Sermon Tone Analysis

In helping to prepare the residential program at the Transformation Project, I was introduced to Restorative Justice.

This is an approach to criminal justice that places more emphasis on restoration of a criminal offender to a fruitful life in their community rather than retributive justice that can often result in repeat offenses and a lifetime cycle of incarceration, homelessness, and recidivism.

Restorative justice is turning exile into restoration.

As Christians, we believe that God created us to live fruitful lives.

Wherever possible, we should seek the restoration of people society would exile.

How does restoration happen?

Exile is easy.

Restoration is hard.

There are obstacles to overcome.

Offenses must be addressed, through either forgiveness or retribution, or some other way.

Trust has been broken, and that takes time to restore.

But the offender must change as well.

How does someone who has made a wasteland of their life become a fruitful member of society again?

Our passage today is about God doing things that we can’t.

We cannot save anyone from their sins.

In Isaiah 26, we see God setting up salvation like a city with strong walls of refuge for exiles.

Isaiah 26:1 (ESV)

In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:

“We have a strong city;

he sets up salvation

as walls and bulwarks.

We cannot establish true justice in the earth.

In this section, we see God resurrecting the dead who will sing for joy.

God can do what we can’t.

Isaiah writes to a nation that was about to enter exile for their sins.

They were going to be exiled to Babylon.

Babylon was an empire, built around greed, a lust for power, control, conformity to a corrupt system.

The empire was based in the city that had been built as a monument to mankind, in direct opposition to God.

In the Bible, Babylon is the symbol of the world system that keeps us all in exile, built on corruption, greed, and injustice.

In the beginning, God created the world and made it fruitful.

His Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos and He brought things into order.

He planted a garden as a home for the human beings created in His image.

God made them partners in His dominion over creation, caring for the garden.

His first commandment to them was to be fruitful.

To be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and share in God’s dominion, His kingdom on earth.

But the serpent came to the first man and woman and told them they didn’t have to obey God.

They could choose their own path.

And they chose to listen to the voice of the serpent and did what seemed right to their eyes.

And as a consequence, God exiled them from the garden.

But there was also a promise, that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, and restore what was lost.

We have all been living in exile ever since.

The world is a big, beautiful place, but it isn’t as it should be.

Happiness comes but doesn’t last.

The more we have, the less satisfied we are.

The world tells us we just need more.

We have a sense that we were made for more, but we can’t get it here.

Why is that?

The world system, like Babylon, is not built for fruitfulness.

It is built for centralizing power and control.

It turns people who should be fruitful, filled with the fullness of God, at rest in Him, and turns them into machines to produce more and more.

There is no rest, there is only conformity or exile.

But what mankind cannot do, God does.

Isaiah has told us that Babylon is doomed to fall because it is corrupt.

The nation of Israel and the tribe of Judah might be sent into exile in Babylon, the “lofty city”, as Isaiah puts it in verse 5, but God will lay it low, cast it to the dust, make it a waste.

God is building His own city.

It is a city of refuge and salvation for exiles from Babylon.

The injustice of Babylon will be punished, and peace will be established for all people.

Peace comes through righteousness, and exiles that make peace with God receive new life and will become fruitful.

In exile in a Babylon world, the righteous, the poor, and the needy all cry in distress.

It feels like all of our attempts to fix things, to bring justice and help to the needy, are like planting seeds that don’t bear fruit - nothing seems to really change.

Isaiah says in verses 17-18, it’s like being pregnant, but only giving birth to wind.

All the pain, and no payoff.

Isaiah says in verse 18,

Isaiah 26:18 (ESV)

we were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind.

We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the inhabitants of the world have not fallen.

But what we cannot do, God can do.

In fact, in verse 12, we read,

Isaiah 26:12 (ESV)

O Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works.

So, in this passage we see God doing all kinds of things we cannot do.

God is building a city of salvation

Isaiah 26:1 (ESV)

In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:

“We have a strong city;

he sets up salvation

as walls and bulwarks.

We build cities for refuge too.

But somehow they always end up like Babylon instead of Jerusalem.

We intend to bring the best people together to build something good, but it always gets corrupted by sin and ends up with injustice and oppression.

The poor get poorer and the powerful game the system.

But the city God builds is salvation, and even the poor and the needy have a place there (verse 6).

2. The city of salvation that God is building is entered by righteous people, verse 2

Isaiah 26:2 (ESV)

Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.

But then in verses 7-9, we see that it is God who provides the righteousness through His judgments.

Isaiah 26:9 (ESV)

For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.

3.

There is a promise of perfect peace, but it isn’t a peace established by a human institution,

Isaiah 26:3 (ESV)

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

And in verse 12, it is God who establishes our peace

Isaiah 26:12 (ESV)

O Lord, you will ordain (establish) peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works.

In fact, by the end of chapter 26, the LORD God has not only defeated all the enemies and overlords of His people, He has saved them from exile, made them righteous, Isaiah says God has done what absolutely no one else could do, He has raised them from death to life,

This promise is that even though we live in a world ruled by Babylon on the human level, and even though we are in exile because of our sin, you are never beyond God’s reach, and His love.

You might turn your life into a wasteland.

But God can raise the dead, He can do that for you.

So by the end of chapter 26, God invites His people to rest while He takes care of all the injustice that we haven’t been able to fix.

As chapter 27 begins, the image Isaiah uses to describe the victory God is winning for His people is the overthrow of the serpent that we met way back in the garden of Eden.