The Open Gates of God

Turn to Isaiah 56, which will be our reading this morning. We're gonna read the first eight verses of that. As we turn to that Isaiah 56, I want to just say hello to Zeb and Cassidy. Most of us will know Zeb, and it's great to have you back. And welcome Cassidy as well, his beautiful girlfriend.

I wanna start this morning by asking this question. Did you see Zeb when you came in? Did you scan the room for new faces to say hello to this morning? If you did, I wanna ask you the question, why? Why would you scan for new faces?

Why would you wanna say hello to them? Why would you want to make them feel welcome at church? If that is your normal routine, I wanna ask you the question, why do you do that? And secondly, if you don't do that, if you didn't do that, if you didn't notice it, if you didn't scan for new faces, why not? What is sort of on your mind when you make that decision?

And I think it is a decision at one point. I'm gonna have us look at Isaiah 56, and it may seem like a weird place to be looking for reasons or answers to these questions. But let's look at Isaiah 56 verses 1 to 8 together. This is what the Lord says, verse one in Isaiah 56: Maintain justice and do what is right.

For my salvation is close at hand, and my righteousness will soon be revealed. Blessed is the man who does this, the man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath without desecrating it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil. Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely exclude me from his people. And let not any eunuch complain, I am only a dry tree. For this is what the Lord says to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me, and hold fast to my covenant.

To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off. And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to serve him, to love the name of the Lord, and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it, and who hold fast to my covenant. These I will bring to my holy mountain, and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar.

For my house will be called the house of prayer for all nations. The Sovereign Lord declares, he who gathers the exiles of Israel, I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered. So far our reading this morning. Three groups of people we see in this passage. Three groups of people that God Himself addresses and speaks to.

The first group of people we see here, and it may be a strange name that you've never heard of before, are eunuchs. Believers in God who are eunuchs. Now it's something that we don't really understand, that word or that idea. But a eunuch was a male slave who was castrated, whose reproductive organ was cut off. And this was done when a slave had to serve in a king's palace or had to serve a person of great responsibility, a high profile master. And the reason that their manhood was taken was that any idea or temptation of a sexual orientation was removed.

It was feared that slaves that often belonged to other nations or tribes or even villages had such intimate connection with the kings and these rulers that they may sway the kings or the queens in some sort of way. And so to remove the connection that these slaves may have or hold over the queens or the kings, they had this happen to them. They were neutralised to be a better alternative. And so God addresses very uniquely in the Old Testament this group of people, eunuchs, Jewish eunuchs, who were now in Isaiah 56. Isaiah 56 to 66 is the third part of the book of Isaiah, and it refers to the exile return.

Seventy years of being in Babylon, and now the people are starting to come back. God's favour was upon them. We read Isaiah 40, which is the indication that your hard service had been completed. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, that God had paid for their sin, and now that they're coming back. And so we find Jewish eunuch slaves also returning to the promised land.

But we see and we understand that these Jewish men had this done to them without their consent. They were victims of something really impactful and lasting. Often a eunuch became a eunuch at a very young age, boys. And so even as they were growing up, their hormones were impaired. They were stunted.

There are stories of people wanting to have beautiful voice choirs, and they knew that these guys would go through puberty and their voices would deepen, and so they became eunuchs. They were forced to become eunuchs in order to sing beautifully. And so the eunuchs that God is speaking to are victims of choices outside of their control. They were captured prisoners. They were children who lost the opportunity of manhood at the hands of someone else.

And the reality is, as eunuchs, they would never marry. They would never have children. And as an Old Testament Israelite, as an Old Testament Jew, this was such a terrible future because in their understanding, and I think even today we understand it, children is a blessing from the Lord. Over and over and over again throughout the Old Testament, the command or the mandate is to fill the earth and be fruitful.

Israel's blessing by God is seen in Egypt in how they multiplied and grew as a nation even as slaves oppressed by the Egyptians. But a eunuch is the very opposite of fruitful. Verse three puts it in that they saw themselves as a dry tree with no children to carry on their legacy. And so they are the scarred. They are the weak.

They are the victims, and they think in this return to God's people, in this return to God's land, that they have nothing to offer. The second group we see are Gentile believers. Gentile believers. These were the non-Jews. They were all the rest of the people besides the Jews of that time.

But we see that these Gentiles were also people who wanted and who chose to believe in God, Yahweh, specifically, the God of Israel. But again, the situation is hard. The situation is difficult. They are, by their birth, recipients of a culture and a belief and a moral system, which is something that they didn't choose. They've grown up with values outside of their control.

They didn't choose to be born into the Ammonite tribe or people group. They didn't choose to be Persian, but they read or they hear in some way the story of God, and their hearts are made alive. And they desire Him, and they long for Him. They want to worship this God. There's a hitch.

Although they wanted to worship Yahweh, the God of Israel, and they wanted to worship this God at the only place they could, the temple in Jerusalem. Because they weren't Jews, more specifically because they weren't circumcised, the best that they could hope for in worshiping God was to stand on the outside and look in. The best that they could hope for at the temple was to stand in the courtyard for the Gentiles, to stand close but not quite there yet, to look in from the inside, from the outside rather. They weren't ever allowed to go into the sacred spaces. They could never bring their own sacrifices.

They needed a Jewish priest to do that. There were limitations in the worship of this God they loved. And so these Gentiles, although they are believers, are outsiders. They are without a spiritual family.

They are awkward believers. They don't fit in. They don't easily associate with God's people. And then the third group, and they're not listed here by name, but they're definitely spoken to, is the Jewish people, God's people, and I call them the church, the Old Testament church. Jewish believers of that time is the first audience that God is writing to here through the prophet Isaiah.

But the church of this time has been through a very hard period themselves. They are trickling back into the promised land after seventy years of exile. They have been persecuted and oppressed, been made slaves, had terrible things done to them and their people at the hands of Gentiles, these Gentiles, some of whom have so called become believers. Yeah, right.

They were forced to leave their home. They were forced to leave God's temple. God's temple, in fact, was destroyed by Gentile hands. They also were victims of ungodly treatment. But God writes to them, and He says, accept the eunuch and accept the Gentile.

You must understand, friend, how profound and challenging this command is. The eunuchs, they served in the very palaces of these overlords and these kings. The eunuchs, although they were slaves, were well treated, often very wealthy, often. And now the eunuchs, these people that had the ear of the king, who stood idly by as the kings and the governors and the rulers oppressed them. They're back.

They're with us. And then there are the Gentiles that they are called to accept. These are the oppressors. These are the ones at whose hands we suffered. Their people attacked my people.

Their people disrespected my God. Can you understand? Can you imagine just how difficult, how revolutionary this command is? So we find three groups that God speaks to with very different circumstances, but they're all difficult. People are scarred.

People are outsiders, awkward. People are distrustful. But have a look at this. What do they have in common?

They're believers. They are all believers. They have placed their trust and their dependence on God. They all desire to worship Him. They all desire to honour Him with their lives.

And we see this in our passage by the reference to the sanctity, the keeping of the Sabbath, mentioned for all three groups. It's repeated in verse two. Blessed is the man who keeps the Sabbath without desecrating it and keeps his hand from doing any evil. Verse four refers to the eunuchs doing this. Verse six refers to the Gentiles doing this.

What ties all of this together is that they all honour the Sabbath day. The opening verse begins with these words: Maintain justice, do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand, and my righteousness will soon be revealed. But how is this justice and this righteousness done? It's done, funnily enough, in verse two, by those who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it. Now we will ask ourselves why.

Why this specific command? Why this specific reason? The keeping of the Sabbath was a mark of distinctiveness for God's people. It was especially in this time of return from the exile a very key indicator against very blurry, fuzzy lines in Judea. What is a good indicator of someone's spiritual priority and their spiritual health is how much they long to worship God. As the Jews were coming back from Israel, it was a people who are divided.

Some of them came back with pagan beliefs, Babylonian beliefs, Persian beliefs. They were back because they had a bit of land and they could do a bit of business, but they came back as pagans. Others came back because, well, their people are going back and they're Jewish and they're very proud of their heritage and they're back. So nominal, in name only, are they Jews.

But to keep the Sabbath, to set aside one day a week, to do no work, to spend time with God, to spend time with God's people is a distinctive sign that a person's priority is set on God. Why the Sabbath? Because it shows something of the heart. Secondly, the keeping of the Sabbath focused the mind on the worship of God. To put tools down on the Sabbath was as good as locking away the smartphone in a safe on Sunday.

It focused the mind on God. It pushed out every other worry, every other stress, every other distraction or obligation. In your head, to keep the Sabbath meant that you could worship God more delightfully because you could put your heart and your mind on God more fully. And thirdly, to keep the Sabbath brought encouragement and accountability in faith with fellow believers. If there was no work to do, what else do you do? Well, you talked and you ate, and you spent time with others to fill the day.

Otherwise you'd be bored at home. These other believers, however, in turn had also locked away their smartphones in the safe. And they also didn't have anything better to do, so they talked to you. They ate with you. And what this brings about is mutual edification, mutual encouragement, mutual support.

It's not rocket science. Spending time with other believers means that you pick up certain habits, you pick up certain elements of their faith that can be a real encouragement, a real support to your own faith. It doesn't even need a bible study. It is just talking about how I've dealt with my week in a godly way this week or at least try to. And I think there are some elements here that we can apply as Christians.

We aren't bound to the Sabbath law anymore. We know that. We believe that. Not in the same way as the Israelites were. We don't rest on the seventh day, for example.

We rest on the first day of the week, on Sunday. Our righteousness with God is not bound by our obedience to this law. Jesus Christ, the New Testament says, is our law. Jesus Christ Himself declared Himself to be the Lord of the Sabbath. He did good things on the Sabbath.

But as with all God's laws, they are given to us in order to promote health, in order to give prosperity in our lives. We are poorer, and we miss out if we don't align ourselves with these laws or these designs rather that God has given us. So I wanna just pause here and ask yourself, do you see your Sunday as something like this? Do you see it as a priority with God? Do you push back against the pressure of a seven day work week, which is becoming more and more a thing?

Or do you rest in God's provision for you? At least for that day. Do you see time with fellow believers as precious? Do you pursue that? Do you believe that they may encourage you in your faith?

That may be a big hurdle to overcome. Do you desire the worship of God with other believers, or is church worship the last option when you don't have better to do that morning? So we see three groups. Eunuchs, Gentiles, and the church, all broken stories, heartache, harassed, victimised. But God gives us command: do what is right because my salvation is close at hand.

My righteousness will soon be revealed. The time is coming, God says, when the eunuch will have a legacy even though they don't have children, even though they aren't married. Verse five: To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters. To the Gentile believer, verse seven: I will bring them to my holy mountain, which is the place where the temple stood in Jerusalem. And I will give them joy in my house of prayer.

No longer outsiders. No longer looking in from the cold. Now they are God's people, and they are embraced, and they are accepted, and they are welcomed. To the church, God says there will be forgiveness. There will be a time that ends bitterness.

The eunuch and the Gentile, He says to the church, will be your brothers. They will be your sisters. Now in part we know, in the history of Israel, this sort of happened. The eunuchs did settle. The Gentiles did have some part in the worship of God at the temple.

Herod the Great eventually built a beautiful temple complex and created a beautiful courtyard for the Gentiles, massive, big, huge, so that the Gentiles could come and feel some of this reverence for God. But this new reality, we also know, was far from complete, far from perfect. Five hundred years later, we see Jesus storming into that temple with a whip in his hand, overturning tables, chasing out money lenders and merchants in the temple courts rather. And it quotes this very passage from Isaiah 56: My house will be called a house of prayer, but you've made it a den of robbers.

In three of the four gospel accounts, Matthew 21, Mark 11, and Luke 19, Jesus is furious and reminds the people of what God had said. He says that transformation, guys, has not taken place. Outsiders are still outsiders. These money changers were giving people money, pure money, religious money in order to sacrifice to God at exorbitant exchange rates. You think you're getting ripped off by Westpac?

Think again. Selling temple endorsed animals to sacrifice. Outsiders are still outsiders. People are still blocked from truly worshiping God. If they don't have the money, well, I'm sorry.

No sacrifice for you today. The scarred, the victimised are just victimised again. The reality is nothing much has really changed. But then we see in an account of John, and he talks about this in chapter two. Jesus adds something.

He says, when asked or confronted by the religious leaders, what right do you have to be doing this? Who gives you this right? Jesus responds and He says, destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days. And the crowd laughs in his face. They say it took forty six years to build all of this, and you can do it in three days by yourself.

And Jesus doesn't respond. He doesn't give an answer back to this, but the apostle John, writing many years later, says that Jesus was referring to the three days between His death and His resurrection. John 2:21, but the temple that Jesus spoke about was His body. What did Jesus mean by this? There are two levels of what is happening in this dialogue.

First, Jesus said to the religious leaders, you are destroying this temple. You can quickly have a look at John 2 if you wanted to. Keep it open to that. You are destroying this temple.

Jesus is saying, just like you kill worship in the temple with your consumerism and your materialism, with your greed, you are exposing it to the wrath of God. It will indeed be destroyed. This is a prophecy because forty years later, the temple was in fact destroyed, once again at the hand of the Gentiles. The Romans came in and broke it down so that no one rock was left on top of the other.

It was flat. The temple literally is destroyed in 70 AD as punishment. But at a deeper, secondary level, Jesus is saying, this same deadness to God, this same deadness to spiritual proof, that will destroy this temple will destroy me. Jesus is saying, just like you kill worship in the temple with this materialism, this unlove towards genuine worshippers, for this same reason you will kill me. In other words, because you destroy the temple, you will destroy me.

If you treasure money, power, status more than my Father, you will treasure my death even more. And that's what they did. They bought the death of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. This temple will be destroyed, but you will destroy the temple of my body first. Then Jesus says, on the flip side, I will raise this temple in three days. And what does this mean?

Well, again, Jesus has two levels here. The first is He says, I will raise up my body in the resurrection after three days. That is what Jesus means. Later in John 10:17 to 18, Jesus would 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, and I have authority to take it up again.

When the sin of mankind causes the body of the Son of God to be destroyed, Jesus has the authority, He says. Jesus has the divinity. Jesus has the authority to restore it, to prove that sin has been dealt with, to prove that death has been conquered. That's the one level, but then there's a second meaning. The material temple that would be destroyed.

Jesus builds again in three days in the sense that He has now replaced this temple. He has become the new place where finally everyone, everyone who would want to choose, who would want to desire to follow God, can come to meet with Him and have fellowship with Him. And I believe that this is the reality that Isaiah was pointing to in Isaiah 56. God is throwing open His temple. God is throwing open entrance into His people.

He's doing it through this death and the resurrection of His Son. And it was in this incredible sacrifice of Jesus that the Jew and the Gentile, the male and the female, the young and the old, the eunuch and the family man, the bogan and the snob come together, be united deeply in faith and belong to the family of God together. There is now no division.

God is available to all. As a friend, the church must reflect that. The church does and will reflect that. And maybe some of us, and we may know of others in this church who are still the outsiders. We may still be seen as the ones that don't quite fit in.

They don't particularly smell very Christian. They don't look very Christian. They will come in here wearing hats inside when it's more polite to take their hats off. They will have potty mouths when it is more Christian to watch your tongue. God may send many of them here.

Indeed, He has done so in the past. But God has thrown open the gates, friends. You have to understand. You have to believe. There is no division.

There is now only the call to love your brother, to love your sister, to look for them when you come in here, to scan this building. God may send modern day eunuchs here. Indeed, He has already started doing so. People who are the only Christian in their family, people who have no spiritual legacy, people who can't convey or are limited in conveying their faith to their kids. God may send single mothers here. God may send the bachelors here who are never married, will never marry.

Or people who have been married, because of situations outside of their control, because of sin beyond their control, they are victims of bad decisions. Like the eunuchs of Israel, friend, God has flung open those doors. They are welcome here. They are welcome in God's family. To them, God has said, I will give an everlasting name that will never be cut off.

The name will be written in the temple. They will have a memorial and a name, God says. That is amazing. Beautiful. The temple is the body of Christ.

The New Testament says the temple is the body of Christ, and Paul later writes, the body of Christ is the church. I tell you, Jesus announces in Matthew 12:16, something greater than the temple has now come. Today, Jesus reminds us, I am the new temple. When I raise my body from the dead, everywhere in the world, people will come to God through me. My work on the cross has thrown open the gates.

There will be no pilgrimage to Jerusalem anymore. There will be no Hajj to Mecca. There will be only the unmistakable movement of a heart moving from self to Christ. From closed hearts to generous hearts. From selfish hearts to Sabbath-keeping, worshiping hearts.

From coldness for the outsider, the eunuch, the Gentile in our midst, to deep and lasting care and concern for them. Because of Jesus, God's church truly is for the scarred and the outsider. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, forgive us. Forgive us when we hold on to things that are petty and small.

Forgive us for a focus on ourselves, whether that be our comfort or our feelings or our inadequacy or our spite. Father, help us realise that we are the outsiders. Help us to realise that we are the scarred. Father, give us the grace to look beyond the outward appearance but to see the heart of those who are searching and hungering and desiring to meet and to know their Creator, their Saviour, their God. God, give us generosity of spirit.

God, give us discipline of time. God, give us mercy of the heart. We pray for this church. We pray for open house in this new year, Lord, where you may send many people that may be uncomfortable, that may be hard to engage because they're so different.

Father, give us hearts that will push through. Not simply to tolerate, not simply to let them in here, not simply to give a quick smile, but Father, to love and embrace and accept and do the hard yards with them. Why? Because they are brothers. They are sisters.

They honour God in the keeping of the Sabbath and the desiring to put God first. But like all of us, they also fail. Like all of us, they also struggle. Help us, Lord, to keep all of this intention in mind. To love far more.

God bless us this year. Bless this church in the coming year. Send those people to us, oh mighty God, by Your Spirit. Irresistibly bring them here to hear the gospel, to be saved, oh God. And may they find a home as well.

We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.