Isaiah chapter 52, brethren. Whenever you ask somebody how they were saved, the first word out of their mouth
usually tells you who they attribute all the glory to. You ask somebody
how they were saved and they'll say something along this line. Well, I decided one day to give
my heart to Jesus. The Lord says in the scriptures
that your heart was dead, corrupt. You did not have a heart to give
to the Lord Jesus. Or people will say something
like this, well, it had gone a while and I decided it was
time to turn over a new leaf and I accepted Jesus. The question is not for you to
accept Him, it's if He will accept you. The Lord's child is going to
say something along these lines. The Lord sent the Gospel to me. And the Lord found me continually
blaspheming His name. I was listening to false Gospels. I imagined a false God. I was
continually, every day, blaspheming His name. And the Lord showed
me mercy. The Lord came with the gospel
and spoke into my heart and revealed himself in me. You see, the person
that begins with I, I did this, I did that, they're attributing
the glory to their salvation to themselves. They're saying
that the ultimate reason they're saved is because of what they
did. God's child wants Christ to have
all the glory. We know we have nothing, nothing
in which to glory. We see our Lord's word here in
Isaiah 52. And he said, in the day that
I come to my people, they're going to know it's me. They're
going to know it's me that's speaking. they're gonna know
I'm the one speaking and I'm speaking to them personally.
And when he does that, that's when we say verse seven, how
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings
of good, that publisheth salvation, that saith and design, thy God
reigneth. We've seen from Psalm 137, the
sorrow that the children of Israel were in when they were in captivity
in Babylon. It was great sorrow. They were
in captivity. They said, by the rivers of Babylon
we sat down and yeah, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged
our harps on the willows and they carried us away captive
requiring of us a song. They said, how can we sing? How
can we be full of mirth and sing a song of Zion when we're in
a strange land? Then one day a messenger is seen.
Here he comes. And they see this messenger coming
across the mountains. A picture, a cloud of dust, and
they see this figure drawing closer. And they can hear, but
they can't understand what he's saying. And he draws a little
closer, and he draws a little closer, and they hear him declare. Verse one, awake, awake, put
on thy strength, O Jerusalem. Put on thy beautiful garments,
O Jerusalem, the holy city. They hear the messenger say,
verse two, shake yourself from the dust, arise, sit down, O
Jerusalem, loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive
daughter of Zion. Thus saith the Lord, you sold
yourselves for nothing, You've been redeemed without money,
without your contribution whatsoever. That's the state of all sinners
as we come into this world. We're in bondage, and it's far
worse than it was for Israel. Theirs was just a physical, political
captivity. Ours is a spiritual captivity.
No life, no understanding, aliens from the Commonwealth of Israel,
of God's people. We didn't know anything about
His covenants. We were cut off from God, without hope, had no
life, had nothing. And then one day, the Lord sends
the gospel. And we can hear it, but we can't
understand it. And then the Lord begins to speak
in our heart and He makes you to see you have no ability in
you to free yourself, you have no ability to save yourself,
no ability to keep His law. There's none righteous, no not
one. None. There's none that understandeth. There's none that seeketh God.
We're all together become unprofitable. We're all together going out
of the way. There's none that doeth good,
no, not one. And the Lord makes that so personal
to you, and you see, that's me. That is me. And the Lord shows
you His holy law, how holy, just, and good His law is. And when
He makes you see Him, You see how holy and how just and how
good our Savior is. And you fall down at his feet
and you ask him, Lord, please, please be merciful to me, the
sinner. And how Lord delights to show
mercy. And he said, it's because I am
the prophet. I'm the one who came across the
mountains to you. I'm the one who came and spoke
in your heart. And in the day when I speak in
the heart of my people, they shall know my name. They shall know it's me. Behold,
it's the Lord that does speak. And when that happens, you stop
glorying in self then, and you start praising your Redeemer,
and you start saying, oh, how beautiful are his feet. that came across the mountains
to me and revealed Himself in my heart." Oh, how beautiful. Now, I know that the Apostle
Paul, when he was speaking about that verse in verse 7, he applied
that to gospel preachers. Because God's going to save through
the gospel. Christ is going to save through the gospel. He said,
Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
But how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?
And how shall they believe of him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without
a preacher? And how shall they preach except they be sent? As
it's written, how beautiful are the feet of them, Paul said,
are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring
glad tidings of good. It pleased God to save through
the foolishness of preaching. And when he sends a gospel preacher
or brings you under the preaching of the gospel and saves you,
their feet are beautiful to you. Our preachers' feet are beautiful
to us because the Lord used them to reveal himself to us. But
in our text, the Lord just said, in the day I speak, my people
are going to know it's I that's speaking. And the very next word
says, how beautiful are the feet of him. You see, why is that
important? Because Christ is the prophet.
He's the high priest. He is the king. He's the advocate,
the intercessor, the substitute, the lamb. He's everything. And just as necessary, he gets
all the glory as being the prophet. I said to you, you ask sinners
how they were saved and they'll start most of the time with the
word I. I did this, I did that, I did the other. Ask false preachers
how there's so many people sitting in their congregation. Well,
I learned how to take the offense out of the gospel. I learned
how to speak it so that whoever hears it, they can hear it as
being truth to them. Well, that's not the truth then.
But what does God's preacher say? He did it. It's his feet. He came and he
preached. See, he's the prophet. He gets
the glory from his preacher and he gets the glory from those
he saves through his preacher. So I want you to see this. I
want you to get this one point that when the gospel comes in
saving power to a sinner, It is Christ himself speaking into
the heart of that sinner. He does the work. And that's
how come we behold his feet are beautiful. His feet. Now, let's
begin here first of all and see that this is speaking of Christ
himself. Verse six said, therefore my
people shall know, Isaiah 52, six, therefore my people shall
know my name, therefore they shall know in that day that I
am he that does speak, behold it is I. How beautiful upon the
mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that
publisheth peace. How beautiful are Christ's feet
upon the mountains. Can't you say that? That's what
the bride said in Song of Solomon. Song of Solomon 2.8, the voice
of my beloved Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping
upon the hills. She's speaking of Christ. That's
why I know this text speaks of Christ. How beautiful. Oh, that's
the voice of my beloved. He comes leaping upon the mountains.
Christ's feet are beautiful upon Mount Moriah. His feet are beautiful
upon Mount Moriah. That's where we see him as Jehovah
Jireh. I said to you last time, when
I'm going up that mountain and Abraham's going up to offer up
Isaac, I said, here's the wood, here's the fire, where's the
lamb? Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb.
And we look and see Christ, Jehovah Jireh, the lamb God's provided,
the lamb who's God himself. Christ feed a beautiful on Mount
Sinai. They're beautiful on the outside. The law begins to, when
he makes you hear the law, you begin to hear that law say, you're
guilty. Everything the law says, all 600 plus laws, you've broken
them all. Every one of them. And you hear
that, and you begin to realize, this is so, I've broken the whole
law of God. But then he turns you to Christ
to say, this is why he came, to honor his own law. the one
who gave the law came down and was made under the law to redeem
his people out from under the law to bring us up to where he
was before he came. Isn't that a wonderful Savior?
His feet are beautiful on the mountains. Beautiful on Mount
Sinai. His feet are beautiful upon that
exceedingly high mountain. Remember that mountain? That's
where the devil took him. After our Lord was baptized,
He went out into the wilderness and was up in an exceedingly
high mountain, Scripture said, and the devil tempted him. The
devil tempted him. You know, if somebody doubts
who you are and who you claim to be, that's offensive to us. And the devil did that with our
Savior. He said to him, if you're the Son of God, cast yourself
down off this pinnacle. Lord, he'll save you. If you're
the son of God, command these stones be made bread. He hadn't
eaten in 30 or 40 days. Command these stones be made
bread if you're really the son of God. He sold him all the kingdoms
of the world in one instant and said, if you just bow down and
worship me, I'll give you all of this. You know how our Lord
answered him every single time? Our Lord said, it's written.
It's what my father says. It's written. And the devil couldn't
find anything in him. It takes so much less for the
devil to tempt me and you and for us to fall. So much less. When you see Christ on that exceedingly
high mountain overcome the devil, that's when he gives you faith
to look to him only and you overcome one way by him. By Him. We overcome by faith. That means we overcome by Christ.
By Christ. Oh, His feet are beautiful. His
feet are beautiful on the mount where He preached that sermon
on the mount. I love that picture. Our Lord, it says He went up
into the mount and He sat down and He began to teach the people.
That's what our Savior's done right now. He's gone up into
the mount And he's seated because the works are finished. And he's
sending forth this gospel and he's the one preaching it to
his people and in the hearts of his people. That's what he's
doing right now. Oh brethren, his feet are so beautiful to
his people. His feet are beautiful up on
the mountain called Mount Gerizim. That's where he converted the
woman by the well. We find ourselves to be just
like her. She said, behold a man that told
me everything I ever did. We had all these works that we
thought were good and Christ came and told us about every
one of them and said, they're all sin. We had all these secret
things that we had hidden that nobody knew about but us. And
he come and told us, it's all sin. but oh, he gave us that living
water. That spirit of him come, the
spirit of life came into us and he gave us the living water and
caused us to believe him. Peter, beautiful. Beautiful upon
the mountains. Brother Ben just read about him
going up into the Mount of Olives. Verse before that, in the end
of the last chapter before that, it says, they all went home to
their house and he went up into the Mount of Olives. What did
he do there? He went up there alone to pray.
We're all here taking care of our houses. Where's he? He's in the Mount of Olives interceding
for his people. You know why you believe? You
know why his people are brought to believe? Because he interceded
for them. That's why. That's why, listen,
let me show you, go to Hebrews 7, I want you to see this. Hebrews
7, the reason you believe, if you believe it's not because
of something you did, you don't have any reason of glory, you're
a dead sinner. If you believe it's because He
interceded for you, look here, read this, Hebrews 7 verse 25
says, He is able also to save them to the uttermost
that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession
for them. You see, he didn't start making
intercession for you because you believed on him. He didn't
start making intercession for you because you decided to try
to come to God by him. The reason you believe him and
the reason You see you can't come to God in any other but
Him is because He interceded for you. He said, I'll pray the
Father and He'll send the Holy Spirit and the Spirit will reveal
your sin, He'll reveal I'm the righteousness of God, He'll reveal
I've settled judgment for my people. That's what He does.
You believe because He interceded for you. Oh, that He feed a beautiful
amount of olives. His feet are beautiful upon the
mount of transfiguration. That's where we see His glory.
You know, while we were dead, and if you were religious, and
even if you weren't, you know, the irreligious and the religious,
they all see Christ the same. He's just a man. He's just a
man. Just like any other man. Oh,
He's not a sinner like us, but He's just a man. But when He
reveals Himself through the Gospel, we see Christ transfigured in
His glory. That's the first time you see
His glory. And when you see His glory, you see Him as the only
begotten Son of God full of grace and truth. You see Him in His
glory. Just like, you know, when they
saw Him and they thought, let's build a... Peter said, we're
going to build one altar for Elijah, one altar for Abraham,
and one for the Lord. spoke, there came a light and a voice and they hit
their face. And the Lord spoke from heaven.
He said, this is my son. You believe him. Don't you be
building altars for somebody else. You fall down and worship
him. When they look back up, they
didn't see anybody but the Lord Jesus. That's what he does when
he reveals his glory. You had all these idols you was
wanting to give some glory to, and number one being me, myself,
and I. And when the Lord speaks, and
you see him in his glory, that's when you look up for the first
time. Before, you was looking down
on him. Then you start looking up to him. You give Him all the glory, all
the glory. Oh, but brethren, Christ's feet
are beautiful on Mount Calvary. That's where He went and suffered
for His people. He turns you to the cross and
you behold, right there on that cross, you see Him. visage marred more than any man,
bearing soul agony that we can't even comprehend. You see Him
there and you see that's just what you deserve. And that's
just what you'd have received if God hadn't just chosen you
freely by His grace. And if Christ hadn't entered
covenant to come and save His people from our sin, and if He
hadn't gone to that cross and been willing and laid down His
life to be made sin for us and to bear that curse in place of
His people. You see right there, that's my
salvation. That's my justification. His
perfect obedience and His perfect faithfulness in His heart, even
while He was in those hours of darkness, that's my holiness.
It was by Him fulfilling the will of God for me that I'm sanctified. And in the process, He justified
me. Oh, and when He speaks that word
in your heart, you know it's Him. And you see Him. And His
feet are beautiful on Mount Calvary. And His feet are beautiful in
Mount Zion. You see Him there now seated. The work's finished. And you see that right there,
just like Paul said in Colossians 3.1, that's my life. My life
is right there, hid with God in Christ. That's my life. Really and truly, that's my life.
That's why Christ said, he that liveth and believeth in me, though
he die, he'll never die. Why? Because my life is at God's
right hand. and that's where his feet are
beautiful. In every mount we behold Christ, we cry out in
the joy of faith and we say, how beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth
peace. Now secondly, not only is Christ
himself beautiful, his feet, but it's the message he preaches
to us. I'm gonna be brief here. It says, verse seven, he brings
good tidings. If there was anything that was
required of you, it wouldn't be good tidings. But Christ comes
and declares he's done it all and it's good tidings. Listen
to what all he's done, Isaiah 61.1, listen to how he does it
all. Listen to this now, Isaiah 61.1.
The spirit of the Lord God's upon me because the Lord hath
anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He sent me to
bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim liberty to the captives,
the opening of the prison of them that are bound, to proclaim
the acceptable year of the Lord, the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn
in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for
mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness,
that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting
of the Lord, that he might be glorified. Christ said, the Lord
sent me to do all this. That's why it's good tidings.
He sent me to preach these good tidings and to work this work
through that message. It's the message of full forgiveness
of all our sins, brethren. He said, as far as the east is
from the west, so forth he removed our transgressions from us. I, even I, am he that blotteth
out thy transgression for mine own sake and will not remember
thy sin. That's why this message, verse
7, is Christ publishing peace to us. You couldn't make peace
with God. You hear men say this, well,
I decided to make my peace with God. There's another example
of a man telling you where the glory lies. Ultimately, I did. I made my peace with God. No,
somebody beat you to it. Christ did it for his people. He's the Prince of Peace, the
Prince of Salem. He gets the glory. God was in
Christ reconciling His people to Himself. We saw from Colossians
1, having made peace through the blood of His cross, He reconciled
His people to Himself. He did it. He did it in the body
of His flesh so that He could present you holy and unblameable
and unapprovable in His sight. Christ publishes salvation. Verse
7 says He publishes salvation. He doesn't tell you about a salvation
that depends upon you doing. He comes and tells you about
a salvation that's done. He did it. It's finished. That's
the good news. Anything dependent on you would
be salvation. The message doesn't say Jonah
didn't come out. You think about Jonah. He's running
from God. He's the preacher God sent him to preach to Nineveh.
And he don't want to go to Nineveh and he's running from God. Would
a believer sin? There's one right there. Running
from God, who is supposed to be preaching Christ. And the
Lord put him on a ship and put him out in the ocean and sent
a hurricane out there. And he was brought to the place
where he knew the only way there's going to be peace is for me to
die. And they cast him overboard.
And God provided a fish to swallow him up. And when he was in the belly
of that fish, he began to pray to God. And God put him, that
fish bit him out on that shore. And Jonah said, oh yeah, salvation's
partly by God, partly by me. That'd be stupid, wouldn't it?
Utterly stupid to say something like that. No, he said, salvations
of the Lord. You've been brought there. You've
been brought there. His name is Jesus. For He shall
save. his people from their sin. The only part you got in that
is being the sinner who is passively been saved by the Lord. That's
it. From election to redemption to
regeneration to preservation to resurrection, to glorification. It is all of the Lord. It is
all of the Lord. And any preacher you hear preaching
who puts one aspect of that in your hand is telling you a bald-faced
lie. And you will die if you believe
that message for eternity. Christ's message to Zion is this,
verse 7. Thy God reigneth. Listen. God doesn't try. Man's false
God tries. He's trying. He's trying to get
his message across to you. If you just cooperate with him,
just let him. That's a little worthless, helpless idol that
can't save anybody. The God I'm telling you about
and the God that Christ is going to speak about in the heart the
true God who reigns. He does what he will, when he
will, with whom he will, and passes by whom he will because
he's God and you're not and I'm not. He can do what he wants
to. Now we're going to have to be brought there. We're going
to have to be brought to that God and bow to that God and realize
that's the true God. He don't owe me nothing. He don't
owe me a thing. If you did everything you ought
to do, Scripture says, you don't deserve a reward. You just did
what you ought to have done. We fall on our face and say,
to God be the glory. This is the God who reigns. This
is the God who, everybody he loves, he saves. That's the only
way he could say, I've loved you with an everlasting love. It does not change. That's the
only way Paul could say, Nothing shall ever be able to separate
us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. This world's
God loves today, but if you don't trust Him and you don't make
the ultimate decision for Him, then tomorrow He'll hate you
and throw you into hell. That's not the God of this book. If
you worship in that God, you worship a liar, a false God,
a lie. The God of this book, if He loves
His people and He loves them, He loves His people everlastingly
and He saves everybody He loves. He will not lose one. This is
the God who actually came down and took flesh and fulfilled
the law for His people and saved His people from the curse. When
He cried, it's finished, He was saying, I did it. I accomplished
it. When they were in that mountain
of transfiguration, He heard Abraham and Elijah speaking of
the death that He should accomplish. What do they call it? I'm skipping
my mind right now. the departure he should accomplish. I forget exactly the word, but
anyway, he accomplished it because he reigned. And when he comes
in this message and he comes speaking to that heart, to your
heart, when you read back there in Isaiah 52 and you read there
in verse 6, he doesn't say, my people might know my name. They
might know in that day that I'm speaking. See, if it was up to
you and it took your cooperation, Then that's how it'd have to
read, but it don't say that. It says, they shall. They shall. Why? Because this is the God
who reigns. You want a God that might save
you tomorrow, but tomorrow might lose you? Is that you want a
God like that? I don't want a God like that. I know something about
me. I need a God that can save to the uttermost, because if
He don't, I know I'll perish. I need the God who reigns. Well,
that's the God that we're talking about. Rejoice greatly, O daughter
of Zion. Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem.
Behold, thy king cometh unto thee. That's what a king does.
He reigns. Your king comes to you. He's
just. And oh, bless God, he's lowly.
He's nothing like natural man thinks. They thought he was going
to come on a mighty stallion. He came on a lowly ass's coat. They think that He's going to
come because they built a big cathedral and they were doing
everything just right and they play enough stanzas of just as
I am and they beg and plead and they come down the aisle. His
thoughts are not our thoughts. He saves through the foolishness
of preaching. The message is foolish to the
world because it gives man no glory whatsoever and gives him
all the glory and offends natural man or it's offensive to natural
man. But that's the message through
which he saves. The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver,
the Lord is our King. He will save us. He reigns. Oh brethren, when the Son of
Man shall come in His glory and all the holy angels with Him,
then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory. And He'll gather
the nations and He'll separate them one from the other and He'll
put the sheep on His right hand and the goats on His left. And
the King is going to say to them on His right hand, You bless
to my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation
of the world. He said, blessed are those servants
whom the Lord, when he cometh, shall find watching. I say to
you, he shall gird himself. Think about this now. The king. We're so full of pride and sin,
we can't even enter into this. We can't enter into being where
there is an absence of sin and pride, the king said, Christ
the king said, I will come forth and gird myself and sit you down
at my table and I will serve you. See, to be greatest in the
kingdom of heaven is to be the least and serve. That's who our king is. That's
who our king is. I pray as I'm preparing, I pray
that the Lord will bless the message and speak and preach
it. I pray he'll be the preacher.
That's what I pray more than anything. When I'm here walking
around, that's what I'm praying in my heart. Lord, please, please
preach the gospel to us today. It's a humbling message. It's
going to take Him speaking because He's going to show us we're the
sinner and He's the Savior. But He grants repentance and
He only does it. Only Him can do it. Makes you
repent from everything about yourself. He grants you faith
to cast all your care on Him. And He delights to show mercy.
And in that day and every time thereafter, When we hear the
gospel and we really hear it in our heart, we know who's speaking.
It's Christ speaking. And every time we say how beautiful
upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings,
that publisheth peace, that sayeth, that publishes salvation, that
says design, thy God reigneth. I pray that our prophet has spoken
to you this morning I pray that He'll continue to. That's our
only hope. Father, we thank You for Your
Word. Oh Lord, please speak in our hearts. Please speak in our
hearts. Save us from us. In Christ's
name we ask it. Amen.