Sunday 09 • 01 • 19

Good morning, everyone. Very delightful to be with you. As James mentioned, it was about twenty years ago that we started, wasn't it? And it goes by in the blink of an eye. We were just young, foolish college students trying to help out as best as we could. But it's been exciting to see what God has done with that beginning over the years. As God has brought many people in and out, including all of you here today, I see great evidence of God's supreme faithfulness to us as his people and to the city of Raleigh as well through the witness of CTK. So it's very much a privilege for me to be with you here today to look at God's Word.

As James mentioned, I serve as President and Professor of Old Testament at Christ Bible Seminary, which is in the city of Nagoya, Japan. Nagoya is about the same size as Chicago. Most Americans I find haven't heard of Nagoya unless you've been there, but we might have a little bit of a complex in comparison to Tokyo, which is a city of 37 million people—the largest in the world. So we boast only about 4 million. But anyways, it's big enough for us.

If you are interested in learning more about us, there's a little welcome table out in the foyer. I have an email sign up and some cards with information about us. If you would remember to pray for us, we'd very much appreciate that. If you don't want to carry around an index-sized card, I also put some information on my business cards there. We would love to stay in touch if you're interested and would very much covet your prayers for the gospel ministry in the nation of Japan. Thank you as a church. CTK is, of course, one of our partner churches that supports us through finances and prayers. We're very much grateful for you. We could not do what we do without you doing what you do on our behalf and for the sake of our God together.

Scripture Reading

Now, it is also my privilege to look at God's word together. The passage we'll be looking at is Isaiah chapter 52. The title of this sermon is Gospel 101, coming out of Isaiah chapter 52. As is the practice here in this church, let us read God's word together, beginning in verse one through verse 12.

Awake, awake. Put on your strength, O Zion. Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city. For there shall no more come into you the uncircumcised and the unclean. Shake yourself from the dust and arise. Be seated, Jerusalem. Loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter of Zion. For thus says the Lord, you were sold for nothing and you shall be redeemed without money. For thus says the Lord God, my people went down at the first into Egypt to sojourn there and the Assyrian oppressed them for nothing. Now, therefore, what have I heard? Declares the Lord. Seeing that my people are taken away for nothing, the rulers wail, declares the Lord. And continually all the day, my name is despised. Therefore, my people shall know my name. Therefore, in that day, they shall know that it is I who speak, Here I am. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, your God reigns. The voice of your watchmen, they lift up their voice. Together they sing for joy. For eye to eye they see the return of the Lord to Zion. Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem. For the Lord has comforted his people. He has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. Depart, depart, go out from there. Touch no unclean thing. Go out from the midst of her. Purify yourselves, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. For you shall not go out in haste and you shall not go out in flight. For the Lord will go before you and the God of Israel will be your rearguard. — Isaiah 52:1-12

Let us pray together. Father, we praise you as our great God and King. We give you praise for your great faithfulness to CTK as a church. We praise you that you are worthy to receive all glory and honor both here in Raleigh and to the ends of the earth.

Lord, as we turn to your word, we pray that you would give us ears to hear, that you would give us eyes to see, that you would open up our minds to understand your word and to respond to it in repentance and faith. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

When my family and I first moved to Japan, I did what most missionaries do when they first move to a non-English speaking country. I enrolled in language school. In this case, of course, Japanese language school. And in order to assess our abilities, the language school has every incoming student come in and take a placement test so that it can set us in the right class.

Well, the first day of school comes around and I go into the building and I follow the signs to the testing room. And I come in and I see various other foreign students sitting down waiting to take the test. So I walk in and sit down. The teacher comes in, passes out the test. I look at the test and I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what anything on this test means. I mean this may as well have been a technical exam for how to change the oil on a spacecraft written in Martian. I had no idea how to read a single letter, let alone how to answer correctly. What I did manage to figure out is that the little line up right there at the top—that's where you write your name. So I wrote my name and I turned it in.

Well, unsurprisingly, when the test results came back, I was placed in the very bottom class, the very beginning class: Japanese 101. Now this class presumes no knowledge of Japanese for those who are coming in. For me at that point, that was obviously a very good thing. And it starts with the very basics of the language. It starts by looking at the alphabets. And yes, I did say that plural. Japanese has three alphabetic scripts that they use that you have the joy of memorizing. And then it moves on from there to talk about pronunciation and the vocabulary, simple sentences, and it moves on from there.

Well, starting at this 101 level was absolutely critical for me. Because without that basic foundation, I would not have been able to understand the concepts that were then later taught in Japanese 102, Japanese 103, and so on. In order to understand that teaching that came later, I had to have a firm grasp of the fundamental rudimentary elements of the Japanese language. And that's exactly what Japanese 101 gave me.

Gospel 101

Well, I've entitled this sermon "Gospel 101" for very similar reasons. When we talk about the Gospel in the church, it's been my experience that oftentimes we start with Gospel 102 or Gospel 103. We start with the New Testament and its various uses of the term Gospel to describe the saving work of Jesus on our behalf. And in a sense, there's nothing wrong with doing that. There's nothing wrong with talking about the Gospel that way. The New Testament talks about the Gospel that way. But in order to understand fully the implications of this New Testament use of the word Gospel, we need to go back to the fundamental passages, the original context in which this term is used. In order to understand that teaching that comes later, we need to start with Gospel 101.

And this passage that we're reading here and looking at this morning in Isaiah 52 is arguably the most foundational text in this respect. So the term that's translated "good news" or "gospel" in verse seven of our passage here—it's used prior to Isaiah 52. But in every situation in which it's used, the scenario that is envisioned is the same. It describes the announcement of victory that a messenger brings home concerning the outcome of a decisive battle.

And I've chosen Isaiah 52 in particular because it's this passage that the Apostle Paul quotes when he is describing the need to send people out to preach the Gospel. So in Romans 10:14-15, Paul says this:

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news." — Romans 10:14-15

Paul uses Isaiah 52:7 as a source text to describe the need to send people out to preach the Gospel. And for this reason, understanding what is going on in Isaiah 52 is absolutely critical for us to understand the fundamental rudimentary elements of the Gospel. It's what we can call Gospel 101.

But before we get into this passage itself, I thought it would be helpful to give a bit of background on the book of Isaiah as a whole. Isaiah is a very large book and it can be kind of difficult to get our grasp of the whole of it.

Well, the prophet Isaiah began his ministry in the year 740 BC. And during this time in antiquity, the Assyrian Empire was the sort of grand superpower of the ancient world. And Assyria was beginning to encroach on the kingdoms of Israel and Judah during this time.

So at this time God's people were divided into Israel in the North and Judah in the South. And God was raising up the Assyrian Empire in order to bring judgment against His people for their unrepentant sin. Well, the Assyrians eventually come and conquer and exile the Northern Kingdom of Israel in July. And then in the decades that follow, they begin various incursions into the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

Now during this time, God protects Judah but various prophets including Isaiah come and are issuing warnings to God's people. And so Isaiah chapters one to 39 is concerned with this period of time, what we can call sort of the Assyrian crisis. And Isaiah's goal is to get the Southern Kingdom of Judah not to make the same mistakes that the Northern kingdom made. He's trying to get them to avoid the judgment of exile by exhorting them to repent of their sin, to turn to God, to trust in Him. But by the time we get to chapter 39, it becomes clear that exile is going to be coming to Judah as well.

Well, then when we turn the page and we look at chapter 40, the entire tone of the book of Isaiah changes. So chapters 40 to 66 are written as if Judah's exile has already become a reality. At this point, God ceases for the most part giving oracles of judgment and warning. And he begins giving oracles of salvation, oracles of hope. In these chapters, they envision God's people as exiles, as prisoners waiting to be redeemed. And it's this context then that the oracle in chapter 52 is given.

Four Fundamental Elements of the Gospel

And when we look at this passage, we see that it teaches four, what we could call fundamental rudimentary elements of the gospel. And the first is this: the concern of the gospel is God's name. The concern of the gospel is God's name. We see this right out of the gate in verses one to six.

So these verses, if you look at them, they contain two sets of commands. The beginning of verse one and then verse two. And these commands are calling those who were left in the ruins of Jerusalem during the exile to get ready because redemption is coming. You see, when God exiled His people to Babylon, some people were left to remain and to live in the ruins of Jerusalem. These were the poorest of the poor. They were left to live in what Isaiah calls in verse nine, the waste places of Jerusalem.

And God tells these people to awake and put on strength and beautiful garments in verse one. And then he says in verse two, to shake yourself from the dust, loose the bonds from your neck. Well, then following each of these sets of commands, God then gives reasons for the people of Jerusalem to do this. He says in verse one:

for the uncircumcised and unclean, that is foreign oppressors, will no longer come into you

For, verse three says:

you were sold for nothing and you shall be redeemed without money

Now, the idea here is that God has never sold possession of His people. The Babylonians, even though they conquered them, even though the Babylonians think that they own them, they have never owned them. They have always been God's people. And therefore, for God to purchase them back requires no money. They've always been His.

Well, after these commands and these reasons are given for Jerusalem to get up and get ready, we see the underlying rationale for this upcoming redemption in verses five and six. God says:

now therefore, what have I here?

So He's sort of scanning the horizon. And what does He conclude? Look at verse five:

Their rulers wail, that is their foreign rulers, and continually all the day, my name is despised

See, people back then believed that if one nation conquered another nation, that that conquering nation's deity was more powerful than the conquered nation's deity. That's what enabled the armies to win was this battle in heaven. So the Babylonians thought that because Israel was in exile that their god Marduk was more powerful than Israel's god Yahweh. Yahweh's name is being despised.

Well, how does God respond to this? Verse six:

therefore my people shall know my name. Therefore, in that day, that is in the day of redemption. They shall know that it is I who speak, here I am.

Now, the point here is even though God's name is currently being despised by the nations, even though He is not being recognized for who He is as the sovereign God of all creation, when He saves His people, they will know His name. And name, of course, is representative of His reputation, His identity, who He truly is. They will know that Yahweh has not been conquered. God will save His people in order to vindicate His great name.

Now, much of the time when we Christians talk about the Gospel, we tend to assume that we are the primary concern. We often think that the Gospel is primarily concerned with how we are saved. But what we fail to realize is that God's primary concern when it comes to redemption, when it comes to the Gospel is His name, His reputation, His glory.

So later, the prophet Ezekiel, who actually lived in Babylon during the Babylonian exile, he makes the very same point. So through Ezekiel, God says this:

It is not for your sake, oh house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations.

Now, the fact that God shows us grace and mercy and pursues us and forgives us and restores us is of course a beautiful truth of the gospel. God cares deeply about us as his people. But we need to recognize that the chief concern of the gospel, the reason fundamentally that God restores us is for the fame of his own name. That God would be recognized as faithful and merciful and gracious. That God's name would be worshiped and adored for who he is. The concern of the Gospel is God's name and this is then the fuel that should drive us to go out and preach the Gospel to others.

You see, when we see people or when we interact with people who do not know the Lord Jesus as king, who have not admitted their sin, who have not submitted to Him, who have not received His forgiveness, who do not treat Him as king. When I walk down the streets of Japan and statistically 99.7% of the people that I pass by do not know the Lord Jesus as King, our fundamental concern should be God's name, that God is not being recognized as the glorious King of kings of all creation that He is. It should break our hearts because it breaks God's heart. We should be concerned that our God's name is being despised. And therefore, the reason that we share the gospel with others is so that first and foremost that he will receive that recognition that he deserves.

The Content of the Gospel

But what do we tell people? What do we say to them? What is the content of the Gospel? Well, is the second fundamental element that this text teaches. Whereas the concern of the Gospel is God's name, the content of the Gospel is God's reign. You can see this in verses seven to nine. So after verses one to six instruct the people of Jerusalem to prepare for God's upcoming salvation, Verses seven to nine describe a messenger coming to Jerusalem and proclaiming that this salvation has been realized.

You see, for God to save His people back then meant that He had to defeat their enemies. So he had to defeat the Babylonians. So this act of redemption that's happening is happening far away from Jerusalem. And so the picture in verse seven here is of a messenger who has been dispatched from the battlefield to travel back and bring good news of victory to the people back home.

And notice what this messenger communicates. The text begins:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news. That is who brings the gospel.

And then it describes the content of this gospel in four clauses. It says that this gospel messenger, one, publishes peace. Two, brings good news of happiness. In Hebrew, this is literally brings good good news, like super good news. Three, publishes salvation. And then four, this messenger proclaims to God's people in Zion, in Jerusalem:

Your God reigns.

Now, you'll notice here that this last clause only that is actually recounted as the direct speech of the messenger. This is a way of underscoring the centrality of this clause. So what is the basic content of the Gospel that this messenger proclaims? Your God reigns. Your God has not been conquered by the Babylonians. Your god has not lost possession of you. Your god has not given up on you. Your god reigns. That's the good news.

Now, what this reign of god brings are things like peace and happiness and salvation, that which the messenger is said to proclaim. But at its fundamental rudimentary level, the gospel is the announcement that God reigns as King. And salvation is then an outflow of that reign.

Well, verses eight and nine then record the response of the people in Jerusalem to this good news. You notice that they rejoice with singing because of God's powerful redemption, because He has brought them comfort from their oppression.

Now, when we talk about the gospel, we tend to focus on this latter part, don't we? On the redemption and the comfort that God brings us. But oftentimes we neglect what Isaiah 52 emphasizes here that salvation is an outflow of God reigning over His people as king. And without understanding this broader context of God's reign, of God's kingship, we misunderstand the purpose for which we are saved. We misunderstand why God saves us.

In my experience, much of the time, Christians believe that the primary purpose of our salvation is so that we don't go to hell when we die. But as we've just seen, according to this text, the fundamental concern of the Gospel is not us, but God's name. And in line with that, the fundamental content of the Gospel is not you're not going to hell, but rather your God reigns. And so therefore, the primary purpose of our salvation is not our avoiding punishment but rather our incorporation into god's kingdom over which he is reigning now.

Now, the glorious reality of this incorporation, of course, is that our sins are forgiven, that God redeems us and restores us to fellowship with him. I am a fan of not going to hell. I'm not trying to downplay that. Don't hear me wrong. That's a good thing. But if we fail to see that we are saved into a Kingdom that is preoccupied with God's name now, then we fail to understand why we are saved.

And our understanding of the purpose of our salvation will then determine how we live after we are saved. If we think that the purpose of our salvation is simply so that we get into heaven when we die, we are probably not going to have very much different lives after we are saved than from before we're saved. After all, salvation is primarily concerned with the next life, not this one. It's unlikely that we will feel much motivation to live in radically sacrificial ways for the sake of God's name if we do not believe that that is the purpose for which we have been saved.

But when we recognize that the purpose of our salvation is for us to be incorporated into this kingdom over which God reigns now, the only logical question for us to ask is, what does our King expect of us? What does our King ask of us? What does this King who has graciously rescued us for the sake of His name expect us to be doing as citizens of His Kingdom?

Well, Isaiah 52 doesn't spell out explicitly what we are to be doing. Isaiah leaves this unstated. We need to rely on other portions of Scripture to fill this out. But for example, if we were to go back to Romans 10 where Paul quotes our passage in Isaiah, we would see that God wants people who will one, preach the Gospel and two, send people to preach the Gospel.

And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? — Romans 10:14-15

So God the king wants his redeemed subjects to participate in the proclamation that he is king and offers salvation.

The Scope of the Gospel

What Isaiah 52 provides for us is a glimpse of the scope of this gospel proclamation. This is the third fundamental element in this text that we see: the scope of the gospel. That is how far and why does God want the good news that he is king to be extended. The scope of the gospel is the ends of the earth.

The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. — Isaiah 52:10

To bear one's arm here is an idiom in Hebrew for showing one's strength. It's kind of like that classic scene where the guy's trying to show off and he rolls up his sleeve to show his muscles. He's bearing his arm. That's the idea here, except without that vanity.

Or you all remember "Our God is an Awesome God," that old praise song? I got an Amen in the 9:00 service when I mentioned that. There's a line in that song that I think for many people it might feel a little bit corny, but theologically it is absolutely spot on.

When he rolls up his sleeves, he ain't just putting on the wrists. Our God is an awesome God. There is thunder in his footsteps and lightning in his fists.

Power. That's the idea here. That's what's happening here.

Now, these two lines of poetry here in verse 10, they mirror each other in an inverse manner. The first line ends with the phrase "before the eyes of all the nations," and this corresponds then to the beginning of the second line, "and all the ends of the earth shall see." This indicates that the outer lines correspond with one another as well.

How has God bared His holy arm mentioned at the beginning? Through His salvation mentioned at the end. So all of this shows us at least two things here. One, the way that God shows His power as king is by saving His people. And two, God wants knowledge of the salvation to reach all the nations to the ends of the earth.

So what is the scope of the Gospel? How far should the good news of God's reign for the sake of God's name—that is demonstrated by God's powerful salvation—be extended? To the ends of the earth.

Now, I'm a missionary, of course. And so when I come back to the States, it's very typical and probably expected that I'm going to come back and share updates about missions and preach sermons about missions. And that's fine. I enjoy doing that. It's kind of be a bad missionary if I didn't. But what I want us to see from this passage is that missions—the proclamation of the good news to all nations—is not an addendum to the Gospel.

The Gospel, the good news that God reigns as king, a reign that is now administered through the resurrected rule of righteous Jesus, is at its fundamental, rudimentary level a global proclamation.

When you hear the word gospel, what do you immediately think of? Do you think of God's worldwide reign of power and salvation being announced and heralded to the ends of the earth? Or do you primarily think of personal individual salvation and renewal? In my experience, most times Christians tend to think the latter. But this doesn't reflect the fundamentals of the gospel at a basic 101 level.

You'll notice here in the text that verse 10 is a continuation of the reasons that the waste places of Jerusalem are to break forth in singing. So after we hear the Gospel message in verse seven, verse nine says:

Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem.

And then grammatically, the text gives three reasons why these waste places are to rejoice. One, for the Lord has comforted His people. Two, He has redeemed Jerusalem. And three:

the Lord has bared His holy arm before the eyes of all the nations and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.

There is no division here between the comfort and redemption in verse nine and the global proclamation of that redemption in verse 10. So whereas we tend to think of the Gospel as comfort and redemption and then missions as proclamation to the ends of the earth, here Isaiah includes all of this in one thought when he's talking about the Gospel and implications of the Gospel.

So what this means for us is that we need to reorient the way that we think about the gospel at a basic 101 level. Now again, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we should stop reveling and rejoicing in the individual redemption and care that God extends to us. God is our Father. We are His children. We can and should be transformed and rejoice in His personal love and care for us.

But if we stop there and think that that's the gospel, it's like we've taken an apple and extracted the apple seeds, set them out on the table, and then said, hey, look, an apple. Well, the seeds are a central part of the apple, of course, but on their own that's not an apple. And similarly, personal redemption and salvation is a central part of the Gospel, but on its own, it is not the Gospel.

It's the seeds and the core and the fruit and the skin that altogether make up an apple. And similarly, it's comfort and redemption and international proclamation that make up the necessary constituent elements of the Gospel message. And the reason why is because God is king over all creation.

Now, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't use the word missions, of course. But it does mean that we should not think of missions as some tangential specialized aspect of the church. Missions is fundamental to the identity of the church because missions is fundamental to the identity of the gospel itself.

The Four Fundamental Elements of the Gospel

Well, so far we've seen that the concern of the gospel is God's name, the content of the gospel is God's reign, the scope of the gospel is the ends of the earth. And here we see the fourth and final fundamental element, what I call the guarantee of the Gospel. The guarantee of the Gospel is God Himself.

We see this in verses eleven and twelve. If you remember, this oracle began with commands for Jerusalem to prepare for God's redemption followed by reasons for them to do so. And here similarly at the end, we see commands for God's people in Babylon to depart, to be redeemed followed by reasons for them to depart. This oracle began with even a double imperative. In verse one:

awake, awake.

And it ends here with another double imperative in verse 11:

depart, depart.

Those who are in exile in Babylon are to get up and to go out and return to Jerusalem. Those who bear the vessels or the pieces of the Lord's temple are to bring them back to the Promised Land. This is describing redemption. This is describing salvation here.

Well, verse 12 then gives the reason that God's people can have confidence in their redemption:

for you shall not go out in haste and you shall not go out in flight.

That is you don't have to flee in fear in order to escape your enemies. Why is that? The good news at the end here:

For the Lord will go before you and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.

That is God Himself is the guarantee of the security of the redemption of His people. This imagery here in the last line of verse 12 is actually a physical impossibility. So God is presented as the trailblazer, the one who goes up front and makes sure that the path is secure. But then He's also presented as the rearguard, the one who marches at the end and ensures the safety of those who are traveling. So this imagery presents God as the beginning and the end. The first and the last. The Alpha and the Omega of Israel's redemption.

Well, throughout our time here, you can see how God's redemption of Israel is a picture of our redemption in Jesus. God rescuing His people out of exile in Babylon is a picture, as it were, of the much larger act of redemption—really rescuing us out of our exile from the garden, the penalty of our sin.

And just as God was the first and the last, the guarantee of Israel's redemption, so is Jesus, the first and the last, the beginning and the end of our redemption from judgment that we deserve. And the only thing that He asks of us is to respond to His word in faith and repentance.

So when He calls for us and He says, depart, depart, turn from that way of life in which you formerly used to live. Come to Me. Submit to Me. Find rest in Me. Find life in Me. Our response is to come. We come with nothing except for what we've already done here this morning, confessing our sin and trusting in His forgiveness and redemption.

And we can have confidence in that redemption. Why? Because Jesus has gone before us on the cross and secured our way. And because even now He marches as our rearguard, having poured out the Holy Spirit to be in our midst. And He saves us in this way, in order that we would be incorporated into this global kingdom over which He reigns as the exalted King.

So the gospel is good news first and foremost because it's not contingent upon us. Jesus guarantees our redemption not because we are faithful, but because He is faithful. So from now on, when you think about the Gospel, I pray that you will remember this fundamental teaching here, this one on one teaching from Isaiah, that the concern of the Gospel is God's name, that He would be glorified as His power is displayed in His salvation. That the content of the Gospel is God's reign, that He has authority and the scope of His reign is the ends of the earth. And that He Himself is the guarantee of the Gospel, the guarantee that we can have new life, that we can come out of our own exile and into His courts.

And may he receive all glory and honor as we seek to learn and to grow as citizens of his kingdom. And may we bring him that glory together. Thanks for having me here this morning. Let's pray together.

Our Father, You are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. And Lord, we thank you that even though our sin and rebellion merits us your judgment, your wrath, that you have seen fit to extend mercy to us through your son Jesus. Lord, we thank you for that. We thank you that Jesus not only died on our behalf, but that he has risen and now ascended to glory and even now reigns from on high over a kingdom that is encompassing this earth.

And we pray, as our Lord Jesus taught us to pray, Lord, that your kingdom would come here to earth even now as it is in heaven. We give you all praise and glory here this morning. In Jesus' name, Amen.