The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
When Isaiah was given the task of writing the book that now bears his name, it was in the 8th century, 700 BC or so. And in that time, Isaiah was given to see the time when a Babylonian army would invade Judah, the Southern Kingdom, lay siege to Jerusalem, and carry off his fellow countrymen into exile and slavery. He saw a day when the temple would be destroyed along with the city itself, and that the orchards and the vineyards would be laid bare by a siege, and the people of God would be carted off to a land far away — far away from the temple wherein they used to go weekly to worship God in His presence. It would be a 1,700-mile journey from captivity in Babylon to freedom back in Jerusalem. There would be seemingly no hope that these people would ever return back to their native home, Jerusalem.
But then God sent a voice. A voice cries: “And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field… the grass withers, the flower fades.” The greatest tragedy of this entire bucket full of tragedies was that God’s children, both in the north and in the south, brought this hopelessness, this death, this destruction upon themselves — one country right after the other — forsaking the Lord God for idolatry. They were the ones that had rejected what God, their forefathers had said in His words and in His covenant and through His prophets. They had no use for them. Instead, they were trusting the lords and gods of other pagan countries. So God sent them prophets. He sent them prophets so that He could call them back to repentance.
Now, if you remember your geography: to the north of Jerusalem was the Northern Kingdom, it’s called Samaria. And Samaria fell to the Assyrians about 133 years before Babylon conquered the Southern Kingdom, Judah. During the 8th and 7th centuries, God had sent Isaiah and Micah to the south, and Amos and Hosea to the north, to call both nations to repentance — to return to the words of the prophet Moses and to the prophets sent to them, and to restore right worship and a true understanding of the Lord God. He was calling both nations, each a century apart or more, to repent and to come home. But instead of listening to and acting on what God said through the prophets, the rulers and the people paid more attention to the opinion of pagan countries than to their own God. They listened to false prophets and kings of other pagan countries. The Northern Kingdom fell in 721 BC to Assyria; the Southern Kingdom in 586 BC to Babylon.
When the children of Judah were taken off to Babylon as slaves, they weren’t just far from home now. They felt very far from God, and God felt even further away from them. After all, they had worshiped their whole lives in the temple in Jerusalem, where God Himself dwelt between the cherubim. And it looked now, as they were in Babylon as slaves and prisoners, that there was going to be no Moses-like Exodus for them. What they did have, though, was the Torah and a few scrolls from a few of the Old Testament prophets. More than a century earlier, Isaiah would summarize the future captivity of Babylon in this way: “The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it… surely the people are grass.” That’s the bad news. The bad news is that all of them, and all of their ideas and all of their beliefs, are like the grass and the flower that dries up and goes away. But the good news is: the Word of the Lord our God will stand forever.
God’s Word means both the bad part — the Law and the punishments — and the good news of salvation, the forgiveness of sins, and especially the promise of a heavenly, eternal home. He is their God, and they are His children, regardless of where they have ended up. He will not forsake them. He will not allow them to perish in Babylon. That’s different than the Northern Kingdom in Assyria. The Israelites in the Northern Kingdom were taken off into Assyria and vanished. History and the Bible have no record of where they ultimately ended up, other than they were given and taken in marriage, and they became among the lost tribes. But in the south, the Israelites still remembered the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. He is their God, and they are His children. He will not allow what happened to the Assyrians and the Israelites to happen to them. He will deliver them and return them to the Promised Land, just as He had promised this land would be theirs under Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
As if Isaiah were a contemporary of the Israelites held captive in Babylon, God gives him words to write down which will be read and spoken to the captives in Babylon 100-plus years later. There God commands the prophet: “Go up on a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Behold your God!’ Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and His arm rules for Him; behold, His reward is with Him, and His recompense before Him.” More than a hundred years before the Israelites in Judah were hauled off to captivity, the Lord God gave Isaiah the words of both Law and punishment for their idolatry — those are chapters 1 through 39 — and the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins, restoration, and return in chapters 40 through 66, all through the pen of the prophet Isaiah. Through the prophet Isaiah, the scrolls of God will speak to the Israelites in Babylon, assuring them that He knew this all along, that He hadn’t forgotten nor forsaken them, and that He is in fact using the Babylonians to chasten them, to bring them back to repentance. He assures them that He is in fact coming for them — not in anger and in judgment, but He is coming as a compassionate, gracious, forgiving God who orders His prophets to comfort the people who sit in a land of darkness: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare” — that is, the warfare between God and His children — “is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”
The Lord comes first through His prophet Isaiah to comfort them while they are in slavery in a foreign land. Second, the Lord will come and free them, and facilitate their return — the 1,700-mile journey — and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, their homes, and the temple itself. “He will tend His flock like a shepherd; He will gather the lambs in His arms; He will carry them in His bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.” They weren’t free yet — not when they first heard these scrolls and the comfort of the prophet Isaiah. It would be 70 years, 70 years in Babylon held as slaves. But God wanted them to know that He was not coming to them to heap judgment on them. He was coming to forgive them, pardon them, restore them in His sight.
Thus the call to prepare the way: “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.'” The Israelites had been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon. As the conquering king, he would have led a giant parade full of the spoils of war, including all of those Israelites bound in chains who walked all the way to Babylon into their captivity. As that king, Nebuchadnezzar II, made his way back to his city of Babylon, the people would go ahead of him, and they’d make the road smooth, the high places more level. They prepared the way. God now tells the Israelites He’s coming for them, and they have time to prepare. But what does preparation look like for the children of Israel in the Old Testament, here in Isaiah 40? God tells the captives that He’s on His way, and they are in fact to make His way smooth by virtue of repentance. It looks the same in the Old Testament as it looks in the New: to prepare the way of the Lord is to confess one’s sins and throw oneself upon the mercy of the promised Messiah, Jesus the Christ. Repentance is confessing their sin and trusting in the promised Messiah to atone for their sin, and preparing for their rescue by God Himself. The Lord will first release them from their sin and guilt — “her iniquity is pardoned… as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.” Then, in this case, He will set them free through another king, a benevolent one, who decides to let the Israelites return to Jerusalem and provides for them everything they need for the journey, and helps them with material help to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and the temple itself.
No amount of iniquity could overcome the comfort and the pardon that God speaks through the prophet Isaiah to the children of Israel who are held in captivity. The Lord God wants them to know He’ll come in His good time. He is in control of all of human history. He will return them to Jerusalem, to their own homes, and to the temple. The vineyards and the fields and the orchards will be replanted and made plentiful. They will be restored, forgiven for their sins. There will be a joyful homecoming for one reason alone: because God’s Word is never irrelevant, nor does it have a shelf life. It endures forever. And remember what Jesus said during the first wilderness temptation: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'”
Isaiah saw a day when God’s people would be far from home, far away from God. But more importantly, he saw a day of reunion and a homecoming for the exiles. God would come to them in kindness, in the forgiveness of sins, and provide for them a new home. It took over 70 years before the Israelites were sent back to rebuild their homes. Still, the coming of the Lord was good news for the Israelites then, and it’s good news for us today. It’s good news today because, like Judah, we sin daily and much. God seems a long way from us sometimes, we think, and heaven too. For some of us it’s not quite as long as others, but it still seems a distance. But the promise remains: you will enter the Kingdom of Heaven — sinless, a sinless lamb in the sight of God, sins forgiven.
The Southern Kingdom, you see, did not learn at first from the example of the Northern Kingdom. In similar fashion, we don’t learn from our sins or the sins of those around us. We keep committing the same ones over and over and over again, just like the people of Judah. And when we disregard His promises to defend ourselves from danger, and guard ourselves and protect ourselves and enrich ourselves, we’re pretty much doing the same thing they did — just in a more modern and sophisticated fashion. But the First Commandment, the one that they broke the most, both in the Northern and the Southern Kingdom, is vast and all-encompassing. From the Large Catechism, the meaning of the First Commandment, we read: “Thou shalt have [and worship Me alone as] thy God.” What is the force of this, Luther writes? How is it to be understood? What does it mean to have a God, or what is God? The answer: “A god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe Him from the whole heart, as I have often said, that the confidence and faith of the heart make both God and an idol.” In other words, whatever you find yourself running to in times of trouble, that’s your real god. If it’s money, if it’s your own wits, if it’s your own associations, your own deals, your own deceptions and lies, then that’s your god. But if you run instead to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and bow down to His will — why, that then is your God.
The words of Isaiah are just as relevant for us today, because nothing ever really changed. Ecclesiastes: there’s nothing new under the sun. We keep committing the same sins, principally against the First Commandment. He has the same message for us today that He had for those Israelites — only we live post-Christ and the crucifixion. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the shepherds thought they were beyond God’s reach. They believed they were unforgivable. Shepherds were on the low end of the social status; people didn’t really like them, and they were pretty much loners out in the wilderness. But when Jesus came, the angelic host appeared to the shepherds first. And when Jesus began His ministry, what did He do first? A paralytic, troubled in his sins — Jesus declared, “Your sins are forgiven you.” He proclaimed the forgiveness of sins, and then the paralytic walked. To a Samaritan leper, he was healed first, and then, “Your faith has made you well.” Zacchaeus was told that salvation had come to his house first, and then Zacchaeus celebrated a banquet because of the coming of his Messiah. By His suffering and death, Christ brought you back to your heavenly Father. He brought you back to your heavenly mansion. He ended your exile of sin when He died for all your sins. Your iniquity was pardoned, just like the Israelites, and you received from God double for all your sins, just like the Israelites. At the cross, Jesus was pierced for your transgressions; He was crushed for your iniquity. And now you have the angelic proclamation: peace to those with whom He is pleased — that’s you. By Jesus’ death, you are healed.
Advent is a time of waiting. Each Advent, it’s like a portion of the 70 years. We’re waiting for the coming of the Christ again. Because God came in Christ, forgiving your sins, you can look forward to the last day when you’re returned to your true and eternal home. Why? Because it was given to you in the promised words of both the Old and the New Testaments, and His Word endures forever. He will come again. He will gather you and all the sheep together, and He will lead you on a journey to your heavenly home — an eternal mansion that He prepared in the Father’s house. In Jesus Christ, we will leave our captivity to sin behind, and we’ll have a joyful homecoming at the end of our Advent, our waiting — for the Word of the Lord endures forever, and He proclaims: your sins are forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.