Sunday Sermon

 

Shout

Isaiah 58:1

The Lord says, “Shout out loud. Don’t hold back. Shout out loud like a trumpet. Tell my people what they have done against their God; tell the family of Jacob about their sins.

Over the last forty years as a minister I have spent a lot of time in scripture. Most of it has been preparing sermons and Bible studies but there is also my personal devotional time which is central to the development of my faith in God. I want to say that having spent all that time getting to know the God who inspired those who wrote all of that material in the Bible I like God and I really appreciate how God thinks. This might sound weird but let me explain. When I first came to scripture, I saw God’s word as commands to be obeyed because if we disobeyed we went to hell. When I really started studying the Bible, it came as a fairly large surprise that I did not actually understand what the Bible was all about or what God was trying to do with all the stuff God was telling us. The first thing God taught me was about his love and what that meant. One of the sermons I wrote forty years ago talked about what love means and I have used that sermon multiple times over the years because it speaks to some essential things about God that we need in our faith. Slowly over the years I have found this God who calls to us and invites us to know Him and it is such an exciting thing to discover this God. What is interesting is that the God I found in the pages of the Bible is the same God other people over the millennia found. Other people have come to the same place of liking God and liking how God thinks because they have encountered the same God. I know saying that I like how God thinks may sound strange because God is so far above us but one of the reasons God gives us all the material He does in scripture is so we can learn who God is and know at least a little about how God thinks. God wants us to know Him and He calls to us to come and learn about Him. We have a God who wants us to know that He always does the right thing so we can trust that His commands are good for us. Even when God does things that are hard to deal with like destroying cities with fire things make sense when we know that we have a God who understands the evil in human hearts and knows the dangers of that evil. Knowing how God thinks and liking it does not remove the fact that God is scary but it does help us move past the fear we have of God so that we can build the relationship God wants with us. That is the whole point of why God revels Himself to us. God wants us to know who He is so we will choose Him not out of fear but because God’s wisdom and teaching are the greatest hope we have of being the people we were meant to be. Getting to know God is worth the effort that it takes because we will fall in love with this God who wants to save us from ourselves and God actually then explains to us how it works. This is a God we should love because He loves us.

Let me explain what I mean by I like how God thinks. When God comes to the Israelites to make a covenant with them God does not force them to choose Him. Instead God offers the covenant and explains what it means. God takes the time to list all of the blessings that will flow if they choose Him and He also explains the curses the will result by rejecting Him. It then is up to the Israelite people to decide what to choose. And it needs to be clear that the curses are not a punishment for not choosing God but God is just explaining that if they do not choose the source of life then the only other thing that can happen is death. It is a wonderful thing that God does not hide anything and explains everything to the Israelites. Our God is a righteous God which means He always does the right thing. The importance of God always being truthful means that we can trust what God tells us. Another place that helps us develop a real understanding of how God thinks is how God works with Moses. We could spend hours talking about God’s love of humans but Moses is a great one. God and Moses talk together like they are friends. Moses spends so much time with God in such close quarters that Moses’ face begins to glow with the glory of God. The relationship between God and man is powerful and God longs for us to find in Him the power and strength we need to live our lives. There are so many places where God speaks with and works in the lives of people and they tell us so much about God. A favorite of mine is Jonah. There is something broken and angry in Jonah and God cannot let it be and so God sets things in motion to confront Jonah and his anger. What kind of God would do that? Then there is David or Abraham and Peter or Paul. I like how God thinks because it is a wonderful thing that is filled with beauty and hope.

The great hope we have is that God wants to talk with us and has spent a great deal of time explaining things about reality to us. This is what I like about God that God would even take the time to talk with us and yet God does. We have a God who loves us because we are His creation. When God sees His creation in trouble He steps in which tells us so much about the God we worship. The God that is described in the Bible is an intervening God and best of all is that God gets involved not to destroy us but to save us from the destruction that sin brings. In the verse we have we see this God at work in a wonderful and amazing way. The magnitude of what God is doing here is the first thing that grabs our attention. God wants us to know something and He is desperate for us to hear it. First we are told to shout out loud but that is not enough and God then says don’t hold back and yet that still is not enough because God tells Isaiah to shout like a loud trumpet. Most people do not shout unless the information that is being communicated is important or the distance between to two individuals is so great that shouting is the only way to get the message across. If either of these are true about what God has to say they both speak to a God who has something that is essential for us to know and God does not want to miss it. Then there is the idea of don’t hold back which means not to stop just once or twice but to keep going and to go harder if possible. What God has to say is so critical that we cannot just speak it once but we must not let one person be uninformed and so God calls us to keep at the message He has given us. The final piece to how significant this message is comes in the idea of a trumpet. Today we don’t use trumpets as systems of communications but before we had phones or the internet and all the other things of instant communications information that was critical to the well-being of the society was done by using trumpets. God even tells the Israelites to use trumpets to tell people different kinds of things. When God tells Isaiah to shout like a trumpet God is saying the message I have is of great importance. For me this gives me such hope. We have a God who is not silent but instead we have a God shouts to us because there are things we need to know about the universe. Also this tells us God thinks this is crucial material that we need and God wants to make sure we know it.

So we have established that God has a massage of real urgency that He wants everyone to hear. It should not come as a surprise that God wants to warn people about the sin they are involved in. Notice that God sees sin as something done against Himself and this is a very central concept we need to get into our heads. This is not because God takes sin personally but because the nature of what sin is and the consequences of sin. We need to know that God is not just telling Israelites how guilty they are just to be mean but God knows that sin is a deadly thing that cannot just be walked away from. A fundamental concept is that sin is the breaking of our relationship with God. Instead of choosing God we choose not god and the price of that choice is death. The reason that choice is death is because God is the source of life, if we choose not god we also choose not life. We learn this when Adam and Eve decide to eat what God has prohibited which means they can no longer eat from the tree of life and so death is the result. God is shouting because He wants everyone to know the risk they are at. More importantly God wants them to know the danger sin poses because God wants them to know there is another way the way of life and God is the one who offers that. We have a God who wants people to know they can choose a different path then death if they want and all they have to do is live by the ideas and concepts the creator of the universe give us. People might ask that if death is the result of choosing not god then why do we not die the moment we choose not god and that is a good question. It is call grace. Instead of letting us be destroyed by our choice immediately God offers time for us to see the effects of our sin and to seek a new way of life. If we did not have grace from God we would be crushed by our sin but God loves us and wants something different for us so He gives us time we do not deserve to choose life instead of death. This is what I like about God and it is the starting place of appreciating how God thinks. We should be dead but God loves us and God always does the right thing so God offers to save us if we will choose to let Him.

Some people might find the judgement God sends here as a problem because it is condemning people for their sin but I don’t think God sees it that way. If God would not say anything and just let people be destroyed by their sin that would be a problem because that means we have no hope and we have a God who does not care about us. God cares so much He will not let us just forget about our sin but God challenges us to face our sin because God wants to save us from our sin. We have this God who always does the right thing and who so wants to save us from ourselves but who will not force Himself on us and will let us choose death if we want it but God will not stand silent and let us do it without a lot of noise because we are loved by God. I like how God thinks and I am glad he does not give up on us but shouts to us to warn us about the death we have chosen.