The God of the Outsiders

This morning, we're sort of continuing our thinking around the church. We've been doing that the past few weeks, and it's tying in, obviously, with the membership classes that we are running at the moment. Thinking about the church, thinking about what we do here on Sunday mornings specifically, I wanna ask you the question, I wonder if you came to church this morning with certain expectations, particularly around an expectation to be welcomed. Did you come this morning hoping for a friendly smile from Desiree or from people next to you? Are you hoping for a friendly conversation with morning tea after church this morning?

Or did you come this morning expecting to welcome others? Did you come to church expecting to be welcomed or did you come expecting to welcome others? Why do we choose at Open House Church to be called Open House Christian Reformed Church? Why have we chosen not to welcome others? Why is that perhaps something that is not foremost in our thoughts when we come to be with God's people?

Well, I wanted to look into some of those reasons and what God has to say about that from Isaiah chapter 56 this morning. Isaiah chapter 56, and we're gonna be reading the first eight verses. Isaiah 56 verse one, we see that God is the God of the outsider. God says, thus says the Lord, keep justice and do righteousness. For soon my salvation will come and my righteousness will be revealed.

Blessed is the man who does this and the son of man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath not profaning it and keeps his hand from doing any evil. Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely separate me from his people. And let not the eunuch say, behold, I am a dry tree. For thus says the Lord, to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it and holds fast my covenant, these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. The Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares, I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered. This is God's word. Okay.

Well, what do we find in this passage and how it relates to us as God's church today? Well, firstly, I wanna identify three groups of people that God is addressing in this passage. Firstly, you will see that God addresses eunuch believers. These are the people I called the scarred. Well, some of us may know what it means to be a eunuch.

A eunuch was a male slave who had been castrated. In other words, who had their genitals cut off. For some, that was a complete cutting off of everything, and other times it was a partial castration. This was done to individuals who had become slaves to serve, often in a king or a high profile master's house. It was done so that they could not perform in a sexual way, so that there was either no temptation for them or no ability for them to do something that would be criminal in the king's palace.

It was a real fear in the ancient times that servant slaves that could be that close to the royal family could, in some way, if there were sort of these relationships that were going on, could sway the entire empire or sway the entire kingdom if these men were able to perform in these ways. So a neutralised male was seen as a better alternative. In the context of Isaiah, in the context of the exile, when the Jews were taken into Babylon, some of them were forced to become eunuchs, slaves to the Babylonian Empire. And it is these Jewish eunuchs that God is addressing here. This all happened to these men without any consent, of course. And so the eunuchs that God is speaking to are victims, victims of choices outside of their control.

They were captured prisoners. They were young children who lost their manhood at the hands of someone else. What it meant for their lives is that they would never be able to marry. They would never be able to have children, and put yourself into the mind of a Jew or an Israelite. To be fruitful and have children, to multiply, was a profound blessing from God, and it was something that was taken from them.

Verse three paints the picture of their heartache very clearly. Eunuchs saw themselves as dry trees. They would have no children to carry on their legacy. Scarred by evil powers, they were disempowered. They were victimised, and they felt that they had nothing left to offer God or His people.

So that is the first group. Then there are the Gentile believers, or the foreigners, translated in our ESV verse three. They were, in essence, the non-Jews. They were essentially the rest of the people on earth that did not belong to the Jewish nation, but these Gentiles were non-Jews who wanted to follow Yahweh, the God of the Israelites. So these were Gentile believers.

Again, their situation is also difficult. They are recipients of cultures, beliefs, and values that were outside their control. They didn't choose to be born to the Babylonian people or the Ammonites or the Persians. They read or they heard the story of God, and they became believers in Him. They loved this God, and yet their nationality caused them not to be a part of God's people.

They wanted to worship God. They wanted to go to the only place they knew they were allowed to worship God, which was Jerusalem, the city of God, and yet the temple of God did not allow Gentiles in. They could never sacrifice their own offerings. A Jewish priest had to do that, and there were strict limitations on their worship, and so these Gentile believers are also outsiders, limited in their interaction with Yahweh. They are a people without a people.

They are awkward believers, not fitting in with God's people. And then we find the third group, the Jewish believers, which I call the church, the Old Testament church, at least. Verse eight calls them the outcasts of Israel. In essence, it is the Old Testament church, the people of God. They are the Jewish believers of that time and God's first audience through the prophet Isaiah here.

God is specifically speaking with them here as well. But we also see them as a people under pressure. It was a church that had gone through a very hard time. Jews had started returning from their exile at this point. For seventy years, they were forced to live in the Babylonian Empire first, which then became the Persian Empire.

They were essentially captured prisoners living in a far off country. They were forced to leave their home. They were forced to hear and experience the trauma of their temple being destroyed. That place, that holy place where God dwelt, destroyed in their lifetime. It's a church of God.

There was a church deeply impacted by gentile kings and overlords that did these horrible things to them and their God. There was a church that was a victim of ungodly treatment. And now God writes through Isaiah to them, and He says, people of God, you will accept the eunuchs. People of God, you will accept the gentiles into my temple, onto the holy mountain. And you and I must understand how profound this command would have been.

Think about it. These eunuchs were slaves who served the highest overlords, the emperors, the kings, who were the enemies of God's people. They had the ear of the kings and the queens. Could these eunuchs not have spoken a kind word about the Jews and sway the king to treat them better? There would have been alliances.

There would have been political allies that were made by these eunuchs. Meanwhile, they would have been seen as those who stood idly by as God's people were persecuted by their very masters. Then there were the Gentiles who they were forced to live with, being asked, being told to come in and share God's people. These were the oppressors. Their people had attacked my people.

Their people have disgraced my God. So we have to try to understand how challenging this word would have been. Now God comes, however, to the Old Testament church, and He tells them, you will welcome back the eunuch. You will welcome the gentile. They will come and they will worship me in my temple, in the holy city of Jerusalem.

So we find these three groups that God speaks to with very different circumstances, very difficult situations. They are people that are scarred, they are people who are outsiders, and they are people who are distrustful. But here is the one thing that they all have in common. They are believers. They are all believers in God, and this is seen by the Sabbath day that is being repeated here in verses two, four, and six.

So we ask the question, what ties all of these people together? And it is that they all honour God by keeping the Sabbath day. The opening verse begins with these words. Verse one, keep justice and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come and my righteousness will be revealed. But we see that part of this maintaining of justice and doing what is right.

God says in verse two, blessed is the man who does this, the son of man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil. Now that doing any evil is not some generalised, you know, don't do bad things. Evil here is the disrespecting of the Sabbath. So we have to ask ourselves, why is that important in what is happening here? Why is being obedient to the fourth commandment the defining thing of the belief, the faith of these three groups that is somehow unifying them all?

Well, I think there are a few factors, and I'm gonna list them here for us. Why the Sabbath? Firstly, it shows a distinctive allegiance to God. Keeping the Sabbath was a mark of your unity, your allegiance to God in the face of an increasingly blurred environment in Judea. Ask yourself the question, what's a good indicator of someone's spiritual health?

And the answer is, how much they desire to worship God. As the Jews are coming back from the exile, they are a people divided. Some come back as pagan believers, having, over those seventy years, adopted the Babylonian Empire's beliefs. Some come back with nominal beliefs. They are Jews in name only.

They are worshippers of God in some sort of philosophical way. But to keep the Sabbath, to set aside that one day a week, to do no work, and to spend time with God was a distinctive sign that this person's priority in life was God. So that's the first reason. There is a distinctive allegiance to God, physically expressed through a change in your week's pattern. The second reason of keeping the Sabbath, and why this is a significant thing, keeping the Sabbath focused the heart on the worship of God.

To put down tools on the Sabbath was as good as locking your smartphone in the safe and not checking your emails on a Sunday. Keeping the Sabbath focused the heart and the mind on God, and pushed every other stress, every other worry, every other obligation in your life to the side. To honour the Sabbath meant you would worship God more delightfully because you had put your thoughts and your feelings on God. And then the third reason why the Sabbath here is a distinguishing factor is that keeping the Sabbath brought encouragement and accountability. If there's no work to do, what else do you do but you talk?

You share a meal. You discuss good and important things with one another. You spend your time with other people, and you would do this with who? Other believers, because they also aren't working. They've also locked their smartphones away for the day.

And so the Sabbath brings together a context of mutual encouragement, mutual edification as people worship their God together. It's not rocket science. Spending time with other believers means you pick up the elements of their faith that can be a great encouragement to your own. Their faith shared together on that day is an accountability factor. And of course, I would say there are many great principles here for us to take on board as Christians on how we think about Sunday, the Lord's Day.

I think we've become way too prone to treat Sunday as just any other day in the week, when many of these principles would be really good for our own lives and hearts. But let's recap. Three groups of people being addressed here by God: eunuchs, gentiles, and the Old Testament church. All with stories marked with great heartache. But now God reveals a new hope.

And God begins His address to these three people by saying something new is happening. He says in verse one, keep justice and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come and my righteousness be revealed. God is saying to these three groups that a new salvation is happening, something new is going to happen to them. First, God says, a time is coming when the eunuch will have a legacy. God says to them in verse five, I will give to them in my house, my temple, and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.

The eunuch who can't have children anymore will have a legacy, a heritage greater than kids. To the Gentile believer, God says in verse seven, these I will bring to my holy mountain, again, the temple mount, and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar. Old Testament Gentile believers, they could come into the courts of the temple, but that's it. That is how close you could come to God, and God is saying, you may bring your offerings and sacrifices to me.

No longer is the Gentile an outsider looking in from the cold. They are embraced and accepted. And then finally, to the Old Testament church, God says in verse eight, I will yet gather others to him besides those already gathered. Again, we may not see that immediately, but what God is saying is, you church that feels so small, that feels so threatened. You're coming back from the exile and you can scrape together barely enough resources to buy and build a tiny little temple. You were once a great nation and now you are this leftover ragtag people called the Judeans, the Jews.

I will gather yet more and you will become a great church again. I am adding more numbers to you, says God. I will increase your size. And so now, as the Old Testament prophecy generally goes, this prophecy is fulfilled in part. Seventy years are up and the exiles do return, and I'm sure there would have been eunuchs who have been set free.

They return. There would have been Gentile believers who decide to settle in Judea, but the magnitude and the vision of what Isaiah predicts here is never really the reality. It's an in-part return, but like I said, things look pretty humble. It's only until five hundred years later when Jesus stormed into that same temple being talked about here, upending tables and chasing out money lenders and the merchants in the temple courts. It's with Jesus five hundred years later where we get a glimpse and a casting back to Isaiah 56. As Jesus is upending these money changers' tables, he quotes this passage from Isaiah 56.

You remember what he quotes? He tells them in Matthew 21, and recorded in Mark 11 and Luke 19, he quotes Isaiah 56 verse seven, my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but, said Jesus, you have turned it into a den of robbers. Jesus is pointing to the transformation that never happened. Outsiders are still outsiders. The gentiles are still not included.

There's another time when Jesus pointed to a poor widow who felt compelled to give her last two copper pennies to the temple. He says, giving all that she had. And so the victimised are still victims. They are just now forced into a system of exchanging money for so called purified money in order to feed very greedy overlords, but this time, so called religious people. The whole sacrificial system in Jesus' time is corrupt, and Jesus is furious.

The reality is, even as God promised a temple where all peoples would be welcome to bring their worship to him, nothing has changed. Reflecting on this, but in a way that only John the apostle does in his gospel account, John writes in the second chapter. He gives us one extra detail to what happened when Jesus was clearing the temple. When he is asked by the people watching on what authority he has to be clearing the temple, do you remember what he says? He says, I will give you a sign. Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days.

John says the crowd laughed in Jesus' face. They say to him, it took forty-six years to build this temple. How will you rebuild it in three days? Jesus doesn't respond. But the apostle John gives us this editorial line in John two verse 21, but the temple he was speaking of was His body.

What did Jesus mean? Well, there are probably two levels of what is happening here. At the first sort of level, probably the more superficial level, Jesus is saying to the religious leaders, you are destroying this temple. You are destroying this temple. By desecrating the worship of God with your greed, you are destroying it.

You are exposing the Jerusalem temple and its system of worship to the wrath of God. It's significant to point out that Jesus says in two verse 21 that it's the Jews destroying the temple. If you read that word, it says, destroy the temple and I will raise it up. This is not Jesus saying, I'm destroying the temple and then I will raise it up. You destroy the temple and I will raise it up.

This is, in fact, prophecy. The temple would indeed be destroyed forty years later. It's remarkable how God works in lots of forty. Forty years later, in AD 70, and it's a historical fact, the Jerusalem temple is torn down brick by brick by the Romans. The temple that Jesus was talking about, it's destroyed, and Jesus is giving us the interpretive grid for why that happened.

Historians will point out that it was a Jewish rebellion and the emperor had had enough and all that sort of stuff. Jesus is saying, it's the Jews who destroyed the temple. And so what is happening here at one level is the corruption of the old system of worship is now complete. The people have destroyed the temple, but there's a second level, a deeper level. And Jesus is saying that the same hardness of heart that is destroying this temple will destroy me. Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days.

Jesus is saying, just like you are killing the worship in the temple of God with your greed and your inability to honour and identify genuine worshippers, it is for this same reason that you will destroy me. In other words, because you are destroying the house of God, you will kill me. And the twist is, of course, what Jesus says next when he says, and in three days, I will raise it again. What is that referring to? Anyone?

The resurrection. The resurrection. Firstly, he means, I will raise up my body through the resurrection after three days. Then Jesus would go on later in John 10 to say, I lay down my life for my sheep, only to take it up again. No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.

I have the authority to lay it down and I have the authority to take it up again. The temple that would be destroyed, Jesus will spiritually raise again in three days, because his resurrected life becomes the vehicle by which we meet God. And this, I believe, is what the prophecy of Isaiah is all about. Yes, there were returning eunuchs.

Yes, there were interested Gentiles who were called God fearers, who were interested in the worship of Yahweh. But even then, the prophecy is only fulfilled in part. It is only in Jesus Christ, through His death and resurrection, where we see God flinging open the gates of heaven. And every person, every person, whether an outsider, whether a scarred, or whether they are faithful alike, can meet God. It was only His holy sacrifice where the Jew and the Gentile, the male and the female, young and old, eunuch or family man, the insider or the outsider have now been brought into God's family.

So that Paul can say, in Christ, there is no division. What that means for us today, as the church of Jesus Christ, is that we will reflect this vision of Isaiah 56. We will reflect it. If this is prophecy, if God's church, in other words, is not made up of so called eunuchs, the dry trees of individuals scarred by pain and suffering in a world ruled by foreigners, unbelievers. If God's church is not made up of people marked by frailties and weaknesses caused by the hands of evil regimes, ultimately, at the hands of the prince of darkness himself.

If our church is only ever expected to be filled by those who are put together enough to be here, if our church is only ever to be filled with those who have no scars, no castration marks left by the hands of sin and Satan on their lives, then the prophecy of Isaiah 56 is not fulfilled in Jesus Christ. My friends, God tells us today that the scarred people, the so called eunuchs who feel like they are dry trees, barren branches, lifeless stumps, stripped of all vitality because of the ravages of their sin. God is saying to those people in the body of Christ, the church, you will find your legacy. You will find your people. In the church, spiritual eunuchs will have children.

Dry branches will sprout green shoots. If you think the church should not be a place made up of people marked by sin, we have to ask ourselves, are we really the church of God? Because that is ultimately the vision God has for His people. The truth is, if this church truly does the work of the body of Christ, the things we must do, there will be people coming to this church who are outsiders. They will not smell Christian.

They will not look Christian. They may come into this church wearing a hat and worshipping God with a hat. They will have potty mouths when it is more Christian to watch your tongue, and God may send many of them here. Indeed, He has already begun. And this is all part of the glorious plan because in Christ, God has flung open those gates.

Friends, there is no division. There is no hierarchy of those on the inside, because at one point, we all were outsiders. The temple of God is the body of Christ, and the body of Christ, Paul says, is the church. I tell you, Jesus announced in Matthew 12 verse 6, something greater than the temple has now come. Something greater than the temple has now come.

And Jesus is reminding us, I am the new temple. When I was raised from the dead, Jesus said, everywhere in all the world, people were given access to God through me. My work on the cross has opened the gates. There will be no need for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem anymore. There will only be the unmistakable influx of deeply touched hearts moving from self to Christ.

A sanctification from selfish hearts to Sabbath keeping, worshipping hearts will be their marks. In the church, there will be found hearts who may, at one time, have kept the outsider in the cold, but now the hearts of God's children have been moved with deep and lasting care for the spiritual eunuch and the Gentile in our midst. Because of this, because of Jesus, God's church is truly the temple for the scarred and the home for the outsider. Let's pray. Lord, we ask that You may grip our hearts by the lavish love that You have. Lord, not simply to behold it and be moved into humility and great love for You because You have welcomed us.

Us who were once outsiders, also scarred by the ravages of sin. Now God, that we may be moved as Your church to move beyond ourselves and out of thankfulness, be the church for the outsiders. Thank You, Lord Jesus, that You came for the outsiders like us. And we pray that our hearts and our minds, our energies may be focused on the very same things that You prioritised. And as we reflect on Your great passion for the temple, the place of worship for the holy God, Lord, help us to see that that was ultimately a desire for us to welcome those You welcome.

Father, equip us as Your people here at Open House. Help us as leaders. Help us as members to put our efforts into the things that matter most to You. Father, as we prepare our hearts, will You prepare the harvest field? Will You raise up the harvesters that are necessary, and will You prepare our place here, our space to welcome and to love and to cherish and to grow these people that must come to know You as well.

Lastly, Father, we thank You that as we read at the start of this service, that You are the God that binds the brokenhearted. And so even as they come in from the outside with all their baggage, Lord, even as we persevere and we encourage through all that baggage, Lord, You are the one who heals. With You, there is hope for full redemption. And so, Lord, may our hope be in Your work that is eternal, unstoppable, a plan that cannot be thwarted. We thank You, Lord, for the power that You have on our behalf.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.