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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Richard Walton

The Rest of the Story

The good days, the days of plenty, were long since gone.

The nation was in economic collapse, banks and trading houses were closed, fields sat empty with crops unharvested.

Cities lay deserted and broken by violence and looting.

Those who could still find work look to a future where no 1 could be guaranteed security and safety.

The enemy could attack anywhere at any time, terror in homes and churches and schools and businesses.

Politically and militarily, the nation's power was shrinking and the political leadership had to contend with a war that it was losing.

God's people, having enjoyed the good life and in the meantime wasting away the precious moments of opportunity to fulfill God's purpose in putting them there, had spent all their time fighting with each other, until with little left other than bitter memories of what might have been, the chosen now found their horizons shrunk to the small encircling walls of 1 embattled city." It is 722 B.C.

And from the north the mighty Assyrian army has swept across the promised land like a horde of hungry grasshoppers.

Every nation that has stood against them has fallen.

Every city that has tried to withstand has been breached and its inhabitants scattered to the 4 winds.

Israel, a great nation bordering Judah, all of its cities, the wonderful commerce enriched repositories of wealth and ease in which God's people have done financially well while becoming spiritually bankrupt, in fact to the point of allying themselves with pagan kings so they can more effectively fight with each other, Those days are gone.

God's people have been scattered to the winds.

Judah and most of its cities have likewise fallen, and in a breathtakingly short period of time, an entire collection of nations of believers, of people that all felt the same way, have found themselves wiped off the face of the map, and the last tiny toehold that is left to God's true people throughout the promised land is the embattled city of Jerusalem.

And so there they sit, gone from enjoying the good life to wondering just how much longer the walls can hold out the screaming dark.

And scream it does, in a voice and with a message.

A voice of a giant that many of us might recognize today.

A voice of doubt, of fear, and of a future filled with certain failure.

Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of the king Hezekiah that Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and did what?

Then the king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh with a great army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem.

And he stood by the aqueduct from the upper pool on the highway to the fuller's field.

And then Rabshakeh called and stood out with a loud voice in Hebrew and said, hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria.

Thus says the king, do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you, and don't, whatever you do, make the mistake of letting Hezekiah con you into thinking that your God is going to be able to deliver you because He can't.

Do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, The Lord will surely deliver us.

This city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.

Has any 1 of the gods of the nations delivered its land from the hand of the king of Assyria.

Has any 1 of the gods of the nations delivered its land from the hand of the king of Assyria?

Indeed, have they delivered Samaria from my hand?

Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their countries from my hand that the Lord should deliver this city, Jerusalem, from my hand." It is a time of trouble.

Because today I want to take you through a brief survey of just a couple of chapters in the book of Isaiah.

My message for today is a message for the troubled times in which we lived.

And in just a few chapters in this amazing book of the Bible, Isaiah gives us 4 fascinating views of the God we serve, views that are incredibly relevant for a troubled time in which anybody who's not afraid of the future simply isn't turning on the news.

View number 1, view number 1 from Isaiah, a redeeming Lord.

In times of crisis, Isaiah reminds us that we serve a God who loves us in spite of our failures and who is always working throughout our lives, throughout the challenges, the triumphs, and the failures to make us better people.

Now, I've got a question I'd like your help with.

There's 66 books, 2, 500 years' worth of literature, much of it written quite literally in blood, what does all this stuff mean?

If you had to condense the Bible down to a simple question, what would it be?

Certainly this book reveals God to us, and yet at the same time we know that from Holy Scripture that the greatest mystery of all is godliness, and it's something that in fact created minds with an entire eternity to reflect on it will never fully understand.

But we get such a wonderful insight into the God we serve from this book.

The guide to abundant life, the guide to abundant life.

I'm going to suggest to you Something I always try to tell my law students.

If you can frame the issue, you can solve any question.

You give me the right question to ask a jury, and if I ask it the right way, I can usually get the jury to give me the answer that I want to hear.

For instance, if you frame the question, was it an exercise of, a valid exercise of discretion for a police officer to use his baton to restrain a subject who's charged with aggravated assault murder and take that suspect into custody, your answer would probably be, ask the question, is there any way to justify a police officer beating an unarmed man 6 times on the head with his baton before cuffing him, and in fact twice after cuffing him, what's your answer?

Frame the issue, you can answer any question.

The question the Bible asks you, I submit to you this morning, can be summarized in 6 simple words, do you really trust the Lord?

Time after time, Scripture regales us with stories of crises and failures, of opportunities gone wrong, both personal and national apostasy.

Stories of when everything was stacked against God's people and looked like there was no way through.

Israel at the Red Sea, Israel at the Jordan.

Joseph, a bright young dreamer, sold into slavery and locked away in Egypt.

Moses, wandering in the wilderness for so many years, wondering how a life that had so much promise could go so wrong.

Gideon and his handful of warriors against the superior military force.

Over and over, the Bible challenges us with stories where humanly There is no way through the storm.

And despite its bitter catalog of repeated personal and institutional failures, 1 by 1, the Bible stories exist to tell us the rest of the story.

And every 1 of those stories of trial and crisis, for every failure, personal and institutional, that is cataloged in the Bible, there is also a story of divine power, of divine love, of second chances, and ultimately of triumph, of heroes of faith finally learning to really trust the Lord.

1 thinks of David and his vile sins and of a God who could forgive him so completely that he would later pray to be judged because he knew his Redeemer.

1 thinks of the nation of Israel and its consistent failures despite God's millennia-long patience in trying to give them the health, the prosperity, and the peace by which they could show the world the happiness inherent in doing things God's way.

1 thinks of dear old Abraham and of his repeated failures at God's tests of faith, until at last he demonstrated on a mountain called Moriah that he had at last finally and truly learned to trust the Lord.

And for those who can accomplish that, Isaiah has a very special passage that I'd like to share with you this morning.

In Isaiah's view number 1 of a redeeming and loving Lord, Isaiah chapter 49, I prefer the New International Version because it just, it does something very special with the language.

The NIV doesn't always do that, but I love the way they translate this text.

From my birth, he has made mention of my name.

He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, and in the shadow of his hand he hid me.

He said to me, You are my servant Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.

But I said, I have labored to no purpose.

I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.

And now the Lord says, it is too small a thing for you to be my servant.

I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." Isaiah reminds us in view number 1 that we serve a God who is more powerful than all of our individual and personal failures, a God who can love our flawed and frail selves enough to not just call us His servants, but also to take our lives and turn them into a witness for others.

There is Perhaps no better example of this than the lifetime of the prophet Isaiah himself.

We know not a lot about Isaiah, but what we can glean from the Bible and from some ancillary historical sources tells us that he was probably born, 1 might say, with a silver spoon in his mouth.

He was born to a wealthy and influential family, quite possibly a cousin, in fact, of King Azariah himself.

Isaiah began his ministry under the reign of King Azariah and was 1 of the longest serving prophets of Israel, something like 64 years of ministry.

He was a prophet of Israel under kings Azariah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.

During His ministry, He repeatedly warned Israel and Judah of the consequences of apostasy, and unfortunately had the terrible burden of living to see those prophecies fulfilled.

His 2 sons' names reflect the troubled times in which he lived.

His older son was named Mahar Shalal Hashbaz, which literally translated, yeah, I don't know how he got through middle school, literally translated means destruction is imminent.

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The Rest of the Story

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