Isaiah chapter 40. I try to be
reminded often of the work the Lord has put in
my hand to do. So I try to read these verses,
and I pray He's giving me a message for you today from this. Isaiah 40, verse 1. We'll be
looking at verses 3 through 5, but we'll read verses 1 through
8. Comfort ye my people, saith your
God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,
and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity
is pardoned. For she hath received of the
Lord's hand double for all her sins. All our sins have been
removed as far as the east is from the west. and we've been
made the righteousness of Christ. We receive double for all of
our sins. Verse 3, the voice of Him that
crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make
straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall
be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and
the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. and
the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall
see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken." The
voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the
goodness thereof is as of the flower of the field. The grass
withereth, the flower fadeth. All of our consistency, our steadiness
like grass, our uniformity. We're steady. We're solid. And
all of our flowery aspects, little things that shine here and there,
what we think is fruit. The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it. Surely
the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth, But the word of our Lord God shall stand forever." Before
Christ made himself known in his public ministry in this earth,
he sent a messenger to preach the gospel. He declared that
Christ's arrival, when Christ enters into These
earthly bodies that He bought, that He purchased, each one He's
redeemed by His blood. He does so by the proclamation,
by the preaching of the gospel. That's how He enters His people.
It says there in verse 3, "...the voice of Him that crieth in the
wilderness, prepare you the way of the Lord. Make straight in
the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and all the crooked
shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. And the glory
of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall sit together,
for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." This is His means. Why? He said so. The mouth of
the Lord of hosts has spoken. Let's turn over to Exodus chapter
19. What is that voice going to cry?
That all flesh is grass. Everything that we have we think
is good is going to be burned up on that final day. Exodus
19, I referenced this to you this morning when we looked at
1 Peter. We'll take a look at it now. Malachi told us, he said, do
you remember The Lord's Law, that's what we read in Malachi
4. Exodus 19 verse 3, And Moses went up to God, and the Lord
called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to
the house of Jacob, and tell all the children of Israel, ye
have seen what I did unto the Egyptians and how I bear you
on eagles' wings and brought you unto myself." Every one of
those in that political nation Israel, that physical nation,
they saw what the Lord did. They were eyewitnesses to the
miracle of Him pulling them out of Egypt, Him saving every one
of them. Now, therefore, if If ye will obey my voice indeed
and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure
unto me above all people, for all the earth is mine. And ye
shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These
are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.'
And Moses came and called for the elders of the people and
laid before their faces all these words which the Lord had commanded
him. And all the people answered together and said, All that the
Lord hath spoken, we will do. And Moses returned the words
of the people unto the Lord. The Lord's getting ready to give
them all of His laws. I'm going to lay it all down
for you. And He gives them an if-then statement for the people that
attend the computers. If you do this, if you obey the
voice, then you're going to be a holy nation, be a kingdom of
priests unto me. Turn over to Exodus 31. All these
trips here from Exodus 19 to Exodus 31. All these trips up
and down the mountain. Getting these commandments. Laws
about servants. Laws about murder, about property.
The Lord laid out how to perform all the feasts. About God's protection. He said, I'll make an angel go
before you. the ark, the candlestick, the tabernacle, everything about
that tabernacle, how to make it, all the colors of the fabric
used, and the priesthood, and their garments that they wore,
the bells and tassels, every bit of it is a picture of Christ.
All of it. He's given all this to Moses
for these people. That breastplate and that robe,
how to appoint all them, and finally he gave them the rules
of the Sabbath. Last thing he gave Moses. What
a true rest. Moses came down with two tablets
of testimony. Look here in Exodus 31 verse
18. Hold on. Exodus 31, 18. And he gave unto Moses, when
he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two
tablets of testimony. Tablets of stone written with
the finger of God. He just gave these to Moses.
Moses is about to make his way down. They're done talking. Chapter
32, verse 1. And when the people saw that
Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered
themselves together under Aaron and said unto him, Up, make us
gods, which shall go before us, for this Moses, the man that
brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we want not What has
become of him? We don't know where he went.
We don't know what happened to him. Make us some gods. Now,
this is that same people there in Exodus 19 that said, Oh, every
word that the Lord spoke, we'll do every bit of it. We'll obey
all of it. The Lord made a conditional covenant
with a political nation of Israel, but they never obeyed his voice.
They never fulfilled their side of that covenant. Natural man
cannot do so. That's our spiritual lesson in
all this. We can't fulfill it. Can't do it. The Lord sent prophet
after prophet in the Old Testament, crying with the voice, saying
man can't. All flesh is grass. The Lord
will provide Himself a land. He established this covenant.
He's the one that's going to fulfill this covenant. Tell them
constantly, over and over and over. And they mocked and they
rejected the message of the Lord. Give us something else. Give
us a king. Give us some rules. Let us make
our own way. We can do this. But the Lord
said through Isaiah, there in our text, that He would send
one last messenger to them that's going to announce this Lamb slain
before the foundation of the world. It's going to announce
His arrival. So I'm going to send you one more messenger.
And we know that he's speaking of John the Baptist. Matthew
told us that. He said, In those days came John
the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, and saying,
Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is
he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying, The voice
of one cried in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord,
make his path straight. Matthew told us plainly. This
is who the Lord is talking about. This is the last of the Old Testament
prophets. John the Baptist. Remember, Zacharias,
turn over to Luke chapter 1, Zacharias and Elizabeth, Gabriel
came to Zacharias and said, you're going to have a child. And Zacharias
said, you sure? I'm pretty old. And he said,
you're going to be dumb until that child is revealed in your
hands, until this prophecy, until you hold it. You ain't going
to be able to speak. And Elizabeth gave birth to John,
and they said, everybody counseled her, they said, you call his
name Zacharias after his daddy. And she said, his name's gonna
be John. And they looked to Zacharias for a sign, because that's all
he could give them. He couldn't talk. And he wrote
down and said, his name's John. And then he spoke when he held
that baby. We'll look in verse 76, Luke
1, 76. Now Zachariah's been silent for
10 months, he's speaking. And thou, child, shalt be called
the prophet of the highest, for thou shalt go before the face
of the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation
unto his people by the remission of their sins. How sin put away,
verse 78, through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the
day spring from on high hath visited us to give light to them
that setteth in darkness, and in the shadow of death to guide
our feet. into the way of peace. This is
what every one of God's messengers do. They clear the way. They make the way clear. They
clear all the brush out of the way, get it down to a flat level
road and say, here's the king. It ain't the one that's talking
to you, it's the one they're pointing to. That's what Zacharias
said to his son, is this one's going to preach Christ to people.
What happens when God's messenger preaches Christ? Clearly implanted. Turn over to Malachi 3. Malachi chapter 3, we're going
to begin in verse 1. Behold, I will send my messenger,
and he shall prepare the way before me. He's going to be consistent. He's going to be an instrument
used by the Lord. And the Lord whom ye seek shall
suddenly come into his temple, even the messenger of the covenant
whom ye delight in. Behold, he shall come, saith
the Lord of hosts. The cross came to His earthly
temple, not made with hands. He came to a body that wasn't
made by Adam, by the seed of Adam. It was a holy, immaculate
conception. But that's how, through the preaching
of the gospel, through the messengers He sends, He suddenly comes into
His earthen temple. Suddenly comes that seed He's
planted in these earthen vessels. And that's how it goes, isn't
it? You hear the gospel preached over and over and over, and,
uh-huh, oh, I know these things. All of a sudden, one day, I remember
a man, well, he's a role model to me, he took notes incessantly. And I thought, that man knows,
that's a man of God right there. And one day, he set his notes
down. And tears started coming down his face. Suddenly, the
Lord entered his temple. That's where He abides inside
of His people, that's me and you. And back to our text there
in Isaiah 40. A voice came in the wilderness
crying to the desert. Verse 3, the voice came of Him
that crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our Lord. Why was John sent
to the wilderness and not into the temple? Why didn't he go
to downtown Jerusalem? Why didn't he go on the Christian
television show in front of everybody else? Put this in context. There in Isaiah's day, Israel
and Judah were taken captivity by Babylon. That harlot Babylon
came in and was running everything, wasn't it? John the Baptist's
day, nothing really had changed. Babylon, spiritually, was taken
over. They were rejecting God for that
earthly tabernacle. They had a physical building
they worshipped. They thought they were priests.
They thought they were the mediator between man and God. They had
their shiny robes. Everything looked right. Babylon
was there, was ruling. What's going on in this day?
Something different? Between Isaiah and John and us? This world's flooded with people
that think they're priests. They're flooded with people that
worship buildings, congregations, worship man. Nothing's changed. Babylon's still ruling, isn't
it? So, John's out in the wilderness. We're out in the wilderness,
ain't we? Just like Boaz's field, we're out in the corner of a
field, out in the country. So it is with all men by nature
in our day. The people to whom Christ sends His gospel, we are
the wilderness. Not just physically where we
are, not out here in Hamul. Each one of us individually.
If the Lord comes to us, we are the wilderness. We're the desert. We're a land of desolation. We're
a dry and thirsty land. He's that water of life that
comes to us suddenly. The King, Jesus Christ, is not
coming to a temple made by our hands, but by His Spirit, one
that He established. It was not made with hands. He's
not to be served by men who make themselves a holy priesthood
or that other men make a holy priesthood. He's served by those
that He's made holy priest and made them the righteousness and
holiness of Himself. He's the fulfiller of His own
covenant. He made the covenant. He fulfilled
the covenant. That makes Him just and the one
that justifies, doesn't it? He's the just and the justifier.
We may be surrounded with religion all our lives. We may have grew
up in any kind of church you can think of in this nation.
Or we may have grown up and never cracked open a Bible. Our shadow
may never hit a church door in our whole lives, but Christ the
King sends His ambassador through preaching of the gospel, and
He says, the King's here. And one day He makes us hear,
don't He? Gives us ears to hear Him. What does the Spirit of
God do through the gospel? Look here in verse 4, Isaiah
40 verse 4. Every valley shall be exalted
And every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked
shall be made straight, and the rough places plain." I'll give you a guess how many points
I got out of that verse. First one, every valley shall
be exalted. Every sinner with a broken and contrite heart. Somebody the Lord humbles, and
they are weighed down by their sin and their guilt. I mean,
in a valley, in that miry pit. Lord, help me. They're going
to be exalted. Why? Christ has preached to them.
He says to them, fear not. Your iniquities pardoned. You
need a righteousness to come before God, and guess what? My
Son's going to give it to you. That's going to be your righteousness.
Well, that'll exalt somebody in the valley, won't it? Every
mountain and hill shall be made low. Every self-righteous thought
we have Every falsehood. All of our high places. That's
what them Pharisees liked, didn't they? They liked the high seats
in the synagogue. We're way up here. Sometimes
I'll come down here and visit with the common folk, right?
Some men are mountains, but they're only dung hills. That's all we
are. And through the preaching of
the gospel, Christ cuts them down. He'll humble every one
of his servants, bring us from our lofty places and ideas of
who God is and what we are, and show us what we are and teach
us who God is. The crooked shall be made straight.
Henry always used to say that. He said, you want to show somebody
a stick's crooked, just lay a straight one down next to it. And so I
don't pinpoint people I preach against, but I'll sure tell you
what a crooked doctrines out there by laying down the straight
doctrine. But that will happen in His people
too. All of our crookedness, our malice, our guile, all of
our hypocrisy. They say, well, I'm a Jew. I'm
the Lord's child. Guile. Well, I'm a Baptist. I was born a Baptist and been
a Baptist all my life. Hypocrisy. Envy and evil speaking,
that's all it is. Everything we think about ourselves.
We pretend we know God. We pretend we believe in God.
And we'll pretend we're righteousness. We'll speak high of ourselves
and low of everybody else. I'll let God on our mouth. The
Lord will preach another gospel, wipe it clean out of us. The rough place is made plain.
We're born with a stony, jagged heart, ain't we? He's going to
smooth that thing right out. He'll make it out of flesh, make
it soft, just like that. Not an old jagged rock. And the
other thing with that rough place made plain, that stumbling stone. There was a time Christ was jagged,
wasn't there? Oh, that's offensive. Oh, that
hurts. I want to steer clear of that.
When He reveals Himself to you through the preaching of His
Word, what do we do? Oh, that's a smooth stone. That's a sure
foundation that we're built on, isn't it? Precious cornerstone. Isaiah 40 verse 5, And the glory
of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. It says, And all the
glory of the Lord shall be revealed. This is what happens as the Gospel
is being preached. The glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ. When you behold the Lamb of God,
you behold the Lord God. You see, they're one and the
same, ain't they? Look here in verse 11. This ain't
from me. I can't convict. I've heard a
lot of preachers been asked over the years. You're awful steady. Boy, you're just calm in a storm.
You seem so comforted. Can you come talk to somebody
and comfort my grandma or comfort my brother or my sister? Can
you give them some of that? No, I can't. I can't convict
anybody of sin. If I did, it's a false conviction.
I can't give comfort to no one. I can tell you where comfort
can be found. Look at verse 11. He shall feed his flock like
a shepherd, and he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and
carry them in his bosoms, and shall gently lead those that
are with young. The Lord performs this. When
you see, if I just tell you who He is, and you see Christ, and
you see that He's God, and you see what He's accomplished for
His people, He's fed you. He's gathered you to hear this.
He carries you in His bosom. What a comfortable place to be
and He'll gently lead you. Anything I do won't be gentle.
That ain't my nature. I'm jagged and I know it. And
any gathering I do won't be, it'll only be temporary. Any comforting I do will only
be temporary, and any feeding I do will only be temporary.
But if I am used to the Lord, He'll effectually feed His people,
gather His people, care for His people, and lead His people.
He'll perform it. It says there in verse 5, all
flesh shall see it together. Every one of His elect is going
to see Christ. All of us, throughout time. We're
going to see the same one. We'll all see it as one in unity. He'll be taught of God in the
heart where he's planted that incorruptible seed. Christ is
the incorruptible seed. So that means that's no different
between Abraham, between Isaiah, between John the Baptist, between
John Giel, between you, between me, between anybody else to come
until the Lord's pleased to end this world. The heart's the same. We look to the same Savior because
we have the same God, don't we? in the temple that the Lord made
for Him to dwell in, in His people. He makes His chosen an eternal
generation. Makes us live forever. He makes
us a royal priesthood. He makes His possessed treasure
to be of great value. He makes us to behold the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Every one of us. All His flesh
will see. And what does this voice do?
We remember there in Exodus 19, it says, Now therefore, if you
will obey my voice, indeed, and keep my covenant. But we can't
do that. Like Malachi warned us, we remember that law, Moses.
I can't complete that law. Jesus Christ, the servant of
the Father, He heard the voice of His Father. The Father spoke
to Him and He said, My law must be honored. My justice must be
satisfied. My people must be redeemed. If
you obey my voice and keep my covenant, then he shall be a
peculiar treasure unto me above all people, for all the earth
is mine." The same thing the father proved that sinful men
could never do. The father said to his son, our
surety, our mediator, he said, do this. And the son heard his
voice and agreed and came and he fulfilled every word of that
covenant, every jot and tittle. How are we going to be made a
holy nation? Christ has to do it for us. God has to do it for
us. How are we going to be saved from that altar of sacrifice?
God has to provide himself a land. Because He's the messenger of
the covenant. When Christ the prophet speaks
through the voice of His messengers, through the Holy Spirit, He makes
us effectually obey His voice. He's our prophet. He's the one
that speaks to us. He's our priest. He intercedes for us, for the
throne of God. And He's our King. He rules and
reigns for us, doesn't He? And believing on Christ who fulfilled
the everlasting covenant, by believing on Him, we fulfill
the covenant. By faith in God, in Him, don't
we? The Lord said, if you do all
this, you obey my voice, you fulfill all this law, then you're
going to be a holy nation. You're going to be kings and
priests unto me. How are we going to do that? I can't keep it.
Believe on the one that did keep it. Look to Him. We read in Peter this morning,
Peter listed these things out of Exodus 19, and he said, you've
been made a holy nation, royal priesthood, and he said, now,
go forth and show the praises of the one that made you that
way. That's what we do. It says there at the end of Isaiah
40 verse 5, For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. That's
why all this comes to pass. It's not the doing or dying of
man. The Lord spoke it. Just as He
spoke this world into existence, just as He speaks to His children,
just as He'll speak and it'll be over one day and be burned
up. He said this is how He's going to do it. You see, John
the Baptist came forth because the mouth of the Lord said He
would. Did John the Baptist come? Sure
did, didn't he? Did he preach the gospel? Yes. Did all the Lord's apostles come
and go forth preaching the gospel? They absolutely do. Does his
messengers now go forth and tell the truth about God? They do.
Why? Are they that good? The Lord
spoke it. It came from His mouth. The second
thing here is as John the Baptist preached, all these things came
to pass through John because the mouth of the Lord was speaking.
It was His word through John's mouth. Over and over we hear
Him described there in the Gospels as the voice of one. The voice. You see there in verse 6, it
says, The voice said, Cry. And He said, What shall I cry?
But look up in verse 3. The voice of Him that crieth
in the wilderness. Well, that's the same word. Is that two different
people? No. The Lord's servant is just an
ambassador. An ambassador comes and speaks
on behalf of the one that sent him. And he speaks only the message
of the one that sent him. Let's look over to Isaiah 52,
just a couple pages. Isaiah 52. Look there in verse 6. The same voice
goes through all the Lord's prophets in the Old Testament. The same
voice was in John the Baptist, the same voice in the Apostles,
and the same voice is coming out of His messengers in this
day. Isaiah 52 verse 6, Therefore my people shall know my name.
Therefore they shall know in the day that I am He that doth
speak. We're going to know His name.
We're going to know His voice. Behold, it is I." How are we
going to learn that? Verse 7, how beautiful upon the
mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that
publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of good, that publishes
salvation, that saith undesigned, thy God reigneth. Thy watchman
shall lift up the voice. That's more than one watchman,
that's watchmen. They're going to lift up Christ
the voice, exalt Him. With the voice together shall
they sing. With Him they're going to sing.
For they shall see eye to eye when the Lord shall bring again
Zion. Those sent of God have one message. The same message
because they're used the same way. And they're in agreement.
Always have been, always will be. There's no bearing on who
the message is. It's always Christ. Now what
do we sing? What do we sing together? Verse 9. Break forth into joy,
sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem, you deserts, you
wildernesses. For the Lord hath comforted His
people, He hath redeemed Jerusalem. We say He's successful. It is
finished. He came and He accomplished what
He set forth to do. It's done. And we rest in Him. We sing His praises. He sends
forth His messenger crying, Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. But
in doing so, the Lord receives all the glory for effectually
comforting His people in their heart. Look here, just a page
over in Isaiah 51. Verse 3. Who is it that's going
to comfort us? Isaiah 51, 3. For the Lord shall comfort Zion,
He will comfort all her waste places, and He will make her
wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the
Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found
therein, thanksgiving and the voice of medley." The songs of
Christ, sang in His praises. We looked at Hebrews chapter
2 this morning. It says, For both he that sanctifieth
and they who are sanctified are all of one, for which cause he
is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy name
unto my brethren. Christ is going to preach effectually
to His people. In the midst of the church will
I sing praise unto thee. We're required to praise God
at all times and obey Him at all times. Christ, our Redeemer,
did. And He comes into the heart of
His people, into that incorruptible seed, and we sing the praises
of God through Him. We sing with the voice. Have
you heard His voice? Have you obeyed His voice? Are
you persuaded that that everlasting covenant was completely fulfilled
by Christ? He accomplished salvation to
the uttermost. If you have, if you do, rejoice
because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you. The Lord
spoke to you. Amen. Let's pray together.