Up until now, this chapter has been remarkable for its descriptions of man's sinfulness, and even of man's total depravity and helplessness in his sin. But God is not helpless, and the chapter begins saying, Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save. or his ear dulled that it cannot hear. And now in verse 14, where we'll pick up through the end of the chapter, we'll see what the Lord has done on behalf of people in their sin. Justice is turned back and righteousness stands far away for truth has stumbled in the public squares. and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The Lord saw it and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no one to intercede. Then his own arm brought him salvation and his righteousness upheld him. He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head. He put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and wrapped himself in zeal as a cloak. According to their deeds, so will he repay. Wrath to his adversaries, repayment to his enemies. To the coastlands, he will render repayment. they shall fear the name of the Lord from the West, and His glory from the rising of the sun, for He will come like a rushing stream which the wind of the Lord drives. And a Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, declares the Lord. And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the Lord, my spirit that is upon you, And my words that I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children's offspring, says the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore. Amen. In this scripture, so full of promise, the Lord reveals His plan to correct the moral degradation in the world. His plan centers on the success of a champion. How interesting that He declares in verse 21 that His covenant is for His chosen people, and yet He addresses not them, but a single person, someone anointed with the Holy Spirit to wage war for God in a sin-corrupted world. The Lord's Word rings true to what we know, and isn't it a relief to hear the truth that the problems of the world are not because some people are victims and the others are victimizers, but that all people are sinners and therefore oppressors. Separated from God, Isaiah has just said, the way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths. Sin is common to all, and so all people have suffered from their own and others' lawlessness, hurting their victims, for the hands of all are swift to shed innocent blood. This moral depravity is so toxic that human society cannot right itself. And sometimes things get so bad that God begins to judge. Well, one example of that was, of course, Noah's flood, when God destroyed the world that then was. In this scripture, God takes stock of the moral atrophy of Judah. And he notes that that moral decline has gone so far that without his intervention, the situation is hopeless. God was disgusted that no man could be found to do justice and righteousness. Ask yourself, are we consigned to wholesale moral atrophy in our own persons or in our society? Or has God moved to reverse our decay? Can God help sinners with their sin? Well, here God shows His someone, His anointed champion, putting on His battle armor to do just that. God overcame man's moral atrophy by sending a warrior to turn people from their evil. And these verses tell us what the Lord saw and what the Lord did and how the Lord won. And we will take those in turn. What the Lord saw was moral collapse. The Lord saw moral collapse. Verse 14 shows that justice is turned back and righteousness stands far away for truth has stumbled in the public squares and uprightness cannot enter. The Hebrew supplies the word so at the head of verse 14, so justice is turned back, et cetera, because the sinful depravity of every individual, which is the bulk of the beginning of this chapter, that makes for a society like the one Isaiah is just about to describe. Think of these four good things that every society needs to thrive. First of all, justice, or treating other people nobly, And lawfully, as well as having fair judgments in courts, that's one. Another is righteousness, and that's right words and thoughts and deeds in conformity to the revealed will of God. Truth comes from a clear vision of reality. It's knowing right and wrong. It's the opposite of deception and lies. Truth is honesty, fidelity, or faithfulness. Faithfulness that can withstand all scrutiny. And fourthly, uprightness is fair dealing with people without taking advantage of them. And now a very bleak picture emerges. The structural support that keeps people at peace has crumbled. If a circus were held under a big tent and all the elephants ran through the support poles, you'd see that tent fall down and collapse like a big parachute settling into the dust. You've probably seen buildings demolished with carefully placed charges. Once the structural integrity is weakened, it collapses on itself. Well, what is the structure that holds up human society in the first place? Well, God says here it's adherence, willing adherence, to God's revealed will. Justice and righteousness, those are the first two things, are absolute, unchanging features of the way the world must run. They're not material things like metal or stones for building structures, but these are the substances of human civilization because man is moral as his Creator is moral. Man shall live, man shall live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. The law says, and again this is God's revealed will, the law says do this and you shall live. For the world of men as society, in other words, was meant to function on the will of God. That's the structural glue that holds it all together. But there in Isaiah's day, in the nation of Judah, justice is turned back. Whenever fair judgments were to put in an appearance, or whenever treating other people as image bearers of God would shake up the comfort of the powerful or of the popular, society just gave justice a shove and pushed it back into hiding as much as to say, we don't want any of that here. A society is in collapse when its judgment calls assign advantages to some, by some metric other than God's law. In other words, when the rule by which deeds are judged, moral or immoral, is no longer the Ten Commandments, but the ideas of men, then true justice has been given a push. Now, if justice is the foundation, then righteousness is the floor joists. Righteousness stands far away, out of sight, out of mind. Have you ever noticed how much effort sinners will go to to keep righteousness out of sight. You might just think about how those Ten Commandments used to be displayed here and there on courthouse property here in America, but one by one people removed them because that righteousness just couldn't be tolerated. When something is far away, it can't be used to your advantage, like a tool that's out of reach. Righteousness is like that. It stands far away, therefore It can't be called to anyone's help quickly, and when he needs it, by the time it gets there, the wrong has already been done. So a person needs, we all need, righteous character to be real people, godly people. But if righteousness is never afforded a place in public life, few commoners and few of their leaders will ever be able to call up personal righteousness. Isaiah also says that truth has stumbled in the public squares. This is the truth. It has tripped and fallen flat. And the only thing left standing in public is lies, public lies with no tolerance for challengers. These rule public discourse and uprightness being shut out means people just come to expect that they'll be taken advantage of and they take advantage of others. So you get the picture. A corrosive has weakened the structure of society. Moral relativism of making truth and right a matter of preference has turned the stabilizers into jelly. You have your truth and I have mine. When that's commonly believed, it means collapse is imminent. Isaiah gives the final view in the first part of verse 15, He says, truth is lacking. It's missing where wanted most. Truth is the medicine that could heal, but nobody has it. And you say, well, what about the one man or the woman who won't compromise with evil? What about the Christians? What about the church or the remnant? Can't they do anything? You've probably thought that about your elected senator or representative. Can't he do anything? Well, verse 15 tells you what happens to the individual who tries. And he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. So now it's predator and prey. The wolves come out to hunt the weak. And those who are non-conformers and dissenters get crushed by forces too strong for them. And those who departed from evil, which is what he says here, those are the godly. Those are Christians who believed God's word and walked with Him in faith and obedience. You remember the book of Hebrews in chapter 11. It says what happened to believers in history. They suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonments. They were stoned. They were sawn in two. They were killed with a sword. They wandered about in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. Tradition says it was Isaiah who was sawn in two. And if that's true, we know why. He had made himself a prey. I think that this verse is saying that people are so bad collectively that they'll turn their malice on any former friend. who begins to walk in God's ways or even question the path of evil. Perhaps the saddest part of this is that Isaiah was talking about the church. Judah was the church. They had known God's saving might. They'd known Him as the Redeemer. They'd known His grace, but they had not walked in His ways. Their sins had separated them from God. And when any society gets to this point of declination, it's easy for believers to make one of two errors. One is to despair, to give up completely and say, there's no help for us, there's no help for my church anymore, there's no help for my nation anymore. Well, that's unbelief, isn't it? We just heard God say in the first verse of this chapter, is the Lord's arm shortened that it cannot save? Of course not. God knows no inability. He is the God of desperate situations. He's the God of helpless people. And the other error is to trust in a man, a person, to get you out of this fix. Wasn't that what King Ahaz did long ago? Instead of trusting in the Lord, he sent his messengers out to the king of Assyria for help and said, I'll be your servant. You be my politician. You fix my problems and get me out of the mess I'm in. Let's be honest, moral decline leads to very desperate situations. Isaiah saw it long before this in chapter 3, announcing how God would give the nation over to the consequences of their sin. And here's what God said. He said, I will make boys their princes and infants shall rule over them. The people will oppress one another. A man will take hold of his brother in the house of his father, saying, you have a cloak. You shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule. Women rule over them. Your guides mislead you." And when things are this desperate, Christians will see people making both those kind of errors. And believers will ask, does God know what we're going through? Is God conscious of what's happening to us? And the only thing that will keep a Christian sane in a mad world is knowledge that God sees. Beloved, God does see moral collapse. God says He sees the believer's plight in an ungodly society. And if God sees, then God cares. If God, by His very nature, gives a thought for the persecuted church, there in the middle of verse 15 and 16, the Lord saw it. And it displeased Him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no one to intercede. You know, God is never taken by surprise. One of the ways we know we are Interpreting scripture literally is when our interpretation accounts for literary forms. In the case of this verse, God is depicted as coming to some knowledge that he didn't have before, as if surprised. But what this is, is God accommodating himself to us. He's not saying that he lacks omniscience or sight of the future. God cannot be surprised. But what this does is this helps us to see sin through God's eyes. He saw it, it was evil in His eyes. Look, when no other changes, sorry, when no other eyes marked the change from bad to worse, when other eyes did not weep for the pain and the danger and the oppression, when other eyes did not flash righteous anger at evil, God's eyes did. God sees His misused people and He sees that to which other eyes are blind. And it says in verse 16, He saw that there was no man. No one was really reliable. Even a powerful man, even a good man, someone like King Hezekiah, who did right in the eyes of the Lord, he could not accomplish the tasks of righteousness and justice for his nation, far less the whole world. There was no man because there is no man. And Jehovah was appalled that there was no one to intercede. He was astonished that what mankind needed for his own help and what God needed to help man was nowhere to be found. To intercede is to pass between, as between a man condemned and his accuser. There was no one who could interpose himself between the people and the consequences of their sin. So what the Lord did was go to war. And if you're taking notes, this is the second thing God did. He went to war. This was His second act to overcome man's moral condition. Verse 16, then, His own arm brought Him salvation. and His righteousness upheld Him. We get to see the arm of the Lord laid bare. To see His strength, the strength of what? His own righteousness, His integrity, His honesty, His truth. These are God's attributes, the qualities of His eternal character. And we know that the flexing of God's arm is the revealing of Himself in Jesus Christ the Savior. And so this scripture clearly points to the divinity of Christ. He bent His strength to save His people. And he brought salvation, exactly what sinners needed, in exactly the way in which a key fits the lock of his own righteous character. I am saying he didn't compromise his own righteousness with sinners. He glorified himself and saved them. That's what Reformed Christians have always understood by the terms to the praise of his glorious grace taken from Ephesians 1. where Paul explains that in love, God predestined to elect sinners according to the purpose of His will to salvation, so that believers, when they had come to understand it, would glorify Him for His grace being accepted in the Beloved, that is, Jesus Christ. And Christians can answer the questions, whose power saved me? God's power, His own arm. And they can answer the question, What righteousness upheld me? God's righteousness. Children and everyone, I don't know if you have ever noticed that you can tell a lot about people and how they identify themselves by their clothing. Think about someone you know who might wear a cowboy hat or cowboy boots or somebody who wears a suit or if you can identify a bespoke suit, it tells you something about such people. God's warrior clothing in verse 17 is a word picture for His zeal to win and for His own righteous qualities. So, verse 17, He put on righteousness as a breastplate and a helmet of salvation on His head. He put on garments of vengeance for clothing and wrapped Himself in zeal as a cloak. He appeared in public. wearing these garments to show who He is, to show what He intended, and that He's able to accomplish it. Remember how the king of Syria boasted about he would want to go beat Israel in war. And Israel's king said to him, let not him who straps on his armor boast like him who takes it off. In other words, men don't know the outcome of the war. Don't boast before you've won. Well, God doesn't suffer from man's frailty. If God puts on his body armor and his helmet and his battle dress, his garments of vengeance and his cloak is zeal, then his mission will be accomplished. God is able and God has done it. Now watch his method. Verse 18, according to their deeds, so will he repay. Wrath to his adversaries, Repayment to his enemies. To the coastlands, he will render repayment. Remember that God is a God of vengeance. Psalm 94 says, O Lord, God of vengeance, shine forth, repay to the proud what they deserve. God's vengeance is a foundational doctrine of scripture. Every sin will be repaid fully, one way or another. Either the sinner will get according to his deeds, or if she trusts the Savior, God's repayment of wrath will have fallen upon his son in her place. God's judgments are repaid equal to the offense committed, which is called parody. Wrath, what's that? That's his holy anger, his hostility against sin. And what He gives is recompense, that's language for financial transactions, meaning there can be no peace until all the debts are paid. Think about facing a warrior like this. He's on the side of right and justice. He has authority to wage war. He has all power and counts you, a sinner, as a hostile. He's not sinister, but his justice requires that he must not cease prosecuting his assault until his holy hostility is paid out in full. It suggests that sinners owe a debt of penalty of a punishment that they have accrued. Now, someone might think, well, this is just God saying he's going to repay Judah's enemies. It does say, to the coastlands he will render, rather, repayment. Coastlands being Gentile nations the far-flung places of the earth. Maybe your translation says islands It could just be the lands of the Philistines the enemies of Judah and there is truth to that because God will avenge persecutions that are brought against his church and against individual believers for the sake of his own Righteousness, he'll avenge them He repaid Edom. He repaid Babylon He's jealous for his blood-bought people But there's something more, because the Jews were no better morally than their Gentile neighbors. And Paul makes this one of his themes in Romans 3. Are the Jews any better, he asks? No. Jews also are under sin and therefore condemned. In fact, Isaiah in this chapter supplied the model confession for the Jewish sinner, a prayer that says, and this is verse 12 and 13, if you care to follow, for our transgressions are with us and we know our iniquities, transgressing and denying the Lord and turning back from following our God. So if God the warrior unleashes his wrath, he is picking out not the nations for conflict, but the sin that they represent. The true enemy is sin, and here's where you can expect the brunt of God's force to be applied. If sin cannot be conquered, no one can be saved, Jew or Gentile. God's campaign is for the salvation of immoral sinners. You can even sense from the next verse that salvation extends to the Gentiles, for it's the coastlands who shall fear the name of the Lord from the west and his glory from the rising of the sun. That's a picture of worldwide conversion under the gospel. We believers have to concentrate on this when we see truth stumble in our public squares. when our nation is having its moral death rattle, we have to be thinking about not who is friend and foe on earth, but about all men condemned and in need of God's saving grace through the Lord Jesus. And that means we should be praying for the conversion of all the nations of the world. Jehovah to his anointed in Psalm 2 speaks to him saying, ask of me. and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. Christ the mediator, risen from the dead, is accomplishing that even now, so pray for it. Pray for the spread of the gospel and for the growth of the church, and name those nations that you know of, especially where missionaries known to you are laboring. We cannot tell whether a whole nation under its rulers could be truly converted and saved. However improbable that seems to us, it is possible and desirable to give glory to Christ. So pray that the nations would come to fear the name of the Lord from the West and His glory from the rising of the sun. And we have to accept that it's quite possible our nation has been a hindrance rather than a help to His gospel and to their salvation. And so, as we try to have God's own view of these things, we have to know that altars to Baal must be torn down before altars to Jehovah can be built. And therefore, if we see public moral collapse, we should assume the Lord Jesus is prosecuting His campaign against sin and pray that the outcome of this recompense will be salvation. But we also do not need to despair if God is fighting for us. Despair is contrary to hope, and hope is one of those traits of a genuine relationship with God, a trait that abides. Now abide, these three, faith, hope, and love. When we despair in the face of such things that God has declared to be true, or that He has promised it is a great sin. Indeed, the Lord's armor here in this passage of Isaiah is the model armor for the Christian. Paul calls it the whole armor of God in Ephesians 6 that Christians put on in hope of victory. Like God, we wrestle against the enemies of our souls, cosmic powers over this present darkness, whose chief weapon against us is sin and temptation to sin, especially the sin of disbelieving God. Brothers and sisters, we need to be battle-ready with the breastplate of righteousness on us, with the helmet of salvation on our heads, holding the shield of faith the sword of the spirit, having shoes of the gospel of peace, and wearing the belt of truth. And all of these are contrary to despair. If God has given us a promise of deliverance, and if we despair that he will keep that promise, then we sin against God. And like the Hebrews who doubted that God would give them the promised land, despaired and wept and said, God's brought us out in the desert to kill us. Well, it wasn't even true, and it's not true for us. And if we come to believe that God's going to save some other people, but for whatever reason is not going to save a sinner like you or me because we're too weak or sinful, well, we also sin. And when the future is unknown or looks too dismal, and if we say God tells me to rejoice and be hopeful for the Lord to save the sinners around me, and we know those things, but we say the future's too awful, well, I might as well die. and that is a sin of despair. There is a kind of despair that is a damnable despair, a kind that will end up in hell. It's when sinners do not believe that God will pardon sin, if they do not believe that this gospel is true or that Christ is this Savior pictured as coming to save His people. Satan would use all of our lesser doubts to get us to that place if he could. He'll make the moral collapse of our nation an instrument to get everyone into hell if he can. And that is why you need your head capped with the helmet of salvation, and I do too. This blow will fall, and anyone not helmeted will be mortally injured. But instead of losing hope, Will you not instead dwell upon God's astonishing goodness? When all the rebels of Judah had ruined everything for their nation and there was no man, did God say, Oh well, too late to do anything for you? No, He said, My own arm will bring me salvation. My righteousness will uphold me. And what else, verse 20, a Redeemer will come to Zion. to those in Jacob who turn from transgression." Friends, you cannot measure infinite mercy. You cannot contain infinite love. And so when God promises a Redeemer, and when the record of Holy Scripture is that this Redeemer has come, has paid the ransom price, has set believers free from their sin and from its eternal consequences, when it says he's paid with a fully sufficient sacrifice, then there are no grounds for despair. Pardoned, full and free is yours, believer. I know you believe on the Son of God. Then do not think of Him as a reluctant Savior. God clothed Himself with zeal for your salvation. That is not reluctance. Grace has not barely crept up to you to sniff out your worthiness. Grace has abounded to the chief of sinners. Or like Isaiah says in verse 19, he will come in like a rushing stream, which the spirit of the Lord drives. We should never be so proud as to say nothing can help us now. No thought could be more pleasing to the powers of darkness or to the devil than that one. The testimony of God is that those who have been forgiven much will love much. And so you, believer, you win a victory with the strength provided you by Christ himself when you glorify God for the great mercy shown to you, a sinner, and when you love him much. And while we are not to give up on people or societies in general, we also have to transfer our hope to the kingdom of God. That's the kingdom that will outlast the world. And there all our hopes and dreams and affections and desires should be. Tonight, Lord willing, we'll see more of how God's warrior acted to turn sinners from their moral decay. Let's pray. holy and everlasting God, we pray to bless your name and to thank you for sending your warrior, the Lord Jesus Christ, your servant, to accomplish for us the salvation we certainly could not accomplish for ourselves. And we have seen many instances in your scripture and many instances in our own lives when things were going from bad to worse. And we remember your grace to us that when we were progressing morally from bad to worse, and when sin was working its fruit in us, you stepped in, you interposed your own grace and the salvation of your son. You sent the washing of regeneration to us, that new birth. make us one with the Lord Jesus Christ and you granted us faith and repentance and turned us back onto the level and upright way. We say this is all you're doing. It is all of grace. We praise you for your mercy that we have come to understand. We pray that Christ's name would be glorified here in our community a small segment of society, and we earnestly implore you to save the lost. Help us to be a good witness and a good testimony to it, not ever resting upon our laurels, but upon the merits of Jesus Christ. We pray that you would convict people of their sin. and that you would chastise sinners, that they might be saved, that they too might be able to say, affliction has been good for me, for now your law I keep. In Christ's name we ask these things. Amen.