The Feast of Yahweh
Download MP3Good morning everyone. If I haven't met you, my name is Joseph Ray, I'm the discipleship pastor here at Redeemer. And I have the privilege today of taking us through our time in the word. And so, you've got a Bible, open up to the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 25. In your worship guide is printed Isaiah 20 five:six through nine, which is what we're zooming in on today.
Joseph Rhea:It also has some verses from Isaiah twenty four and twenty five that we'll kind of refer to along the way for context. So, we're continuing our series this morning, the Gospel according to Isaiah, which is where we look at this prophet who ministered seven hundred years before Jesus was born, and he had visions and words for Israel that applied to them in that moment, and also foretold and prepared for not just Jesus' coming seven hundred years later, but even the end of history, which is what we're looking at today. We have here in our text, you know, if history is like a TV series, almost like a preview of the finale where we get a glimpse of what's coming and what's waiting for us at the end of time. Now, this finale is sometimes called by Christians the new creation, sometimes just called heaven. Now, I wish we could cover everything there is to know about heaven and the new creation, but we would be here a lot longer than the half hour that we have this morning.
Joseph Rhea:And so two ways to maybe get a chance to learn more. One, this evening at Back forty Brewing Company from five to seven, I'll be at a table just outside somewhere because the weather's nice. You're welcome to come, grab a meal or just hang out and bring your questions about heaven, hell, the new creation, and as long as you're ready to hear, I wish I knew the answer to that more than maybe you'd like, I will do my best to talk through what the Bible teaches about these things in a little bit greater detail. And also for the men of the church, our men's breakfast, which starts this coming Tuesday, runs five weeks in the summer, we're gonna be zooming in on the hope of heaven together. And so we're gonna spend five weeks meditating on these things more fully.
Joseph Rhea:We'd love to have you join us guys for that. Please do register just so we know how much coffee and Chick fil A to have ready, but love to have you there with us. Alright, so I'm gonna read Isaiah 25 verses six through nine. And just one note as I do, your Bible might have the word the Lord there a few times in small caps. What that is, is that's a place where Isaiah wrote God's name, Yahweh, as a reminder that God's not just some generic divinity that he has a name, he's the triune creator of the universe who exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Joseph Rhea:And I'm gonna read that name where it comes up in these verses. So just so you know that that's coming. But Isaiah 25 verses six through nine. On this mountain Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that spread over all nations.
Joseph Rhea:He will swallow up death forever. And Yahweh God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth for Yahweh has spoken. It'll be said on that day, behold, this is our God, we have waited for him that he might save us. This is Yahweh, we have waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Joseph Rhea:This is the word of the Lord. Amen. Pray with me. Dear God, in this preview of heaven, of what you have laid up for us, we see a world of greater joy and delight than anything we could ever experience or even imagine here. And so I pray as we explore this hope this morning that you would make these things come alive to us.
Joseph Rhea:Help us see the glory and the joy that are waiting in your hands and in your face at the end of time so we could long for it and we could wait patiently for it knowing that it's going to come not because of anything that we could do for you but entirely through your grace. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. So a few years ago, we started giving our kids an allowance. If they did their chores and they were kind to each other, then at the end of each month, they get a payday.
Joseph Rhea:Now when we first started this, as soon as they had that money in their hand, they wanted to rush off and spend it. So they wanted to go to Walmart, they wanted to to Target, and they just blew it over and over again on just $5 junk. You know, little stuffed animals, things like that, that within a week, they had lost or broken or just forgot existed. But eventually, over time, they've come to realize that there are some things that are worth passing up the $5 jump for. They're worth saving for, saving up their money and waiting for so they can get something better than just what's immediately available, you know, on one month's worth of allowance.
Joseph Rhea:Now I have one kid saving up for a puppy and one who says he's saving up for a tiger. So we may come to regret this decision. He said, can I get a tiger? And I said, you are on your own buddy, you can get whatever you can afford. And so we'll see how that goes.
Joseph Rhea:But my kids have begun learning that some things are good enough to be worth waiting for. See, when I was young, Christianity was portrayed in the media as mainly concerned with keeping people from fun. You know, there's all this happiness to be had out in the world and Christianity is like the grumpy parents in Footloose saying like, no dancing, you know, that's all we do. Now Christianity does teach us to say no to some earthly pleasures, but not from a general hatred of fun. C.
Joseph Rhea:S. Lewis puts it this way. He says if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.
Joseph Rhea:We are far too easily pleased. So Lewis says, in other words, these earthly pleasures that Christianity teaches us to say no to, they're $5 junk at Walmart. That as appealing as they might seem in this moment, they are absolutely nothing compared to the infinite joy on offer for us from God. In this preview of heaven in Isaiah 25, God has something so incredible laid up for us that Isaiah can't think of a better image than take the best party you've ever been to and multiply it by infinity, extend it out into eternity. He describes heaven as a feast of a world of absolute eternal joy that's so much better than any pleasure or power that can be found here.
Joseph Rhea:And he wants us to wait for it, saying no to the cheap junk on this side of things so that we can join him for the feast of Yahweh. So this morning, that's what we're gonna look at. We're gonna look at the feast that Yahweh has laid up for us, and then we're gonna see how we get there. So as we look at the feast of Yahweh from these verses, we see five blessings in this feast. If I was feeling cute, might say there are five ingredients.
Joseph Rhea:So I'll let you do that what you will with that. But the first is divine hospitality. So if you look at chapter 25 verse six, it says, on this mountain, Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. So this means first that we will actually eat in heaven. When Jesus was raised from the dead, when he was resurrected, he ate and drank like normal.
Joseph Rhea:And so in heaven we don't become spiritual beings that transcend food, we literally feast in the new creation. And we talked about this a few weeks ago, but Hebrew literature repeats words or phrases to emphasize them and kinda underscore them. So when Isaiah says rich food and then rich food full of marrow, he's repeating and extending the image to paint it more richly in our imagination. See, he wants us to see like a thick rib eye steak that's beautifully marbled and cooked perfectly rare, which is how steaks are supposed to be eaten. Aged wine, while refined, is like one of those wines you see in a movie that were bottled in 1972 from a perfect harvest in this one vineyard in France and are being saved for the best occasions.
Joseph Rhea:That when we hear this today in the modern West, we probably notice the quality of the food first. Stephen Peacock on our college team noted this the other week, but bone marrow and fine wine are still recognized as luxurious foods today. So God's not offering us Lunchables and Capri Sun, he's preparing the best for his people. But Isaiah's hearers would have heard something different in this. Because in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, there's one other place where a group of people gets to feast with God.
Joseph Rhea:In the book of Exodus, God brings the Israelites out of slavery from Egypt to Mount Sinai. His glory descends and it covers the mountain, so he makes kind of a temporary home there. He gives a covenant that makes Israel his people. This is where the 10 Commandments come. And then, in Exodus chapter 24, God says to Moses, I want you and 70 of the elders of Israel to come partway up this mountain.
Joseph Rhea:I've made my temporary home and we're gonna have a feast together. Not all Israelites, the rest of them have to wait at the base, but Moses and 70 elders, they come partway up the mountain and it says that in there they see kind of this floor sort of that separates heaven from earth, but they can see through it and they can see God, you know, kind of fuzzily somehow. But But it says in Exodus 2four 11, they beheld God and they ate and drank. These 70 men from the representatives of Israel. But look at verse six again.
Joseph Rhea:On this mountain, Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast. So this time everyone is invited. Not just all of Israel, but all the nations, Gentile nations as well. The feast is for everyone who comes and it's all the way up the mountain in the presence of God. In heaven, all peoples are invited to enjoy the hospitality of Yahweh, to come to his house and eat the incredible food at his table, the best the world has to offer.
Joseph Rhea:At the risk of sounding flippant, this says the God of the universe is throwing a party at his house and he wants us to come. There's abundance and delight enough for everyone for eternity. So divine hospitality is the first blessing. The second is victory. Let's keep reading.
Joseph Rhea:Verse seven into the first line of verse eight. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever. So Isaiah uses that poetic repetition again to describe this covering that's laid over all peoples. Israel, Assyria, Jewish, Gentile, White, Black, Hispanic, we all have this kind of sheet laid over us.
Joseph Rhea:Then Isaiah tells us that covering is death itself. See death is the unavoidable end of every life. It's the period, it's the punctuation mark that tells us that a human story is over. And whenever we face it in ourselves or in someone we love, we feel this isn't right. It's not the way it's supposed to be.
Joseph Rhea:Atul Gawande, who's a surgeon and a Harvard professor, he wrote a book called Being Mortal, which is a physician, so someone whose job is to fight death, reflecting on death and mortality. He writes, death is the enemy, but the enemy has superior forces. Eventually it wins. But this tells us that in God's feast, death doesn't win anymore, that God wins. That God is gonna take death and every power that causes death and swallow them up completely from the world.
Joseph Rhea:He's gonna recreate every man, woman, and child who trusted him in this life in bodies that can't get sick or die anymore, and will enjoy his victory over death and its power for eternity. Death doesn't get the last word for God's people, God's victory does. Now you think we might stop there, but God keeps going and so we're gonna keep going. The next blessing of the feast is healing. So if we keep on in verse eight, it says, Yahweh God will wipe away tears from all faces.
Joseph Rhea:This means that God won't just destroy death. He'll come to each of his people one by one and comfort them personally. The image here is like a kid who skins her knee. She comes to her mom crying, it's usually her mom or at least it is in our household, my wife is a comforting one. And the mom takes her into her arms comforts her until she's okay again.
Joseph Rhea:She soothes the pain away with this personal tender compassion. Heaven is gonna be like that but on an eternal scale. Because a little pain can be soothed with a little comfort. But there are wounds that nothing on this side of eternity can heal. Some sicknesses or injuries or emotional wounds, they just hurt And the most loving thing that we can do in that moment with someone is just be with them in their pain.
Joseph Rhea:There's nothing we can do to take that away. In the new creation, the all powerful creator of the universe will take his children into his arms and soothe all pain away. He will heal us and our world so completely that there will be no more physical, emotional, or relational pain anymore. The fourth blessing of the feast is forgiveness. This is at the end of verse eight.
Joseph Rhea:The reproach of his people he will take away from the earth. Now I don't know the last time you used the word reproach in conversation. I try to squeeze it in weekly if I can. Reproach is disgrace or shame that's deserved. So for example, even people who know basically nothing about Christianity know that calling someone a Judas is an insult because Judas' name has become completely associated with betraying people who are close to you.
Joseph Rhea:So the name Judas carries reproach with it. In this day, God's people were under a reproach. They'd spent centuries cheating on the God of the universe by chasing after pagan gods and idols and the wealth of other nations. And so because of that, God had removed His blessings of protecting them and providing for them. And so Isaiah finds them in this time faithless, vulnerable, divided, weak, and it was because of what they had done.
Joseph Rhea:So that's reproach. I'm disgraced and it's my fault. I was at a marriage ministry training a few months ago. The first people we heard from were a married couple, they led worship. And so they let us in a song or two and then the husband of the couple starts telling a little bit of his story.
Joseph Rhea:And he tells us that he was on staff with another church and he had an affair. His marriage almost completely fell apart. They had to He lost his job, they had to leave that church and they ended up coming to this church and finding a way to find forgiveness and reconciliation. God repaired their marriage. And so he was sharing that story with us.
Joseph Rhea:One, when he started talking, you just heard the air get sucked out of the room, like you could have heard a pin drop. But as they talked, he shared it not to minimize having an affair or make it seem like it's not a big deal, it was a huge deal. But in telling that story, he was able to share some of the forgiveness and reconciliation they had already experienced on this side of things. That the reproach of what he had done had by God's grace been transformed into a trophy of grace. That's what it means to have reproach taken away.
Joseph Rhea:It doesn't minimize sin or make it not a big deal, but it shows us that God's forgiving and reconciling grace will be so deep in heaven and in the new creation that even the memories of our sins will become trophies of grace instead of markers of shame that we carry with us. One writer says that for God's people, heaven will work backwards and turn even agony into glory so that forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of heaven. Some of you, I'm sure, are carrying around a reproach, a sense of shame and disgrace over something that you've done and you can't undo. But God says even that thing that you did, you chose, and you can't undo, it has happened. God says I'm gonna remove the pain and the shame of that from the earth.
Joseph Rhea:My forgiveness will be so powerfully real that your reproach will just be another testimony to my grace, just another trophy of grace. We sang earlier the song, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. It has a line in it that makes me tear up every time I sing it. It says, oh that day when freed from sinning, I shall see thy lovely face. That song, that line moves me because I get so sick of my sin on this side of things.
Joseph Rhea:So sick of having a heart that keeps manufacturing new occasions for reproach. And I'm so excited for the day when in the new creation, God's not just gonna wipe away that, but he's gonna transform me with a new heart to where I no longer have to struggle with things anymore. That's part of the feast that God offers us with his forgiveness. We see the final blessing of the feast in the beginning of verse nine. It says it will be said on that day, behold this is our God.
Joseph Rhea:We have waited for him that he might save us. This is the blessing of presence. See, the feast of heaven includes face to face reconciliation with God, and it includes eternal community with others too. We've already seen how God meets each of us individually with personal comfort. In Psalm sixteen eleven, David writes to God, in your presence is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Joseph Rhea:God is the most glorious, beautiful, satisfying being in the universe. We were created to delight in him. And in heaven, we'll see and we'll know him face to face. We also see that the community of heaven is a community, that everyone who belong to God on this side of things will belong there in eternity too. We'll meet Isaiah and get to talk with him about this passage.
Joseph Rhea:We'll meet our Christian family members or friends who have died and we'll begin a life with them that can never be broken by sin or death again in the presence of the God who has saved us. That's the feast of Yahweh. The creator of the universe is going to welcome us to his table for eternity. He's gonna put an eternal end to death and suffering replacing them with life and joy. He's gonna remove the shame of our sins so completely that they'll only be trophies of grace.
Joseph Rhea:And we'll live face to face with him and his people in this abundant, healed, restored world. Hospitality, victory, healing, forgiveness, and presence. That's the hope of heaven. And so if that's the feast, how do we get in? How do we receive it and be part of it?
Joseph Rhea:Let's look at verse nine in full. It says it will be said on that day, behold this is our God, we have waited for him that he might save us. This is Yahweh. We have waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Joseph Rhea:So how do we get into the feast? We wait for Yahweh to save us. This is something we do, we wait for Yahweh, and something that He does, He saves us. And so on our side, we wait for Yahweh. There's a great illustration of this in Psalm one thirty.
Joseph Rhea:The author, King David again, is in distress and he's crying out to God for mercy and he writes this. I wait for Yahweh, my soul waits and in his word I hope. My soul waits for Yahweh more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. David compares his soul to a soldier standing guard through the night waiting for the morning to come. He's on guard, he's watching for danger, but he knows that when the sun comes, the time of danger is gonna be past, and so he's got one eye on the horizon too, and he's thinking, please, let the dawn come soon.
Joseph Rhea:Waiting is tied to hope. In Isaiah twenty four and twenty five, which there's some verses from those in the worship guide, we see at the end of time a ruined city filled with people who quit waiting for Yahweh. So in chapter 24 verse five, we see people who gave up on their covenant with God and decided to define right and wrong for themselves, which is an act of pride that goes back to the very entrance of sin and death into the world in Genesis three. So these people in their pride say, we don't need God. You know, in the language of today, they might say, religion is a thing of the past.
Joseph Rhea:It's all superstition. It's something we know better than now. But someone who gives up on God's design and God's will for life. So his call to love our neighbor as Jesus does, his call to be holy as he is holy, they're not waiting on him anymore. And pridefully choosing our own way instead of God's leads to missing the feast.
Joseph Rhea:In chapter 24 verses seven through nine, we see people who just decide to live for pleasure. To go back to our illustration from the beginning, they say, I'll take the $5 junk. You know, I take the drink, the entertainment, the music, the comfort, and I don't really care about anything else. So like we've seen, God has joy beyond anything we could hope for waiting in heaven. But if we make pleasure or comfort our first priority here, that's not waiting for Yahweh anymore, and that's missing the feast as well.
Joseph Rhea:And then in chapter 25, especially in verses four and five, we see the ruined city filled with people who decided, you know what, God helps those who help themselves. Which to be very clear, that is not just not in the Bible, but that's the opposite of the message of the Bible. And so these people decide, you know, if I want something in life, I just have to get it for myself. And so they go on and seek power over everything else. And Isaiah says they become ruthless.
Joseph Rhea:So today that looks like people who bully, abuse, manipulate others to get their way. Instead of loving others, they try to control them. And that's not waiting for Yahweh. Waiting for Yahweh is the opposite of these things. It's humbly keeping his word over our own desires.
Joseph Rhea:It's living for eternal pleasure, which often means sacrificing pleasure or comfort here rather than earthly good. And it's serving others for God's glory rather than bullying or manipulating them for my own. And it's keeping our attention on that horizon where God is, like a soldier waiting for the morning rather than on ourselves or anything around us. So if that's our side of getting to the feast, we'll close by looking at God's side because we wait for Yahweh and Yahweh comes and he saves us. He is our hope.
Joseph Rhea:We've seen some of his qualities in our passage already, that he created all people from every nation and race. He has compassion not just for humanity as a whole but for each individual man and woman and child. He hates evil and suffering in all its forms. And he has the power to put a final end to death, evil and suffering by recreating the entire universe in perfection. In Isaiah's day, they just had to trust this in faith.
Joseph Rhea:They were like a soldier on guard when it's 3AM and there is no sign of the sun coming. You're in the dark and just looking at the horizon praying it's coming back. But on this side of Jesus' life and death and resurrection, we've seen the dawn begin to break. We've seen the sun begin to rise. See, two thousand years ago, God the Son was born on the earth as a human being.
Joseph Rhea:In his earthly life, he had such a reputation for feasting that the Jewish religious authorities thought he must be sinning somehow. You know, he's just, he's having too good a time. One writer said that in the biography of Jesus called the Gospel of Luke, Jesus, through the entire story, is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal, through the whole thing. And so he eats his way across Galilee for a few years. Jesus works miracles of healing and even resurrection that score short term victories against the power of death in that time.
Joseph Rhea:He has compassion on the hurting. He tells people your sins are forgiven, which is something that only Yahweh had the authority to do. And so in other words, he lives a preview of the feast of heaven. And then he's crucified to show us how these things can be true, particularly how we can be forgiven. He absorbs God's holy wrath against pride, selfish pleasure, abuse of power and every other sin into himself coming under the curse of destruction.
Joseph Rhea:He becomes the destroyed city from Isaiah twenty four and twenty five. And on the third day after, he's raised from the dead as a new creation that death can't touch anymore. His new life has swallowed up death in victory forever. And another book about the end of time called Revelation tells us that he offers now not just a feast, but a wedding feast, where he's not just our host, but he's the covenant husband of everyone who waits for the salvation of Yahweh. And the joy of God's presence now isn't just a party thrown by someone we don't really know, it's a wedding where we take the best marriage that you could imagine, the best that marriage has to offer and multiply that now times infinity, that that's the relationship with God that we're waiting for.
Joseph Rhea:That's the salvation that God's people celebrate in Isaiah 20 five:nine, the recreation of our bodies beyond the power of death and pain, the recreation of our souls with no more sin or shame, and the deepest, richest relationship we could ever have in a soul to soul union with God the Father as our Father, God the Son as our husband, and God the Spirit as the love that fills and binds our souls. When we arrive at that feast, we'll experience joy beyond anything we can imagine. And so may we wait for Yahweh that he might save us. Let's pray. Dear God, you have laid up an unbelievable hope for us, of a world of abundance and eternal life beyond the reach of death, pain, sorrow, and sin, and a reunion with you.
Joseph Rhea:I pray God that we could see this in our imaginations, that we could long for it and we could wait for it by now living faithfully for you and with you and looking ahead to the hope to come. We thank you that this is on offer entirely by your grace, what you've earned for us and given to us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
