God's promise of unhindered thanksgiving. God's promise of perfect peace. Isaiah chapter 65 beginning at verse 17. For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind, but be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create. For behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy and her people to be a gladness. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people. No more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days or an old man who does not fill out his days. For the young man shall die a hundred years old and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them. They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit. They shall not plant and another eat. For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be. And my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity. for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord and their descendants with them. Before they call, I will answer. While they are yet speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord. And so far the reading, the grass withers, the flower fades, the word of our Lord endures forever. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Huddleburg Catechism question answer 103, in light of Hebrews chapter four, uses the language of eternal Sabbath, And that language is appropriate. It anticipates the fact that our weekly Sabbath to us is given as an anticipation of the eternal glory of heaven, the eternal Sabbath of heaven. Now, yearly Thanksgiving Day, is not commanded in the same way that a weekly Sabbath day is, although for the nation of Israel in the old covenant, a couple of their feasts were very much like an annual Thanksgiving day. But when we do think about Thanksgiving day, just as a weekly Sabbath can be an anticipation of the eternal Sabbath, so a yearly Thanksgiving day can be a day where we think forward to, anticipate, look forward for the eternal Thanksgiving. Because as we think about Thanksgiving on this earth, well, on this earth, there are many things which hinder Thanksgiving. There are many circumstances which make Thanksgiving difficult. But what is eternity with God in heaven? It is eternal joy. It is eternal Thanksgiving without any hindrance, without any barrier, without any difficulty, without anything that would hold us back, without anything that would make it difficult. This is what God has promised in his promise of the new heavens and a new earth. He has promised us unhindered thanksgiving joy. That's our theme this morning. God has promised his people an eternity of unhindered thanksgiving joy. We will look first at unhindered fellowship and then at unhindered prosperity and then at unhindered peace. We will begin with that first point then. the unhindered fellowship. And as we begin and as we look at the first verse of our text, we notice that it is clear this is all the work of God. God is speaking. God is the one who will do the creating. Behold, I create. New Heavens and a New Earth. And then there is this, what is in this New Heaven and New Earth? Well, there is a new city in this New Heavens and a New Earth. And the name of that city is Jerusalem. And it is the Jerusalem for, we see in verse 19, my people. What does that speak to? What does a city speak to? It speaks to people all being together. It speaks to the fellowship of God's people, my people, all rejoicing together. Heaven is not some small thing for some small group in the sense that there's very few people there. It is for all of God's people gathered from all the corners of the earth, everyone who repents and trusts in Him. And it is described as a city. It is all of us together. We're not going to be walking off to just live on our own to get away from everybody. No, it's going to be perfect fellowship and joy. We're going to want to be together. And we might say that sometimes now there's some things nice about maybe not living in the biggest city. Why is that? There can be a lot of reasons, but I think if we just say it simply, one reason is because people now are sinners. We're all sinners. Everybody else is a sinner. Maybe we might say sometimes it's just nice to not be around everybody. That's not what the new heavens and the new earth is like. And the new heavens and the new earth will all be together, and we'll all be glad to be together, because we're going to have unhindered fellowship and joy together. And indeed, it's not only God's people together, it's God's people together in worship. That word worship doesn't appear here, but the name Jerusalem emphasizes that. What is Jerusalem about? It's where the temple is. is where God's presence was given in a special way, specifically for worship. And so this repeated use of the word Jerusalem as the name of the new city reminds us that we're going to be worshiping together. perfectly. And then what is unhindered fellowship? It's not just God's people together, but verse 19 takes us to the deeper level. It's not only God's people together to be a gladness, it's that I, God, will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people. God is with his people. in a face-to-face and direct way. And God rejoices to rejoice with us. Now, with the many hindrances to Thanksgiving joy, now we have all the sorrows and weaknesses and Hebrews 4 verse 15 is a reminder that Christ sympathizes with those weaknesses now. But the focus in heaven is that since all of those weaknesses, all of that pain, all of that sorrow is gone, it's only joy. Now the only description is this, that God will share in our joy with us. John Calvin beautifully put these two things together, the fact that now Christ is sorrowful with us in our sorrows, sympathizes with us, and the fact that the day is coming when he'll share perfect joy with us. And hear how Calvin described that in his commentary on these verses some hundreds of years ago. Quote, and hence we obtain no small confirmation of our faith when we learn that God is moved, and so powerfully so, by such an affection toward us. If we are in painful and distressed circumstances, he says that he is affected by our grief and sorrow. And on the other hand, if our condition is pleasant and comfortable, He says that he takes great pleasure in our prosperity. Verse 19 takes the joy to a deeper level. God is rejoicing together with his people. And then if we think about the hindrances to our Thanksgiving joy on earth, let us say this, and for those who were here this past Sunday morning, that was really the focus of our sermon on Sunday morning, the first thing which hinders our fellowship and worship and being in God's presence and being with him, the first thing which hinders that is sin. The first thing which brings separation between us and our holy God is our sins. And so the beginning of restoring the relationship and the fellowship with God is to repent, to believe in Him, to trust in Him, to see that need for us to become holy as He is holy. And then this past Sunday morning we talked about how we won't need to repent anymore in heaven because sin will totally be gone. And so we just mention that now in passing because it really is the first thing that hinders true thanksgiving is sin that would separate us from God. But our fellowship in heaven will be so perfect in joy, rejoicing, God rejoicing with us. And then if we jump ahead to verse 24, we note this also, that our prayers will be perfect in heaven. Now one of the things that hinders perfect fellowship is the fact that We pray in weakness. We do not pray as we ought to and the Apostle says in Romans 8 and We do not always pray in accordance with God's will As John the Apostle reminds us and then sometimes even when we do pray in God's will We don't understand God's timing in answering our prayers, and so there's you know if we think about prayer it is a our fellowship with God on this earth. It's not the only form of fellowship. Worship, again, that language of Jerusalem is part of that fellowship certainly. But prayer is part of our fellowship on this earth. And those prayers are hindered by our own weaknesses, by our own lack of understanding, by our failure to always pray in accordance with God's will. And God is saying there's going to be perfect fellowship in the new heavens and the new earth. There's going to be perfect worship altogether. There's going to be perfect personal prayer, if we put it that way, and I am going to hear your prayers while you call. While you are yet speaking, I will hear. Why? Because our prayers will be perfect. All the weakness, all the lack of understanding, any of the praying against God's will, it would all be gone. All the hindrances to fellowship that we have now will be gone. We will not be hindered by our sins. We will not be hindered by imperfect worship. We will not be hindered by weak prayers. We will have perfect fellowship with God and God's people in all joy and gladness. That's God's promise of unhindered thanksgiving through perfect fellowship. There's also unhindered prosperity. And we see this especially in verses 20 to 23. And we have this language of work being exactly how it should be. So if we kind of jump to the end of verse 21 and into verse 22 for the moment, there's this planting of vineyards and you're going to eat your own fruit. There's not going to be any of this circumstance where you work and you don't get all the fruit of your work through taxes or war or slavery or anything else. Everything that you work for will be as it should be. It's going to be a perfect society. Now there is some language here which we know is symbolic. And so, for example, Jesus tells us in Matthew 22 that there will no longer be marriage in heaven. And so some of these things are tied to a perfect home and work environment. Right? And so the, and those two things are wrapped together, right? Because they're going to plant and it's not going to be, uh, there's going to be no hindrance. They're going to be able to build and inhabit. And then also their descendants with them looking now to the end of verse 23, there's going to be a no more worrying about bearing children and calamity and war and famine and all those kinds of things. It's just all going to be gone. And, uh, some of, some of this is symbolic language because there's not going to be There's not going to be home and family in the same way, because again, Jesus says there's going to be no marriage after the resurrection, Matthew 22. But it is language which, if we put it this way, helps to roll us back towards Eden and speaks in language that we can understand. And Isaiah is saying, look at all these things that have not happened the way that God originally created them for. These things are all being rolled back. And indeed, if we think about the very curse upon work, that's the first thing which the man heard related to the curse of sin taking its effect. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. Genesis 3. 17 to 19. And we know that whether you work in an actual field with actual thorns and thistles or whether you work in any other environment where there's figurative thorns and thistles, there is all kinds of sweat and all kinds of prickly situations and all kinds of things which hinder work from being the joy and thanksgiving and prosperity that God made it to be. And so Isaiah is using this language to kind of roll us back towards, well, what is the perfect image? What is the prosperity and peace that God originally made work for? And then if we just sat back for a minute and thought about all the thorns and thistles in our work, we could start making a rather long list, including the fact that you know, we have our own sinfulness to deal with and the contrasting pull of laziness and workaholism and then the fact that we have to work with prickly co-workers or bosses sometimes and we throw all of that into the mix and we say, there's many hindrances to my prosperity and to my work and to giving thanks and to and to the kind of joy that we long to have there and it's all because of the curse. It all goes back to the curse and the effect of sin on this earth. Now as we take that language of kind of rolling back to to Genesis and to Eden, that helps us understand what is not the easiest image in verse 20. The beginning of verse 20 is plain and beautiful, but the end of verse 20 is more difficult. There, for the young man shall die a hundred years old and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. If we think of it in terms of rolling back towards Eden, I think John McKay, the Scottish Presbyterian, was very helpful when he said it this way. Verse 20 pictures a return to the longevity of the generations after Adam before the full impact of living in an degraded environment had taken its toll upon mankind. In other words, how long is Adam and his first descendants living? They're living 900 plus, 800 plus years. And so this picture of there's so much strength and prosperity and ability, and this idea that a person could die at 100 years old and be considered a young man, this is all the language that Isaiah is using to roll us back to Eden, to roll us back to perfect peace, to roll us back to unhindered thanksgiving. Because the fact that lives are short, prosperity is interrupted, calamity is present, all of these things make thanksgiving difficult. All of these things, all the different kinds of thorns and thistles break up the joy and Thanksgiving gladness that God originally made. But now we come to our third point, and we come to unhindered peace. And for this, we start with the beginning of verse 20, which is easier to understand than the end of verse 20. Because again, there's not going to be childbirth in heaven. But as Isaiah is rolling us back, he's talking about things which hinder joy and thanksgiving now. And what does he say? He says, no more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days. There are many things which hinder thanksgiving, certainly after sin near the top of that list is those who are not around the Thanksgiving table. Because the infant does not always live in this cursed world. And man does not always fill out his days on this cursed world. And in using this language, Isaiah is saying all that the mess that sin has brought, all of the effects of sin and death is right near the top of that list for the pain that the curse has brought. It will all be gone. There will be no more of this. In fact, we won't even need to think about death. The former things, verse 17, shall not be remembered or come to mind. One of the great things which hinders the great hindrances of Thanksgiving joy now is the fact that the Thanksgiving table is not always full and the role that death itself plays in that. And God says, this will be no more. All these things will be rolled back. There will be perfect peace. Indeed, Isaiah, earlier in his book of prophecy, speaks not only about this rolling back of death and death being taken away, but about the complete defeat of death, and uses that language in Isaiah 25, verses 8 and 9, where we read concerning the Lord God that he will swallow up death forever and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth for the Lord has spoken it will be said on that day behold this is our God we have waited for him that he might save us this is the Lord we have waited for him let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." There will be unhindered peace which will make Thanksgiving so much easier. We read 1 Thessalonians 5 for our New Testament reading this morning. There is a call to rejoice in Christ through all the circumstances, but the circumstances are hard. And what God is saying is, well, you're no longer gonna rejoice in me with the difficulty of rejoicing through hard circumstances. All those hard circumstances will be gone. It will be perfect joy. It will be perfect peace. And then he's not only going back to the reverse of the curse, And so, right, the language of perfect work that reverses the curse on Adam in Genesis 3, 17 and 18, the reverse of death, including the pain and death of even losing an infant reverses the curse of Genesis 3.16 and the pain of the woman in childbearing of which the most difficult pain is the pain of the lost one and he's rolling all of this back and then in verse 24 which we already looked at in our first point with unhindered pain what is he going he's really going back further he's going back not just to the reversal of the curse of Genesis 3 but he's going back to the face to face fellowship when God could walk with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day and when they could hear him and he's going back to Genesis 2 and Genesis 1 and he's rolling it back further. He's saying not only will all of the pain be gone, no we're rolling all the way back into Eden. It's going to be perfect peace, you're going to be with me, you're going to have fellowship with me. And then, verse 25, that language might be, you might say, why are we all of a sudden talking about animals? But we might notice that this is, God's now bringing us all the way back. He's not just rolling it back. He's not just talking about the things that won't be anymore. He's actually brought us now back into Eden. Because what is the picture there in verse 25? It's a picture not of the reversal of the curse of Genesis 3, 16 to 19. It's a picture where we finally return to the very behavior of the animals in Genesis 1 verse 30. This is Genesis 1 verse 30. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And so what is Isaiah 65 verse 25? That's God saying I'm taking it all the way back to the peace of Eden where all of God's creatures lived in peace, where the wolf was not the predator of the lamb, but where they were both grazing animals, where all of the animals ate green things. And that's the return there. It's no longer predator and prey. It's now like a Now the wolf is like a playful puppy and it's just right by the lamb and they're both what? They're both grazing together. They're both eating grass together. They have both returned to the Genesis 1 verse 30 diet. And so we're no longer rolling back the curse. We're now back to God's paradise. We're back to how God made things to be. And so the lion also, notice that emphasis on eating green things, on eating plants, and none of this predatory red and tooth and claw. The lion shall eat straw like the ox. It's perfect peace. All of God's creation will be restored. But then we also have the mention of the serpent. And here, Here, let's take the language of Genesis 3 verses 14 and 15. Genesis 3 verse 14 and 15, God is speaking to the serpent in the presence of Adam and Eve and the Lord God says this to the serpent. Genesis 3 verse 14 and 15, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, and above all the beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." The first beginning of the promise of the gospel that there would be the seed of the woman, ultimately Jesus Christ, born of a woman, who would crush the serpent and crush death. on the cross. But now I want us to take that language of Genesis 3, 14 and 15 and we go back to Isaiah 65 and it's interesting there is one thing which is reversed which is different and there's one thing which is not different. The similarity is this that the snake even in the new heavens and the new earth will still eat dust, he will still have a humble form. He will still be a crawling creature. Now in Genesis 3, the emphasis is on the fact that because of the serpent's role, with Satan taking over the serpent and talking to Eve and deceiving Eve, because of the serpent's role, the form of the snake was changed. It took on this humble form where it's a belly on the dust creature. So that's the similarity. The cursed form of the snake remains. But there's also a difference. There's no mention of food in Genesis 3. In fact, the prophet Micah in Micah 7 talks about that the licking of the dust is related to the serpent's humility. It licks the dust. It doesn't eat the dust. Actually, the serpent, the snake, is the only animal in the world where every single species is a true carnivore. Why is that important? Remember that animals being predators is part of the curse. You reverse the curse when you go back to Genesis 1.30 and all the animals graze together in harmony. The snake stands as a symbol of death and disorder Every single snake is a carnivore. Not one person has ever seen one snake in the history of the world eat a blade of grass or a single leaf. They are true carnivores. They are a symbol of death and destruction. Now the form is the same, but while Genesis 3, Micah 7, the emphasis is on the humble form and the licking of the dust. There's a new word in Isaiah 65, and that new word is food. That the serpent's form will be the same, but even the serpent's diet will change. And so there's something important that we can take from that similarity and that difference. From that similarity, What do we say? We say that even the snake is brought back to a place of peace. Even the animal which is only ever a true carnivore will return to a diet of peace. But now we think about that thing which does not change. We might ask ourselves, why does the form of the snake remain the same? Why does the form of the snake remain the same? Isaiah 65, verse 17, the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. That is a general promise of eternal thanksgiving with God, but it does not mean we will forget absolutely everything. Do you know what we will remember? we will remember the victory of the seed of the woman over the seed of the serpent. And so even though even the serpent will be brought back to a diet of peace and will actually have its food from the ground, the serpent's form remains. And perhaps the reason for that is because it's one of the things that reminds us of the victory of Jesus Christ and reminds us of the very first promise of that victory which God gave to Adam and Eve though they did not deserve it before He even expelled them from the garden. And so now we trace that promise through from the first giving of that promise to the serpent in the hearing of Adam and Eve and we trace that promise through to what that seed of the woman did and you know revelation never explicitly tells us that Jesus will still have the nails in his hands in heaven but there are many reasons to say that Jesus will still have the holes of the pierced nails in his hands when he is in heaven and that while generally we will not remember or will not have anything come to mind we will remember this one thing that Jesus Christ died for our sins and now we've not only rolled back to Eden we've gone to something better than Eden because we will not only be restored in fellowship with God but we will be restored in fellowship with God worshiping Christ who died who saved us who brought us to that eternal glory and we know that we will remember that because we're told in Revelation 5 that this will be part of the very song that we sing saying with a loud voice Revelation 5 12 worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing we will remember that the lamb was slain to save us from this earth. This earth where sin and our own selves and our need to repent is so evident. This world where the effect of sin and all the pain and suffering that that brings and all the things that, let's just say it this way, there are There are going to be things that are going to be hard to celebrate. There are going to be reasons why it's hard to give Thanksgiving to God today. And there's going to be different reasons for that from one pew to another. But it's going to be true from one pew to another. There are going to be reasons why it is hard to give Thanksgiving today. But we will remember that we are delivered by Christ when we come into heaven. And all of the other things in a general way will not even be remembered. They will not come to mind. We will have no barrier, no hindrance. We will only have perfect joy and fellowship and thanksgiving with God and Jesus Christ who was slain for our sins. Amen. Let us pray. Lord God Almighty, we pray that You would uphold us through all the circumstances of this life. And we look forward to eternal Thanksgiving joy, where giving Thanksgiving will have no difficulty.