We’ll get ready to turn our attention to God’s Word from Isaiah chapter 45. Sermon titles are treacherous things! Given birth in a flash of insight and a dash of praising – you see them in the bulletin and you say, “What was I thinking?” We’ll be here all night if we try to talk about what God’s sovereignty looks like! We don’t have to endure all of that, but Isaiah 45 does tell us some things to look for as we wrestle with the sovereignty of God, as we seek to recognize the sovereignty of God, we find something in Isaiah 45 that will be helpful to us and will really be the two points of our outline. That God works for the good of His people, God bends His sovereignty towards the good of His people, God bends His sovereignty toward the honor of His name, we’ll see that as we read the passage and think broader about the kinds of things that God is telling us here in these verses. Let’s pray and then let’s read God’s Word together.
Father, we thank You that You don’t leave us to figure out what You are doing. You speak to us, and when we hear You speaking in Your Word, we have the surest clue of how to recognize Your hand and how to respond to You. So Father, help that to be our guide this evening – how to recognize Your workings and how to respond to You. Make our hearts tender, Father, and teachable, and speak to us clearly from Your Word. We make our prayer in Jesus’ name and for His sake, amen.
From Isaiah chapter 45, beginning with verse 1. We’ll read verses 1 through 7:
“Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and to loose the belts of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed: ‘I will go before you and level the exalted places, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I name you, though you do not know me. I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God stands forever.
Let’s remember as we begin to make our way through this passage that Isaiah’s prophetic ministry began in 739 BC and he preached for perhaps as long as 60 years. That’s 200 years before Cyrus captures Babylon, and it’s upon Babylon’s capture and Cyrus’ coming to power as the emperor of the Medes and the Persians that he frees the Jewish exiles to return home. So 200 years before Cyrus is in a position to act on these promises that God is making, God names him and tells his people to expect Cyrus to come. Catch some of these – we’ve got some unusual language here. Cyrus as “the anointed.” Now let’s not miss that that is a title that is only used of the Davidic kings of Judah, the Lord’s anointed. That is an important title. That’s charged language, foreshadowing the Lord’s anointed that is to come. That word is the word we translate “messiah.” In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that word is “Christo” – Christ. We translate that as Christ. This is Messianic language that we apply to the king, that the scriptures apply to the Davidic kings of Judah and also now to this pagan king who God says, “You don’t know me and you won’t know me, yet I am going ot do these amazing things for you so that you can turn and do amazing things for my people and that you will all know that I am the Lord and there is no other.”
Let’s think about what the Scriptures teach us and our confession teaches us about God’s absolute sovereignty over all His creatures and all their actions. Let me read from The Westminster Larger Catechism Question and Answer 18 – “What are God’s works of providence?” “God’s works of providence are His most holy, wise and powerful, preserving and governing all His creatures, ordering them and all their actions to His own glory.” God is free to do, isn’t He, with all His creatures according to His holy will. And so we find God making amazing promises about a king who will serve Him closely, and yet not know Him – a king for whom He will open doors and saw through bars and snip the sword belts of kings who oppose Him so that their swords fall at their feet. That’s what it means to “loosen the belt of kings.” They can’t grab their weapon; their weapon has fallen to their feet. They fall before King Cyrus, all for the good of God’s people and the honor of His name.
Let’s look at those two things. Now remember now, let’s think about Isaiah’s ministry just here for a bit before we go forward. Isaiah is a ministry of preaching doom and destruction because of the covenantal unfaithfulness of the people of God. Isaiah preaches 100 years before the destruction of Jerusalem. Jeremiah will be known 100 years later as “the weeping prophet” because he has a message that is much the same as Isaiah’s and yet in Isaiah’s day, and 100 years later in Jeremiah’s day, there seems to be no hearing of the message of “Repent and return, worship Me, honor Me in your ways, walk with Me faithfully.” That’s the kind of message and invitation that God gives to Isaiah and it falls like water off the back of the duck in the hearing of the people. So He’s warned His people of judgment to come but now He tells them that in the midst of that judgment a deliverer will come who will restore their descendants, and in some cases some of them, to the land and rebuild Jerusalem, lay again the foundations of the temple. It’s the goodness of God that is on display here, lest His people become worn out in the long trial that will come to them. Wouldn’t have to come to them if they repent, but they don’t repent, it comes to them, and God even here is giving them a way to last, of good news to hold onto even in the midst of what will be an awful, an awful trial.
Well let’s then talk about the good of His people. What is Cyrus supposed to do for the good of His people? Again, let’s look back at verse 4. “For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I name you, though you do not know me.” Yahweh is raising up a deliverer to serve the interests of His people. At the end of their years of captivity, Jeremiah says that captivity is going to last for 70 years, and it is Nebuchadnezzar who initiates that as he conquers Jerusalem and eventually destroys Jerusalem and destroys the temple and carries whatever part of the population that he hasn’t carried already into captivity into Babylon, he carries the largest majority of it at that time. And so, you know, here’s Cyrus who, at the end of those years of captivity, those 70 years, God raises up, he creates this massive empire as God gives him incredible success in battle and in governance. It ranges from the Aegean Sea in the west to India in the east. Upon his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, you find that reflected in Daniel chapter 5, he decreed after that that Jewish captives, and not just Jewish captives but other captive people too, but we especially concentrate on the Jewish captives here, that Jewish captives should be allowed to return to their homeland and rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. Ezra chapter 1, Cyrus says, “I want you people praying. I want you people praying for me. I want you people worshiping as you worshiped.” Cyrus was an amazing tyrant in that he was extremely willing for other cultures to flourish under his reign and the cultures of the conquered not to become all Persian.
Again, look at verse 13 of this chapter. We just read to verse 7, but look at verse 13. “I have stirred him up in righteousness; I will make his ways level. He shall build my city and set my exiles free, not for price or reward.” He does it because God is moving him to that. God has given him that impetus and that desire, again, for the good of His people. And catch again that language – “I have called you by your name.” “I name you.” Three times in the verses that we read, especially verses 3 and 4, that expression of Yahweh’s personal care, his personal commitment to Cyrus, but also His power and His right to name him. His power and His right to call him by the name he is known by. We see that same expression in Isaiah 43 – “I have called you by name; you are mine” as He is speaking words of comfort to His people. “I have called you by name; you are mine.” And elsewhere in Isaiah’s prophecy, Revelation chapter 2 – “I name you. You are mine.” So elsewhere you find God naming, God changing Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel – God expressing His lordship, His ownership over His people, changing names from time to time. Who would have thought that a pagan king who would remain a pagan would be so prominent in the restoration of God’s people to the land that He promised them?
But not just a pagan – let’s understand this – this is what this passage teaches us – not just a pagan who happens along at the right historical time and place, but one whom God has raised up for this very purpose at the very right time, whose every success in battle and in administration and governance was the gift of God’s gracious hand. God is caring for His people through the pagan ruler, Cyrus, and raising him up for the purpose that he would do His people good. God is doing good to His people for restoring them to the land and rebuilding Jerusalem. As men make their free choices, Cyrus is making his own free choices, he serves a God who declares the end from the beginning. The God who creates those poles of reality we see in verse 7 – light and darkness, wellbeing and calamity. God is saying, “I am the Lord of everything. Everything. Those great poles – light, darkness; wellbeing, calamity. I am the Lord of those things, and everything in between.” Whose counsel shall stand – the God whose counsel shall stand, who accomplishes all His holy will and the entirety of His purpose, whether they know and acknowledge Him or not.
It is not necessary for Cyrus to acknowledge the Lord, for God to raise him up and use him to accomplish the good that He intends to accomplish for His people. Again, God is raising up a deliverer who will serve the interests of His people, one who is anointed, one who is a messiah in a sense to save, certainly a temporal messiah at that time. It’s a foreshadowing of the ultimate salvation that is to come through Christ. Cyrus responsible for a physical deliverance under the mighty hand of God, but preparing and pointing us and pointing the people of God towards a spiritual deliverance. A deliverance promised – let’s not miss this – a deliverance promised to a people not seeking one. Because they are not hearing as Isaiah preaches. Why is there not some vast, great revival that the Scriptures tell us about in Judah as Isaiah preaches? They are not hearing. They are not hearing. Isaiah’s hearers are not moved by the threats of judgment that God is making through him. There’s no great move toward Yahweh that we can see in the Scriptures. There’s no great renewal of faith and obedience.
There’s no great forsaking of the idolatry that God clearly condemns through Isaiah’s preaching, and yet God promises a deliverer. They’ll yearn for it. We read the Psalms – Psalm 137 in particular. “How can we sing the songs of Zion in this strange place?” Their hearts are broken. Their hearts will break. In time, they will shed bitter tears and there will be much loss of life. In time, they will see their families scattered, dead in the streets, under Nebuchadnezzar’s terrible, terrible wrath. And then maybe they’ll remember God promised a deliverer. Daniel certainly searches out Jeremiah’s preaching. Daniel would remember some of Jeremiah’s preaching most likely as a young boy. He finds the record of Jeremiah’s promising a 70 year season of captivity. And there’s that great prayer, Daniel chapter 9, as he lays his heart before God in repentance of his own sin, in repentance of his leaders’ sin, of his father’s sin, of his nation’s sin. He is energized by the hope of deliverance. A hope of deliverance. A hope that they might be returned to the land, someone, and begin the worship of God again. That hope lived, even though the hearers of Isaiah’s day seem not to grasp it, and yet in their deadness of mind and heart, there is the promise of a Cyrus to come.
It reminds us that God promised also a Son who would take away our sin, a Son who would open the door to heaven. Maybe that’s not reality for us. Maybe we’re kind of deaf like Isaiah’s hearers. Yet one day we’ll long for and we’ll look for and we’ll yearn for the work of that Son. Maybe we’re a lot like Isaiah’s hearers, and at the moment of crisis, our eyes are turned to the promise. Oh, there’s a deliverer! Oh, there’s a helper! Oh, there’s an anointed one! And so God keeps His promise.
But He also is working for and bending His sovereignty towards the honor of His name. Three times in the passage that we read, God says, “I am the Lord. I am Yahweh. There is no other.” Twice He says, “I am the Lord. There is no other. There is none besides me.” Four times in that passage, that language or similar language, God is speaking into a world of rank idolatry – among His own people as well as among the pagans. He is staking His claim on their and our allegiance. We have a problem with idolatry too. It’s not just a carved piece of wood that elicits our worship. It’s any hope, it’s any dream, it’s any plan, it’s any desire that draws the attention of our life and around which we encircle our life. This is what makes meaning. This is what makes life make sense. This is my happy place. That takes our eyes totally away from the God who made us, the God who redeemed us, the God who opens heaven’s doors to us through the Lord Jesus. We don’t even think about Him. We think about this thing that we have anointed as, “This is where my life makes sense. These are the things that have to be in place for everything to work in my life.” We are as idolatrous, and if we don’t understand that, we’re not going to get the message that this passage has for us.
“There’s no one else to worship besides Me.” That’s what God says. “There’s no one else to worship besides Me.” He’s so much as saying, “Why would you pursue the foolishness of idolatry?” If you’ve still got your Bibles open, go back to chapter 44. Let’s just read a couple of verses. This is Isaiah 44 is a marvelous massage that shows us the foolishness of idolatry. But I’ll just read a couple of verses from verse 16 and 17. “Half of it he burns in the fire. Over the half he eats meat; he roasts it and is satisfied. Also he warms himself and says, ‘Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!’ And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’” Verse 20, “He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” Idolatry has deluded him, has fooled him. In fact that whole section begins in verse 9, “All who fashion idols are nothing. The things they delight in do not profit.”
Think about God’s amazing promise here. Not only will His people be carried away in exile because of their continued unfaithfulness and unbelief, but after a time, they’ll be restored to the land they have lost. What peoples in the ancient world were carried away in conquest and were encouraged by their conqueror to return to their native land, to rebuild their cities and worship again as they once did? Who could do that but Yahweh? That’s not the pattern of history. That’s not what conquerors do – send people back to where they took them from. That’s not what conquerors do – and yet. And look at the experience of the ten northern tribes that were carried away into captivity 200 years prior. They disappeared. They disappeared. They disappeared across, scattered across the Assyrian Empire of that day, and the kings of Assyria brought in colonists from other parts of their empire to take that land and to settle there, that northern half of Palestine, and intermarry with the few that were left there and raise a new race. That’s the beginning of the Samaritans that we find so prominent in the Gospels.
That’s the pattern of history. That’s the pattern of history – colonization, disappearance. Their culture entirely disappeared under the judgment of God. You realize they hadn’t worshiped God in 200 years. From the moment they split from the house of David at the time Rehoboam became king, they never worshiped God again. There was no hold of the religion of the fathers on them anymore. We never hear of them again. Look at verses 5 and 6. God says, “I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other.” God is making a name for Himself as He does.
As He does with us, He makes a name for Himself. And how many ways has God, in some set of circumstances has God not made the same claim to the ears of our hearts. “I am the Lord. There is no other. You’ve got no one else. I am the one who cares for you. I am the one who delivers you. I am the one who helped you yesterday. I will help you tomorrow. Who is the one who helped you last year when all hope was lost? And yet here we are. We made it through because I strengthened your hand. I put solid ground under your feet.” See, that’s what God is telling us. We want to count on anything. We want to count on anything. And God is saying, “I am the Lord. I am no other. I am the one who has helped, saved, guided, kept you.” He’s telling us the same thing He’s telling His people and He’s saying about Cyrus.
Let’s talk about a couple of take-aways and we’ll wrap up. And we’re right at the first take-away I wanted us to make. We are always seeking saviors every time we’re in trouble, every time there’s bad news, every time things go haywire. Let’s admit it, we are always seeking saviors besides Yahweh, besides the God who promised to save and there is no other. It’s a political savior. It’s a medical savior. It’s a financial or business savior. Savior for every area of trouble in life. And Yahweh tells us there is no other, time and time and time again. He reminds us and He speaks to us. What do the puritans say? That “God whispers to us in our joys and He shouts to us in our troubles.” That’s what He’s shouting to us. “Behold, I am the Lord and there is no other! Don’t look for help other than Mine!” Only the Lord is our hope, our help, our all in all.
And here He promises a deliverer – one He calls His “anointed,” translated in the Greek translation of this passage, His “christ,” for a particular, limited, temporal deliverance. But here we recognize the pointer to the ultimate Anointed One whose work has been to deliver us from the slavery of sin. And He did so by becoming sin for us that we might become the rigtheousness of God as we place our trust in Him. Have you made that transaction? You might be sitting here tonight and I might be speaking Chinese to you! Have you made that transaction? Have you made that transaction to trust Christ as your Savior, that ultimate Deliverer, seeing Cyrus as a signpost to something bigger and better and broader and brighter? If you haven’t, I hope you will. I hope you’ll consider it. I hope you’ll consider what God says to us about a need for a Savior and His provision of a Savior that touches every aspect of life in the person and work of His Son.
Here’s another take-away. We enjoy light and wellbeing from the Lord, those puddles of reality that I talked about just a moment ago. We don’t pursue, for good reason, we don’t pursue darkness or calamity or, “Bring me more trouble.” That’s not our prayer. “Lord, bring me calamity.” That’s not our prayer. But when God does bring them, can we still find our comfort in Him? When God does bring them, can we see His sovereign, good hand in the bad that comes to us? Or to say it another way, “Can we praise Him with tear-strained faces?” Can our praise, can our worship, even can our adoration be wept and tear-stained? Nobody wants to endure the bad, but surely God brings us bad from time to time, brings us hard things from time to time. Can we find His hand there and can we trust Him to bring about good out of all that we would identify as bad at any given time? That’s what God is appealing for here. That’s what God is saying. “I am going to raise up a deliverer and he’ll bring you back, bring your descendants back. And you’ll begin life and worship in Jerusalem and in the temple again. Once they grasp the reality of the terrible shape they’re in, they can’t necessarily see that right away, but can we get to that point?
In the worst of times, in times that we would call the worst of times, that we can still say, “God has made a plan. God has made a plan. He did not strand those people in their captivity. He will help me here. Whatever that looks like, He will help me here.” We say as Paul said in Romans chapter 8, “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” There’s my plea for help. There’s my confidence in hope in the rescue of God, whatever that looks like. He is not going to abandon us as we give ourselves to Him, as we trust in Him, as we trust in His Son, He won’t abandon us, but He will come in mercy and rescue. Whatever that may look like.
Third take-away. This whole promise is a deep, and I think, sweet reminder of the goodness of God. These people have got trouble coming. Now, you know, it’s 100 years before Nebuchadnezzar shows up knocking at the door. These people are going to be in their eternal reward. It’s their children and grandchildren who will pay the bill and have to face the horrors that they will face as Nebuchadnezzar breaks the door down with his bloodthirsty troops. It will be harsh. It will be brutal. It will be grinding. It will be miserable. There will be death and destruction at every turn. But yet in His goodness, God says it will be a season and there will be a return. Let’s not miss the goodness of God here. Let’s not miss the goodness of God. God is saying, “There is a season; it will end and there will be a return for My people to the place of My habitation and the land I promised their forefathers.”
That’s true for us. There is a season and there is a return. Our days are bounded and really if we’re looking for it, saturated with the goodness of God. Now we look past it. We overlook it. We’re entitled. We think it’s supposed to be coming every time, God in His goodness. As we really begin to look at it, we see how rich His goodness is towards us. Here’s a place where He is talking to a people that don’t even hear what He’s saying. He’s saying, “Terrible things are coming. There is an end to it. I’ll raise a deliverer who will bring you back to the land I gave your forefathers.” Let’s not overlook, let’s not be deaf to, let’s not be blind to the amazing goodness of God that saturates our life every day. Here we’re talking about tragedy, but let’s be liberated from tragedy and let’s look for the goodness of God in the things that meet us and the people we deal with and the opportunities in front of us every day. God is bent to be good to those He’s called His own, those who have trusted in His Son, those who trust in Him. God is bent to be good. And in the hard times, it’s that goodness, those little bitty goodnesses, those little bitty glimmers that can really take us through if we look for them. So I think that the goodness of God is a rich take-away that we need to take with us as we look at this passage.
Well one last thing to say and that’s this – what God has already said. “I am the Lord and there is no other.” Amen and amen. Let’s not look to another. Let’s look to the Lord. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank You that You would speak, You would stoop down to speak to our hearts. You would stoop down to speak in our need. You would stoop down to speak in our deafness. You would point Your finger at the things we need to see and our blindness. And Father, thank You that there will be a time when we recognize our need for what You are telling us and You are there ready to open again ears and eyes and hearts. And so Father, help us. Help us see, help us hear, help us take Your Word with us for our good, for the good of our souls, and may it be a blessing to the people that You put around us. Hear us, Father, as we make our prayer in Jesus’ name. And all God’s people said, Amen.