The Rev. Canon Dr. Brett Cane, November 28, 2010
Advent 1; 8:30 Holy Communion and 10:00 a.m. Litany and Holy Communion
Isaiah’s Visions of Christ’s Coming #1:
“The Coming Kingdom”
Isaiah 2:1-5 (Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44)
Opening Prayer:
Lord Jesus, all prophecies and patterns point to you, our Saviour and our King; help us now, by your Holy Spirit, to grasp the impact of what has been told before so that we can fully live out your will today and establish your kingdom to come, to the glory of our Father in heaven. Amen.
Introduction
One of the great things I love about being in a liturgical church is the Church Year or Christian Calendar. This means that every twelve months we get to go through the significant events in the life of Jesus yet again. In this way we can rediscover all he has done for us and how that impacts our lives now.
The beginning of the Christian year starts today – four Sundays before Christmas. The name for these first four weeks of the calendar is “Advent.” “Advent” is derived from the Latin, “Adventus,” meaning “a coming.” We would naturally think of Advent as preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth at Christmas, his first coming. However, Advent is much broader than that; as a matter of fact, it focuses more on two other comings of our Saviour, as the collect for the first Sunday in Advent says – see if you can spot all three of Jesus’ comings:
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility, that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
Jesus’ first coming is clear: he “came to visit us” as a humble baby; his second coming is also obvious: he “shall come again” as a glorious and majestic judge. These are Christ’s comings in the past and in the future. But there is a third coming, and that is in the present: we are to “put on the armour of light, now, in the time of this mortal life.” This is an echo of today’s New Testament reading from Romans: “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14). So Advent is the season of the coming of Jesus in three distinct ways: past, future and present.
Advent is followed by Christmas, as we celebrate God becoming human and all that means “for us and for our salvation.”[1] Then follows the season of Epiphany where we focus on Jesus’ being revealed to the world and his mission to reach out to all nations with salvation.
In our sermons during Advent and Epiphany this (Christian) year, we are going to be looking at the prescribed Old Testament readings for the two seasons from the prophet Isaiah. In Advent, we are looking at “Visions of Christ’s Coming” and in Epiphany we will look at “The Suffering Servant.” Today we begin with “The Coming Kingdom” from Isaiah 2.
The Old Testament – why and how to read it
Now, many people find it difficult to read the Old Testament so I want to begin this whole series by looking quite extensively today at the importance of reading the Old Testament and how we are to understand it in relation to the New.
The importance of the Old Testament: It is important to know the Old Testament because I believe it is impossible to grasp what Jesus is all about without being rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus demonstrates this very clearly when he engages the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on the evening of Easter Day: “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). He later tells the other disciples, “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” and it goes on to say “Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:44-45). The first thing Jesus does after the resurrection is to get people to understand what has happened by looking at the Old Testament. Therefore, we need a thorough grounding in the Word of God as Jesus had it in order to understand who he is, what he has done for us, and what is to come.
How to understand the Old Testament: But how are we to read the Old Testament so we can understand it? In the same way Jesus described to the disciples that first Easter eve – to see it all through a “Jesus Lens” – how Jesus fulfills promises and sets up the new covenant – this is the key. Indeed, this is foreseen in the Old Testament itself as we see in the book of Jeremiah the prophet:
“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:31, 33)
Now this is fairly clear – it is a direct prediction of what is to come. Looking back, we can see that the new covenant Jesus has brought through his death and resurrection has moved beyond obedience to some external law to an inner transformation that enables us to live out God’s will in a brand new way. But even to understand this, we need to know the rest of the Old Testament to explain the background to what is meant by “law” and “covenant.”
But a lot of prophecy seems less clear or so rooted in what was going on then – even in today’s passage, it talks about what Isaiah sees “concerning Judah and Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:1) – what could that possibly mean for us 2700 years later? First, we need to realize that prophecy is not primarily about predicting the future. In contrast to later religious approaches, including some of those popular today, the Biblical prophets were concerned first with the present, and only then with the future, as a result of what decisions were made in the present. They were more interested in forthtelling God’s truth about how people should live and act and only secondarily in foretelling how things would evolve from that in the time to come. We see this in Jesus teaching in today’s Gospel. He has just responded to the disciples’ questions about “signs of the end of the age” but then moves immediately to warn them about speculating about times (things having to do with prediction) and moves immediately to exhortation to keep watch and be ready (things having to do with conduct and relationship): “No one knows about that day or hour…therefore keep watch…be ready” (Matthew 24:36, 42, 44).
So how are we to handle these Old Testament passages like the one we have from Isaiah? The prophets were inspired by God to see things from his perspective. Isaiah 2:1 says, “This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.” They saw God’s will and how he would work things out but they expressed it using the timing and the models they were familiar with. But God was inspiring their visions – so a prophecy might have both an immediate or near-time application as well as a far-future one. A prophecy might be related to a person or institution known to the prophet but also might have a more far-reaching application. To explain this concept of expanded perception in time and mode we are given two Biblical devices – one we call “prophetic perspective” and the other “typology.”
Prophetic Perspective: When Jesus spoke to the disciples about the “signs of the end of the age” earlier in Matthew 24, he conflated together the time of the destruction of Jerusalem which happened in 70 AD with the final day of judgement which is yet to come. He was using what we might call “prophetic perspective” to describe events to come. It is like looking at the Rocky Mountains from Calgary. At first sight, it appears as if all the peaks are together, but when you get nearer, you realize there are valleys and gaps in between various ranges. In the same way, at times Jesus has given us the view from afar, and at others from closer up. In this way he has shown us there is going to be a gap between his ascending into heaven and his second coming. This gap is referred to elsewhere as “the last days” which are not the final years just before his coming again, but the whole period between his two appearings. This is evident from Peter’s quoting the prophet Joel on the Day of Pentecost: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people” (Acts 2:17). The Kingdom is here already, not in its fullness, but we begin to see its effects. The final establishment of the rule of God will come on that great day when Christ returns, fully visible to all the world. So, looking back, we can use the “prophetic perspective” to understand the visions of the Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah and his reference to “The last days” (Isaiah 2:2).
Typology: A second device to help us understand the Old Testament is typology. Typology has to do with models God uses or patterns of how he works – “types”. A type could be a person, event or institution that God uses as a picture of how he is going to work things out. For example, the king is a major figure in the Old Testament – but the kings were mostly a bad lot. However, the prophets continually speak about God raising up a good king to deliver his people. Jeremiah says, “They will serve the LORD their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them” (Jeremiah 30:9). Now this is not referring to the literal David who died centuries before but one like David (in his good points). David the king is a type. The Psalms support this as well – they were put together long after the kings had all disappeared but the fact that so many refer to a kingly figure shows that the inspired compilers knew this was the model or type God was going to use to deliver them. “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy hill…You are my Son, today I have become your Father” (Psalm 2:6, 7). This passage was part of the declaration God gave over Jesus at his baptism. David the shepherd king was a type for Jesus who was to come. In this way, we can apply many of the former references to the king to Jesus. only in a greater and expanded fashion.
Another example is seen in our passage from Isaiah – it speaks of the “mountain of the Lord’s temple” (Isaiah 2:1-2). The physical temple was later destroyed and Ezekiel spoke about a reconstructed temple; indeed, it was rebuilt, but seven hundred years after Isaiah, Jesus says, referring to his own body, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19). The temple as the place of God’s presence is a type of something far greater to come – Jesus as God among us in the flesh. That type is further expanded by Paul when he speaks of us, the Church, as Jesus body and that “You yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you” (1 Corinthians 3:16). We could go on and talk about other “types” or patterns of God’s working to save and deliver such as the Exodus, the Passover, the sacrificial system, and so on. Each time a pattern is restated or reworked in the Bible there is an expansion of the original concept into something far greater. One author has summed it up well: “The Old Testament constantly points to something beyond itself…it looks forward to something which should follow it…Not only does the New Testament discharge the promises of the Old but it takes up the mission and message of the former covenant and makes them its own.”[2] Typology helps us understand this something – Someone – the “far greater” to come.
Direct prediction, prophetic perspective, typology – all these are ways of illustrating the old saying: “In the Old Testament, the New is concealed; in the New, the Old is revealed.”
Isaiah’s Vision
In the moments we have left, let us use these tools to look at what God could be saying to us through what Isaiah saw using the questions, what, when, where, and who – with a bonus point:
1. What? What Isaiah is talking about in this section is the coming rule of God – what we would call his Kingdom. Looking at typology, the “Mountain of the Lord’s Temple will be established as chief among the mountains” (verse 2) tells us that God is present with his people and his rule has triumphed over evil and every other power. People ask to be “taught his ways that they may walk in his paths” (verse 3) – people’s hearts are turned to obey God; his “law and word” go out (verse 3) and disputes and wars are ended (verse 4). This is a picture of god’s coming Kingdom. Your refer to it every time you say the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come.” Pray for it!
2. When? When is this to happen? Isaiah speaks of “the last days” (verse 2). Knowing Matthew 24, and “prophetic perspective” we can say both “now” and “not yet.” Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God “coming upon you” (Matthew 12:28) or “within you” (Luke 17:21) or “near you” (Luke 10:11). The Kingdom begins now but realize you will only see a partial fulfillment through us here, in preparation for the final establishment of the kingdom when Jesus returns. Work for it!
3. Where? Where is this to take place? Isaiah says his vision concerns “Judah and Jerusalem” (verse 1) – is this the literal land and city? There is some possibility of a literal fulfilment but Judah and Jerusalem are more likely the type of the Kingdom to come. John confirms this typology when he says, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). There is a great future ahead. Be excited!
4. Who? Who is to be part of this new Kingdom? Here we have a direct prediction that it will be “all nations” (verse 2) and “many peoples” (verse 3) – salvation is not restricted to any one people group but for all who are willing to “Go up to the mountain of the Lord” (verse 3). We are to expect and invite all nations to come in. Make the way clear!
5. Bonus! All of this seems pretty straightforward, until we look at the context of this passage. This vision of hope is surrounded by repeated condemnations of the sinfulness of God’s people: “Ah, sinful nation, a people, loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption…See how the faithful city has become a harlot!” (Isaiah 1:4, 21). But in the midst of the condemnations come God’s pleas to his people to repent: “Come, now, let us reason together…though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). Isaiah sums up his appeal in the final verse: “Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord” (verse 5). Be hopeful!
Let this promise of the coming Kingdom invite and inspire you to live for Jesus today. We have come back full circle to our collect for Advent…can you say to God: “I cast away the works of darkness…I put on the armour of light, now!”?
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility, that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
[1] As affirmed in the Nicene Creed: “Who, for us and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”
[2] H.H. Rowley, various works, cited by D.L. Baker, Two Testaments, One Bible. (Leicester, England; Inter-Varsity Press, 1976), pg. 345.