Our scripture reading this evening is taken from the book of the prophet Isaiah, the prophecy of Isaiah chapter 35. Isaiah chapter 35. Isaiah 35 follows a prophecy of God's judgment upon Edom, those who had hated God's people and set themselves against them. But then Isaiah 35 moves into a message about God's new creation. Isaiah chapter 35. The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, even with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the excellence of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the excellency of our God. Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are fearful hearted, be strong, do not fear. Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God he will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then the lane shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb sing. The waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. The parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. In the habitation of jackals, where each lay, there shall be grass with reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the highway of holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it, for it shall be for others. Whoever walks the road, although a fool, shall not go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast go up on it. It shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransom of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. And may God bless the reading of His Holy Word. Our text this evening is found in the chapter that we read, Isaiah chapter 35 and verse 4. Say to those who are fearful-hearted, be strong, do not fear. Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you. At this Advent time we consider particularly the subject of the promise of Christ's coming. The scripture is filled with promises that Christ is coming, your God will come. And although Isaiah says your God will come with vengeance, it's quite clear that the vengeance is not against the people to whom he is speaking. The people whom he is speaking are the faithful, those who put their trust in God, people like Isaiah himself. People who struggle with the realities of this world, people who struggle with suffering, trials and difficulties. And Christ's coming, we are told, for these who are fearful-hearted, these who have their doubts and their fears. The second coming for them is a matter for great encouragement. We are to encourage one another with these things. Your God will come with vengeance. With the recompense of God, he will come and save you. Now Isaiah, like most of the Old Testament prophets, very often when he speaks of Christ's coming, he has an effect in which he sees aspects of both together The illustration has been used often, it's a very good one, of climbing a mountain. And initially, if you look at the mountain, you think there's one mountain. But as you go up, you find in fact that there are two. You go up one and then there is down and then up to the next one. And that's what the two comings of Christ are like for many of the prophets. They see the coming of Christ, but they do not necessarily see that there is a first coming and a second coming and there is that period between the two, the end times, as they have been called, the latter days. And so here we see Isaiah speaking of Christ's coming again and how Christ's coming is a great encouragement to his people. So we see first of all the promise of his coming, the promise that he gives. We see secondly the pilgrims, God's people in their journey through this present world. And thirdly we see the path, the way of holiness, the highway of holiness. that God has made for his pilgrims to travel. The promise, the pilgrims and the path. And first we have the promise. God has a promise to his people. Your God will come. Now the chapter begins speaking about the change that is to be in the new creation. The present creation has the wilderness and the wasteland. The present creation is one that is under the curse of God. The curse that comes following Adam's sin. The present state of things is what it is. It's a situation where there are temptations, there are things that make us fearful-hearted. We look at the news at the moment. It's been, I think, quite rightly said that we were not really meant to have this sort of real-time, 24-hour updates of the mess the world is in. And the world is in a mess because the world has always been a mess since Adam and Eve sinned. And because we now can get these real-time updates, things look to be worse than they have been in the past. But are they really worse? Well, certainly they are not worse than they were in the days of the world wars. massive loss of life. They're not much better either. But there has always been wars and rumours of wars, diseases and natural disasters. Why? Because of human sin. The world is cursed because of sinful humanity. We have brought down God's wrath against us, and yet at the same time we have the promise of God in the midst of this. The Apostle Paul contemplating the creation Romans 8 from verse 18 he says, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, because of him who subjected it in hope. Because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labours with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves, groan within ourselves, eagerly awaiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. For we were saved in this hope. But hope which is seen is not hope, for why does one still hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. The promise of what shall be, the promise of the new heavens and the new earth. And as Isaiah contemplates these things, he thinks of the wilderness and the wasteland, that exists because of human sin, and the desert, and yet the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose, shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, even with joy and singing of the glory of Lebanon, shall be given to it the excerpts of Carmel and Sharon. Lebanon famed for its cedars, for its vegetation, Carmel and Sharon, beautiful hills covered in vegetation, And if the desert shall be like these, then how much more wonderful shall everything else be? That's the picture here. The new creation is a creation where all is beauty, where all is lush and life, life springing forth on every hand. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the excellency of our God. Shall this creation see Him? Yes, this creation shall see Him. This creation has seen Him when the Lord Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. The creation saw Him then and when He comes again, every eye shall see Him. And this ruined old earth when he shall touch it again with his feet it shall be made new. The language that's used of being burned up is not of being destroyed but rather of being melted down and made new. I remember some years ago now going to the church at Alton, near Alton Towers, the parish church, and they just had the bells restored. And when they restore a bell, what they do is they, because over time bells can get cracked and worn, and what they do is they melt it down and they refound the bell. They restore. So it's the same bell and yet it's a new bell. Well so the new earth will be, the new heavens and earth, the same and yet new, renewed, restored, made, made new, even as the resurrection of the body means that the body that was laid in the grave is raised, not as it was before, but to a new and wonderful life, the resurrection of life, even as the Lord Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. And so the promise of his coming, the promise of glory, And here is a fascinating fact about the Hebrews and about Christianity. If you had gone into the Roman Empire, if you had gone, say, to Athens and you spoke to the Athenians about the Golden Age, they would say, oh yes, the Golden Age was back in the past. They had an understanding of a sort that humanity had declined. But what they did not have was any idea, any grasp or understanding of the wonderful fact that the Golden Age is not in the past. The Golden Age is in the future, when Christ comes again. You look at the Bible. The Bible, yes, we start out with Eden, with Adam and Eve in a garden. Just two people in a garden. And where do we end? We end in the New Jerusalem, which is a garden city. with a population so great that no one can count them. It's a better, better end than the beginning. The Bible says we don't look back and say well the past was better. We look forward and say the future when Christ comes again will be better. And it will be better not because of man, not because of what we do, but because of God. Because of the redeeming work of Christ. And here again the Bible gives us a wonderful hope. The world looks at man and says, well we've got to make the future for ourselves. And it's an interesting thing if you look at ideas about the future that people had in the past. And again and again, you look and say, well why didn't we achieve what they thought we might achieve? And the answer is in here, human sin. Human sin. It's that man develops technologies and then uses it to kill one another. To bomb one another. Not to help one another. And why? Because human sin. We are the problem, not in the sense that the nihilistic people think, but we're the problem because we are fallen and our God, God in Christ, is the answer. That God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and forced sin to condemn sin in the flesh. The promise is in Christ. The promise that we look to is the promise of His coming. And it's because of what He has done. For Isaiah, of course, it was what he would do on the cross. That's why 2,000 years ago, for us, in Isaiah's future, And the earth will see our God. Your God will come. There is the great promise. Your God will come with vengeance. He will bring judgment upon all evil. With the recompense of God, He will come and save His people. His name is called Jesus because He will save His people from their sins. And He has saved us at the cross. And He shall save His people when He comes again and raises them from the dead and brings that new creation. The promise. But now we have the pilgrims. God's people are pilgrims travelling through this world. And because we are travelling through this world, we need His strength, we need His mercy. And so this chapter is encouragement to the pilgrims. Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. We are weak. Christianity is for weak people because there aren't any people who are not weak. All human beings are weak. but God is mighty. We are weak but he is mighty. And so it is that the pilgrim's great confidence is in our God. Say to those who are fearful hearted, be strong, do not fear, behold your God will come. There's an encouragement to pilgrims that is outside of ourselves. He doesn't say, look into yourselves to strength. He says, look to God for strength. Look to Christ for strength. He is our strength. He is our might. Our situation is that we are the ones who have weak hands and feeble knees. We are fearful hearted. We tend to fear. Some more than others, but we all tend to fear. And there are many things to fear. Now, he doesn't say there's nothing really behind these fears. Sometimes there isn't, but the world is full of evil. Our own hearts are full of evil. Our own hearts will betray us. The arm of flesh will fail you, says the hymn writer. You dare not trust your own. We are assailed with doubts and fears and fighting. And what do we need? Well, the world just says, look within yourself. And that's the worst advice you can possibly give, look within yourself. Look within yourself and you will see your sins, you will see your guilt, you will see that you are weak. Now the Bible says, look outside yourself, look to God, cease from man and look to God. Look to Christ, look to God in Christ. Because we have to look to God in Christ. If we look to God outside of Christ, then all we find is that we are crushed with His holiness. But we look to the Lord Jesus and we see God's mercy and grace as well as His power. Be strong, do not fear, behold your God will come. You know what he's like because he has shown himself. No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known. And so the pilgrims must look to him. O happy band of pilgrims, onward he will tread, with Jesus as your fellow, to Jesus at at your head. How marvellous it is that he is with us and he is coming. Jesus says, behold I am with you always even to the end of the age. He does not leave us, he says I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. He doesn't just mean by that His coming at the end of the age, He means His coming by the Holy Spirit to dwell in His people, that we are joined to Him. Your God, you know who He is. He has revealed Himself in mercy and in grace as our Saviour. Your God will come. And then, when he comes, what shall be? Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb sing. Christ, when he came the first time, he carried out these healing miracles. And they were but signs of what is to come. The scripture tells us that it was through sin that death came into the world. And all blindness and deafness and lameness, all of these are reminders of the fall. They're reminders and elements of the death that comes when every eye shall be blind and every ear deaf because the body lies dead in the grave. But Christ came to give life. The life of God. And finally, of course, the life of the new creation. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. We're not to fall into the mistake of some who look so much upon the present day and upon the idea of healing right now that they forget that what we look for is the new heavens and earth in which righteousness dwells. Then when He comes again, when He comes with the fullness of the new creation, the full salvation, He will come and save you. Then there shall be no more suffering, no more sickness, no more death. there shall be only joy for evermore. The lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing. And again Isaiah speaks of this natural imagery. Water shall burst forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The parched ground shall become pool. And it may very well be the language of the parched ground here refers to the fact that in the desert you get mirages. It looks like there's a pool but there is no pool. There are no mirages in God's promises. God fulfills his promises. The thirsty land, springs of water, the habitation of jackals that waste places. There shall be grass with reeds and rushes. God's pilgrims are travelling through, yes, a dry and thirsty land. And yet we are travelling to a new creation where there is no dry and thirsty land, where there is no thirst, because all thirst shall be quenched. And God's people shall be satisfied in Him and with Him. The pilgrim journey We are headed for the fullness of the new creation, the celestial city, the city of our God. And so we come to our third and final point, the path, the path. And first of all, there is a highway, there is a path. God has made a way. The Lord Jesus Christ says, I am the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me. But He is the way, there is a way. That way is in the Lord Jesus Himself. And that way is called the highway of holiness. Because the only people who travel there are holy people. And holiness, its first meaning, it's vital to emphasise this, the first meaning of holiness is to be set apart for God. Set apart for the Lord's use. That's what holiness means, first of all. Now, there is the moral element of it, because, you see, to be set apart for the Lord's use means to be the sort of people who can do the Lord's work. In the Old Testament, if an animal was set apart for God, there were certain physical characteristics it had to have. It could not have any blemishes. It could not have any missing parts, like a missing ear or something. It couldn't be deformed. You couldn't have a calf that had one leg shorter than the others and give it to God. And all of these spoke of the fact that God's people are people who are made wholly renewed in his image, made like unto him. They are those who walk in the light as he is in the light, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin, as the Apostle John puts it. It's a highway for holy people who are being conformed, who are being transformed. And so the unclean, they are those who are the ungodly, shall not pass over it. They cannot walk in that way. It is, after all, it is His way, the highway of holiness. And it is for those who are God's people. It matters not their Weakness, and many of God's people are weak, but they shall not go astray. And in that way, the pilgrim way, The way the Christian walks, no lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast go up on it. It shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. Now we know that in this world, the evil one, your enemy the devil, Peter says, is roaming around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. The devil is looking, and yet he cannot touch the Christian. He can do nothing without God's permission. We see that with Job. When the devil would harm Job, he had to ask God's permission first. And what the devil meant for evil, God meant for good. That Job's righteousness might be made known, might be seen by all. And of course Job's righteousness is celebrated today, because the book of Job exists. God's people who are the redeemed, they have been bought with a price, they are not their own. The redeemed shall walk there. And they have been bought by God and brought into His family. We are made the people of the living God, redeemed out of sin, redeemed out of this worthless existence that the world so often celebrates, but redeemed to walk there in that way of holiness. John Bunyan, in his famous book, depicts Christianity as a pilgrim's progress. And so successful is he in telling his story that there have been readers who have failed to remember that it is, after all, an allegory. So there were some who complained, well, why is it that Christian left his wife and children? And of course, it has to be pointed out, it's an allegory. Bunyan did not leave his wife and family, but they were not with him on the path until they were converted. And with Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress, it's his death that leads to his wife and children going on pilgrimage. But if you lay aside the allegory, he was there with them all the while. The redeemed shall walk there. And it can be a difficult road, and yet the redeemed walk it together. The pilgrim brethren walking together. And so Isaiah brings us to the last image. Where do God's people end up? We end up, again to go back to Bunyan's language, to the celestial city. The ransom of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing. Now part of Isaiah's thought here is to do with the return from the exile in Babylon. But it goes beyond that, it goes to the New Jerusalem, to God's people coming to that celestial city, that eternal home of the redeemed. They are the ransom of the Lord, bought with the blood of Jesus Christ and they come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads. That is to say, when God's people arrive at Zion, they arrive rejoicing. Mourners below at times perhaps, but we come to Zion with singing, with great joy and happiness, with everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. So what is left? What is left is joy everlasting. What is left is sharing the joy of the Lord. God's own joy, the joy of the Lord Jesus Christ who rejoiced to do his Father's will, who rejoices to see all his people brought at last to Zion. Joy and gladness, that is the last word for God's people. And it is everlasting. There isn't a point at which it ends, it goes on forever. that sorrow and sighing which we experience in this present passing world. We sorrow over our sins, we sigh over the world that surrounds us, we sigh and we sorrow in our sicknesses in our infirmities and all this shall disappear and there is left only the joy, the eternal joy of the Lord. The great promise, the path that leads to the new Jerusalem. The path that God's people shall come to the end of. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. And all that is left is the joy of the Lord for all eternity. God's people have this rejoicing. Your God will come, and He will come, and Jesus says, I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go to prepare a place, I will come again, that where I am, there you may be also. He has promised, O Jesus, thou hast promised to all who follow thee, that where thou art in glory, there shall thy servant be. And therefore, Your God will come. Be strong, do not fear. Your God will come. Here is the promise of His coming. He comes for His people. He comes that we may know that joy forevermore and sorrow and sighing will pass away. Our God is the end of the journey. His pleasant and glorious domain. For there are the children of mercy. to praise Him for Calvary's pain. Amen.