This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Suffering Servant” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, January 4, 1987.
About this sermon
The ready servant stands in sharp contrast to a slumbering people throughout this passage, wide awake where Israel is spiritually asleep. Isaiah’s own preaching is what rouses that sleeping people, not merely his prophetic vision. True freedom, set out across 52:1-10, comes through exactly that kind of preached word, not through Israel’s own effort.
Sermon transcript
The reading begins with the 17th verse of Isaiah 51. We’ll be reading through verse 10 of chapter 52. Rouse yourself, arise, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the Lord’s hand the cup of His anger, the chalice of reeling you have drained to the dregs.
There is none to guide her among all the sons she has borne, nor is there one to take her by the hand among all the sons she has reared. These two things have befallen you. Who will mourn for you? The devastation and destruction, famine and sword, how shall I comfort you? Your sons have fainted. They lie helpless at the head of every street like an antelope in a net, full of the wrath of the Lord, the rebuke of your God. Please hear this, you afflicted.
You are drunk, but not with wine. Thus says your Lord, the Lord, even your God, who contends for his people. Behold, I have taken out of your hand the cup of reeling, the chalice of my anger. You will never drink it again. And I will put it into the hand of your tormentor. who have said to you, lie down that we may walk over you. You have even made your back like the ground and like the street for those who walk over it.
Awake, awake, clothe yourself in your strength, O Zion, clothe yourself in your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city, for the uncircumcised and the unclean will no more come into you. Shake yourself from the dust. Rise up, O captive Jerusalem. Loose yourself from the chains around your neck, O captive daughter of Zion.
For thus says the Lord, you were sold for nothing and you will be redeemed without money. For thus says the Lord your God. My people went down at first into Egypt to reside there. Then the Assyrian oppressed them without cause. Now, therefore, what do I have here, declares the Lord, seeing that my people have been taken away without cause. Again, the Lord declares, those who rule over them howl, and my name is continually blasphemed all day long. Therefore, my people shall know my name.
Therefore, in that day, I am the one who is speaking. Here am I. How lovely! On the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation and says to Zion, Your God reigns. Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices.
They shall joyfully together, for they will see with their own eyes when the Lord restores Zion, break forth Shout joyfully together, you waste places of Jerusalem, for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, that all the ends of the earth may see the salvation of our God. Our Father, we do in fact yearn for that fullness of proclamation that is here spoken, giving anticipation of the wonderful and glorious proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we pray our Father that as Isaiah himself was moved, we might be moved too, and as he would endeavor to reach those to whom he spoke, that similarly that would be the intention of this pulpit. We pray, our God, that you would bless your church with glorious and wondrous preaching that is worthy of you. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.
You will recall the last time I spoke to you about the servant of the Lord, I called attention to the images of slumber in this portion of Isaiah’s prophecy that we have been looking at presently. I noted, first of all, the servant himself. In chapter 50, verses 4 and 5, the servant himself who is there pictured as awakening morning by morning for the purpose of doing God’s will. It is, as I have said to you, an amazing picture that is given us there. He awakens me morning by morning. He awakens my ear to listen as a disciple. The image, of course, is of one who from his first conscious moment, awakening in the morning, is ready to do the Lord’s bidding. I also noted the people of God. in Isaiah 51, 1-8.
And although words about slumber are not used here directly, it is as if the people have been distracted, as if they are sleepwalking while the Lord himself clamors for their attention. Here, the contrast between the people described and the servant previously described. The Lord does not have to clamor for the attention of his servant, but here he pleads for the attention of his people. He strains to regain their attention by giving his people descriptions of the coming magnificent glory of the kingdom. In counter-distinction to the end of all things, the end of the heavens and the earth, the end of those who revile the children of God, the people of the Lord, so says God Himself, His salvation shall stand. his righteousness shall prevail.
That, Isaiah 51, 1-8. But such is the description, that the prophet, in the vein of that perfect servant of the Lord, proves at least at this point, that he at least is awake. He proves that he, at least, hears the Lord’s message. Isaiah is awake and listening. And as such, he gives response then to this message from the Lord, and the urgency with which the Lord himself has entreated the people, now lays hold of the prophet himself. He calls out boldly. Possibly we would react, at least initially, too boldly.
He calls out for the Lord to awaken, to awaken from his slumber. in verses nine through eleven. In other words, the prophet prays that the Lord will awaken and act, and act soon to bring to pass the fullness of all that he has spoken of in the previous verses. Far from a prayer born of impiety, therefore. This prayer by the Prophet is the Prophet’s way of asking, by kingdom come, and as well put in New Testament language, come Lord Jesus, even so quickly come. The Lord’s response to this prayer then follows, verses 12 through 16.
And that response comes in a way in which it cleverly intermingles the people and the prophet, so that the prophet is seen united to the people’s weakness in the initial verses, 12 and 13. but bend the people to the prophet’s calling, as if they are dressed up in prophet’s garb.
Verse sixteen. Against such a background, the Lord depicts the proximate, the near deliverance from exile. His comfort is mediated. Verse twelve. He is the one who comforts. His comfort is mediated in the name of that truth that says, you are my people, verse 16.
And truly, this has been the Lord’s suit all along, over against a people who has given up on the Lord, the Lord is insisting that they, regardless of what they are saying, are, in the end, his people and his promises shall be kept to them. But looking once more to the prophet. With the Lord’s response to his prayer in his grasp, The Prophet quite openly picks up the image of slumber once more. The image now of the sleeping people. And this quite directly, you see. Before it was implied, and now it is very direct.
The Prophet’s passion had been directed toward the Lord, so that he was driven to cry out in prayer. But now, in verse seventeen and following, his passion is directed toward the people. And with preaching of incredible power, he declares to Jerusalem the certainty of her future hope. That future hope, by way of the Prophet’s preaching, becomes the source of present urgency on the Prophet’s part, and comfort on the people’s part. But notice how forthright the Prophet is. He doesn’t avoid the truth about God’s dealings with his people, and he doesn’t avoid the truth about the people.
Their condition, again, under the image of slumber, is depicted as a drunken stupor. The image, however, may not be what we think. rather than were directed against Jerusalem for her sin as real as that it is. This word is actually intended to comfort Jerusalem because her chastisement is over. It is ended.
Surely She is seen as that one who has been made drunk by the Lord’s doing. It is the Lord who has forced into her hand the chalice of drunkenness and made her drain the cup. But she is not drunk on her own sins, but rather on the Lord’s judgment. she is full of the wrath of the Lord, and because of his judgments, she staggers, reels.
Given this description of her, and how it is intensified in verse 18, there is none to guide her among all the sons she has There’s no one to take her hand, among all the sons she’s reared. Who then is left? Who will mourn for her? How shall she be comforted? She is therefore thoroughly wasted. She is utterly incapable of helping herself.
What a truth this is, simply given the realities of what we know concerning drunkenness, period. Someone finds themselves in this kind of condition. Can they find the help they need within themselves? The help must come from elsewhere. She is incapable of helping herself. There is none to help her save the Lord, the Lord himself being her hope. The preacher, therefore, declares to this hopeless and helpless people their hope in God. And God is the one who will remove forever, because of his great love for her, the chalice of his anger. Those who have tormented Jerusalem in her weakened condition, they themselves now will be tormented as circumstances are reversed. But the powerful thing about this preaching is that it registers in the present. It registers in the present the yet future state. It draws into the present the yet future state.
And that on the basis of what God Himself has said. may well have experienced a modest deliverance during Isaiah’s lifetime when that city was delivered from the hands of Syria and Ephraim. Jerusalem may well have experienced a modest deliverance when that city was delivered from the hand of Sennacherib and the Assyrian horde.
Isaiah, however, is reaching out beyond any of these deliverances. He is reaching out to one even yet more distant, that of the exile, over a hundred years later and still further to that time when the chalice goes round no longer ever again. It is the end time, then, that is breaking in with the preaching of the prophet, a time in which the reeling of Jerusalem will be an impossibility, the drunkenness of the sons of Jerusalem an utter impossibility. Having seen this vision, of a coming day in which judgment will be removed and salvation will be full and free and complete.
Isaiah is driven, he is compelled, what can he do but preach? Here I am Lord, send me. Such a vision drives Isaiah to rouse the sleeping drunken Druze that she herself might be gripped by what is surely to come to pass. When the prophet calls on Jerusalem to rouse herself, he is not calling upon her to do something that she cannot do, something that she is incapable of doing, weak as she is. He is calling upon her to take hold of the hope that is hers, and it is the hope itself that raises her. Preaching brings into focus and into the present the future state promised God’s children. Preachers gripped by God are driven by that vision, their urgency is born of it, and because of that they are content with nothing less than grabbing hold of the lapels of the people of God and calling upon them in terms of the hope which alone can give them strength.
But the Prophet goes further. From the picture here at the end of chapter 51, a picture of Jerusalem the drunk, the Prophet, also here depicted at the end of chapter 51, is that one who is haunting the streets and reclaiming Jerusalem from the gutter. The Prophet now moves on and he describes the city as a sleeping slave. Verses 1 through 6 of chapter 52. The action of the Lord is such that by it the Prophet is transformed into the ambassador of a wonderful benefactor. a benefactor who has lost his charge and now is regaining that charge.
So it is that the ambassador arrives at the trading place before the slaves awake. So anxious is he. And it is this ambassador that awakens the slave girl. And as he awakens her, The thing to which he awakens her is her freedom. That’s the first thing that greets her in the morning. She is dressed, therefore, in ways no slave girl could imagine. Each piece of apparel testimony to her benefactor’s goodness. Nor is this a temporary deliverance for her. One that will be given up shortly. One which she can lose. One in which she will have to trade the apparel gained for the rags that she knew formerly. No. She is introduced into that which is permanent.
She rises from the dust. She is freed from her chains. She is no longer ravaged in the streets. by the uncircumcised and the unclean, who is her benefactor, but the Lord her God. And while she has been in her slave state, His name, His name has been abused amongst all her tormentors. But now His name through her freedom shall be vindicated and her freedom shall stand as a standard, shall be the standard.
This description then of the roused awakening people gives way to one of the most popular Old Testament texts, verses seven through eleven of chapter fifty-two. This text, in keeping with all that has gone on before, is concerned with the preaching of the word. It reminds us to be sure of the glory of that office. that belongs to preachers called. But it also reminds us of the incomparable character of the message born, a message that has its power in God, not the messenger. And that message, with its power, liberates. sets free. What kind of freedom may it be that preaching and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ brings? Is it a temporary freedom born of the machinations of men?
Is it something contrived in the halls of government and justice in the nations of the world? that rises and falls as governments rise and fall? Is it something that could be known by slaves in Roman society, even though they had no political clout or freedom, as far as the world is concerned? Is it something that could be known by those who live at the very bottom of societies the world around? denied what the world counts political franchise. Or is it something that must be married to the political franchise.
Spoken out in one breath. Freedom of this world joined to freedom in the next. Can you be denied freedom in this world and still have the freedom of the gospel? Could you be living in an ancient society, say Jerusalem itself, and there, even though be oppressed, still know the freedom that the gospel brings? Can you live behind the Iron Curtain and be denied a thousand freedoms? politically, socially, economically, and still be a free man? That’s the victory, you see. For such freedom, societies, governments can never take from you. Such freedom is born of true preaching. People set free by the truth.
May the Lord be pleased to grant his Church preachers who have the urgency of Isaiah, grabbing hold of the people of the Lord calling upon them in terms of the hope that is there, that that hope may have its perfect fruit in them. And may the Lord be pleased as well to grant to the Church the discernment to recognize through preaching and through preachers. Let’s pray. Father, we would then have the freedom that is spoken of by the Prophet.
And while it was prefigured in deliverances from armies of the flesh and an exile in a foreign land, still, Father, it is true that the freedom that you grant stands above and beyond any of the oppressors and the oppressions that we might experience. Our freedom is secure in you. It is a freedom from the tearing of sin and the terror of death. It is a freedom into the children, the liberty of the children of God, which you have ordained that we should enjoy. Father, for freedom Christ has set us free.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.