We are grateful that in the midst of trial and transitions in the life of the church, and particularly in the life of your pastors, that the Lord has supplied for the ministry of the word here. And we are grateful that John Sanford, dear brother and friend, has agreed to open the Word of God for us today. So brother, would you come and minister on God's behalf to us? It's always good to be here and in honor to bring the Lord's Word this morning and again this afternoon. I had These two passages which I'll be preaching on really go together and so it's a It's good that I'm going to be preaching both morning and afternoon. I had, since they go together, considered preaching them in just one sermon, but that would make for a very long sermon. And I was warned as much as this is a very sweet and kind congregation, if you preach into their lunch hour, they get grumpy. So we'll split it into two different sermons. These are dark and uncertain times, with the rise of a threatening, aggressive superpower, a shaky economy, the decline of religion, moral decline, exploitation of the poor by the wealthy, and a weak and vacillating national leader. The leader I speak of is none other than King Ahas, The date is 700 BC, and the rising superpower is Assyria. Now that sounds a bit like today. I sort of wrote it that way. But there are a lot of similarities to the situation we find ourselves in today. These are indeed dark times. History often repeats itself, but scripture and here Isaiah remain always relevant to our time. In my conversations with Christian friends about our times, I often go to Isaiah 3 as an explanation of why we find ourselves in the situation we're in. Put it a little bit into context, that is Isaiah 3. The book of Isaiah itself formally begins in Isaiah 6 with the commissioning of Isaiah. So the first five chapters are a preface or introduction. to the book, sort of a summary of some of the major themes of Isaiah. And as you can see in the little extra handout you have there, the chapters two through four really form a unified chiastic literary unit. What I mean by that is it's one of the Characteristics of Hebrew poetry is what's called a chiasm, where you have a structure like you can see before you, an A-B-B-A structure. It's important to be able to see this as you go through a lot of the books of the Old Testament because one of the things that people find difficult with Isaiah is he seems to jump all over the place. He says something and then he changes the subject and then he goes back to what he said originally. We're used to linear A, B, C, D, laying it out. Well, that's not the way Isaiah wrote things. So if you understand that Isaiah is using this chiastic structure, it's a lot less confusing. In fact, you can see in chapters 2 through 4, as I've shown there, what you have is The outside shells of the sandwich, so to speak, of the chiasm are the ideal future Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem, or the branch. And inside you've got the actual Jerusalem. So it goes the future Jerusalem, an exhortation, the actual Jerusalem, its religious condition and other exhortation, and then its social condition, and then closing out the chiasm, the New Jerusalem. So it's a unified chiastic literary structure. Just stopping right there, a few observations just on that whole section. One is, Isaiah sets up a literary tension. On one hand, he talks about the depravity of Israel. It's a very dark, dark picture. But then he says, no, the future is going to be really great. And he shows these just amazing pictures of the future. And we're left with this question of, well, how do we get from depravity to glory? a total darkness to incredible light. And as you go through the book, he drops a little hint here and there, and you don't really see the answer to that question until you get to the end of the book. Now, Stefan has assured me that I'll never make it to the end of this book, but you can go ahead and read on your own. And that's a situation similar to our own lives. We can sit and say, Things are a wreck. You know, I'm, you know, personal problems. I'm certainly not the holy man I'd like to be. The church is a wreck, but yet there's those promises and we can sort of feel that tension within us of how are we going to get there? Well, we've read the New Testament and we understand how we get there. And, and as Stephanie intimated too, One of the great things about Isaiah and the prophets of the Old Testament is amidst the darkness, amidst the gloom, there's hope. There's certainty. There's, as I would call it, guaranteed hope. Isaiah's time was a very, very dark time. The country was about to be, well, would in the future be overrun. People go into exile. And his message was, a message of judgment. But yet, he gives us a lot of hope there. And that should be our perspective, too, our outlook, our attitude toward things. As we look around and we see a nation that's not doing well, a church that's not doing well, and I don't mean Trinity Reformed. I'm talking about the US church, the Western church, and maybe personal problems in our own lives. We know that it's a difficult time, a dark time for the Lindblad family, but there's hope. And that needs to be, we need to sandwich that darkness, that discouragement with hope and sprinkle our speech and our thinking about it. It's easy for us to sort of grumble about how things are, to be critical, to be negative, But we always, in our speech and in our thought, need to remember that there is hope. As much as we can sit, for example, and talk about the dismal state of the church, we know the glory is into the church, and we know that the church will be God's bride, and the church will be in God's presence, in God's glory, and it will be holy. Sometimes hard to believe, hard to imagine, but we have that hope and we need to keep that in our thoughts and in our conversations. As we look through this section again, we, well, last time, last time being a few years ago, in the previous section, Isaiah talked about the corruption of religion. This section we look at now is the corruption of society. This is not just a, well, religion is corrupt and also society is corrupt, but there's a logical movement that the corruption of religion, which we see in chapter two, leads to the corruption of society in chapter three. If you don't mind me being a bit pedantic and a few theoretical observations here, which I think makes sense out of that. Paul Kingsnorth writes, culture is always a fundamentally spiritual question. What is culture? What's it coiled around? It is always, always a religious question. So culture, it's not just art and music. Culture is everything we do. Culture is our law system, our government, our dress. Everything about it is culture. And what's the basis of culture? It's religion, according to Kingsnorth. And that makes sense. Religion is the basis for our morals and our standards. It is, so to speak, the metaphysical foundation, or more simply put, the ontological basis of life. Big words. Let me explain them a little bit here. Out of our religion, for example, comes our dress. So we as Christians, we have a certain view, a religious view of sexuality and of women being modest, therefore, Our women dress in a specific way. Go down to the beach and you can see life has changed because our society has moved from a Christian basis to a secular or humanist basis, and so has our dress. Or our laws, for example. Back when I was young, which was many, many years ago, homosexuality was seen as just an abhorrent sin, coming again from our religious base, and so there were laws against it. Well, we've shifted to a secular humanist base, and instead of saying it's an abhorrent sin, there's a different view of sexuality, and a view that, well, what's important is freedom, and what's important is having a good time, and therefore the laws are gone. A friend of mine in China made the interesting and I think very observant observation that our rulers are like our gods. So if you have a religion which is based upon self-betterment, based upon power, that's what our politics are going to be. If you have a religion that's based upon justice and righteousness and service, that's what our politics will tend to be. I use the word tend because in the depravity of man that doesn't always work out that way. But you have that metaphysical basis of saying the job of the rulers is to be righteous, to serve the people, to ensure justice. That is, if those are the metaphysical, the religious underpinnings of society. If not, then your rulers become whatever your religion is, often power-based. So if you ask me, for example, what's wrong with Haiti? I'll tell you, it's Buddhism. Voodoo is a religion of power and you have power factions. All they're interested in is gaining power. You want to know what's wrong with Afghanistan? Islam. Islam is a violent tribal religion. Afghanistan is a violent tribal country. So getting back to our text here. A hypothesis or post it that I would make is that much of what we see today in our own culture, in our own country, in the culture and the politics, is due to this underlying shift or deterioration of religion. The deterioration of religion, which Isaiah talks about in chapter 2, led to the deterioration of its political structure in chapter 3. Well, I would posit that's the same thing we have today here. Now, I want to just back off a little bit, just make the statement, you know, we value expository preaching and going through the text. And so that's what I'm doing with Isaiah. And sometimes you run across texts and you go, what am I going to do with this one? Stephan chuckles. He knows what I mean. And it's important to apply the text, otherwise it just becomes completely theoretical. And so that's what I attempt to do here. But I'm not a prophet. We don't have prophets anymore. I can't say, well, the U.S. is under judgment because of X, Y, and Z. All I can do is say, hmm, God's very consistent. This is what God did with Israel. Maybe that's what's happening today. It's one way of looking at our present time. But you're all very smart people. You have Bibles. Read your Bibles. See if I'm right. If I'm not, well, hopefully you have a better understanding of the text. If I am right, that happens occasionally, not as often as I'd like. And I'm also not saying that the United States was a Christian nation. I don't think in the context of the New Testament there is such a thing. God's people are the church, not the United States or Britain or any other group. But what I'm saying is that the principles of our nation, the underlying principles, morals, and values used to be Christian. If you went back to the founding of our country, Virtually everybody would sign up for at least the values and morals of scripture. Now, even the deists would have done that. Thomas Jefferson famously took a pair of scissors to his Bible and cut out the theological parts that he didn't like, but he didn't throw the Bible out. He kept the Bible, at least the parts that he liked. But what we've seen is this shift away from that Christian basis. are interested further, I'd highly recommend Carl Truman's book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Carl Truman being a Christian writer. And one of the applications that flows out to us is if we're following the pattern of Isaiah 2 and 3, then a lot of our problems are not political problems. A lot of our problems are moral and spiritual problems. And as has been said from this pulpit in previous times, you can't solve spiritual problems politically. If you look through history, the Old Testament, European history, There's been a lot of attempts to solve spiritual problems politically, and they do not work. They just simply do not work because they're spiritual problems. Maybe a good modern example on that is the war on drugs, which that goes back to Richard Nixon's time. We aren't winning that war. Why? It's a spiritual moral problem. It's not a political problem. And we'll get into this further, but one of the things that we face as Christians and as citizens is we have a very strong tendency to put too much trust in our government and in politicians, thinking that they can solve our problems. Now, moving into the text a little bit more or in depth, you can see on your handouts again, we run across another chiasm. And in this case, it goes A, B, C, and then B, A, with C in the middle, judgment on Jerusalem and Judah being sort of the center, the most important thing in this chiastic structure. So again, on the outside, the action of the Lord of hosts, the word of the Lord of the hosts. So it looks sort of like this. Jerusalem and Judah are blatantly sinning, and therefore they're going to be judged. How? Well, he's going to judge the leaders. There's going to be the removal of the leaders and social collapse. Who will do this? It's the Lord of hosts. This is what the Lord has said. That's our archaistic structure. One of the things we notice as we go through this section is, again, and we see this in chapter 2, take away. Lord is going to take away, take away this, take away that. In chapter 2, it was Lord would take away their idols in that great day of the Lord, that day of judgment. And here we see the same thing. Chapter 2 ends with the exhortation Stop regarding man in whose nostrils is breath. For what account is he? Our society today, being secular and humanist, is a follower of what's called meliorism, or belief that man can solve his own problems. And of course, that makes sense, doesn't it? If there is no God, who else is going to fix this thing but us, right? But that's not what we as Christians believe, and we need to move away from that. And that was the situation in Isaiah's time. Their trust was in men, and God says, why are you trusting in men? They die. There's breath in the nostrils, and it's taken away. And he says that he will humble them in that day. And so that verse becomes a transition into our section, where the men that they trust in, the leaders that they trust in, will be taken away. And as we go through, we'll see the question which it really asks to them and it asks us is, who do you trust? Who do you think is going to sort things out in this country, in the church, in our own lives? Men or God? He begins this section with a strong emphasis, for behold, And then it says, he will take away support and supply, or in the King James, staff and stay, the beginning an economic collapse. Now, the word supply and support, or staff and stay, are actually the masculine and feminine form of the same word. And what you have is a concept of totality. All of the things economically dependent upon will be taken away, the beginnings of the collapse of their society. And then in verses 2 and 3, we have a list, the leaders that are going to be removed. The mighty man and the soldier, the judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder, the captain of 50 and the man of rank, the counselor and the skillful magician, and the expert in charms. Note that these are all the people that they trusted in. Isaiah lists these people in pairs, roughly starting from military to national leaders to local leaders. One of the other things we can note too is that some of these, many of them are legitimate, But there's many illegitimate leaders here. For example, the charmers, the experts in charms, the skillful magician. Again, depicting a depraved and disordered society which is dependent upon illegitimate rulers. And then in 4 through 7, we see the result of this. Some things which are very similar to what we find at our own society. In verse 4, and I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. You have rulers who are inexperienced and immature. But isn't that the same thing that we tend to find in the United States? Just this mythology, I'll call it the myth of the newbie, where we'll take a person, he's got no experience, but he's fresh and he's new, he's not corrupted by the society, by the system, and he'll be a great leader because he can start from scratch. But as one person put it, since when does the leader of a superpower become a starter position? We pick men with very little experience. Go to your voter guides and see what sort of experience we have or people that we've picked. And, you know, we find the same thing in the church. There's a tendency in the church to pick outsiders. There was a leader of a local megachurch who boasted that he had no theological training, he had no experience in the church, but he was a pastor and he was going to build this big megachurch. Well, he was, he did, and the megachurch collapsed with a lot of casualties. The myth of the newbie. And the people will oppress one another, everyone his fellow and everyone his neighbor. The youth will be insolent to the elder and the despised, the honorable. Society becomes divided and oppressive, each group against the other. Sound familiar? The moral order is reversed. There's no longer honor. and respect, but instead it's power. I've got it over you. I'm stronger than you. And we see that again in our society. You just have to go to the social media. It's vicious. In our politics, it's not a discussion of policies and experience. It's who's got the best soundbite. It's name calling. And sadly, again, we see the same thing in the church. All you have to do is go to some of the, you can listen to some of the sermons, or you can go to some of the blog sites, and there's that same personal viciousness, that divisiveness, that being divided within even church circles, that hostility against other groups. Continuing on in 6 and 7, for a man will take hold of his brother and the house of his father, saying, you have a cloak. You shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule. And that day he will speak out, saying, I will not be a healer. In my house, there is neither bread nor cloak. You shall not make me leader of the people. Leadership decisions become, just fall into despair and desperation. Leadership is not taken seriously. A man is chosen because he has a cloak, or maybe because he's a good orator, or he looks handsome in our age. Hasty choice of leadership, not based upon character or qualifications. but just what's on the surface, and also an unwillingness to accept responsibility. The result is that despair sets in. You notice the comment about the heap of ruins and healer of a wounded body politic. I can only reflect on a counterexample in scripture, and that is Nehemiah, who really came back to a heap of ruins and look through it, and instead of saying, I'm out of here, I'm going back home, he said, we'll fix this. We'll put Jerusalem back together. And so as Moitier says in his excellent commentary, Isaiah is in reality describing a breakdown in national character and seriousness, the spirit which treats national welfare, politics, and leadership as a joke. So a few observations on this last section. One is that God appoints leaders, political and religious. In this text here, God removes leaders. We also know that God raises up leaders. We can see a lot of similarities, as I have pointed out, between Judah and our present state, Judah, which is under God's judgment, and the current state of the US and the West. Again, I think it's following the same pattern. You read it, you see whether I'm right or whether you disagree with me. We find ourselves in a very extraordinary situation is for a couple of decades, people have been decrying the lack of leadership in the West. There really are no strong leaders. Why? And of course, you look at the future, the upcoming election, and it's really very, the 2024 election, it's very extraordinary. And you go from The Economist to The New York Times to The Washington Post, and the pundits just raise their hands and say, why are we in this situation? Why do we have an election that's the same as what we had four years ago, an election between a man with under indictment, 91 counts, the last I read, versus a doddering old man? Now, you may think of these characters a little bit differently. But here we are in a democracy, and there's one one candidate who's got tremendously negative ratings. There's a lot of people that hate him, that wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances. On the other hand, you have a man who even his own party People say, he shouldn't run again. He shouldn't run again. But that's what we have. Why? How did we ever get here? The pundits, they can say, well, our primary system, yada, yada. I would ask, is this God's judgment upon us? It certainly sounds like what we read about in our text. We, and now I speak to us as Christians and as a church, put far too much trust in leadership. That modern political myth I mentioned about the neophyte who will solve all of our problems, that's pure idolatry. We all tend to want to play the, if I were king for a day, I would fix it. If only the president would do X, Y, and Z. If only we could get the right members of the Supreme Court. If only we would get the right man elected, we'd solve our problems. That's idolatry. It's pure and simple idolatry, because that is trust in man. Let's trust that men can fix a spiritual problem. And it's something that we as Christians shouldn't fall into, but sadly, I think if you look around, an awful lot of Christians have fallen into that idolatry. You can't solve a moral problem with a change in leadership. And that goes for the church too. One of the major denominations in the church has lost, at last count, three or four presidents due to moral scandals. Change the leadership, they haven't dealt with the moral problems within the church. And we as Christians should know better. And we need to be careful of placing charisma before character. That fellow I'd mentioned earlier of the megachurch was extremely gifted in terms of being an orator. But people put charisma before character. He didn't mature, and well, we know the result. In the text here, we have, we'll pick a leader because he has fancy clothes. And I've seen that myself in being on the part of a pastoral selection committee. You listen to the sermon of someone and you say, wow, that guy's a really good orator. I could listen to him all day. Yeah, there's lots of people I'd love to listen to all day. But the question is, in terms of the sermon, how do they handle the text? It may sound good, but do they handle the text correctly and well? If we look at the characteristics of an elder, there's only one gift being able to teach, but the other characteristics or other qualifications are character. And that's something we need to look at very carefully as we think about leadership. Moving on in the text, for Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen because their speech and their deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. For the look on their faces, witnesses against them. They proclaim their sin like Sodom, and they do not hide it. Woe to them, for they have brought evil on themselves. Why has society collapsed? Because Jerusalem has stumbled, the root cause. They've defied his glorious presence. Their speech, their deeds are deliberately provocative. Now, it's one thing to sin in secret, and you can say the advantage to sinning in secret is that at least there's a conscience, there's a recognition, I did something wrong. But here, they're just sinning openly. They're proclaiming their rebellion against God. No conscience there, no sense of right and wrong. And so we live in a society of gay pride month. As one person put it, you take one of the seven deadly sins and apply it to one of the most abhorrent sins known to man. And again, That's a problem within the church, within the evangelical church. And I don't here throw stones. I'm talking about people like ourselves, people who love the Lord, who believe in the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedon Creed, all of the doctrines. But yet, there are churches who would sign up to all of those that believe in same-sex marriage. Again, a megachurch in Seattle, which was belonging to an evangelical solid denomination, but was removed from the denomination because they were performing same-sex marriages. That was one of two churches that denomination kicked out. And it's a very popular major church in Seattle. So we find the rot here too. In 10 and 11, we have a wisdom poem there. Tell the righteous it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their deeds. Woe to the wicked, it shall be ill with them. For what his hands have dealt out shall be done to him. Sort of the, you get what you pay for, you reap what you sow, or you can say the boomerang of sin. It comes around and bites you. but also a promise of hope for the righteous. In this passage, just a little tiny glimmer of hope. We'll see more this afternoon, Lord willing. But the promise amidst the judgment, amidst the collapse of society, it will be well with the righteous. And then we move on to the last section of our text, God's judgment of the leaders. He turns to the present leaders and proclaims his judgment on them. My people, infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them. Oh, my people, your guides mislead you. They have swallowed up the course of your paths. Again, we have that you're being led by people who don't know what they're doing, people who are experienced, infants and babes and women. Now, comment on the women here. He's either talking about possibly domineering wives, like Jezebel, which we have been talking about. Pastor Don has preached about her. And I'm sure we'll hear more about Jezebel as the months go on. Or maybe queen mothers, like Athaliah. The real people behind the throne who manipulate their husbands. Or possibly what Isaiah is saying is just inexperienced. And due to the time, women weren't normally leaders, and they wouldn't work their way up becoming judges and elders and gaining that experience that made them able to be rulers of a nation. So either way, they're ruled by those who aren't legitimate rulers. They're either inexperienced, or they're just not the ones that have been selected that are appropriate to be rulers. their guides, the people who were supposed to take them, where they're supposed to go, mislead them. They remove the signposts along the path. For example, a climbing guide is supposed to be able to say, well you go up here and you go over there and you see that crack, you go up that crack and you go over here. Well, their guides mislead them. Go up that crack. No, that's not the right crack. That's the crack that ends halfway up and you're stuck on the cliff. The Lord will enter into judgment with the elders and princes of his people. It is you who have devoured the vineyard. The spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people? By grinding the face of the poor, declares the Lord God Almighty. So the vineyards were to be left, only partly tended for the poor to go out and to glean. This was, in God's economy, the way to take care of the poor. But the leaders here, they strip them clean. They've devoured the vineyards, they've devoured the means of sustenance for the poor. So what belongs, what should be for the poor is instead in their houses. In modern terms, we could say a rising Gini coefficient. They've plundered the poor, leaving them with nothing and crushing them or grinding them. But just as a side note, mention a vineyard as anticipation of chapter five, which is the vineyard of the Lord and the Lord destroyed. It's sort of one of those bridges or hints of what's to come. So the rulers who are supposed to take care of the poor, who are supposed to serve the people, instead robbed people, instead don't take care of the poor, but instead gain power for themselves. The very opposite of what they're supposed to do. We know that the mark of a moral society is its concern for the poor. We can see that in Leviticus 19, 10, Deuteronomy 15, 7 through 11. And so we can ask ourselves, how well does our society measure up to that standard? And a more pointed question, one that I wrestle with is, how does our church or ourselves meet this? How do we treat the poor? Remembering that in John the Baptist, one of the fruits of repentance was taking care of the poor. Let him who have two cloaks give one. That's a question, frankly, that always bothers me. And I'm not comfortable with asking that question, how do I, how do the churches I belong to take care of the poor? And I suppose in a way that's a, I want to be in that situation of being bothered by it because it's sort of the Lord's reminding me of that obligation. And there's maybe a lot that could be said there. I haven't quite figured it out myself, but I hope that as you sit and you read this, you think about that question yourself. What's our obligation in our society as a church and as individuals to the poor? We don't want to find ourselves in the situation of those who help the plundering of the poor. A few concluding observations on this text here. God raises up leaders, he removes leaders. God will also severely judge sin in our society and sin among his people. I've said many times to friends, the church is a mess. God will clean up the church. It may not be pretty. In fact, it's probably not gonna be pretty, but God will judge his church. He will clean up his church. And again, that's, I'm almost repeating something that's been said from the pulpit many times. Judgment begins in the house of the Lord. God may take away from us those things that we unduly trust in. You know, we as people who, Fallen people, men of depravity, people of depravity, we're forever putting our trust in the wrong things. And God may take those things away from us. In one sense, that's a punishment. We all hate to have things that we cherish and enjoy taken away from us. But it's a punishment of mercy and it's a blessing because that brings us to a point of repentance. It brings us to The point of seeing who we really can trust in. And I say this, apply this as a church, national church, as a local church, and as a personal question. God may take away from each one of us, or us as a small local church, things that we cherish, but things which we unduly trust in. And that's both a punishment and it's a blessing. We conclude with the exhortation that Isaiah concludes with, or we started with, really. Stop regarding man in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he? The question is, which Isaiah presents, who can you trust in? Christ and Christ alone. Other things may be taken away, will be taken away. Christ will never be taken away. Christ is the only one that we can depend upon and he is the one that we must put our trust and our hope in.