The Teacher Who Needs Listening To

This morning, we are continuing our look at the prophecies of Isaiah regarding Jesus, the coming messiah. As we head into Christmas, we'll probably hear a lot of words and readings and passages from Isaiah, and it's just with an absolute gratitude I have to be able to talk about this and reflect on this because we see such beautiful snapshots. And that's why that mosaic is up there, these little puzzle pieces of the character and the personality and the mission of Jesus Christ. And it's a four-part series, and we're up to the third part in that series. So we're continuing with that this morning, and I hope that you have been enjoying this series.

I hope that it's been a blessing to you and that it's touched you as we've worked through this together. We're going to open to Isaiah chapter 50 and read another one of the servant songs this has been called, the songs about the servant. And we're going to read from Isaiah 50, verses 4 through to 10. The servant here is speaking in first person again, and this is what he says in verse 4 of chapter 50. The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.

Morning by morning, He awakens. He awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord God has opened my ear and I was not rebellious. I turned not backward. I gave my back to those who strike and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard.

I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting. But the Lord God helps me. Therefore, I have not been disgraced. Therefore, I have set my face like a flint and I know that I shall not be put to shame. He who vindicates me is near.

Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who is my adversary? Let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord God helps me.

Who will declare me guilty? Behold, all of them will wear out like a garment. The moth will eat them up. Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of His servant? Let him who walks in darkness and has no light trust in the name of the Lord and rely on His God.

So far, our reading. Once again, we come to this passage and we see several facets of the servant coming through. Several interesting viewpoints or perspectives on this servant, this mysterious servant from Isaiah. But the overall picture, especially in this third prophecy, is this idea that the servant has something to tell us. The servant has something to teach.

And so we'll notice not only that he has something to teach, but the servant, Isaiah says in verse 4, has something wise to teach. He is wise. Now you notice here, it's saying the Lord God has given me, the Lord has given me the tongue of those who are taught. The last half, morning by morning, He awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. Now as we read the gospels, don't we?

We hear and we see Jesus speaking and we see the crowds respond to this and they are amazed. They are astonished that this man who's come from Nazareth, from Galilee of the Gentiles, is teaching as an educated man, and he speaks with an authority even greater than the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. They say that when Jesus speaks, their spirits are moved. He speaks with a razor-edge authority. Jesus speaks to them as though He had come from the very presence of God with God's word for them.

And yet, He is also gentle, isn't He? He says to the lady at the well, it is true what you say. You aren't married, but you have had five husbands. He says to the other lady, caught in adultery, your sins are forgiven, but sin no more.

He speaks with grace, with gentle warmth to them, and they respond so amazingly to that. It's as though He sees right into the souls of a person and He brings upon their lives a word that is perfectly matched to where they are in their need. How does Jesus know this? How does He have this insight? Well, the answer is here.

Morning by morning, He awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught, to speak with a tongue as one who has received the teaching. He has listened and He has heard and He has been taught by God Himself, God the Father, by the power of the Spirit to reveal the heart and the word of God. Do you ever wonder this about Jesus, that for thirty years, He just was a nobody? Just out of the blue, at 30, He bursts onto the stage. But we get an indication here that it wasn't thirty years of nothingness.

You know, we know that He was a son of a carpenter. He was a carpenter probably by trade, but that's not what He necessarily filled His time with. Thirty years of meditating on God's word. Like many good Jewish boys of the time, He would have learned the Old Testament scriptures. He would have memorised it for perhaps twenty-five of those thirty years.

He was regarded as a rabbi, meaning that He was exceptional above all the other boys that would have learned the Old Testament in His understanding and His ability to know the Bible. And so He learns from God. He studies and He meditates on God's word. Remember, however, that this Jesus was God who Philippians 2 says emptied Himself of divinity, taking on the form of mankind and in a sense, needing to grow and learn from God in the same way we do. And yet, divine at the same time, so that He was able to do this perfectly and had such a relationship with the Holy Spirit that the Spirit spoke to Him and He understood.

Spoke to Him and He remembered and was able to communicate and preach and teach that. But we get this understanding that for thirty years, Jesus is growing day by day. Morning by morning, this passage says, He has awoken to learn. He is awoken to be able to eventually teach. God gives me the tongue of one who has been taught.

God gives me the ears of one who has been instructed. And that is why Jesus was such a master. That is why Jesus could explain in ways that this society, this Jewish people who were well versed in the Bible had never heard before, because His words are full of truth and of grace. But we also notice the goal, don't we, of Jesus' teaching ministry, of His knowledge?

Notice why He was taught. The Lord has given me the tongue of those who are taught, verse 4, that I may know how to sustain with a word those who are weary. Isn't that a beautiful thing? This is why, not so that He just knows, not so that He is puffed up by this, but so that He can bless those who are weary. He can sustain them.

I think this is one of the most difficult things in the world to do. What do you do? And as a pastor, I face this very regularly. What do you do with someone that is so caught in despair? That is so brought down by weariness, the depression and the struggles of life?

What can you offer them? Can you just say to them, pull yourself up, get yourself out of this situation? Can you give an instruction that will please them and get them out of that pit? The weary can't pull themselves up. They are too weary.

What do you say to someone who is crushed by the weight of their life, their depression, their anxiety? Jesus says, however, didn't He? Come to me all of you who are weary. Come to me all of you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest. And this is, of course, what His word does.

His word comes to us in the weariness we find ourselves in, the way that we have sinned and we have broken God's laws again. We have broken our living, life-giving relationship with God. And some of us, the weariness of that is too much to bear. Some of us, the weariness of this world racked by sin is too much. And yet He is able to embed His word into our minds.

He is able to embed His word into our souls. Have you ever experienced that? That moment where you come morning, and you come weary and heavy laden, and there is not a person in the world, not anyone this week that you've been able to talk to that has been able to give you what you need, not being able to put their finger on the issue, and you come and you give yourself over to worship. And then when God's word is exposed to you, when God's word is preached to you, when you open His word and read those words, a light dawns. A piercing message comes and brings comfort in a way that no one, no one could have provided you.

That is the word of Christ. That is the message that only He can give. That is the supernatural power of God at work. Those words that no one else could give have a power to lift you up out of despair. And we are being told here, therefore, this is because Jesus has had the ears to hear God, and He's got that tongue to speak them to us.

So friend, this morning, I wanna ask you, where do you go to when you need counsel? Where do you go to when you need these words? It is appropriate, absolutely, for us as human beings to go and see psychologists from time to time and counsellors from time to time, but it would be a tragedy if you didn't go first to the Lord Jesus Christ and say to Him, Lord, You're the one who knows how to speak a word that I need to hear. You're the one who knows what my needs are before I can even articulate them. You're the one who can give me insight when I'm weary and confused.

So Lord, show me. Show me how I need to live. But the hard thing is that in our current days, and I think this is more so than any other time probably in human history, we have a culture and a society where we are happy to hear some things to tidy up our life and get things, you know, in order, and yet we discover that we're not so keen on hearing life-changing counsel and advice that will cause us or need us to change. We are happy to hear some things that build us up and a psychologist or a counsellor is good at giving us healthy advice from time to time, but we need the counsel from God's word as well.

We need to hear things that get right into your soul, and the only person who can do this is the Lord Jesus. And the main way that the Lord does this among His people is in the fellowship of the saints, is in the worship of God, is hearing God's word taught and preached and proclaimed. That is where it happens. It's the ABC of Christianity. And so if we had to ask why are you struggling?

Then I want to ask how often are you coming to church? If I have to ask you or you say, I'm struggling with depression or weariness, I ask you how much are you really worshipping God? How often do you hear a solid teaching, explanation of God's word or just have it in your life? How often is your life oriented around that word? We need to understand that in a nation with a mindset of what psychologists call the therapeutic culture, where we love hearing nice things to make us try and feel better about ourselves, sometimes God's word will say, you are not very good at all.

And you don't need a counsellor or a psychologist. You need a saviour. And that is the thing we need to hear. That is the thing that will get us where we need to be. But then the poem goes on and we learn something else.

Not only is this servant a wise teacher, but He is also an unrelenting soldier. Verse 5. We see that He does not take a step back from this mission that He has been given by God. It says, the Lord God has opened my ear and I was not rebellious. I turned not backward.

I didn't turn backwards. I gave my back to those who strike, my cheeks to those who pull out the beard. I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting. Now commentators point out at this point, at this message, at this verse that there's overtones here of a court martial taking place, of someone, a soldier, a military person who has been in battle and has turned his back. Now you've heard those terrible stories of the Red Army, the Soviets, when they would charge at the Germans completely outnumbered, and if any of their men turned back, they would get shot by their own men.

Desertion on the spot. Court martialling happening here. In that place, you would get beaten for desertion. The Persian empire would pluck out chunks of your beard as a man in this process. And yet, we see this court martialling process taking place with the servant and yet He hasn't deserted.

He did not turn His back. He set His face like a flint to the task. He is the obedient one. But He is punished as though He has given up. But the amazing thing here is, and it is amazing, there's a twist.

And we see that in the gospels again, don't we? The gospel of the cross which says that even though Jesus was flogged and gave His back, even though He was spat upon by the soldiers, even though He was stripped naked and He died on a cross, while it looked like He had been punished for rebellion against God, blasphemy of the most holy one. It was His death that was the mission all along. While it looks like He had failed, while it looks like He was receiving a punishment for failure, it was the facilitation of His victory. Do you remember those movies that you've seen or those stories that you've read with a fascinating, tantalising plot twist?

I love a movie called Ocean's Eleven. Now, these men aren't particularly upstanding civilians. They're robbers, bank robbers and scammers and the like, but they pull off this incredible heist of robbing hundreds of millions of dollars from this casino. You know, it's got George Clooney and Brad Pitt as the bad guys, as the bad guys who are actually good. So you can't hate them.

And they're just too good looking. But the story ends with this heist, and it just looks like everything has gone wrong. It looks like they've been caught. It looks like they never got away with the money, and you're just waiting there going, nearly, but they didn't do it. And then a twist comes and it reveals that they've done the perfect bait and switch.

The casino owner and the police and everyone thinks they've got these guys and then they're actors. And they've got away with the millions. An incredible plot twist, a great story. Well, this is the marvel of the gospel. See, just a little hint of it in our passage.

It says that the servant gives His back to those who strike. He gives His back to those who strike. He gives His cheeks. He turns His cheeks to those who will pull out the beard and He does not hide His face from disgrace. Isn't that wonderful?

Isn't that marvellous? This is the soldier, the prince of the king who crosses enemy lines to win the victory in the other country. He is the obedient warrior prince sent to win back the kingdom. But friends, this is another wonderful thing for us to realise, isn't there, that the saviour who came, this warrior prince knows what it means to suffer. Suffer.

He knows what it means to be a victim. Victim of injustice, even. He is the saviour who understands our pain. Pain. And so again, if you are victimised, if you are treated unjustly, here is the Prince of Peace who came out on the other end with not a tinge of resentment on His soul and who has ridden out like those amazing movies do in victory into the sunset.

And then we come to the third little element in the picture. He becomes not only a teacher and a counsellor, He not only suffers as the unrelenting soldier and prince, we come to this amazing picture of Him triumphing because in Him, the might of God is revealed. He is used by God to reveal God's power. Verse 8 says, He who vindicates me is near. So who will contend with me?

Let us stand up together. Let us measure one another up. Who is my adversary? Behold, the Lord God is the one who helps me. Who will declare me guilty?

Again, we see this in the gospels so uniquely and strangely, the crowd that yelled, crucify this man. He deserves death. Could not find anything to declare Him guilty with. The penalty was issued before there was a guilt sentence. And as they tried to scramble for something, they could find nothing that stuck.

Guilty, this servant. He is not guilty and then these words come, behold, all of them, all of these adversaries will wear out like a garment. The moth will eat them up. Now if you've seen, and maybe we don't have this issue anymore these days, but if you've seen a garment, a dress, a shirt hung up in the closet and the moths have gotten into it, it's a funny thing. You can literally poke your finger through this shirt.

You can rub it between your hands and it becomes dust. This is the image of the enemies and the adversaries who have flogged this servant, who have spat in His face. It's a picture we get here that at the end of this servant's life and His death that this tragedy has overtaken Him, that the enemies have won. He is taken away and He is buried in a tomb, but it just takes a touch of the Lord God and He is raised. And all the clever plans of His enemies, like so much moth-eaten garments, they turn to dust.

And in this vindication, He reveals the power of mighty God behind Him. He reveals the authority and the power of God. In this vindication, in the fact that the triune God is involved in this resurrection, it is the power of God the Father and His will through the working of the Holy Spirit. Romans says that raises Christ from the dead. He is the vessel by which God's might is revealed and that gives us, friends, incredible confidence.

It gives us incredible security that this is the wise teacher who speaks into our lives, who gives us a reason to trust, why we have a reason for us to trust in His word. Because if the resurrection is true, if the resurrection is true, it shows that Jesus' vindication and power has come from God Himself, that He has spoken on true authority. We can stake our lives on the teaching of this servant. We can build our lives on it. So do you believe His words?

Do you believe these words? Do you believe this man, Jesus Christ? Have you placed your trust in Him? Or will you try to do it your way? And will you try to perhaps live one foot in one camp and sort of kind of walk the line here between God and the world or will you wholeheartedly give yourself to Him?

And this leads us to the final theme of this passage in verse 10. The servant is the one who has a call on your life because He is the authoritative father. Verse 10 asks a question, who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of His servant? Let him who walks in darkness and has no light trust in the name of the Lord and rely on His God. The amazing thing here as you read it is realising that God's voice and the servant's voice are on the same level.

If you trust and hear and desire God's voice, listen to the voice of the servant. If you fear God, you will fear His servant. When the servant speaks, it is as though Yahweh, the Lord God Himself has spoken. In other words. Now I wonder again how true this is in how families, our households here, but remember when you were a kid and as a kid you were a little bit naughty, a little bit rambunctious at home, maybe after school, and mum would give you a few stern words, and then you generally would not listen to mum. And then mum would say, wait until dad gets home.

And immediately, the blood drains from your face and you burst out into a cold sweat. And those few hours between sort of coming back from school and waiting for dad to come back home from work feels like centuries. Just wait till I let dad speak to you about this. Maybe mum was the one that gave that more regular, consistent instruction on how to live. But then dad gave that less regular, but far more weighty declarations.

And He often gave the final punishments as well. And the words of the servant carry weighty authority with it. Like a father's voice, it demands obedience. But He is also a good father. Verse 10 says, it brings light.

This word, this message brings light to where there is darkness. Darkness. It brings understanding and truth where there is confusion. It brings trust and security when there has been fear and insecurity. And so you can trust Him.

You can depend on Him. You can place your hope and your eternal security in this servant and in His actions. And so we are to listen, we are to trust and we are to obey. Now this counsellor slash teacher, this unrelenting soldier and prince, the revealer of God's might, the father who has and speaks with authority. Does that remind you of a picture we get somewhere else in the Bible?

I wonder if you've picked up on a pattern and our worship team and our small group this week has reflected on it. Don't know if you guys remember, Rob. But it's a passage that comes out every Christmas, also from Isaiah. And we've already alluded to part of it before, but Isaiah 9. Turn there with me and we'll have a look.

Isaiah chapter 9. The promise of a child to be born. But there will be no gloom, verse 1. There will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time, He brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali.

But in the latter time, He has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. Does this sound familiar? The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them, a light has shone. What will the voice of the servant do?

Give light. What will His teaching give? He will give understanding. But then I want us to look and these are the verses that you'll probably have memorised. Verse 6, for to us a child is born, to us a son has been given and the government shall be upon His shoulder and His name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Does that not give you goosebumps? This is the saviour who not only came to save, but to teach. Who not only came to teach, but to heal. Who not only came to heal, but to forgive. Who came to give not only His life but His words and His very personality to us.

The Wonderful Counsellor to which we can go for all our needs, the Prince of Peace who has won the victory for us behind enemy lines and did not relent, the one who deserves our complete obedience. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we honour and praise You this morning. How wonderful and rich. How deep, how profound Your word is.

And we marvel, God. We can spend our whole life digging and dealing and investigating these things and be stumped and staggered and amazed every time. Thank You, Lord Jesus, that You came not to be served but to serve, to give Your life as a ransom for many. Thank You, Lord, that in You there is wisdom and there is life. For lives that are so fraught with insecurity and need, with so much desperation.

Thank You, Lord, that You are the Wonderful Counsellor. Thank You, Lord, that You are the Mighty God who has revealed the power of the resurrection, the vindication over sin and death, that Your punishment on the cross was not the final word and was not the victory of Your enemies. Was simply the vehicle to complete and accomplish the mission. And Lord Jesus, You are the Father, everlasting, everlasting, who speaks and demands our attention. And so, Lord, forgive us when we ignore You.

Forgive us, oh God, when we think we know better, when our pride and our rebellion stands in the way of what You need to do in us. Forgive us, God. Show us the error of our ways, specifically, oh God, and help us to live lives worthy of this great saviour of ours, Jesus Christ, our Lord, our King. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen.