Isaiah 40:1–11
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 5th December 2021
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”
You who bring good news to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good news to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, “Here is your God!” See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power, and he rules with a mighty arm. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him. He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.
“O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion …” This is the ninth song of Handel’s Messiah. It is from Isaiah 40. There are five excerpts from this chapter which feature in Messiah. Charles Jennens, who chose the Bible passages for Handel’s music, obviously thought it was important. So did the New Testament writers. All the Gospels quote from it, as do other New Testament authors. We should take a good look at it, if we wish to understand Christianity the way they did. I will do little more today than work through it like a Bible Study. I have provided a print out so you can better follow along.
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
Who is talking here, to whom, and about what?
The speaker is God, and he is telling someone far into the future to tell Jerusalem that its troubles are over. You can see that it is for the future, because it follows on a description of the King of Assyria’s attempt to capture the city—which God miraculously defeated at the last moment—and Isaiah’s warning to King Hezekiah that the Babylonians would one day come and pillage the city; that lay nearly two hundred years in the future and would not be the end of Jerusalem’s sufferings. We are dealing here with a prophecy, one of the most important in the Old Testament. The fact that it turns up so often in the New Testament indicates its interpretation comes originally from Jesus.
I spoke last week about suffering—Job’s undeserved suffering. Jerusalem, however, was getting what it deserved. She was chosen to be the City of God, the place to which the whole world would look to understand the ways of God, but she became as corrupt as anywhere, and God punished her hard. After the Assyrians came the Babylonians, then Greeks, and the Romans. And she has continued to suffer these past two thousand years. There has been hardly any let-up. At the time of Jesus there was a Roman governor and an occupying military garrison. Jerusalem’s promised liberation had not yet come. The Jews of Jesus’ time understood that in some ways the conditions of what they called the Exile were still in force; God had not yet returned to them in the way promised in this and many other prophecies. They still looked forward to a great liberation, which was sometimes called the comforting or the consolation of Jerusalem. When Jesus said, “Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted,” he was referring to our prophecy. Summing it up: Jerusalem—that is, God’s historic people, the Jews, are being punished, but one day that will come to an end and they will be comforted.
A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
So now a messenger steps forward. Isaiah is still describing something that is to take place in the future. God is going to comfort his people, and now someone has come to get them ready: “A voice of one calling…” Jesus understood this to be John the Baptizer. On one occasion a delegation was sent from Jerusalem to where John was baptizing. “Who are you?” they asked. “Are you the Messiah?” “No,” said John. “Are you Elijah?” “No.” “Are you the Prophet?” “No.” “Then who are you; we have to report back.” “I am the Voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord.’” John saw himself as the Voice prophesied in Isaiah 40. Isaiah foresaw a great road building project, a highway from east to west, so God could return to his people. John knew what he meant was a highway through people’s hearts. He preached that people should repent, fix up their lives, and ready themselves; but ready themselves for what? “And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together.” God is going to reveal his glory, and Luke, who focuses on this statement, makes it clear that the way God would do this was Jesus; his coming and glory would be witnessed by the whole world.
A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”
It is not so clear who is speaking here, or whom they are speaking to. I take it God is telling Isaiah to cry out about the frailty and transience of human life. Here today, gone tomorrow. Isaiah 40, then, is not just a message about Jerusalem’s sufferings. The world is a place of death, but when God comforts Jerusalem the whole world will experience his glory.
On Friday mornings at George Whitefield College everyone practises how to preach. I had a two-hour class with the first years. Many of them were trying themselves out for the first time. Thulani is a Zulu man. I asked him to stand out front and tell us why he had come to college. He told us how as a teenage boy two men came to his family’s farm and asked to see his Dad. Thulani pointed them to a shed at the bottom of the field where his father was with the cows. A little while after he heard a gunshot and ran to find his father dying in a pool of blood. In his deep Zulu voice Thulani said, “I learned that day that everything in this world passes away; only the word of the Lord lasts forever. I knew I must become a preacher.” He was echoing the words of Isaiah 40:
All people are like grass … The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.
This is a word to hang on to when everything else is withering away and disappearing.
Why does this church put so much emphasis on the Bible? Why do we preach? Because God’s word is true and enduring; everything else passes away. Build your life on the rock of my words, Jesus said, and when the storms come, which will sweep everything else away, you will stand. This is true of all God’s words, but, of course, in Isaiah 40 it is a special message that is in mind.
You who bring good news to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good news to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, “Here is your God!” See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power, and he rules with a mighty arm. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him. He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.
What is happening here? Someone is being told to get up onto a high mountain and shout a message to the cities of Judah. The King James Version of the Bible has, “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion.” This is the wording in Handel’s Messiah. It is not clear here who the messenger is. But the ESV has it right. The messenger is Zion—Jerusalem—a she; Jerusalem is personified as a woman. She is to shout from a high mountain the message she has just received, so the cities of Judah can know it too. As to who told her: this is not told.
So, what is the message? The message is that God is coming. To understand this we need to do a bit of exploring. When God could finally take no more of what was going on in Jerusalem and the rest of the country he sent the Babylonians to clean out the rats’ nest. They overran the country, took over Jerusalem, knocked down Solomon’s temple, and took the best of the surviving population back to Babylon as slaves. This is what we call the Exile. It was seventy years before the Persians took over in Babylon and sent the Jews home again. That was supposed to be the end of the Exile, but it wasn’t. Many never came home. The Jews have had a diaspora around the world ever since. Things were not good in Jerusalem. They built a new temple but it wasn’t a patch on the old one. Things limped along. When God sent them into Exile it was like he was turning his back on them—divorcing them. And when they came back it didn’t seem all that different. At one point they could say, “We grope along the wall like blind men; we have become like those over whom you never ruled.” That was the feeling at the time of Jesus: “we are God’s people, but God has turned away from us, but he has promised one day to return.” Hope remained alive, in large part because of this Scripture we are looking at today, and others like it.
What, then, is the message Jerusalem is to shout out to the other cities?
“Behold your God! The Lord God comes with power, and his arm rules for him.”
Here we have a puzzle: God is coming, but how will he come? Part of the answer is here in this line: “his arm rules for him.” The arm of the Lord is what we might call “his right-hand man.” This is the Messiah, the anointed king, the human being who God promised King David would one day rule an eternal kingdom for him. God will return to his people by sending them their promised king, who will rule in God’s way. Notice what he will do:
He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.
Does this ring any bells? Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd; the shepherd gives his life for the sheep.” This future king will be a true shepherd to his people. Especially, he will be gentle with the weak and vulnerable. He is coming to comfort his people, and indeed the whole world.
Now I need to go back a step lest we miss something of the utmost importance in this reading.
Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news …
As I said before, this is correct, but it still hides something important and we have to go back to the Hebrew original to fish it out.
“Herald of good news” translates a single Hebrew word (participle) Mebasser. When the Jewish Bible was translated into Greek hundreds of years before the coming of Christianity, this word was translated as euaggelizomenos—“the one who evangelizes”—the announcer of the gospel. It is from this passage and others like it that we get the word “gospel”.
The mebasser or “gospel-man” is a common figure in the Old Testament. He is the long-distance runner who carries important state messages. The message was called a besorah, a euaggelion in Greek, a gospel in English.
Let me tell you a story to drive this home! King David was holed up in a small city called Mahanaim. His son Absalom had rebelled, and David had fled from Jerusalem with a small band of faithfuls. Absalom has gathered the armies of Judah and Israel and has come out to finish him off. It is David and Goliath all over again. David wants to lead his small army, but they wont have it. “They’ll all be hunting for you, and once you are dead it is all over. No, you stay here.” So, Joab leads David’s army out and they meet the enemy in the Forest of Ephraim. There is a terrible battle and Israel is defeated. Absalom gets stuck in a tree by his thick hair, Joab puts a spear through him, and it’s all over. And now someone has to get the news back to David.
Communications in the ancient world were not easy: no radio nor phones nor postal service. Important messages were carried by ships, or on horseback, or in a difficult country like Israel, by state runners. The runner who was first to arrive with important news was given a great cash reward. So Ahimaaz steps forward, but Joab wont allow it. Today’s news won’t please the king. Yes, they have won, but Absalom is dead, and everyone knows that David is crazy when it comes to his children, even those who set out to kill him. Joab orders “the Cushite” to run with the news. The Cushite was an African runner. He races off.
But Ahimaaz wont give up. “Let me run too,” he pleads. “No, my son, there’ll be no reward today.” “But let me go anyway,” says, Ahimaaz,” and Joab allows him. What follows then is one the great races of ancient history. Ahimaaz has a lot of ground to catch up. David is at the wall of the city talking with the watchman, anxiously waiting for news. Suddenly the watchman spots a runner in the distance. “One or many?” asks David. If there are many it will be the survivors trying to reach safety in the city. “No, it’s one.” “Then he’ll be carrying besorah (gospel),” says David. “But hang on,” says the watchman, “there is another coming behind and he also is alone, and he runs like Ahimaaz the son of Zadok.” You can see that these guys are athletic heroes. “He is a good man,” says David, “he will carry a good gospel.” Couriers could carry good news or bad. Ahimaaz overtakes the Cushite and reaches the city first. He cries out, “Good news for my Lord the king, for the Lord has delivered you this day from the power of all who rose up against you.” That was his gospel. The poor Cushite had to deliver the bad news of Absalom’s death. You will find this story in 2 Samuel 18. It illustrates an important social custom in the ancient world and helps us see what is going on when God orders Jerusalem to be the mebasser for the cities of Judah. She is to play the part of the courier and deliver the message that God is returning to rule his people by his promised King-Messiah. This gospel is not a prophecy, that one day in the future God will return, it is the news that he has—he is here.
Mark the Gospel writer tells us that Jesus came into Galilee “announcing the gospel of God, and saying, “the time is come and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.” It is not a message that the kingdom is coming, but that it is here. Is it any wonder that thousands poured out of the towns wanting to know if it was true.
So now I come back to the question I asked earlier, if Jerusalem is to gospel the cities of Judah, who is to gospel Jerusalem. We find the answer in Isaiah 61. Again, Isaiah speaks into a situation of brokenness about a time yet to come when a Spirit-anointed “gospeller” will come with an important message for Jerusalem.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning …
It was Jesus, God’s Son, who stepped forward and volunteered to run that message to earth, even though everyone warned him that it might not be received as good news—not at first, anyway—that he might not end up as a hero. Jesus’ rejection is the reason the prophecy of Isaiah seems not to have fully come true. Jerusalem is still in bondage, and who knows for how much longer that will go on. But certainly not forever. For the Lord has come, and his glory has been revealed and all nations are coming to see it. God has spoken, and the word of the Lord endures forever.
Listen to Handel’s rendition of “Thou that tellest good tiding to Zion,” and ponder the reality that this teller of the gospel to Zion was none other than the Lord Jesus Christ himself.