There’s this Hezbollah militant, desperate for water, and he is treading wearily through the Judean wilderness when he sees something shimmering far off in the distance. Hoping to find water, he hurries towards what he hopes is an oasis, only to find a little old Jewish man with a small stand, selling ties.
So the Hezbollah guy says, “Do you have water?”
The Jew replies, “I have no water. Would you like to buy a tie? They are only 100 shekels.”
The militant shouts, “Idiot! I do not need an over-priced tie. I need water! I should kill you, but I need to save my energy and find water first!
“OK,” says the Jew, “No matter. If you continue over that hill to the east for about two miles, you will find a lovely restaurant. It has all the ice cold water you need. Shalom.”
So, the Hezbollah guy staggers over the hill, cursing as he goes. Several hours later he staggers back, almost dead.
The Jew says, “So what’s the problem?”
“Your brother won't let me in to his restaurant without a tie!”
Israel’s Wilderness
The only time I’ve been to Israel, I took a coach trip one day from Jerusalem down to a place called Masada in the valley of the Dead Sea.
If you’ve done the same coach journey - and if you’ve been to Israel to see the sights, you probably have - you’ll remember I’m sure how the road, surrounded by rough, craggy cliffs either side, keeps winding down and down and down. It seems to go on forever.
You begin to say to yourself “I’m sure we can’t go any lower than this.” And you’re right, because eventually, at 423 metres below sea level, you arrive at the lowest point on the planet.
You are at the northernmost edge of a deep gash on the surface of the earth called the Great Rift Valley that extends all the way down to the heart of the African continent.
When you finally get there, you find that it is quite unlike any valley on earth (except perhaps Death Valley). We tend to think of valleys as fertile places watered by streams and rivers. But this is an arid and bleak and rocky place. This is what it looks like.
It’s a bit like the surface of Mars, but with constant heat haze shimmering over it. The Dead Sea itself is over 8 times more salty than the ocean – which is great for floating tourists. But it’s a harsh, inhospitable and unforgiving environment.
In fact, you can hardly go anywhere in Israel without quickly getting dehydrated. That’s one of the reasons Jesus said “Those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
I remember getting out of the air-conditioned coach to take a stroll around outside. Nothing prepared me for the shock of stepping off the coach into what seemed like a furnace. It was like opening an oven door and being blasted by a power wave of blistering heat.
When I went it was July, when the average daily high temperature is 40 degrees and often pushes up to 45 and even beyond that. From May to September the average rainfall there is nil. In fact, it only rains at all in that place for two weeks a year. Very few plants or shrubs flourish there and hardly anything living survives for long.
This is the setting for this morning’s reading from Isaiah. When Isaiah prophesies about the wilderness, you can see it’s not like the Sahara with its fine sand and rolling dunes. The sand in the desert of Judea is gritty and dirty. It’s a lifeless, charmless, hopeless, waterless wasteland.
Spiritual Dryness
But God’s word to us this morning is not actually about a physical wilderness. When Isaiah says,
The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom
it’s a metaphor. A friend of mine, Sarah Hodges, said to me this week, “It’s only when I am in the desert place and really thirsty that I can truly appreciate the utter truth and beauty of this.”
She was meaning spiritually thirsty. The wilderness is spiritual. God is saying “This is what it’s like when someone is away from God.
This is how it feels to leave the path of his perfect will for your life. Your entire soul becomes parched dry.
Everything around you just begins to feel wretched and without hope. Everything about the future looks bleak.”
Now if you will bear with me just a moment, I need to set the scene so we can understand the context of these verses.
At the time of this prophecy, God’s people were settled in their own land. They were relatively prosperous; things were quite stable. They thought they were safe. They were wrong.
Isaiah, inspired by the Holy Spirit, says that things are going to get worse.
History records that Isaiah’s predictions and warnings in the early chapters of his book were spot on.
- God’s people were indeed overrun by an invasion of awesome military might - as Isaiah had warned.
- They would soon suffer the deep trauma of a heavy loss of life - as Isaiah had warned.
- They would soon be carried off as a people to a foreign land and that generation would never see home again - as Isaiah had warned.
- Those that survived the bloodbath would end up in Babylon, away from their land, away from their roots, away from God.
This empty, barren, deserted place is what exile was going to feel like to them and it was about to happen.
Isaiah says here (these are his words) that being away from God, being out of his purposes for your life is like
- a desert
- a parched land
- a wilderness and
- a thirsty ground with burning sand
Have you ever (spiritually, I mean) been in a place like that? Maybe you are there now?
What does it feel like when you find that you are far away from the God you once loved and encountered in worship?
Verses 3 and 4 talk about feeble hands, knees that give way and fearful hearts.
Feeble hands – it’s what you feel like when you’re handling so many burdens that you think you just can’t carry them all anymore.
Knees giving way – it’s that sense of fatigue, of overwhelming tiredness. Spiritually as well as physically, you feel you just can’t stay strong much longer.
Fearful hearts – it’s when you’ve lost the sense of God’s provision and now you just don’t know how you’re going to pay the bills.
It’s when you’ve lost the sense of God’s enabling and now you can’t see how you’re going to get your marriage back on track or know his power in your workplace – or whatever.
Have you been there? This is the desert.
Isaiah, in v5-6, also talks about the blind the deaf, the lame and the mute.
Blind - it’s when you just can’t see how God’s hand is over your life anymore.
Deaf – it’s when his word seems like a closed book that has nothing relevant to say to you.
Lame – it’s when you’ve stopped walking with God because you feel you just can’t. Your walk with the Lord has slowed to a stop.
And mute – it’s when you feel so powerless, like you haven’t got a voice and everything you say seems to be ignored.
Have you been there? This is the desert. For Israel in Isaiah’s day those feelings were brought on by the exile to Babylon, but for us any trauma or sorrow or trail of bad news can land us in that desert place.
Real Peace, Real Joy
The times when I’ve been furthest away from God and the most estranged from his will in my life are when I have been tempted to recover that sense of wellbeing that only God gives through other means – like in music or in human friendships or through entertainment or in nature.
People think sometimes that they can generate happiness and produce joy on our own. We never can. Peace and joy are the fruit of the Spirit; they are the by-product of the rule and reign of God in your life.
Actually, I should qualify that by saying that you can find pleasure in all kinds of things – but the Bible (in 1 Peter 1) talks about fullness of joy and inexpressible joy. You can’t find delight like that anywhere apart from in Christ.
People pay good money for substances and experiences that will alter their mood and give them a buzz for the evening. But the Bible talks about unspeakable joy which is real even when everything around you is falling apart.
Similarly, you can find calm and stillness in many places if you look. People pay top money for weekend escapes and havens of tranquillity - but they come back when it’s over to the same old hassle.
You can’t get the peace of God that passes understanding anywhere else than in Christ. Philippians 4 says that this peace only comes through thanking God in all circumstances and laying your burdens before him instead of worrying about them.
If you’ve got the joy of the Lord (which is your strength) and the peace that the world cannot give you’ll be very well over the circumstances, not under the circumstances.
God is Sovereign
Anyway, back to Isaiah 35: The amazing thing about these verses to me is that God is not one step ahead but two. He is telling Israel the good news that’s going to happen after the bad news that hadn’t even happened yet.
Well before even the first sign of a downturn, God is already talking about how good the recovery is going to be.
Don’t you find that encouraging? Though things are going to become very grim for them, God tells his people here that he knows already that things will get much better because he is on the throne. He has a plan.
He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Nothing takes him by surprise. He is sovereign over the affairs of the nations, so you can step out in faith and trust. You can depend on his goodness.
With our God there is no ‘oops!’ With our God there are no accidents. There is no wiping the sweat off his brow.
So before you enter a crisis, God already knows how he can lead you out of it.
The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendour of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord, the splendour of our God.
If you think your life is barren and dry and without purpose, look up. God is sovereign. Even in death God has a better future in store for those who love him. To live is Christ, to die is gain. Armed with that knowledge you can begin to flourish.
The Highway of Holiness
But my message this morning would be unbalanced and misleading if I were to stress God’s dominion and power – and be silent about what it is that the Lord requires of us.
Those feeble hands and trembling knees I mentioned earlier. God says in v3 “Strengthen them. Steady them.” Those fearful hearts I talked about. God commands us in v4 say to them:
Be strong, do not fear; your God will come,
he will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution he will come to save you.
God is calling for a response of trust in him. Given his track record of creation and redemption, how much more trustworthy could he show himself to be?
God is also calling forth from us a response of holiness.
Verse 8 says this:
And a highway will be there;
it will be called the Way of Holiness;
it will be for those who walk on that Way.
The unclean will not journey on it;
wicked fools will not go about on it.
It’s significant that the New Testament describes the Christian life as a “walk” (Ephesians 4.1) and God’s New Covenant people, the Church, are called the Way (Acts 19.9).
The way back into God’s purposes is a path of holiness and righteousness. God says here very clearly that the unclean and the wicked and the morally perverse will not be found here. It is set apart for the redeemed.
There’s a story about an old man living on a nobleman’s estate in Glamorganshire who used to go to the local chapel using the noble lord’s private path because it saved him walking considerable distance.
One day, the two men met on the private footpath. The lord said, “And what right have you on this path?” “No right at all, sir,” said the man, “but I thought you wouldn’t mind an old man who has lived on your estate so many years going this way to worship God, especially as it’s so far the other way.”
The nobleman looked at him and said “Give me your stick!” So the trembling old man gave him his stick, not knowing what to expect. To his surprise, the noble lord gave him his own cane, capped with gold and bearing his family crest.
And then he said kindly, “My good man, when anyone asks you again what right you have to walk this path, show them this, and tell them I gave it to you!”
What right do you and I have to walk on the Highway of Holiness? None at all.
But when Jesus died God made us an offer. We lay on Jesus our filthiness and sinfulness and fallenness. And he takes that on himself, bearing our punishment on the cross. And in return, he gives to us his perfect holiness and righteousness.
That’s grace. And you can only receive it as a free gift with grateful faith. Jesus will take no payment for it. If you were to give me a gift and I offered to pay you for it you’d be insulted wouldn’t you? It’s a gift.
Have you accepted that gift by faith? Are you continuing to receive it, as a gift, every day? Then walk on in the holiness he has given you as a gift.
You men here – it’s like you’ve been given a classy Saville Row Italian suit, perfectly made-to-measure.
Ladies; it’s like a stunning new silk dress that has been expertly tailored to adorn your beauty. Wear it! Put it on! In Romans 13.14 this is what Paul means when he says “Clothe yourselves the Lord Jesus Christ.”
This is the Highway of Holiness we travel on.
It also says this in v9-10:
No lion will be there, nor any ravenous beast;
they will not be found there.
But only the redeemed will walk there,
and those the Lord has rescued will return.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the New Testament talks about the devil as a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.
And when Paul wrote about fighting wild beasts in Ephesus he was talking about evil people with a dark agenda that he had to contend with spiritually.
But the Highway of Holiness is a road upon which we have ultimate victory over the world, the flesh and the devil. If God is for us, who can be against us?
Ending
So to finish, and as we have those words “Your God will come” ringing in our ears, let’s look to the baby of Bethlehem. Like a fragile crocus blooming in the desert, God poured all his fullness into this tiny infant who, though being in very nature God, submitted himself to living among us to show us how much he loves us.
It is in this little one, this fragile, dependent newborn baby in a cradle, raised in obscurity and poverty, betrayed and crucified but victorious by his resurrection – it is because of Him that there are streams in the desert to drink from.
Is anyone thirsty?
Let’s pray…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 11th December 2011
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