If you turn to Isaiah 45. Let's hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held to subdue nations before him and lose the armor of kings, to open before him the double doors so that the gates will not be shut. I will go before you and make the crooked places straight. I will break in pieces the gates of bronze and cut the bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that I, the Lord, who call you by your name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob, my servant's sake, and Israel, my elect, I have even called you by your name. I have named you, though you have not known me. I am the Lord and there is no other. There is no God besides me. I will gird you though you have not known me that they may know from the rising of the sun to the setting that there is none beside me. I am the Lord and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create calamity. I, the Lord, do all these things. Rain down, you heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. Let the earth open, let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together. I, the Lord, have created it. Woe to him who strives with his maker. Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him who forms it, what are you making? Or shall your handiwork say, he has no hands. Woe to him who says to his father, what are you begetting? Or to the women, what have you brought forth? Thus says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel and his maker. Ask me of things to come concerning my son. and concerning the work of my hands, you command me. I have made the earth and created man on it. I, my hands, stretched out the heavens, and all their hosts I have commanded. I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his ways. He shall build my city and let my exiles go free. Not for price nor reward, says the Lord of Hosts. Thus says the Lord, the labor of Egypt and the merchandise of Kush and of the Sabaean men of statute shall come over to you and they shall be yours. They shall walk behind you. They shall come over in chains and they shall bow down to you. They will make supplication to you saying, surely God is in you and there is no other. There is no other God. Truly you are God who hide yourself. God of Israel, the Savior. They shall be ashamed and also disgraced, all of them. They shall go in confusion together, who are makers of idols. But Israel shall be saved by the Lord. with an everlasting salvation. You shall not be ashamed or disgraced forever and ever. For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens? Who is God? Who formed the earth and made it? Who has established it? Who did not create it in vain? Who formed it to be inhabited? I am the Lord, there is no other. I have not spoken in secret in a dark place of the earth. I did not say to the seed of Jacob, seek me in vain. I, the Lord, speak righteousness. I declare things that are right. Assemble yourselves and come. Draw near together. You who have escaped from the nations, they have no knowledge, who carry the wood of their carved image. and pray to a God that cannot save, tell, and bring forth your case. Yes, let them take counsel together who has declared this from ancient times, who has told it from that time. Have not I the Lord, and there is no other God besides me? Not just God and a Savior. There is none beside me. Look to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other. I have sworn by myself, the word has gone out of my mouth in righteousness and shall not return, that to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall take an oath. He shall say, surely in the Lord I have righteousness and strength. To him men shall come. and all shall be ashamed who are increased against him. In the Lord all the descendants of Israel shall be justified and shall glory. This is the reading of God's holy word. We've been looking at Isaiah as I have had the opportunity to teach in a variety of settings. And I actually read a portion of Isaiah 45 before. To me, it's a very critical passage in that it is loaded with a number of things. But the one thing that continually jumps out is that there is but one God. And he repeats over and over again, and I tried to emphasize, I am the Lord, and there is no other. And it's almost to the point where it kind of brings you back to where Peter is having a conversation with Christ that the pastor recently taught on. Jesus asked him, do you love me? And he responds. And then he asked him again. And then he asked him again. And it's almost like an irritating thing. OK, I got that one. Move on. We need something else to think about now. We know you are the Lord and there is no other. And yes, you're Jehovah. You're Yahweh. We know this. We understand this. Now what else do we have to say about all of this? And this particular chapter just doesn't let you put that down. It just doesn't let you put that concept down that God is it. And there is no other. And this passage also has, built into it, directly tied to this idea that God is the Lord and that there is no other, is that he is the creator. And as the one who is the only one, there is no other, he establishes creation. He establishes everything that we see. And as we have looked at Isaiah, we have read a bunch of passages that speak about God bringing this judgment against various peoples, against various tribes. And you constantly have this judgment, judgment, judgment, judgment. And as I pointed out, the reason for that, that judgment actually shows God's righteousness. In the fact that God's righteousness doesn't change as things get worse, okay? It's not like we have this fall, and then we have another fall, and then we have another fall, and well, if I can just get you back up to the next, where you just fell from, don't worry about this part here, just, if I can see some improvement, then that's good enough, okay? And in the world, that's how we think. We bring discipline, you know, and we have the rebellious child or whatever, and we seek to bring discipline, and we get a little correction, you know? And it's a 5%. And we say, oh, well, we got that much, OK. Let's just kind of keep working at it. But God is not that way. He's saying, no, back to righteousness. Righteousness is true. Righteousness is holy. Righteousness is pure. And so when he brings these judgments, regardless of what level they've fallen, so to speak, he brings it. And he brings it very intently. And in many cases, the judgments that are brought against the nations result in those nations being pretty much annihilated, if not just completely fall apart internally. And so it's really just a matter of survival. But what I want you to get, and I only have one point, so it should be a short time, And the point is that everything that Isaiah is saying to us, the judgment as well as the comfort. In chapter 40, it begins, comfort, yes, comfort my people, says your God, speak comfort to Jerusalem and cry out to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, where she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. So she was judged, but now we also have now, after this judgment, we have this comfort that's going to come. And undergirding the whole message of Isaiah, wherever you are in the book, is the creation, is that God is the creation. And I think when I look at the great expanse of the Christian world, and you go to a NAPARC, and NAPARC is a meeting, it's an organization the RCUS is a member of, and I go as a delegate, and the intent of it is anybody who is conservative, Presbyterian, and Reformed, are members of it, and so when we get together, we're having conversations. There's many doctrines we disagree on, many worship styles and so forth, but we still nonetheless get together. Then the second organization I go to as a delegate is the ICRC, and that's International, is the I, and that's reformed churches from around the world. So you have Australia, Africa, you know, the Koreans, the Philippines, whatever organization is members of that where you have a denomination in another country, then they're there. And so we have these get-togethers. And as you hear and because as you're listening and you're you're learning about what is being done in the organization itself, the NAPARC or the ICRC, you also start learning about these other denominations. Many of them, which I was somewhat familiar with when it came to NAPARC, but the ICRC has just been, a lot of them I had no clue even existed. I didn't realize there was a reformed church in Brazil that was anywhere near the size that it is. Incredible size. And these various efforts in India, there's actually three denominations that hold to the reform doctrines. And as you learn that, you begin to learn about these different denominations and what kinds of things and doctrines that they hold. And creation is one that I've always been somewhat amazed at. And when I went to the ICRC, they had this book at the back that you could buy. And it's called The Quest for Historical Atom. And I had not read anything about a lot of this topic material that we covered at the last conference. and regarding creation and how it is that we, as believers, view Genesis 1 and 2, and the whole notion of six-day creation and 24-hour period days. And this guy is making that argument and case. And he's not in the RCUS. And he has one of the... He's one of these Dutch guys that has far too many vowels in his name. It's Van Duord, but it looks like it would be much more complicated to say. But this is an excellent book, and it really does give you an understanding of how, particularly in many of our seminaries, like Westminster Seminary, or Covenant Seminary, and Regent Seminary, and all kinds of other seminaries, how they ended up going and dealing with the issue of creation. Because many of those denominations in Napark want to say, we hold to a literal view of Genesis. But then when you get down into the nitty gritty, all of a sudden, literal means it's literal, but we regard it as poetic. It's literal. We take it literally, but it's allegoric, which is symbolic or metaphorical. And then you have those that simply say, it's just kind of non-binding poetry. And this has entered many of the seminaries. And you've heard the name Meredith Klein, I'm sure, before here. who was a professor at Westminster, and he's one of the leaders in Westminster that ended up going in this direction of opening up the Pandora's box of saying, well, maybe the words don't mean what they mean. And so once you make the day a long day, now all of a sudden we're talking 150,000 years, or we're talking whatever thousands and thousands of years. Some reaching the point where they believe that man started somewhere around 2 million years ago. And then we've been evolving ever since. Well, I think anybody studying history, if you went back 1,000 years and looked forward, you'd probably find maybe we're not really evolving at all, but going in the other direction. But these things are critical because the message is rooted and based on it. Isaiah doesn't say, nor do any of the other prophets say, hey, look, I have this message from God. But this business about the creation, we're not really sure. We're not really sure what God said to us. is true. Now what would we just say about righteousness being true? That there's a standard that doesn't change. It's a static doctrine. It doesn't change. And the interesting thing again with this book, I'll just point out, is that there have been a number of institutions particularly the Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Missouri Synod that started going down this road of kind of a more liberal reading of Genesis and actually have more recently come back. And where there was once a professor in one of the leading seminaries that was going in a different direction, they've been removed and replaced. And so actually the Lutheran Seminary Synod, the Lutheran Synod, Missouri Synod, declared 2012 that if you didn't teach six-day creation, you didn't teach in the denomination. So they've taken a very, very strong position. And again, one of the problems is, is when you go back and you look at Genesis 1 and 2, lighten that load by saying, well, this isn't exact. It doesn't take long till you have a problem with three, chapter three, and then a lot of them that have gone in this literal criticism or historical criticism. It's really a dumbing down the scriptures to say they don't mean what they say. If I come back, but they don't mean what they say, I've opened up Pandora's box. And I really can't stop it in Genesis. It's going to carry on. And it could have easily carried on, if you think about it, as Isaiah is preaching. And he's declaring God is going to bring judgment. The God who created heaven and earth, the God who set the planets in motion, he's coming in judgment. If I don't really believe that that's the case, why should I believe the message? I don't have any foundation to believe the message any longer. And so it's undercutting. And then when you look at Romans, and Romans 1, and verse 20 in particular. which Romans is what? It's the doctrinal thesis of the New Testament. It has the broadest scope of doctrine that it teaches. Everything from depravity in great depths, regarding the work of Christ, what he has accomplished, how the church is to live and behave, and all of those things. But in chapter one, he's establishing of the ground in verse 20. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. So the very creation itself and the fact that God created it is a is tied to that message of the gospel. It's tied to us having that understanding of what we're being taught in the scriptures. And if we reject the creation of the world as that from God, then all of a sudden, what are the attributes that we're seeing? What are the things in creation that we're seeing? The best we can come up with is one of two answers. One is they're just kind of things out there that we just got to spend the rest of our lives figuring out what it is. And the other is that the creation is God. And how many tribes, how many nations even have fallen prey to, I'm going to take this tree and I'm going to worship it. Or I'm going to worship amidst the trees. Or I'm going to be a tree hugger. Or I'm going to, you know, my life and purpose is to take something out of creation and maybe modify it a little bit. And I can't even call it creation. I forgot the world, right? Creation's not there if I don't believe in creation. So I take a tree, and I get my axe out, and I start making a figure. And boom, we got something. We'll worship this. And then we'll build a building. We'll put that in there. Of course, we have to use the materials that God created in order to build the building. So we're going to use the creation to deny the creator and then in so doing we make the creation the creator. Doesn't that sound like evolution? That somehow the creation itself has the ability to improve itself without God. Isaiah doesn't miss it. In chapter 42, he says, and simple things, 42 and verse 4. So let me just put this into the context Let me begin with verse one. Behold my servant whom I uphold, my elect one in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. He will not cry out nor raise his voice, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench. But he will bring forth justice for truth, He will not fail nor be discouraged till he has established justice on the earth, and the coastlands shall wait for his law. So even in a passage like this, we have this promise. A lot of us are familiar with that passage I just read, particularly about the reed. And smoking flax he shall not quench. This is clearly a picture of Christ and anticipating Christ and the salvation that he's going to bring. And even his behavior and how he's going to act. But go to verse 5. Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it. who gives breath to the people on it, and spirit to those who walk on it. I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness and will hold your hand. I will keep you. I will give you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from prison. Those who sit in darkness from the prison house. I am the Lord, that is my name. And my glory I will not give to another. Nor my praise to carved images. Behold, the former things have come to pass. The new things I declare before they spring forth. I tell you of them. This is, again, a clear prediction of Christ's coming. But what's it rooted in? It's rooted in a God who created the heavens and stretched them out. And it seems almost trivial sometimes as you think about it, how it is that we have progressed. And our ability to look at things and to discover things. I recently saw a thing on the Hubble telescope. which is a telescope they made, put it on a rocket, shot it up in space, and let it float around out there, taking pictures of the universe. And many years later, they went back up, and they fixed it, and they made it twice as better. And then they did another, I think, and redid it. And the things that this telescope has been recording regarding all these black holes and all these things are the stars. And people just totally rejoice in this, and they love it. And yet, their attitude is one, particularly many of the scientists I hear talk about this, is that this is man's discovery. This is what we did. And that makes us, by the way, evolving, because nobody else has done it before. So we're somehow much, much, much better, because we got more technology. We have more abilities. And they look out, and they see all these stars. And you never hear things like, boy, we looked at stars here, and we looked at stars there, we looked at stars here, and you know what? They're pretty consistent. When we first look at the universe, you look at the sun, it's burning ball fire. A hydrogen reaction is going on, right? Looks pretty chaotic, but it's not. It's controlled. How many stars have you had fall in your backyard? It's all controlled. It's not a universe that's totally chaotic. It's not when we look out here, we see all these stars and Milky Ways and all this sort of stuff, galaxies. But when we look over here, we see John Wayne movies or something, or some totally different picture altogether. Or we look back here, and we see nothing but darkness. And there's a lot of darkness in space. But some's there, some's there, some's there. So there's still consistency. But we fail to see God's creation. We become totally focused on what we're looking at. And we forget that there's one who created it. And again, my one point is a simple point. And that is that everything that the scripture says, it's not only Isaiah, but everything the scripture says is rooted in a particular foundation. And that is what the scripture says. And that's, so we, fundamental, Westminster Confession of Faith statement regarding how to interpret the scripture. Where one passage is unclear, you go to another passage that's clear. Scripture interprets scripture. So as we understand that, as we see the truth of scripture, regarding some basic things, like I'm reading Romans 7. And it talks to me about, oh, I have a will to do what's right, but I don't do what I want to do. Very fundamental thing. How many of us set out to do a goal, and then we don't achieve the goal? And even more so, how many of us purpose to not sin? I woke up this morning. I made coffee. I thought, I can make coffee without sinning. But I got the first cup. You have to think about that now. There's nothing we can do that sin doesn't enter in. It's part of our reality. That's what Paul is telling us. That's a sure thing, Paul. I got that. You're right. But as soon as I start saying, hey, Romans 7's right, but Romans 1, about that creation stuff, now I've undermined everything. And this is exactly where liberal theology has led many, many, many denominations. They finally ended up concluding, after having all kinds of heydays with historical criticism, chopping this up. Isaiah doesn't really have this chapter or that chapter. This was written by somebody else. What they ended up with is a theology that said, you read the scriptures, and what you think it means is what it means. There's no universal. There's no scripture interpreting scripture. There's my interpreting scripture the way I think it ought to go. And that is literally falling off the cliff of reformed theology. It's literally falling off the cliff of true teaching, true biblical teaching. We truly do live in sick times. Knowledge is becoming sophisticated. Everybody's honing in on a particular subject matter. The whole sense of the Renaissance man, you've heard that phrase. And what that means is that, and this was particularly true of schools in the, in the 19th century, that is, you learned liberal arts. You learned everything. You began with religious instruction. I was amazed to find out that Harvard University required chapel for their students almost 300 years of their beginning. Now, it's one of the oldest institutions. That's over 100 years, actually, that they had that dissolved. They probably have redecorated their chapel to be something altogether different, I'm guessing, like a science building. But I don't know. But clearly, that sense of we have an authority structure from scripture, and it's out of that that we learn. It's out of that that we specialize. And we need to somehow regenerate that kind of thinking, that we need to know the word of God. We cannot depend upon the pastor knowing the word of God, or the elders, or the deacons. You should be able to. But each member, and this is the Reformation coming to us 500 years ago, where's the authority in the church? It's in the word of God, not me. And I'm thankful for that. Without God, we are dust without breath. And actually, without God, there is no dust. The Lord is true. The Lord is good. The Lord is the only Lord. the only God.