Tag Archives: Isaiah

The end of Isaiah….

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Yesterday, I preached our 79th and final sermon on the Old Testament book of ISAIAH, using the final 2 paragraphs as our text. ISAIAH is such a glorious book — this was a moving experience for me.

During the week I finished reading several of the commentaries I had been using for these past two years. Perhaps the finest of them all is Alex Motyer’s IVP commentary on ISAIAH. His closing words are indicative of the detail and passion of his work:

Isaiah by James Tissot (1836–1902)

Isaiah by James Tissot (1836–1902)

“There is a grandeur about ISAIAH not found elsewhere even in the most majestic of the rest of Scripture, a majesty full of glory and of solemnity, plain alike in the revelation vouchsafed to him and the language in which he was inspired to express it. But with the grandeur went a stern resoluteness, that if the glory does not win us to the life of obedience, if visions of the coming King, the sin-bearing Servant and the liberating Anointed Conqueror will not suffice, then maybe the unmistakably horrible rewards of disobedience [see 66:24] will drive our wayward hearts to tremble at the word of the Lord.”

Thank God for His Word.
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God is waiting…

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Amazing grace to us is preceding by an amazing God! A wonderful truth about the character of our God is expressed in Isaiah 30:18, the text from my sermon yesterday —

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.
(esv)

Waiting? Why would God wait to be gracious to His people? A good answer is found in the writing of a great baptist divine of nineteenth century England, John Gill —

[The LORD] waits till the set time comes to arise and have mercy on them; he has taken up thoughts and resolutions of grace and favor concerning them, and has fixed the time when he will show it; and he is, as it were, panting and longing after it, as the word used signifies, until it is up; he waits for the fittest and most proper time to show mercy; when things are brought to the worst, to the greatest extremity, and when his people are brought to a sense of their danger, and of their sins, and to repentance for them, and to see their need of his help and salvation, and to implore it, and to depend upon him for it; then, in the mount of difficulty, and in the most seasonable time, does the Lord appear; and hereby the mercy is the sweeter to them, and
his grace is the more magnified towards them: so he waits to be gracious to his people….
(emphasis added)

If you see your need of Him now, you need not wait. Flee to Christ Jesus the Lord for grace and mercy. There is no safer nor sweeter refuge to be found.

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P.S. — I must share this too: we have a report that after the service yesterday, a young mother who has been attending CPCC for just a few months, prayed to confess her sins and profess faith in Christ Jesus as her Savior and Lord. PTL for this new believer! Amazing grace! Amazing God!