The Promise-Plan of God

All around the world today, people who follow Jesus will be reading a text taken from what is called the Old Testament, that section of the Bible written before the birth of Jesus.
Turn with me to a book called “Isaiah”, which records the sayings of a prophet called Isaiah. I love these Ronseal titles in the Bible, right? Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Anyway, the prophet Isaiah lived an odd 700 years or so before the birth of Jesus. In chapter 52 and 53 of his book he records the following prophecy:

Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? [The Lord’s servant] grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him [the servant] the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, [the servant] will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, [the servant] will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

I love that passage. When that got read out on Sundays, I’d know Christmas was just around the corner. Besides, it offers a great thumbnail sketch of what Jesus set out to do.

Why would this passage be read across the world, in the run-up to Christmas? This prophecy, and the many others like it by other prophets in the Old Testament, reveals not only what God intended to do with the Israelites, at the time when this prophecy was first spoken. It reveals what God intended to do, and still is in the process of doing, with all human beings, throughout history, including you and me.

The passage predicts that one day a man will come who will reconcile human beings to God, and who will bring about a completely new, completely transformed world. And that man who is predicted by the prophets, is Jesus Christ.

For the sake of the theologians amongst us, let me make clear two things from the outset. I am not going to discuss the endless arguments amongst contemporary Christian academics about whether the prophecies indeed refer to a messiah, a saviour, or whether we just impose that view upon these passages because it suits us. In my view, the prophecies do refer to a messiah, and the evidence that they do is overwhelming. If you want to know more about this, I recommend Walter C. Kaiser’s book “The Messiah in the Old Testament”, that explains some of the key prophecies concerning the messiah.

Second, I’m not going to enter the debate over whether Jesus in fact fits the description of the messiah or not. Again, the evidence is overwhelming in favour of the fact that Jesus is the Messiah. For those of you who want to know more about this, I recommend Lee Strobel’s book, “The Case for Christ” as a good starting point. It summarises the various arguments and the evidence very well.

Right, normal people can listen to me again. What am I going to talk about?

I want to talk about the plan that this passage reveals, what Walter C. Kaiser has called “The Promise-Plan of God”. In order to talk about that plan, I must tell you a story, a story that began at the dawn of our world, when human beings emerged for the very first time into consciousness.

It is a story that is still going on today. It is a story that is as old as the world, and we are merely its most recent instalment. That story is the story of God’s epangelia, God’s great promise, to us. Why do we need such a promise-plan?
The story’s beginning is recorded in Genesis, the very first book of the Bible. It records how God creates existence, and sets life in motion. Then it records the emergence of the first human beings.

What do they experience? They experience a time of unparalleled closeness to God. They walk in his garden, and he comes to visit them.

Then temptation intervenes. The tempter comes to Eve, and he says, “You are really better off without God, you know? God is just a jealous old ego-maniac who wants to keep you from having any fun.”

Sound familiar? I have lost count of the times that I have heard the argument that God is just a party-pooper who wants to prevent us from experiencing joy. The sad fact is, the devil has not changed his spiel once in all the long years of human history, and we still get taken in by it like flies drawn to a UV light.

What do the first man and first woman do when they are told, “You’re better off without God?” They fall for it. They believe the tempter, and they do evil. And ever since, we have been doing exactly the same.

Now, I need to make something clear here. The problem is not that the first man and first woman are evil. The problem is that they do evil. It is not in their nature, this evil. It is in what they do.

The same applies to us. We are not evil. We do evil. We can do good, and sometimes we do, but often we don’t. We do evil.

Let me make clear what I mean by evil. It is easy to define evil when we look at the most spectacular examples. For instance, I am pretty sure that most of us will agree that the people who killed Baby P, the toddler who was killed last year, did something evil.

The fact is it’s not always that simple. Evil begins much sooner than we want to admit.

I have never stolen a thing in my life, right. But then I walk past someone begging in the street, and I think, “I’m not giving you any money.”

Now, I know how to justify that, right? He’d just spend the money on drugs or beer or something, so my money wouldn’t help him. But then, I don’t buy him lunch either. Because, the truth is, I don’t want to give him any money, because it’s my money! I worked for it, it’s mine! Don’t you dare touch any of it!

So, my refusal to give money really has nothing to do with concern for the man on the street. It is greed, plain and simple. I will not share what I have with anyone, because it’s mine!

That is doing evil.

Or you may have heard about the people who want the details released of the man and woman who were convicted of causing the death of Baby P, in order to “name and shame” them on the internet. These people might claim that they want justice, but let me tell you, that has nothing to do with justice, that is vengeance. And vengeance belongs to God, not us.

We live in a very vengeful society. The torrent of injury claims currently being prosecuted through the courts, that isn’t justice, that too is vengeance. And our society is full of it.

I’m not saying that there is no evil to react to, right? What was done to Baby P was evil, there is no other word for it. But I am saying that often, in our rush to condemn and to punish what we consider to be an evil, we also do evil, even if it is hidden behind a mask of self-righteousness.

Now, it would be dreadful if that was the end of the story. “We all do evil, all the time. We even do evil when we are convinced that we are doing the right thing. We just can’t help ourselves.” If that was it, if that was the full story of our lives on earth, then life would be unbearably grim.

But that is not the end of story. Right? The good news is, the fact that we do so often do evil is not the end of the story.
Why? Because God has made a plan. He has come up with a solution to the problem, and he acts to bring it about.
That is what God promises.

He makes that promise for the first time directly after Eve and Adam have fallen to temptation, the first time human beings did evil. He says to the tempter in Genesis 3:15:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

One day, a human being will come, who will crush the tempter utterly. He will remove evil from the world, by removing the temptation for it.

The rest of the Bible records how God works towards fulfilling that promise. And all the while, he repeats it, over and over again, to prophets and kings and priests. And each time he repeats it, he refines it. “One day there will be an end to evil. One day the break between God and man will be healed. One day, you will be free to do good.”

So how does that come about?

Let’s return to Isaiah. In Chapter 42: 1 – 7, Isaiah records the following words of God:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope.
This is what God the LORD says— he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it:
I, the LORD, have called you [my servant] in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.

Incidentally, the blind whose eyes will be opened, the captives who will be freed and brought out of darkness, that’s you and me. That’s us human beings.

A little later, Isaiah says much the same in the voice of that faithful servant, the Messiah who will come to rescue the world:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn …
Isaiah 61: 1 – 2

How do we know this applies to Jesus? Because Jesus read that passage when he was asked to preach at the synagogue in Nazareth, the town where he grew up, and then said, “Today you have seen this word fulfilled in front of your eyes.”

That is God’s promise, to you, to me, to every person out there in the world. There is comfort for those of us who grieve. There is freedom for those of us who are captured by alcohol or drugs or debt or fear or doubt or greed or jealousy. There is peace for those of us in strife. There is healing for those of us who are sick and hurt.

That comfort does not come in the shape of some poetic sayings, or some clever advice, or a ten-step programme to change your bad habits. Nor even in some new laws against this or that crime.

That comfort comes in the person of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the faithful gentle, loving servant of God, who bears our grief and pain and evil in our stead.

How does that work exactly? Let’s return to the passage in Isaiah 52 and 53. The Messiah looks like he has been punished by God. But he hasn’t. Instead, he takes upon himself the consequences of what we human beings do to each other. He suffers the evil that you do and that I do, every single day of our lives.

And that kills him. It destroys him utterly. God doesn’t kill Jesus, we do. The evil you do and that I do, that is what kills him.

But God doesn’t leave him dead. He raises Jesus from the dead. As Isaiah prophecies, Jesus returns to the land of the living, and all who know him, all who believe in him, will be freed from doing evil.

To end off, let me give you a picture illustration of that process. It may or may not work for you.

Imagine you’re standing in a field, and you hold a boomerang in your hand. The boomerang is a piece of wood, sharp as steel at the edges, designed in such a way that when you throw it, it will come back to you. Got the picture? For as long as it’s in your hand, it’s just a piece of wood. But as soon as you hurl it, it turns deadly.

That boomerang is an image for evil. Every time you get angry with your neighbour for making too much noise, or when you rant and rave in your car at the guy who just cut you off, you’re hurling that boomerang with everything you’ve got right at them.

If you do it right, you can cause a lot of damage, right? You know that twisted, bitter joy of the put-down, when you say something sarcastic and biting that really hits the other person where it hurts? That’s hurling the boomerang.

But, you don’t just hit the other person. That stupid boomerang, that damned thing in the most literal sense, comes back, right at you. It won’t just hit the person out there, it’ll hit you. Your anger will fester in you, it will burn you like acid.

What does Jesus, God’s faithful servant and the Messiah, do? He steps into the boomerang’s path. When you hurl that thing out there, he steps between you and the person you’re hurling it at, and it hits him instead. And it kills him. The boomerang that should have flown out there, killed the person you hurled it at and then should have returned to kill you too, strikes Jesus instead. It kills him, but it loses all its force at the same time. That turns it back into just a piece of wood.

But Jesus doesn’t stay dead. He rises from death. He gets up again. So, not only does he take the blow of the boomerang. When he gets up again, he takes away the boomerang. He takes it and destroys it, so that you won’t have a boomerang left to hurl. That is a pretty impressive miracle, you’ve got to admit. And its miraculous-ness never fails to stagger me.

That is God’s plan to solve the problem of evil in the world. His promise is that it will work for you, too, if you want it to.

The question is: Do you want to be a part of that?