Radio Friends, if you would open your Bible to the prophecy of Isaiah chapter 35. In the coming weeks, as we consider the treasure and the wonder of the birth of Jesus Christ, we want to look into this chapter as it speaks to us of the blessings that come to us as a result of the birth of Jesus Christ. Isaiah 35 is a beautiful chapter and it speaks in a picturesque way of the blessings that will be brought when Immanuel comes. Immanuel means God with us and the name Immanuel is a reference to the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of God come to us in our human flesh. The writing of Isaiah chapter 35 is as I said, beautiful in its prose, as the chapter seeks to reflect the beauty of the blessings of Emmanuel's reign. And I can remember as a boy being enthralled by this chapter, reading it. The desert, we read, shall blossom as a rose. The eyes of the blind shall be opened. The parched ground shall become a pool of water. The redeemed of the Lord shall go upon a highway of holiness. The point of the chapter is that when God pours out upon us sinners His goodness and grace in the coming of His Son, Immanuel, when God sends Immanuel, great blessings come upon His precious church. The beauty of Isaiah chapter 35 is seen in its sharp contrast to chapter 34 of the prophecy of Isaiah. In chapter 34, Isaiah is the voice of judgment. Judgment upon a reprobate and wicked world which has lifted up itself in pride against God. There, in Isaiah chapter 34, God brings words of final judgment upon the wickedness of all who are his enemies in unbelief and sin. 2 For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations. 4 And all the hosts of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heaven shall be rolled together as a scroll, and all their hosts shall fall down. 8 For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance and the year of recompense for the controversy of Zion. In chapter 34 the prophet Isaiah foretells the day of final judgment when God enters into judgment with mankind. In contrast, chapter 35 of Isaiah speaks of the blessings of grace, blessings that will come to his children in the way of Jesus Christ. In verse 1 of Isaiah 35 we read, The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them. And we ask, for who? And that goes back to verse 17 of chapter 34. We read, And he hath cast the lot, that is, God hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided unto them by line, they shall possess it for ever, from generation to generation shall they dwell therein. The ones to whom God makes these beautiful promises in Isaiah 35 are the ones who will be gathered by His Spirit. They are the ones that God has chosen freely of grace. Rather than that we should be judged and condemned with the world, which would have been justice, rather than that, the Lord has brought to us the blessings of His Son, brought us salvation in the coming of Emmanuel. Now, Isaiah chapter 35 has received many different interpretations throughout the history of the Church, and to which I will not now go into to give a critique concerning these interpretations, but it is plain enough to us that this beautiful chapter, Isaiah 35, speaks of the blessings that come in Jesus Christ. Verse 4, He will come and save you. The ear of faith needs no more introduction to know who that is. That's Jesus Christ. And then to seal it, verses 5 and 6, Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, and so forth. You might remember that in Matthew chapter 11 verses 1 through 6, when John the Baptist in prison was wondering whether Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah, sent his disciples to ask Jesus, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? And in response the Lord quoted verses 5 and 6 of Isaiah 35. He said, tell John that the eyes of the blind are being opened and the ears of the deaf are unstopped. Jesus himself, in Matthew 11, identifies himself as the one of whom Isaiah, in Isaiah 35, is speaking. This chapter, Isaiah 35, speaks in a picturesque and sublime way of the blessings that God will bring to us when Emmanuel, God with us, comes to the earth. In verses 1 and 2 today we look at the beautiful promise that the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose. It shall blossom abundantly, we read in verse 2, and rejoice even with joy in singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord and the excellency of our God. Note with me that there is a marvelous change being foretold. A recreation or transformation is being promised. When God's grace and glory brings His Son into the world, there will be a marvelous change. Isaiah puts the change in the figure of death to life, of barrenness to fruit, of desolation, to joy in singing. Pictured to us is something very familiar to the experience of the Old Testament believer, a desert, a wilderness, a solitary place. The Prophet may well have had in mind the desert that lay to the south of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, stretching all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba, where it was a dry land of slate rocks. arid and hot, inhabited by jackals and foxes, scorpions and screech-owls, a desert, a desolate, barren place, inhospitable to human life, a weary land and burnt. Suddenly the Prophet speaks of the transformation, and the transformation not simply of a momentary change Produced by the spring rain bringing flowers, but he speaks of a miraculous change, of a transformation into a luxuriant garden. The desert shall blossom as a rose, or literally crocus, hyacinth. Desert flowers will be carpeting the entire area of the desert as far as the eye can reach The desert shall blossom abundantly that is beyond expectation. Desert sand, rocks, brush, sharp-pointed cacti changed into an abundant sea of flowers and blooms and more. The very typography is altered. The glory of Lebanon, we read, verse 2, shall be given unto it in the excellency of Carmel and Sharon. The glory of Lebanon was its forests, its cedar trees, trees that Solomon used in the building of the temple which he imported. Carmel and Sharon were mountains in central Canaan noted for their beauty. It was to Mount Carmel that all Israel came in the days of Elijah to learn that Jehovah, He is God. Carmel and Sharon were hills shaded with oak trees, valleys filled with pasture, cows, sheep, oxen, wheat and barley, rich loam ground, bottom land, furrow for farming, so that the idea is that the desert is being changed into a meadow. And yet more we read, The desert land shall rejoice even with joy and with singing. For previously there had been the sounds of the screech-owl the squawk of a vulture, the howl of a coyote. Now there is singing, there's the chirping of birds, there's the melodies and songs from home, where the message once was desolate, solitary, bitter, deaf. Now the message is the heavens are telling the glory of God. All the creation is sounding in joy and song. soul is pictured to us, the marvelous, the miraculous, the glorious change that was brought to pass through the coming and the gift of God's Son, Jesus Christ, when he was born. Jesus Christ did not come to make us over, it was not a patch job, but he came from the hand of God to perform a miraculous spiritual change. It is certainly true that our Savior's redemption is so complete that the creation itself, which is now under the curse of sin, shall be redeemed and shall share in the glory of His redemption. You may read Romans chapter 8, verses 19-23. We must remember that too, that in the manger, the little baby being nursed by Mary is creation's Savior and Redeemer. who shall by his power renew all things in the day of his glory, and shall make anew the kingdom of his Father, a new heaven and a new earth, a new creation, when he through the fire of his judgments would change all things, and change also our bodies and the creation around us. and the curse shall be no more, there shall be no more death and no more need of the Son, and all around us will shout and speak and sparkle with the glory of God. But the promise, the miraculous change that is being pictured in verses 1 and 2 of Isaiah 35 are the miraculous change of grace brought by Jesus Christ in the heart and lives of His children verse 4, He will come and save you, not from physical woe and poverty, not from crop failure, but He will come to save you, your soul, from sin. The desert and the wilderness and the solitary place represent Our life as a result and consequence of our sin and the desolation that our sin brings. Sin promises such sweetness and pleasure, but sin brings utter desolation. In our sin is the heat and the burden of our guilt before a holy and just God. In our sin is bitterness. Sin consumes all things in the service of ourselves. Sin dries up. Sin leaves utterly withered. It reduces us to solitary. It destroys relationship. Sin brings desolation, barrenness, and death, judgment, and burden, and guilt into our soul. But Jesus Christ was born. He came into our state. He took upon Him our sin and our curse, that he might bear it all away. And now being foretold to us is this miraculous and marvelous change, where there shall be life, where there was formerly barrenness of the soul, that we shall be changed. Now the desert land is blossoming as a rose. Now out of our hearts proceeds prayer and praise, faith and trust, all as a result of His coming and His marvelous work. The grace that comes in Jesus, when Jesus is born, was a marvelous grace. It was a transforming power. It was a life-creating and life-renewing grace. As the desert transformed to a meadow, so we dead sinners, under the wrath of God, guilty, are now redeemed and brought into the joyful presence of God. All of this reveals the glory of God. What is being seen in the transformation that Isaiah speaks of is the glory and the excellency of God. God's works always tell about Him. O Lord, our Lord, we read, Psalm 104, verse 20, How marvelous are thy works, and wisdom thou hast made them all. The earth is full of thy riches, The creation and God's work of providence of upholding and directing and governing the creation, all of these to the eye of faith is filled with wonder and awe. But God's glory is revealed especially and to its greatest extent in His work of grace, in His work of salvation by the sending of Jesus Christ. Now we might ask, as we look at the birth of Jesus Christ, where is the glory and the excellency of God to be seen? And the answer is, you must have an eye to see it. You must be given an eye to see it. That's true of the creation as well. For unbelief is blind to God and His glory and His excellency in creation and refuses to acknowledge Him, and so also that is true in the birth of Jesus. Children, if you are to see the glory of the Lord and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the Holy Spirit Himself must give you an eye of faith. You need the vision of a lowly sinner. The eye of man sees nothing glorious in Jesus' birth, and tries to invent and make the glory, and indeed, humanly speaking, there was no glory. It could hardly have been worse. Mary gave birth to her son on a barn floor, amid the smell of animal manure, and he, her son, is Lord of all. And he is now wrapped in discarded rags. But there was the revelation of God's glory. In fact, nothing so revealed God's glory as when Mary held the babe in her arms. It was the glory of God's grace. Rather than we, his church and people, should perish, God had now given his Son in our place to bear our penalty and earn for us what we could not, an everlasting righteousness with God. The gift of Jesus was the outshining of God's heart. He gave his own Son. God's glory was never more radiant, never so revealed. as when He, His own Son, clothed Himself with our flesh and came under the guilt of our sin. The glory is the God of grace. The glory is His favor to the undeserving. The glory is a God of mercy and compassion to the miserable, a God of love to those who are unlovely, and His grace to embrace us in Jesus Christ, is the glory of saving grace which is seen in Jesus' birth, and that is what is behind the change. The desert blossoms as a rose because God is glorious in His grace. Jesus Christ comes to save us because God is glorious in His grace and He is excellent. He works out the way by which we might be saved. When God sent Jesus Christ into the world, God did not ignore His eternal justice against our sin. He does not pass by judgment. He does not excuse sin. But remaining holy and righteous and true, He punishes our sin. Only He punishes our sin upon the head of our substitute, who He in grace has given to stand in our place. God is excellent. God is surpassingly God brings salvation in a marvelous way. Jesus Christ is born, the eternal Son of God, has now come, Heaven's Prince, who remains God, now is joined in our flesh, and He has come to satisfy the justice of God against sin, and He has come to bring liberty to us who are miserable sinners, and to make us new, so that out of the desert there might come forth glory unto God. Do you see this? Do you see this marvelous grace of God to you, an undeserving, desolate, bitter, barren sinner? That's the grace of God, opening your heart and giving you to see your desperate need. and the marvel of his grace and wisdom in giving Jesus Christ as the only Savior. Do you see that as you celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ? Do you see the glory of the Lord being revealed to you? If we are to truly see the marvelous change in the glory of the Lord wrought in the coming of Jesus Christ His Son, then this must be given to us. It must be worked in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. To see all of this is great. All of the rich blessings of salvation are the gift of God. They are undeserved by us, they are unsought by us, and they are unearned by us. They are freely, graciously, and powerfully given. Note that we read the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them. And you remember I pointed back to verse 17 of chapter 34 to define who the them are. They are the ones whom the Lord has chosen in a grace of election. But then note again in verse 2, the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, and shall be given unto them. So that throughout the passage we read that this is all something God gave. that we did not deserve this, that we did not ask for or earn this. The wondrous saving work of Jesus Christ from the very beginning to its end, from the stable to the cross, to the empty tomb, to the exaltation at God's right hand, to His return in judgment, is all something that is given freely of God's grace to His children, to you. who he gives to know the desolate nature of your sin. To you who are burdened and troubled and weary of soul under a load of sin, marvelous and amazing, breathtaking, unimaginable, awesome, excellent, wonderful things the Lord hath done when he sent his Son to be born in Bethlehem. Rather than we dry, dead, solitary sinners should be consumed Grace gave His Son that we might be changed and transformed from guilt to pardon, from death to life, so that the desert might blossom abundantly, that we might praise, give thanks, serve, love, trust, pray, confess, Confess what? Glory to God! How excellent are His ways! May God bless you today with His precious Word. Let's pray. Father, we thank Thee for this beautiful prophecy of the wonderful work of Jesus Christ and the powerful transformation of Thy grace in Him. Bring that Word into our hearts with much comfort and assurance. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.