In a time of upheaval where dread and doom seem everywhere. God speaks to the prophet Isaiah and gives a blueprint of how to come through these hard times.

<p>In a time of upheaval where dread and doom seem everywhere. God speaks to the prophet Isaiah and gives a blueprint of how to come through these hard times.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Newington Three Angels Church

Eric Walsh

Tipping Point

Good evening and welcome back to the 3 Angels Church here in Newington, Connecticut.

As the pandemic is surging in southern parts of the United States among young people, we'll wait and see if that means more hospitalizations or deaths.

But the rest of the country and much of the world now is beginning to really come out of it.

We are still recording in an empty church and have kind of grown used to it now.

So we want to get into the word tonight for this week.

And our reading comes from Isaiah chapter 1, starting at verse 17 through 19.

Come now and let us reason together, said the Lord.

Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.

Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

If you be willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.

Our message this week is entitled, Tipping Point.

The crossroads of history, tipping point.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study your word.

We thank you Lord for being better to us than we are to ourselves.

Lord, once again, I just ask that you make me a nail upon the wall, hang a portrait of Christ there.

Instead, Father God, let us hear a word from the throne room of grace and of mercy.

Isaiah 6 and verse 1 says, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

Isaiah begins the sixth chapter of this book, referring to the death of a king of Judah, that king is king Uzziah.

Now, when we look at the map here, you can see that at the time in Isaiah's day, before the Assyrians took the North Kingdom.

You can see the Northern Kingdoms of Israel.

The Philistines still had their land over here, Philistia, with places like Ashdod and Ashkelon and Gaza.

Judah was here in the middle, where Jerusalem also sat.

And it just shows you all of these territories around.

Edom was out here and King Uzziah had been dealing with Edom and with Philistia for Judah.

In order to make this really plain, you can see here that in Isaiah's day, this is the ministry of Isaiah, you notice that Amos comes before Isaiah.

Pretty much his ministry here is encapsulated inside of Isaiah's life.

The ministry of Micah fits inside the ministry of Isaiah, so they're contemporaries, as is Nahum, who has a short ministry that goes past him.

And Hosea, of course, is also during this time.

He co-reigns with his son Jotham because he gets so sick before he dies.

From there, Ahaz reigns, Hezekiah, and his son Manasseh co-reign for a while due to illness.

So you get a great picture here of where Isaiah sits and what is going on in terms of the monarchy and some of the other prophets.

The book of Isaiah is often called, Isaiah is called the Prince of the Prophets.

His book is often called the Fifth Gospel.

When you study it, it speaks to the triumph of the church.

It speaks to the punishment of the wicked.

It is a powerful book of scripture, 1 that should be highly studied and prayed over seriously.

And you can see the Old Testament has 39 books.

So the chapters match that way and the total books and the total chapters between the Bible having 66 books and the book of Isaiah having 66 chapters is also noted there.

The other thing to mention in the time of Isaiah, of course, is the size and scope of the Assyrian empire.

And you can see Nineveh up here, which was 1 of its capitals.

And all of the green territory is the area they influenced.

And you can notice that after a while, it's just Judah, no Israel.

They were rivals primarily to the Babylonians.

And if you really study Isaiah and Kings and Chronicles, you find that the people of Judah and Israel thought that they could lean on places like Ethiopia and Egypt to help them against the Assyrians, and they didn't trust God.

But the Assyrian empire was a serious and powerful 1 that God in many ways used to deal with the fact that his people had rejected him.

The fact that they rejected him meant his protection was pulled from off of them.

Isaiah 1, 7 says, your country is desolate.

And this is describing what the Assyrians, and even later the Babylonians would do, your country is desolate.

Your cities are burned with fire, Your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers.

The daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city, Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant.

We should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah." Isaiah in the first chapter, even before the scripture reading that we just gave, It tells you that destruction and devastation was coming for God's people.

And it shows you that Jerusalem, the daughter of Zion, would be left like a cottage in a vineyard, or as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, meaning it would just be left out as a besieged city all by itself as the Assyrians began to pick off all of the other walled cities in Judah and all of the protection that King Uzziah had built up.

And then Isaiah gives the reason, and don't miss this, Why Jerusalem had not been completely destroyed by the Assyrians.

It says, except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant.

We should have been like Sodom or like Gomorrah.

Meaning that the fact that there was a remnant who still believed in Jerusalem was enough for God to hold back the winds of strife.

This should take you to 2 places in the Bible.

Number 1, it takes you to the story of Abraham, when the angels come to him and tell him that they're going to destroy Sodom, And Abraham starts at 50 and counts all the way down to 10, asking the Lord if he would just say, spare Sodom for that many.

And if there were just 10 righteous, a remnant in Sodom, the whole city would have been spared.

I want to submit to you that there are places in the world today that are still standing and have not succumbed to the judgments of God because they have rejected him and his protection.

There are places in the world right now that it is because there is a remnant that they're still standing.

1 day when the remnant has disappeared from those places, many of those places will fall.

Well, Ezekiel 16 and verse 49 and 50 tell you what Sodom was like.

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom.

Pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters.

Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

And they were haughty and committed abomination before me.

Therefore I took them away as I saw good.

Pride, fullness of bread, abundance of idleness, and neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy, and they were arrogant, haughty.

And because of all of this, they began to commit abomination.

Fullness of bread, everybody has more than they need.

And as we have been dealing with injustice in this country recently, there's a whole issue around not strengthening the hand of the poor and the needy.

Tipping Point

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