So Isaiah, chapter 54. Sing, O barren, you who have not borne. Break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not laboured with child. For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married woman, says the Lord. Enlarge the place of your tent and let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings. Do not spare, lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes, for you shall expand to the right and to the left. and your descendants will inherit the nations and make the desolate cities inhabited. Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed, neither be disgraced, for you will not be put to shame, for you will not forget the shame of your youth and will not remember the reproach of your widowhood. anymore for your maker is your husband the lord of hosts is his name and your redeemer is the holy one of israel he is called the god of the whole earth for the lord has called you like a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit like a youthful wife when you were refused says your god For a mere moment I have forsaken you, but with great mercies I will gather you. With a little wrath I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer. Excuse me, for this is like the waters of Noah to me. For as I have sworn that the waters of Noah would no longer cover the earth, so I have sworn that I would not be angry with you nor rebuke you. For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from you, nor shall my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord who has mercy on you. O you afflicted one, tossed with tempest and not comforted, behold I will lay your stones with colourful gems, and lay your foundations with sapphires. I will make your pinnacles of rubies, your gates of crystal, and all your walls of precious stones. All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. In righteousness you shall be established. You shall be far from oppression, for you shall not fear, and from terror, for it shall not come near you. Indeed, they shall surely assemble, but not because of me. Whoever assembles against you shall fall for your sake. Behold, I have created the blacksmith who blows the coals in the fire, who brings forth an instrument for his work, and I have created the spoiler to destroy. No weapon formed against you shall prosper. and every tongue which rises against you in judgment, you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is from me, says the Lord. And we're looking at that last verse there tonight. I apologize I haven't got any extra pictures on the PowerPoint tonight. We had visitors this afternoon and so we were a bit waylaid in getting the finishing touches put to the PowerPoint, but I'm sure you don't need a picture of John Higgey, who many of you know is an American pastor, preacher, and outspoken advocate of the nation of Israel. And because of his stand for righteousness and his stand for the nation of Israel, John Hagee is not always a popular speaker. And on one occasion when he was speaking at their church in San Diego, San Antonio, I should say, a gunman walked in to the congregation. He said it was certainly the most exciting Sunday morning service they had had in a long time. But the gunman walked in and started shouting out that he was going to kill John Hagee and produced his gun and started firing the gun at the preacher. I think he actually fired six bullets that were later examined by the police as being in the wall behind where he was preaching. but thankfully every single one of them missed. Now the police said at that range he shouldn't have missed but he did. But what was really interesting was John Hagee's comments after that. I remember this isn't an exact quote but what he he said was this he said what happened was a real study in people and a real lesson in spirituality. He said because you had great big muscly bodybuilders and weightlifters who were hiding under the pews. And you had little old ladies with their Bibles standing up and saying to the preacher and saying to the gunman, no weapon formed against you shall prosper. And standing on the word of God. And I thought that was an interesting observation. Those who looked like they would have been strongest and bravest and the people you'd want to have by your side in that situation, the muscle men, they were the ones who were cowering underneath. Those who knew the scripture, they were the ones who were standing firm. And that's really what I want to, why I want us to have a look at this text here tonight. Because the word of God is what will give us strength in the face of difficulty, in the face of fear and opposition. And this verse especially is a verse Christians have clung to and do cling to for the Lord's protection. And it is a very precious text alongside Psalm 91, Psalm 121, and a few other precious verses like that. This verse is right up there with our prayer verses that we pray when we're asking the Lord to shield and protect his people. And we need this because we are living in dangerous days. You don't need me to tell you, watching the news, seeing what's happening in the papers. You know, you worry about sending your children to school. You used to think school was safe. Now they're doing spot checks to get rid of weapons out of school bags in schools. You know, it's crazy, isn't it? You know, you think you're safe going to town, and you hear of gunmen, and you hear of cars driving on pavement, mowing people down, and it's terrible things that are happening. How are we to stand in these days? Well, we stand on the word of God, and we take the scriptures by faith, and we pray them, and we live in the peace that they give us. And this verse is a great verse for us on God's protection of his people. But we do need, first of all, to understand it in its context, because its primary context, as we've seen with so many scriptures in the Old Testament, is first and foremost to Israel, and then to the believers after that. In its context, as I read in Isaiah 54, It is to the people of Israel when they're returning from exile. And in this chapter, the Jewish people who Isaiah has prophesied will go into exile, into captivity, will one day come back. and Isaiah has a dual sort of vision when he talks about the return of the exiles because it's obvious he's talking about those who were coming back from Babylon and yet you can see from what the language he uses he's looking at something even bigger in the future as well because he uses language that stretches into the book of revelation and is picked up in the book of revelation for the the last days as well. And so God has a bigger picture of the return of Israel in the future as well in these prophecies. But in this passage he pictures the nation of Israel coming back and they're coming back a depleted nation. In the first verse you know he talks about her being like a barren woman who's not born and he says to her to enlarge the place of her tent in verse 2 because she's going to have many children added to her. The image is actually the image of Sarah in the Old Testament, Sarah who couldn't have a child. And as a result of that, she was barren. But God said to her, you're going to have a child. And they prepared for it. And God blessed them with Isaac. Well, God's saying this to the nation of Israel. You're going to come back. Your numbers are going to be depleted. They will be a nation which has gone through the Holocaust again in the tribulation and things like this. And you're going to be smaller in number. But don't think that's the end of the nation. pitch your tents build some extensions on some family rooms because you're going to have more children the nation is going to grow again and this is what God is saying and he says with that you're also going to need a place to live and isn't it true that every woman wants to have a family but she also wants to have a beautiful home as well and God tells her she's going to have a beautiful home and the beautiful home is Jerusalem and this is where we see in in verse in the middle part that this is really prophetic into the future because he describes Jerusalem as being full of these beautiful precious stones For instance, in verse 12, he says, I'll make your pinnacles of rubies, your gates of crystals, and all your walls of precious stones. Well, when you read the book of Revelation, you read that's what it's going to be like for the new Jerusalem. And the Jerusalem in the Millennial Kingdom is a foretaste of that as well. This is certainly not a Jerusalem that could be afford to be built. today or was built in the days of Nehemiah say at the time in a return so this is looking into the deep future as well but he moves from the citizens and the nation and the citizens sorry nation and the city right down to the individual citizens in verses 16 and 17 and he gives the promise of protection to them And this is where we want to pick it up tonight, because it's a protection verse which, as I say, comes to us by extension in the Church. Remembering, of course, that as the Apostle Paul said, all the promises of God in Christ Jesus are yea and amen. And we can rest our faith on these promises for us as well. And it gives us promise of a threefold protection. It gives us promise of physical protection, gives us promise of verbal protection, and ultimately it gives us promise of spiritual protection. And I want to take you through this verse and show you each of those. So first of all then, it gives us promise of physical protection. The first part of the verse says, no weapon formed against you shall prosper. I keep a little list at home of things that happen on this day as I find them in books and I was interested to look ahead for the week ahead and see on the 2nd of March like Kerry said we're nearly into March. The 2nd of March is the anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin on the 2nd of March 1953. And it was one day after he had announced a plot to destroy three million Jews in the Soviet Union. Isn't that phenomenal? And he died the next day. They buried him one week later on the 9th of March, which just happened to be the Feast of Purim, which is not a surprise to those of us who know scripture. But in a sense, that illustrates what God is saying here. He's saying, no weapon formed against you shall prosper. Israel, I am going to protect you from being destroyed. Like the burning bush, they may be on fire, but they're not burnt up. And they will be preserved. And this has been true for the nation of Israel through history. God has protected them. Now, notice God didn't say that there wouldn't be any weapons formed against them. The fact that he says this tells you there will be. he's saying those weapons will not prosper against you they won't succeed in wiping you out the word weapon there goes back to verse 16 where we have in the previous verse the image of a blacksmith working in his uh in his uh smith smithy uh and is that what you call the way the blacksmith works and he's in his workshop and he is um forging weapons to be used against Israel and there's one who's waiting to take those weapons who is the spoiler in the last part of the verse and here's the fascinating thing God says I created both of those men I created the blacksmith I created the arms dealer the man who's making the weapons and I created the soldier who's going to use them against you So Israel, if I created those men, do I not have the power to protect you from them? That's the point that God is making here. He's saying that he is the one who is their creator and therefore he is the one who is able to defend Israel against them because he is obviously greater than those he has created. He didn't create them to do that, as I think he points out in the previous verses but they will do it of course because of sin but God is greater to protect them and he will protect them against physical harm from annihilation and the nation of Israel will survive and very often he will give real protection as well in real situations to preserve individuals. I think just recently as we've seen Iran and their massive attack with all those rockets just a few months back on the nation of Israel. I mean it's been, it was unprecedented really and Israel came out unharmed. It's not that no rockets hit anywhere. They did hit, you know, runways and things like that, but Israel was preserved through it. And it was remarkable how God protected the nation of Israel at that time. And he will protect his people, Christians too. And the way this word is put, it's better seen i like the geneva bible when i'm consulting um different bibles in my preparation the geneva bible one of the uh predecessors to the king james version you know it's uh one of the bibles the bible used by the reformers it says basically all weapons Out of all the weapons, none of them will succeed. I can't remember the exact phrasing, but it's saying all weapons. And you have a balance between the all weapons and every tongue in the next phrase. They're both complete phrases that are used. Well, he's saying here this, there's not gonna be a weapon that's formed against you, not forged in the black by the blacksmith, that will prosper when it's brought against you. And God will protect his people. There's a lovely story to illustrate an incident of this from church history. In the early days after the apostles there was a missionary by the name of Gobert who went to I went overseas, but he was also a missionary into the northern regions like Lebanon and Syria and so on. And on one occasion he was due, he'd paid for a ticket on a border ship and he was due to catch a ship to go overseas. But the day or two before he was due to go, a man came, a runner came to them and said, the chief of our village desperately wants you to come and tell us about Christianity. Will you come? And he was like, I don't know. I know, what shall I do, what shall I do? I've got this ticket booked, you know, to go overseas, you know, what shall I do? And his colleague said, well, look, we can just about make it in time. We'll make a lightning visit to this village, we'll proclaim the gospel, then we'll make it back in time. So he said, okay, we'll do it, we'll go. And they set off that night. And because it was under such extreme time pressures, they decided they were gonna travel on through the night, which was a dangerous thing to do. And they traveled with some Druze. Now the Druze, you know about the Druze. They live in the northern part of the Golan Heights area around Israel. A lot of Druze are very friendly towards Israel. Some even serve in the Israeli army. They're traveling with some Druze. And as they were traveling on in the night, as they saw with their torches in the night, they saw a hyena. Now this was quite rare to see, but these wild animals do come up from Africa and they did a lot more in those days, up until even last century. And they saw a hyena and they said, no way, we're not going on. Hyenas are a no-no, we don't do hyenas. And he said, look, we've got to go tonight. And they said, no. And they said, all the Druze have a legend. They said, you don't cross the path of the hyena. You know, this is a no. And they said, we're going back to the village, and we're staying there for the night. And so Gobert had to go back, and in the morning he had to leave. He wasn't able to get up to the village, and he had then to go and get his ship. And he was really heartbroken. He couldn't help thinking of this village and this chief who were crying out for the gospel. When he got to where he was going, he wasn't there long before a letter arrived from his colleague. He said, you know that trip that we were going to go on? He said, somebody came to me from that village and said the chief wasn't wanting the gospel at all. It was actually a plan to capture and kill us as missionaries. Now God had allowed that hyena to cross their path to frighten them back and so in the Lord's mercy he had protected his servants. And there are countless stories of this aren't there in church history I mean we could go even through the Bible as well we could think of how Balaam wanted to curse Israel but he found that he was you know, blessed by the Lord, the curse doesn't work on them. We think of Haman trying to wipe out the Jews, Pharaoh trying to wipe out the Jews. We think of the king of Aram sending his army against Elisha and finding the power of God delivers Elisha. We think of the army going to capture Elijah and so on. And so many times God protected his servants. Now this is what we can pray for and we can stand on in these days and we can take this verse and we can pray like in that situation with John Gee and let's be honest he survived. They stood on that scripture and he survived. No weapon formed against you shall prosper. And we can preach it. Now be careful what it doesn't say. It doesn't say no sickness will come upon you. This isn't a verse about sickness. It's a verse against attack, all right? So don't misunderstand the context. No weapon is physical weapons. And no, it's not saying that nobody will persecute you. The Bible does tell us we will face persecution. And there is not a promise here as well that we will never die, all right? It's not that we're never going to die. We will die one day of something, but only when God in his sovereignty allows it. There's an old saying, they used to say in church history that the saints of God are immortal till their work is done. When God's time comes, then he allows us to die. I've been reading about the temple in Jerusalem. I wish I could have shown you this. I've got a book I read in bed on Herod's temple. Heather comes to bed, and she's sleeping. She wants to go to sleep. I say, no, you've got to listen to this. So she has to tell me in the morning, tell me in the morning. but I found this fascinating bit thing but with a place where the priests slept overnight in the temple and on the northern side of the temple around the the actual temple proper where the holy of holies was there were different chambers for different things and there was one chamber called the chamber of the hearth H-E-A-R-T-H. And the chamber of the hearth was where the priests who were ministering and staying overnight in the temple to minister, who weren't the guarding priests, they had to stay out on duty and stay awake. But the priests, like the high priest, unless it was a special feast, they would sleep in the chamber of the hearth. And the chamber of the hearth had benches all the way around it. It carved in rock for the older priests to sleep on and the younger priests used to sleep on the floor. And in the middle of the floor was a little hole. and the priest who was in charge of the gates would lock the gates of the temple and he would come into the chamber of the hearth for the night and he would drop the keys into this hole and then his job was to sleep over the keys. So nobody could get their hands on the keys. If they wanted to get their hands on the keys they had to go through him first. And as I was reading that in bed, I just saw the Lord Jesus Christ in Revelation chapter one, where he says, behold, I have the keys of death and Hades. And I thought to myself, what a glorious picture. And this is what Jesus was telling John. He said, you know, I'm the one who's in charge of when my people die. And you need to know that. Anybody who wants to come, they can only do what I allow them to do when the time is that I allow them. And it's in God's sovereign timing that these things happen. That's why like in Acts chapter 12, you have James who is beheaded by Herod. but you have Peter who's rescued from prison. You think, how can both be in the same chapter? Because James' testimony was finished, his race was run, and his testimony was sealed in blood. Peter's wasn't, yet. he was still gonna be preserved and serve God until he was crucified later on. So, no weapon formed against you shall prosper is a verse we can take to heart and apply it to ourselves and be grateful for that physical protection the Lord gives. And if you're frightened this week, Say that verse, say it in faith, stand on it. If you're frightened about walking home from college in the dark or whatever it is, say this verse. I say it often, no weapon formed against you shall prosper. Stand on that verse and thank God for it. I know my life is in his hands and we have that physical protection to look to. And praise God, this was true for so many in the Bible as well. I think of Jeremiah. God said to Jeremiah, they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you. And Psalm 129, verse two, the psalmist said, many a time they have afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me. So praise the Lord for that. And then secondly we see here the verbal protection in verse 17 because he goes on and he says no weapon formed against you shall prosper and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. The verse now talks about when somebody is verbally attacking you and the phrase rising against you in judgment is a phrase describing somebody making an accusation against you and really it's legal language you know somebody rising up in a court of law to prosecute to an attack in this way and the situation here is wonderful because they're rising to condemn you but what we read is it said you will condemn them And it's a reversal of the situation, the verbal protection against attack. Now I'm sure, like me, you don't like verbal attacks against you. I hate them. And when I have a verbal attack against me, whether it's somebody writing a letter or somebody having a go at me in a meeting or on the door or something, I always think of that person 1 peter 5a about satan prowls around like a roaring lion and it feels like he's roared at me uh when i come under attack and and words can be so harmful can't they and so many cruel things can be said i heard about a student who was particularly uh ungracious in his speech about others and said a lot of unkind things about other people and a lot of gossipy things as well about people and one day the chaplain of the of the the boarding school they were at he said uh he said i want you to come with me one day up to the top of the church tower so the young lad went with him up to the top of the church tower and he was puzzled because the chaplain had brought a pillow with him And he said, I've bought a pillow and a Stanley knife. He said, now what I want you to do is I want you to rip open this pillow full of feathers and shake it out. The student thought this was a bit strange, but he did what the chaplain said. And he said, now, and he watched those feathers catch in the wind and just spread all over the campus and go all over the place. He said, now I want you to go and pick every one of them up, every single one of them. And the student said, there's no way I can do that. They've spread so far and wide. And he said, that's what your words are like. He said, you say these things and you want to reel them back in afterwards, but you can't. They go so far. They do so much damage. And the student never forgot that lesson. It really brought home to him the damage he was doing with his words. And that should be something for all of us to consider about our speech. We need to be careful with our speech. That's why they say a dog is a man's best friend, because it wags its tail, not its tongue. But the accusation of the tongue is something that is a particularly painful thing to have leveled against you. And this has been true for the Jewish people as well. Even as we've seen it in recent days with the whole Gaza conflict, you know, what have we heard again and again? We've heard chanting in the street, we've heard people making politicians, making statements. We've had people in the UN saying horrible things. And God says, one day you're gonna condemn the very people who condemned you. This is God's reversal. This is the Abrahamic covenant coming into play. You know, those who go against Israel, God will bring it back on them. And he says, those who rise against you in judgment, you shall condemn. And we have many illustrations of this happening in individuals' lives where God is working in the Bible as well. We think of Moses and how Korah and his rebellion rose up against Moses. I was reading that this week and you know, Numbers chapter 16, Korah led this rebellion against Moses and he said, you've taken too much on yourselves, you and Aaron. you assume far too much authority on themselves and you know what God gave Moses who was the meekest man he fell on his face at first before them but then he said you sons of Korah take too much on yourselves and he said and God will prove it to you And of course, they had the great issue with the censers bought, and then God swallowed them up when the ground opened. But God enabled Moses to stand and fight back. I think of Elijah in the days of Ahab and Jezebel, and how because of the wickedness of the idolatry, Elijah said, there's gonna be no more rain in the land of Israel until I say. And then when the time came, three and a half years later, for Elijah to go and announce that there would be rain again and to call for the contest on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal, when Ahab sees Elijah, what does he say? He says, is that you, you troubler of Israel? Now, what does Elijah say? Does he meekly say, oh, well, you know, we don't want any difficulty. No, Elijah turns around and says, I have not troubled Israel. He says, you and your family have. And he condemned the one who condemned him. Now, lots of Christians would say, oh, I don't think we should talk like that, but that's what the Bible says here. David, when David danced before the Lord, you remember, Michael, his separated wife, said to him, well, you were, that was a pretty display today, wasn't it? And he said to her, I will be even more humble than that before the Lord. In effect, that's what he said. And he replied to her, he condemned her, and of course we know the Lord's judgment on her in that situation. So there's many examples of this in scripture, even in the New Testament, how Paul and at times even the Lord Jesus answered those who condemned them and came against them. Although we must remember the Lord Jesus, of course, went as a lamb to the slaughter at the cross, which was remarkable because he had every power to answer those who were going to attack him. But you know, this is true for us too. God gives us the power at the time when it's right to respond to the verbal attack and to come back with a verbal answer on those who attack us. There's a remarkable illustration of this from church history in the 1500s. In the 1500s, Queen Mary came to the throne and she was a Roman Catholic queen and she wanted to change the whole of the country to be under Catholicism and she wanted to stamp out Protestantism. And she appointed leaders in government and leaders even in the church who were on her side to do that. And the threat of disobedience to becoming a Roman Catholic was death. And this is why the Christians who were standing firm on the gospel, they had to go into hiding at times, and they did things like holding gospel meetings, or they had prayer meetings, or they had communion without calling it mass, and they did so at the risk of their lives. Well one of the ministers out of many, and there were 300 martyrs at that time because of this, and one of the ministers who was being hunted down at the time was a man called Gooch. And Gooch took refuge in the home of a lady called Alice Driver. Now Alice Driver was just an ordinary lady. She was a very down-to-earth girl and she was a very ordinary young lady who gave, she was a strong believer in the Lord and loved his word and she loved the gospel and she said to Mr Gooch, you hide in my house. Well, they were both caught. They were both caught. And because she was complacent in his hiding, she was brought before the courts as well. But she did not hold her tongue. And she answered back again and again and again. One time, she said to the judge who was judging her, your queen is more like Jezebel. than a godly queen in the Bible. And for that, they cut off both her ears. This is the Roman Catholic Church in this country. They cut off both her ears, but it didn't cut off her tongue. And so she kept arguing back. And you know what? They quizzed her about her beliefs, because they wanted to burn her at the stage. They had to prove that she was a Protestant. And they said to her, what books have you been reading? And she said, I have been reading the Old and the New Testament. And she said, the word of God. And he said to her, he said, why do you call it the word of God? And she challenged him, she said, why? She said, what would you call it? That was a great answer. And he had to admit it was the word of God. And then he said, and what do you say about the communion? And she said, it's a sign, it's a symbol. She said, and a sign doesn't point to itself, it points to somebody else, it points to Christ. And she had these great answers. And every time they came at her with an accusation, this poor lady who had suffered so much, she just kept smiling and she kept answering. And at the end of it, she said, isn't it remarkable? She said, you who've been to universities could not answer me, a poor farmer's wife. You know what that was? That was the Lord giving her a tongue to answer her accusers. And she had a testimony before she was later burnt at the stake for the Lord Jesus Christ. And you know what dear friends, that's something you and I can take to heart too. You know, every tongue which rises against you in judgment, you shall condemn. In the book of Revelation, God says those who are of the synagogue of Satan shall come down and fall before those who are his true believers. Those who deny the truth of the gospel will fall before those who they've criticized and condemned. So that's an encouragement to us. And I don't know who's facing battles like this. If you're on the side of truth, then you can find great comfort in this particular verse here. The third type of protection here is the spiritual protection. And this comes at the end of verse 17, where it says, this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is from me, says the Lord. Now I love this because this verse is it it goes really and from what we would say is the most important thing to what most people would say is the least important thing but in God's eyes it goes from the least important thing to the most important thing the spiritual protection because you see you and I have one enemy who doesn't need the weapons that are forged by the blacksmith. He doesn't need the weapons that are made by the arms dealer. He is Satan, the adversary. And his name is the accuser. That's what he's called in scripture. And he rises in accusation against the church. And we need a standing, a defense against him. And so God says to his people, they are going to be his servants, the servants of the Lord. By the way, this is the first time the word servant is used in the plural. Up until now, it's been used of the servant of the Lord, who is the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, graciously, God takes the same title as he does so often in scripture, and he gives the title for the son to the children as well. He calls his son the light of the world. Jesus says, you are the light of the world. He calls his son the Lamb of God. his children are called his flock his sheep and so many times he takes names like this and applies them to us as well because we are his people we are Christians even the name Christian has the name Christ in it and he says you are the servants of the Lord and there's a heritage for you Alec Mateer in his commentary says in Hebrew heritage does not describe the way in which property was acquired you know by an inheritance under a will but the reality of a possession. So he's saying it's not something that's you know will come to you later on when somebody dies he's saying it's something you've got now and he says this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and this is the protection they've got he says and their righteousness is from me." Now I know some of you are using the NIV tonight and you're scratching your heads because your Bible says vindication. But the term is for righteousness. The reason the NIV uses the word vindication is because that is the effect of it. But as Alec Mateer says in his commentary, vindication is an absurd mistranslation of righteousness. because it is righteousness that has been given to us by the Lord Jesus Christ. And this was true of the nation of Israel in scripture and then to the church as well. If you look at the chapter before this, you'll see the amazing prophecy of Isaiah 53. And in verse 11, this great chapter, which you all know is a prophecy of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, it is prophesied about the Lord Jesus in these words. It says, he shall see the labor of his soul and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant shall justify many. And it tells us that the Messiah is going to justify or make righteous his people. and this is what Isaiah 54 the next chapter comes along and says this is your protection spiritually their righteousness is of me literally it's my righteousness which is given to protect you It's almost like the bodyguard. Do you remember when that man shielded his family from the gunman at the Trump campaign? And he put his arms at the fireman who died when President Trump was shot on the campaign trail. And the fireman shielded his family. And he was shot, but his family were protected. It's almost like Christ steps in front of the accuser for us. and his righteousness is our shield against him their righteousness is from me it's put to our account and you know this is where the apostle paul gets it in romans chapter 8 when he talks about who is he who will condemn you and he talks about the righteousness. We're justified by Christ. This comes from these Old Testament scriptures and I believe it comes from Isaiah 54 verse 17. And Isaiah has a lot to say in chapter 45 and chapter 61 about the righteousness of the Messiah given. to his people. And Jeremiah also some 60 years later was to say the same thing. In fact he said of Jerusalem, in those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will dwell safely and this is the name by which she will be called, the Lord our righteousness. In Hebrew Jehovah Sidkenu. means we bear the righteousness of Jehovah. And as the hymn writer said, no fear with his righteousness on. That's beautiful, no fear with his righteousness on. I have the breastplate of righteousness against the attacks of Satan. Now my righteousness isn't any good. It's no good when Satan comes to accuse me of saying, well I've been a good boy this week, because Satan can find things I'd never thought of. His accusations can raise things I'd never thought of. My righteousness is no defense, but I have the righteousness of Christ put against me. I'm justified by faith, and I have a righteous standing before God. And this is the ultimate protection we have as the people of God, the spiritual protection. And if you go out here understanding one thing tonight, I want you to go out understanding this, that if you've trusted the Lord Jesus Christ, you have a shield, a breastplate of righteousness before Satan and whoever else would accuse you of sin that is impenetrable because it is the righteousness of God and you can go home in peace. So what a protection the Lord gives his people. Like John Higgy said, you know, it was a lesson in spirituality. Those great big bodybuilders hiding under the pews, they spent all their time doing this. I'm gonna be strong. I'm gonna be strong. The real strong ones were the ones who said, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna read my Bible. I'm gonna pray. I'm gonna grow. And when it came to the bullets being fired, who was standing safe and strong. Let each one of us in this church take the Lord's protection promised here and the scriptures and learn of them and stand on them.