Christ Church: Sun Nov 28, 2004

8.00am and 10.00am

Isaiah 2:1-5

Once again the season of Advent is here. When I was a child I got very excited when Advent started. It meant Christmas was just over the horizon. And how those days dragged! I couldn’t wait for Christmas Day to arrive!

Advent is, of course, about Christ’s coming. It is about preparing to celebrate his first coming, in humility, at the stable in Bethlehem. But that is so often where our focus stops. Of course, we want to remember and celebrate and give thanks that the Word did indeed become flesh; that he came, as the Creed puts it, “for us men and our salvation”. For most people nowadays, Christmas isn’t even that. It’s just an annual season for indulging and for spending amounts of money that we then spend the next few months paying off on our credit card bills. It is almost politically incorrect to pay attention to the special Christian emphasis on Christmas, and how it begins at least, to mark our faith off from all others.

But then maybe part of our trouble is our monocular focus on the first coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and a forgetting, although we say it too in our creeds, that “he will come in great glory to judge both the quick and the dead”. Our reading this morning from Isaiah chapter 2 and from Matthew chapter 24 have their focus firmly fixed on that time of the second coming. Matthew contains part of that long discourse of Jesus that he gave in reply to his disciples’ question “Tell us when this will happen” (speaking of the overthrow of Jerusalem which happened in 70AD), “and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matt 24:3). That question firmly links the two events together, and so sets the Advent context of Isaiah 2 out, for Isaiah 2 verse 2 speaks of “the last days”, using a word from which our term “eschatology” derives- that study of “the Last Things”, and which used to be the basis of the traditional Advent sermons on “heaven”, “hell”, “death” and “judgment”.

This morning I want for a few minutes to focus on that passage in Isaiah. The NIV heads it “The Mountain of the Lord”. I’d want to think of it in terms of “The establishment of God’s Kingdom”. For God’s Kingdom will be fully and finally established when God ushers it is. Yes, of course, I has come partially. Jesus repeatedly said “The Kingdom of God is at hand” –it is near. He taught us to pray “Thy Kingdom come”, and the whole emphasis of that prayer is a forward emphasis. The Kingdom does not come in its fullness by human effort. It will not come in that way by the work of the Church. We but prepare the ground for that day and for individuals to be given the power to enter it by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Verse 4 of our passage is shared in common with Micah chapter 4 verse 3. It’s a well-known verse- probably one of the best known of the Old Testament. Let me just read it out again:

He will judge between the nations, and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more

Now those words are, I believe, inscribed on the walls of the United Nations building in New York. They are almost the foundation stone of the UN. Though whether they include the words about God judging between nations I doubt. No! These utopian dreams are the aim of the UN, and achievable through the work of that body, which by its resolutions actually arrogate the power to judge between the nations. Judge between the nations and there will be no more war! That I think smacks more of the attitude portrayed in Genesis chapter 11, where the people of Babel revolted against God and in effect re-declared that “UDI” which began in the Garden of Eden, where the serpent tempted Eve, with his final rallying call being “you will be like God, knowing good and evil”

What Isaiah is of course flagging up, and to which he aspires is that day when God will set up his Kingdom and will judge between the nations. That will be the day when the utopian dream is fulfilled and when there will be no more war.

  But if we go back to the beginning of Isaiah 2, what is God saying through his prophet there? First of all, let’s note that the prophecy concerns “Judah and Jerusalem”. It does not concern the Church. Many have tried to spiritualise such passages away, and deny the clear word of the Scripture. Jerusalem is God’s City. There are two great cities in the Bible. One is Babylon (which is the same word as ‘Babel’) and which is the city of this world; it’s the city of man’s rebellion against God. And the Bible is equally clear about what will happen to the worldly city and worldly dominion at the end. Turn to Revelation 18, and however you wish to interpret this book, it says very clearly in verse verse 2:

Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!

Then, of course, equally unequivocally in verse 4, the instruction to “come out of her, my people”.  At the present the city of the world and the city of God seem to get along side-by-side, but when God does establish his Kingdom, there will be no more compromise. We will belong to one or the other. And the other great city is Jerusalem, and the end of time that ‘new Jerusalem’ which will come from heaven (Rev 21:1).

And concerning that city, Isaiah also tells us in verse 2 that “the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as chief among all mountains”. Isaiah’s readers would have understood this straight away, for in the Old Testament the ‘high places’ were the places of pagan worship and why God was so against worship in ‘high places’ by his people. The worship of the one true God will be supreme. There will be no room for muti-faithism when God’s Kingdom comes. God himself will teach us his ways ad we will walk in his paths. For now, we look to God’s Word and know who God is and what he wants; then there will be no double-guessing, for any human mis-interpretation, for maligning of Scriptural truth.

That day of God’s Kingdom will be true utopia, the true ideal. There’s much elsewhere in Isaiah about that day. There’s an instructional word in another well-known verse from the early chapters of Isaiah. In chapter 11 verse 8 we read this- yes, we’ve heard it often, but until I read the commentaries for this passage its full significance had eluded me.

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra and the young child shall put his hand in the viper’s nest.

We’ve already thought of Genesis 3, where the serpent tempts Eve. Then of course in verse 15, God says to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers”. But what’s happening here in Isaiah 11? The child is playing safely with serpents!!. The fall has been reversed.

So! What does this passage say to us if it’s all so in the future, apart from give us hope? Well verse 5 brings us to earth. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord”

From the Gospels we know that Jesus is the Light of the world, and that we too are called to let our light shine. We only do so as we ‘walk’. As we live our lives ‘in the Lord’. In the light of the future hope, live today as Christians. As Paul tells us in Romans 13:

Put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light.