Comfort My People

God is a covenant making, covenant keeping God. Sadly, God’s covenant receiving people are not always covenant keeping people. Therefore, the prophets of the Lord often served as covenant prosecutors of the terms of God’s covenant. In that role Isaiah, one of the greatest prophets, is summoned before the great throne of God in Isaiah 6. He is called there to become a messenger sent from the Lord’s heavenly court to Jerusalem’s earthly court. To his dismay God’s message to Israel was not initially to speak about salvation but to harden their impenitent hearts. Isaiah presented the Lord’s complaint against God’s people. Israel had lost the vision of God’s holiness.

Faithful to God’s Word, Isaiah pronounced the judgment of God that would come upon Israel by their enemies the Assyrians and Babylonians. He names names and foretells events that would take place long after he died. For thirty-nine chapters Isaiah declares that Israel will receive “from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” But even in His judgment God was merciful in limiting their captivity. Jeremiah the prophet set the time limit at 70 years for this Babylonian captivity of God’s people. Then in chapter 40 comes the consolation of Israel. One theologian writes, “when one turns from the thirty-ninth to the fortieth chapter it is as though he steps out of the darkness of judgment and into the light of salvation.” In chapter 40, in a manner similar to chapter 6, Isaiah is called again to the Lord’s heavenly court. There Isaiah overhears God sending messengers announcing that judgment is coming to an end and that Israel’s sins have been paid for.

With most prophesy there is a near and far fulfillment. The near fulfillment of Isaiah's prophesy was accomplished in history through the exile, deliverance, and a return to earthly Jerusalem of God’s people. The far fulfillment would come 700 years later in Christ, who would save His people out of the captivity of sin, restore them to himself, and forever call them His own. But God’s Word to Isaiah reaches farther than the first coming of Christ. The Reformation Bible says: “Isaiah’s vision of God’s kingdom is great, because it includes the history of redemption from his day until the fullness of redemption. It embraces the exile, the return of the Jews from exile, the mission, ministry, and kingdom of Jesus Christ, the mission and hope of the church, Jesus’ present rule over this world, and the restoration of all things in holiness and righteousness.”

This is best described by Jeremiah as the New Covenant. “Behold the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah – not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD; I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. . . . for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jer. 31:31-34).

“When spiritual comfort is sent to you by God, take it humbly and give thanks meekly for it. But know for certain that it is the great goodness of God that sends it to you, and not because you deserve it.” Thomas a’ Kempis

Consider yourselves in bondage, held captive by a power greater than Babylon. This is the power of sin that results in death, hell and the grave. You have no hope of deliverance and no way of escape. And then God speaks “Comfort, comfort My people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned . . ..” This is good news!

Why God Became Man?

In his book, On The Incarnation, Athanasius wrote of The Divine Dilemma. How does God who promised death for the transgression of Adam keep His word, yet, save those created in His image and likeness? For God to not punish the transgression would make God a liar and therefore not God at all. But on the other hand, how could God, finding Adam and Eve in their nakedness and shame allow those created in His image, those who once reflected the very Word of God, disappear and the work of God be undone? “The creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do?” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p.12). What then was a good and holy God to do?

Before God’s very eyes degeneration and death was evident in Adam and Eve; they were in fact perishing and all of God’s creation with them. Only God could solve The Divine Dilemma. Only the Word of God himself, who in the beginning made all things out of nothing, could again bring regeneration and a new birth to all creatures of our God and King. “For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father. For this purpose, then, the in-cor-poreal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. . . . He entered the world a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us” (Ibid, p.13).

Over 700 years later Saint Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote another book important to our understanding of the Incarnation entitled “Why God Became Man?” While the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement would wait another 500 years, Anselm rightly understood that for humankind to be saved from the results of the Fall of Man God would have to be satisfied. Anselm argued, “Satisfaction cannot be made unless there be some One able to pay God for man's sin something greater than all that is beside God. . . . Now nothing is greater than all that is beside God except God Himself. None therefore can make this satisfaction except God. And none ought to make it except man. . . . If, then, it be necessary that the kingdom of heaven be completed by man's admission, and if man cannot be admitted unless the aforesaid satisfaction for sin be first made, and if God only can, and man only ought to make this satisfaction, then necessarily One must make it who is both God and man" (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, Book II, ch. 6). If only God can make satisfaction and only man is responsible for satisfaction, then only One who is both God and man can satisfy the debt we owe.

In other words, we owe a debt we cannot pay. Only God can pay the debt He does not owe. Therefore, only a God-man, Jesus Christ, can both bear the guilt of human sin and pay the debt incurred by it.