Isaiah chapter 22 and verse 1. The burden of the valley of vision. What aileth thee now that thou
art wholly gone up to the housetops? Thou that art full of stirs,
a tumultuous city, a joyous city, thy slain men are not slain with
the sword, nor dead in battle. All thy rulers are fled together,
they are bound by the archers. All that are found in thee are
bound together, which have fled from far. Therefore said I, look
away from me, I will weep bitterly, labour not to comfort me, because
of the spoiling of the daughter of my people. For it is a day
of trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity by the Lord
God of hosts in the valley of vision, breaking down the walls,
and of crying to the mountains. And Elam bare the quiver with
chariots of men and horsemen, and Kir uncovered the shield. And it shall come to pass that
thy choicest valleys shall be full of chariots, and the horsemen
shall set themselves in a ray at the gate. And he discovered
the covering of Judah, and thou didst look in that day to the
armour of the house of the forest. Ye have seen also the breeches
of the city of David, that they are many, and ye gathered together
the waters of the lower pool. and ye have numbered the houses
of Jerusalem, and the houses have ye broken down to fortify
the wall. Ye made also a ditch between
the two walls for the water of the old pool, but ye have not
looked unto the maker thereof, neither had respect unto him
that fashioned it long ago. And in that day did the Lord
God of hosts call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness,
and to girding with sackcloth. And behold joy and gladness,
slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine.
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. and it was revealed
in mine ears by the Lord of hosts, surely this iniquity shall not
be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord God of hosts. Thus saith the Lord God of hosts,
go, get thee unto this treasurer, even unto Shebna, which is over
the house, and say, What hast thou here, and whom hast thou
here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulcher here? As he that
heweth him out a sepulcher on high, and that graveth an habitation
for himself in a rock. Behold, the Lord will carry thee
away with a mighty captivity, and will surely cover thee. he
will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a
large country. There shalt thou die, and there
the chariots of thy glory shall be the shame of thy Lord's house. And I will drive thee from thy
station, and from thy state shall he pull thee down. And it shall come to pass in
that day, that I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Helkei,
and I will clothe him with thy robe, and strengthen him with
thy girdle, and I will commit thy government into his hand,
and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and
to the house of Judah. And the key of the house of David
will I lay upon his shoulder, so he shall open and none shall
shut, and he shall shut and none shall open. And I will fasten
him as a nail in a sure place, and he shall be for a glorious
throne to his father's house. and they shall hang upon him
all the glory of his father's house, the offspring and the
issue, all vessels of small quantity, from the vessels of cups even
to all the vessels of flagons. In that day, saith the Lord of
hosts, shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be
removed and be cut down and fall, and the burden that was upon
it shall be cut off, for the Lord hath spoken it. Amen, may
the Lord bless to us this reading from his word. I'm not going
to make any reference to that verse 25 in particular in the
context of the nail in the sure place which is Eliakim. I believe that verse 25 is a
throwback to the announcement of the destruction of Shebna. and our thoughts today are going
to be in the context of Eliakim and the fact that he is a type
of the Lord Jesus Christ who is the true nail in a sure place. And in that context, the principal
message that I want us to take from our service today is the
dependability and the reliability and the trustworthiness of our
Lord Jesus Christ. We can depend and rely and trust
on Christ. That will, I hope, be our lesson. Our Lord Jesus Christ is likened
here in this passage by type to a nail in a sure place and
you can hang your soul on him. You can trust him with your most
precious possession and he will not disappoint you. We constantly
speak about faith and believing and trusting Christ. And this
little passage here in Isaiah chapter 22, this little passage
teaches us at the most basic, at the most fundamental level
of human need, Christ is reliable, Christ is dependable and Christ
is worthy of our trust. Isaiah has been given a distressing
vision. These burdens are burdens because
they are weighty, because they are distressing visions of other
nations and now even of his own nation, of Jerusalem and Judah,
his own city. And this really was a burden
to him. It led the prophet to weep and
to declare that he was comfortless as the Lord showed him what was
going to happen to Jerusalem, to his own people. It is called the burden of the
valley of vision. And it refers to Jerusalem because
Jerusalem lay in a valley surrounded by mountains. You'll remember
that the Lord in his own lifetime stood on the Mount of Olives
gazing over the city of Jerusalem in the valley below. And while
Jerusalem is sometimes spoken of as Mount Zion, it is because
it is there in a high plateau and yet it sits in a valley with
peaks around about it. And so it is the burden of the
valley of vision. And it is the valley of vision
here because in Jerusalem the Word of God was most fully and
completely displayed, revealed and fulfilled. From the very
time of Abraham on Mount Moriah, to the coming of Christ at Mount
Calvary. It is here in these mountains
and in this city that the vision of God has been most fully given."
So hence Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem as the Valley of Vision. And
in verses 1 to 14, just to give us a little bit of context, taken
with the previous chapter, which we've long ago forgotten, we
have this weighty and disturbing message of the destructive whirlwind
that is coming out of Babylon to engulf Duma and Arabia and
now Jerusalem. And despite warning the people
of Judah and Jerusalem, these same people have ignored
the Lord. And they've sought alliances
with other nations, they've sought protection from their neighbours,
and they've neglected to turn to the Lord. Even when the nations
on whom they leaned proved unreliable. The people simply made provision
for themselves by building up their walls, by digging out wells,
by making provision for their own protection, by going to their
own armories and stocking them up, thinking that, well, we'll
be able to outlast any siege that comes along. and they neglected
to turn to the Lord. They looked to themselves for
help and they neglected the Lord. The Lord called them to repentance
for this, but rather the people relished their own strength and
rejoiced in their own abilities. They said, let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we shall die. And they said that in verse 13,
in mockery of Isaiah, who was calling for repentance. They were saying, we'll enjoy
ourselves today and we'll worry about God another day. which
is of course effectively what so many people say today. I'll think about the needs of
my soul some other time. First, I'll enjoy life and I'll
enjoy the pleasures of this world. I'll go my own way, I'll do my
own thing. There will be time to think about
religion and think about God. But here Isaiah relates perhaps
one of the most fearsome statements in the Bible. In verse 14 he
says, And it was revealed in mine ears by the Lord of hosts,
Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die,
saith the Lord God of hosts. Let us hear that, that condemnation. Let us hear that accusation and
take heed of it. Let us take the opportunity to
deal with the Lord when God's mercy appears to us in the gospel. If we neglect it, if we turn
our back upon it, imagining that there will be another time, another
day, another place, Perhaps the Lord will never bring us back
to this time when the gospel is preached in our ear. If the
Lord withdraws his spirit, our sins will never be forgiven,
even till the day of our death. So much for these early verses
of this chapter. Our main thoughts today are to
be with this man Shebna, or rather with Eliakim, his successor,
whom Isaiah identifies as God's servant. God's servant who will
assume Shebna's office and duties. And we should not, perhaps, just
as we get into these verses from verse 15 on, we should not pass
over the burdensomeness duty that Isaiah had from God even
in delivering these words to Shebna. Isaiah was to personally
confront and inform Shebna of God's judgment. Shebna was an
important and powerful man in Jerusalem and yet Isaiah has
access to him and he boldly and faithfully goes before him and
brings him God's message of judgment. The Lord's preachers must be
bold to speak God's truth even if through fear of man the flesh
recoils from doing so. Shebna was told that Eliakim
the son of Hilkiah would replace him would wear his robe and fulfil
the task of father to the people and governor of the kingdom. Roles that Shebna ought to have
performed but did not. Eliakim, son of Hilkiah, undoubtedly
was a real person and we read about him in 2 Kings, for example. But when the Lord removed Shebna,
and Eliakim took his office, and Eliakim faithfully served
the people, it is not principally Eliakim that we are taking notice
of today. We saw in our little introduction
yesterday, I trust you've had opportunity to look at it, that
the descriptions that were applied to this man Eliakim suggest really
that another is in view. one still to come, and just like
Balaam saw in his own days that there was a star and a scepter,
that there was a lion that would arise, so here Isaiah prophetically
discerns that although this man Eliakim would serve the Lord
in some capacity for the well-being of Judah and Jerusalem, Yet there
was something more significant about the descriptions applied
to Eliakim. It is said of Eliakim that the
government of the kingdom would be placed in his hands and upon
his shoulder. Just as Isaiah had already taught
us that the keys of the kingdom would be laid upon the shoulders
of Emmanuel, the son that would be given. so that the people
that were reading Isaiah's prophecy, both in the days of Isaiah and
in the generations following, as we do today, can make these
connections in the threads of Isaiah's prophecy to see that
these things apply not only in the moment, but that they have
a deeper significance. Eliakim shall open and none shall
shut. He shall shut and none shall
open. Which is indeed a reference to
his power in the kingdom in his day. And yet these were the very
words that Christ spoke to John in the book of Revelation. Behold
I have set before thee a door, an open door, and no man can
shut it. And also in this metaphor of
a nail fixed in a sure place, we find that the sweetest applications
and the finest parallels may be drawn between this man Eliakim
and the Lord Jesus Christ, the beloved Son of God. Because it
is not Eliakim who is the true nail fixed in a sure place, but
our Lord Jesus Christ. And while Eliakim would serve
God's purpose, it is in Christ the Messiah that the full spiritual
significance of this nail picture hangs. Ezra another prophet,
a later prophet, could draw upon the writings of Isaiah as well
as the promptings and inspiration of the Holy Spirit to say that
grace hath been showed from the Lord our God to leave us a remnant
to escape and give us a nail in his holy place. This is showing
the generations of the Lord's people that there was one upon
whom they could place their trust and upon whom their faith must
hang. That God might lighten our eyes
and give a little reviving in our bondage. In the time that
I've got today, I want to show you how Christ is our nail in
a sure place and what that phrase means to the church. The church of all ages, no less
to us today. By this phrase, a sure place,
we have something very tangible and significant, I believe. Now
we may not think of God's covenant as a place, but this is the vocabulary
of scripture. Scripture speaks of God's covenant
as a place. This is the holy place. This is the sure place of which
the prophets speak. And it's a vocabulary, a language
intended to convey security and confidence. So that when the
Lord speaks of a fortress, when the Lord speaks of a high tower,
when the Lord speaks of a shield and a defence, He is speaking
about His covenant purposes. He's speaking about the sure
place where the Lord's people resort further for their defence
and for their security, for their confidence, a place of shelter
and protection. So that when David says, the
Lord has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things
and sure, he was referring to the suitability of the covenant
of grace. for the needs of his soul. That's what it means for the
covenant to be ordered. It is ordered. It is set out
in a way that answers the needs of David's soul. And it is set out in a way that
answers the needs of our soul. When David speaks of the security... that this covenant afforded his
heart. He is speaking of it as being
a sure covenant. David could say, thou art my
hiding place, thou shalt preserve me from trouble. And again, thou
art my hiding place and my shield, I hope in thy word. Listen, brothers
and sisters, if we've got troubles, if we've got concerns, if we've
got anxieties, if we've got problems and trials and tribulations,
in our life, in our souls, in our material well-being, in our
dealings with this world and the men and women of this world.
If we feel these weights and challenges, these gospel truths
are given to us that we might find them to be a secret place,
a hiding place, a place of confidence and security. When we speak of
Christ as our surety, that too implies and suggests this sure
place. Isaiah will later tell us, a
man shall be as a hiding place from the wind and a covert from
the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land. And that's this sure place that
he's speaking about at this time. The place of safety and security
is a man, the God-man. And as our surety, Christ secures
our salvation quite independent of any contribution from us. Therefore our salvation is assured
despite our sin, despite our failings, despite our falls,
despite our weakness, even despite our faithlessness and lack of
belief. He is all my salvation, says
David. Christ is the surety of the covenant. Christ is the heart of our confidence,
our assurance. So God's covenant purpose in
Christ is the sure place that Isaiah is speaking of and the
sure place to which David refers. This is the way in which the
prophets of the Old Testament describe the covenant purpose
of God, the salvation which was wrought in the eternal purposes
of the Godhead. And I know that we speak a lot
about this, but that is because the everlasting covenant ordered
in all things and sure is vital in our understanding of God's
grace and foundational to our justification and the promise
and therefore our hope everlasting life. How can God forgive sin
and yet be holy? How can he condemn sin and yet
deliver sinners? By satisfying the terms of the
covenant of grace. This is the way, this is the
only way. God himself in the person of
Jesus Christ must open the door and having opened it, chosen
sinners by particular redemption are saved and none can close
it. dare I say God himself cannot
close it. The recipient of God's mercy
cannot close it. The world cannot close it. The devil cannot close it. All
of the trials and troubles cannot close this door that has been
opened because it is God's everlasting covenant of grace and peace. and Christ is the surety of it. He is all my salvation. He is
all my desire. He is the sure place. Our great Jehovah God has ordered
all things for the salvation, for the good, for the everlasting
blessedness of His people. He supplies every needful element
of our salvation. from redemption, to deliverance,
to justification, the life that he gives us in conversion, and
everlasting life. This is the terms, the ordered
terms of the everlasting covenant. It is the sure place. And I trust
with David, we see it to be all our salvation and all our desire. And so this is a reference to
the sure place, the covenant of God. And then we have this
picture given to us, that Christ is the nail in the sure place. And it's another delightful metaphor
of the reliability and the dependability and the trustworthiness of Christ. In the sure place, the nail is
fixed. It's nailed into the wall and
upon it hangs the hope and the well-being of all those that
have been given to Christ in the covenant. Let me just see
if I can picture this for you a little bit. My daughter lives
in a house that is over 300 years old. It's an old farm building
that was renovated many years ago. And those renovations are
ongoing. But she lives in a house over
300 years old. And in the roof of that house,
in the ceiling of that house, there are nails or hooks. upon which meat has been hung
over the years. Now, those nails are so well
fixed in the timbers of the ceilings that they will never move, no
matter what weight is hung upon them. Now maybe that's not technically
true, but you get my drift. These screws are so solidly placed
in the rafters of this building that it almost appears as if
the whole building would have to be destroyed before those
nails would give way. And Christ is like that nail. The nail is strong. The wall
is secure. The fixing is robust. It is tight. It is durable. And it's not going anywhere soon. Nowadays, modern houses tend
to be made of plasterboard and sheetrock. And if you nail into
it, though it's a steel nail that you put in, and the nail
can hold a great weight, the plaster wall can't. But Christ is both an iron hook,
an iron nail and the covenant is a secure wall. He is a nail
in a sure place and the souls of all the elect of God are hung
upon that nail within the covenant sureties of God's well-ordered
purpose. So our being hung on Christ is
our eternal security. Christ is the nail on which we
hang and his people's welfare and everlasting happiness is
thereby assured. What Isaiah says is, all the
glory of his father's house. That's a reference to Eliakim. All those that were hung on Eliakim
were all the glory of his father's house. But it's obviously more
than just Eliakim we're talking about. Look at verse 24 in what
we have read. Look at verse 24. And they shall
hang upon him all the glory of his father's house, the offspring
and the issue, all vessels of small quantity, from the vessels
of cups even to all the vessels of flagons. What is that telling
us? Isaiah is speaking of Eliakim, but spiritually it is Christ
upon whom all the glory of his Father's house is hung. All the elect, all the set apart
and sanctified, all the Church of God, all the remnant people. And they shall hang upon him
all the glory of the Father's house. the offspring, the issue,
all vessels of small quantity, from the vessels of cups even
to all the vessels of flagons. It's a homely picture. Even now
we still hang cups on hooks in our kitchens. Vessels of small
quantity, little cups and big cups. And the nail can carry
the weight of all the vessels formed for glory. That's what Paul talks about
in Romans chapter 8. The vessels that were formed
for glory. The vessels of mercy. That's what Paul calls the elect
of God. Our Saviour is sufficient to
the task set before Him. He will hold up God the Father
looks upon the Son and he sees a sufficient substitute. The
church look upon the Son and they see a sufficient saviour. So that in all things, for all
purposes, throughout all time and to eternity, the Lord Jesus
Christ is fixed to be the upholder of every divine requirement of
God. and he is the cup holder of all
his people for all time and for eternity. That's the picture
that Isaiah is giving here to us. Sometimes we say, do we not,
that it was not the nails that held Christ on the cross. And
that's true, that's true. It was his love and it was his
obedience to his father's will. Nevertheless, we may say, as
the nails fixed Christ to his cross, so all the sins of his
people were laid on him. And what a weight of sin that
was! What a volume of sin was poured
into Christ's soul. How heavy was the burden he bore,
but just as the nails held his body to the cross, just as the
Roman nails held the weight of Christ's body, so the love of
Christ bore the weight of our sin. And how heavy that weight
was. Similarly, the sword of God's
justice fell upon the Saviour, a weight of judgment equal to
the weight of sin, and yet Christ hung bearing it all, because
Christ took the weight of all the sin and all the judgment
and all the needs of his people, and as he hung there between
heaven and earth, He was that nail in a sure place for the
redemption and deliverance and salvation of his people. In Romans chapter 8, verse 35,
the Apostle Paul asks, who shall separate us from the love of
God? from the love of Christ. Shall
tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness,
or peril, or sword. What is it? What is it? Paul
says, I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers, nor death, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature
shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is
in Christ Jesus our Lord. All the problems we have, all
the trials we face, all the distresses of life and of death, of sickness,
of health, our sins, our weakness, our failures, our faults, nothing
can separate us when we are nailed together with Christ, when we
are fixed on Him, when we are united to Him. through the effectual
grace and everlasting love of God. Christ is our nail fixed
in a sure place. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to our heart and encourage us in this delightful type of the
anti-type, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.