“And They Lived Happily Ever After…” (Isaiah 55)

Most of you know I love movies—I love stories of all kinds, really, whether they’re movies or books or songs. But as the years pass, I find myself becoming less and less patient with stories that have easy, happy endings. Stories with happy endings make me feel good, but they don’t always ring true. Happy endings in real life are possible—they do happen, I know—but much of the time, people’s stories don’t end well. We march on from one painful event to the next, observing atrocities in the world from afar and witnessing disturbing behavior in the people around us, getting older and weaker as we go, before finally succumbing to the ugly reality that is death.

That’s the way life often is in a fallen world, so I have a hard time believing in happy endings.

But the fact that something is uncommon does not make it untrue. For all the unhappy endings we see over the course of our lives, there is one happy ending that is promised.

That’s what we’ve been looking at over these last two weeks: the plan God set in motion to ensure a happy ending for his people.

On Easter Sunday, we looked at Isaiah 53, in which God tells, centuries in advance, what exactly Jesus Christ would do for us. We saw that in response to the problem of our sin, our rebellion against God which separates us from him, God would send a suffering servant—a Savior, a Messiah, to come and suffer the consequences of our sin, in our place, in order to share with us his glory. This suffering servant described by Isaiah is the perfect description of Jesus Christ, who would come centuries later and do exactly what Isaiah said he would do.

Last week, we saw the first effects of Christ’s saving grace in Isaiah 54. God has given his people a new family situation, a reversal of fortune, from sterile and abandoned to protected and flourishing.

Today, we’re going to be looking at the final application of the good news of the gospel, in Isaiah 55. If Isaiah 53 explains the mechanics of the gospel (how it works), and Isaiah 54 explains how the gospel changes who we are, Isaiah 55 explains how the gospel is lived out in the Christian life.

And it is the only way. There are many different ways of applying what we see here in the minutest details of our lives—because we’re all different from one another—but there are a certain number of commonalities that will always be present if we are truly Christians. In other words, this passage describes not the end, but the beginning: Isaiah 55 describes what some have called “the basic Christian life”.

Context: Everyone, Everywhere, All the Time

Before we get started, we need to look at a bit of context that is really important. Last week, we saw that in Christ, God had brought about a new family situation for his people: instead of being barren, his people would be fertile; instead of being desolate and abandoned and under God’s judgment, his people would receive his salvation and compassion.

But of course, one might say, in chapter 54 he’s talking about God’s people, Israel, the people whom he had judged for their sin and subsequently forgiven, and promised a Savior. What does all of that have to do with the rest of the world, with people who are not members of Israel?

We see that pretty clearly at the beginning of chapter 55. V. 1:

“Come, everyone who thirsts,
      come to the waters—

So let’s not miss that very strong word “EVERYONE”. Next, v. 3-5:

3       Incline your ear [EVERYONE whom he just called in v. 1], and come to me;
      hear, that your soul may live;
                  and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
      my steadfast, sure love for David.

So the covenant God made with David, the covenant God made with Israel, he will extend to you who do not belong to Israel. And in case it wasn’t clear enough already:

            4       Behold, I made him [DAVID] a witness to the peoples,
      a leader and commander for the peoples.
            5       Behold, you [the Messiah, the ultimate descendant of King David] shall call a nation that you do not know,
      and a nation that did not know you shall run to you,
                  because of the LORD your God, and of the Holy One of Israel,
      for he has glorified you.

So the “new family situation” that Eduardo preached about last week, we see here, extends to people from all nations. Those who have nothing, those who have no rightful claim to the blessings of the Messiah, but who are hungry for them. The covenant made with David is extended to all peoples, because he is (v. 4) “a witness to the peoples”—plural, not singular.

In general we need to be careful about taking Old Testament prophecies and applying them directly to our own lives—often, those prophecies were given to specific people at specific moments in history, and for specific reasons. However, because of what we just saw in the first five verses, I do feel comfortable applying this passage to us, and not only to the people of Israel: the chapter opens with God opening up these promises to all nations, to all peoples. And that includes us.

That being said, in this text Isaiah answers for us not one question, but four—four distinct questions that spring out of the gospel. They’re fairly simple, but profound in their impact on our lives. Here are the four questions:

• What is the call of the gospel?

• How can we access the life he promises?

• How can we be sure it will work?

• And finally: What will the result of the gospel be (for us and for God)?

That’s where we’re headed this morning.

For the last two weeks, we have been looking at the most monumental truths imaginable. They are truths which change everything—not just for today, but for all of eternity. They are truths that will right every wrong, that will fix everything broken, truths which tell us that no matter how hard it is to believe, a happy ending is possible for us, and it has been made available for us.

So if the promise of the gospel—that Christ lived, died and was raised in our place, for our sins, so that we might have peace and comfort and salvation in him, how are we to respond?

What Is the Call of the Gospel? (v. 1-5)

I remember when I was a new Christian being consistently surprised by what I read in the Bible. I had grown up in church, so I thought I knew this book pretty well. And that’s one reason why reading the Bible is, frankly, so much fun, so stimulating: I’m always running across passages I never would have expected.

Like this one. If you were to ask me, “What is the call of the gospel?”, at the beginning of my Christian life my answer probably would have been something like this: “The call of the gospel is to repent of your sin and believe in Christ.” And that’s not a bad answer—we’ll get to that answer a little later.

But it’s not how God frames this passage; that’s not how he starts. Listen to what he says. V. 1:

“Come, everyone who thirsts,
      come to the waters;
                  and he who has no money,
      come, buy and eat!
                  Come, buy wine and milk
      without money and without price.

Do you see how that’s different from my earlier definition? The call of the gospel is not a command, it’s an invitation. Or rather, it’s a command that is an invitation. The only prerequisites for receiving the grace of God are being thirsty, being hungry, and being poor.

Come, everyone who thirsts! Come to the waters!

Come, everyone who is hungry! Buy and eat!

Come, everyone who has no money! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!

What kind of king gives an invitation like that? An invitation to people from all nations, from all peoples—even people from enemy nations—to come in and be fed, with no payment, no tariffs, no interest?

This is the God we serve, whose first initiative is to feed those who come to him hungry, to give to those who cannot give back.

Now of course, he’s not talking about physical food and drink—God never promised we would never have times when we feel physical hunger or thirst. So what’s he talking about? If God invites those of us who are hungry and thirsty to come to him and eat, come to him and drink, then what exactly are we hungry and thirsty for?

He answers that question in v. 2-3:

2       Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
      and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
                  Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
      and delight yourselves in rich food.
            3       Incline your ear, and come to me;
      hear, that your soul may live;
                  and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
      my steadfast, sure love for David.

There is a universal desire in the human heart to be happy—to be satisfied. And there is a universal tendency in the human heart to pursue things that will never satisfy us.

The best meal, the best job, the best house, the best marriage, the best children, will never fully satisfy us. I could say that they will never satisfy us because we live in a fallen world and there will always be something that comes along to throw a wrench in the works—illness or financial trouble or broken relationships or sin. But that’s not even the real reason. These things we pursue will never fully satisfy us because they weren’t meant to satisfy us. We weren’t created to be satisfied by these things, and they weren’t created to fulfill that desire.

And yet we still spend most of our waking hours pursuing things that will, at best, give us momentary glimpses of the satisfaction we long for, like walking by a kitchen and smelling good food being prepared. That’s at best. At worst, they will disappoint us to such an extent that our capacity for satisfaction will shrink. We’ll be so frequently let down by these things that we’ll come to believe nothing will ever satisfy us.

Both of these options are substandard. “Why,” God asks, “do you spend money for that which is not bread—” (that which won’t fill us) “—and labor for that which does not satisfy?” It’s a rhetorical question, like when you ask a child who just ate a clot of dirt, “Why did you do that?” There’s no good answer to that question. And that’s the sort of question God’s asking here. Because there is no good reason to labor for that which does not satisfy. We do it, only because we don’t see any better options, and we’re trying to make the most with what we have.

So God offers us a much better option. He says, “Listen diligently, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear—” Why? “—that your soul may live.”

That is what we want. That is what we hunger for. We want to live. So we travel, and we pour ourselves into things we think are worthwhile, and we pursue leisure, and we work on building relationships, and none of those things are bad—but we mistake those things for life, and they are not life.

What gives us true, lasting, satisfying life? Listening diligently to what God says, eating the food he gives us, resting in the covenant God has made with us, and running to the Savior he has glorified. That is what will satisfy us, because that is why we were created.

And living like this is the call of the gospel. It is not a weak call, and it is not a call that is without risk. But it is a call that is unequivocally invitational.

Are you hungry? Come and eat.

Are you thirsty? Come and drink.

Are you tired of working for that which does not satisfy? Come and live.

That is the call of the gospel.

So here is the second question:

How Do We Access This Life? (v. 6-9)

The call of the gospel is an invitation to come and live, and we saw in chapters 53 and 54 that God has provided a Savior who would make that invitation possible. He sent his Son to live our life and to die our death, to take our sin on himself, to be punished in our place and to give us his righteousness. The end result is that our sin dies on the cross with Christ, and all we have left is the righteousness of Christ that was given to us.

But there is a strange thing that happens when we talk about these truths. We talk about these truths as if because Christ has purchased our salvation for us, there’s nothing for us to do—and that is simply not true. We look at the finished work of Christ, and we assume that because his work is finished, ours must be finished too.

But that’s just not the case. And there’s a good reason. Even though his work is finished, our work is not, because we have a hunger in us that only God can satisfy, and if we want to be satisfied, we have to eat.

So what does that “eating” and “drinking” and “living” look like?

It looks like repentance. It looks like confessing our sin, turning away from our sin, and pursuing God’s ways instead of ours.

V. 6:

6       “Seek the LORD while he may be found;
      call upon him while he is near;
            7       let the wicked forsake his way,
      and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
                  let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him,
      and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
            8       For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
      neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
            9       For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
      so are my ways higher than your ways
      and my thoughts than your thoughts.

In my opinion, these four verses are the best description of repentance in the Bible. Because they not only tell us what repentance is, but why repentance is necessary.

Repentance is seeking the Lord and calling upon him—asking for his help, because we know we need it.

Repentance is forsaking our wicked ways and unrighteous thoughts—turning away from them, to the point that these sins we used to pursue are simply no longer an option for us.

Repentance is pursuing an entirely new way of life, and entirely new way of thinking. Learning to think his thoughts rather than our own, learning to walk in his ways rather than our own. It’s absolutely vital for us to see that these famous verses—v. 8 and 9 (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways”)—come in the context of repentance. He’s not talking about the unknowability of God (although God is impossible for us to fully grasp). In v. 7 he calls us to forsake our ways, and then he tells us in v. 8-9 which ways to follow. You see the difference? He’s not saying, “You’ll never be able to understand me” (even if that’s true). He’s telling us that our ways are worthless, and he’s calling us to follow his ways instead.

And that is going to require a serious mentality shift on our part.

The closest thing I could think of to describe what’s going on is schizophrenia. I shouldn’t need to say this, but I feel I may: schizophrenia is real thing. It is an actual disorder of the brain, characterized by disruptions to thinking and emotions, and a distorted perception of reality. And that’s the really spooky part—we all suffer from disruptions to thinking and emotions from time to time, for a lot of reasons. But if you have a distorted perception of reality…how would you know? If you’re suffering from hallucinations and delusions, how would you know, on your own?

Think of how scary that is. You look at the world around you, you think something is happening…but in fact what you think is happening in he world and the reality of the world could not be farther apart.

I don’t want to frighten anyone, but in essence, that is what God is telling us here.

In terms of its ability to skew our perception, schizophrenia pales in comparison to sin. Every one of us needs to accept the fact that we don’t see things as they really are. We don’t think of things as we should. We don’t value things that are valuable, and we don’t pursue that which will satisfy us. Because we are still in this world, we do not see things as we should, reason as we should, or make decisions as we should. Our ways are awful. Our ways are so far from the right way that the only way God can describe it is by saying, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Repentance, then, is the arduous, lifelong process of learning to see that nearly everything I think is wrong, and that everything God is telling me is right. “Incline your ear,” he says, “and come to me; hear, that your soul may live… Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

If we can learn to recognize that our instincts are wrong, and that God tells us what is right, then with his help we can finally start doing something about it. Our ways are wicked, but we don’t have to keep walking in them. We can change. We can repent.

One of the hardest challenges of the Christian life is believing that true repentance is possible. We get discouraged far too easily; we don’t even think it’s possible.

I was in Evian this week at the pastoral conference for the AEEBLF, and someone told a story. A kid asks his dad if he can go play by the lake.

Dad says, “Yes, but don’t go in the water.”

“I won’t.”

“No, really—I know how much you like to swim. Don’t go in the water.”

“No no, I won’t.”

A couple minutes later the kid starts heading for the lake and the dad stops him. “I can see the swimming suit hanging out of your pocket,” he says. “Why do you have that?”

The kid says, “Well, just in case I’m tempted to go in, I don’t want to get my clothes wet.”

This is how we often approach temptation. We’ve given up before it even comes: we assume the temptation will be too hard to resist, so we assume that our sin is inevitable. Often we give in to temptation simply because we leave ourselves the option of doing so.

I see it over and over again: many of us tend to accept a lack of holiness as an ordinary part of the Christian life, and it’s not. God calls us to turn away from our sin—to forsake our ways and our thoughts, and to follow his—and he wouldn’t call us to it if we were unable to do it. We are capable of far more holiness than we think. 

And we come to him and we repent and we pursue holiness—we pursue his ways instead of our own—not to get saved or to stay saved, but because he invites us to do it.

That’s not only why we repent, but how we repent! We already saw it in v. 1. “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Hear, that your soul may live!” Do you see how he describes it so much differently than we do? Repentance and holiness are not a burden; they are air for our lungs, food for our souls, life for our souls.

How much effort are people willing to put into physical exercise when they realize that it will help them live longer? When we realize that holiness is life—that it’s rich food, that it’s good drink—how hard will we work to be holy? What will our repentance look like then?

Which leads us to our next question—if God is inviting us to life, and if God is telling us how to access it, how can we be sure it will work?

How Can We Be Sure It Will Work? (v. 10-11)

The answer to this question is incredibly simple, to the point where it will make some people uncomfortable: it will work because God will make it work. V. 10:

10       “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
      and do not return there but water the earth,
                  making it bring forth and sprout,
      giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
            11       so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
      it shall not return to me empty,
                  but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
      and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

The picture he gives here is almost comical because it’s so obvious. The world is very good at growing things. Rain works well. When it falls, it doesn’t immediately get sucked back up into the sky again. It falls and waters the earth and causes plants to grow, which give us fruit and grain.

In the same way, whatever God decides to do—and that’s what he means when he talks about his “word” that “goes out from my mouth”: he’s talking about his decrees, his declarations, his decisions—will always fulfill its intended purpose. If God says something, that thing will absolutely happen. His word will not return to him empty; it will succeed.

God says that if we come to him, and turn away from our sin, and follow him, then he will give us life. He will feed our souls, and he will make us holy.

Some of you need to hear this, because you’re convinced there’s something in you that is stopping you from living for God as you should. But God says here that that is a lie. There is no defect in any of us that can stop his promise from being fulfilled: his word will always succeed in the thing for which he sent it, and he said, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; seek the Lord while he may be found; return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on you; forsake your ways, and follow mine.”

That is what God has said. That is his invitation to you. Do you really think there’s some handicap in you that could possibly stop God from giving you life if you come to him? There isn’t. His word will not return to him empty. It will do what he intends for it to do.

So no matter how you feel about yourself this morning, you can do this. You can respond to him in faith. You can change.

This is such good news. Which makes the final question incredibly easy to answer: What will the result of the gospel be for us and for God?

What Is the Result? (v. 12-13)

The result is joy for the world, and glory for God. V. 12:

12       “For you shall go out in joy
      and be led forth in peace;
                  the mountains and the hills before you
      shall break forth into singing,
      and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
            13       Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
      instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
                  and it shall make a name for the LORD,
      an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

This is an almost silly level of joy, like he’s describing an old Disney cartoon, where the trees and the flowers are singing and dancing. That is the goal he’s going for: that God might be recognized for the wonder-working, all-compassionate God that he is, and that the whole world might know his name, and respond with such joy that the earth itself sings in response.

This is what it will feel like to be in heaven. This is the result of the gospel: joy to the world, and glory to God.

Conclusion

In the light of the gospel we saw in Isaiah 53 and 54, here in chapter 55 we see:

• a call to live (v. 1-5);

• a call to repent (v. 6-9);

• a promise that God will do what he says here (v. 10-11);

• and a promise that the result will be joy, in the praise of his glory (v. 12-13).

Two calls, to promises.

I know that many of you here today are desperate for life, and you have been for some time. You always feel like there’s something holding you back. You want to be happy, but you don’t know how. And this text diagnoses the problem with laser focus.

One of the first questions we should ask when we’re going through a period of spiritual dryness is, “Is there any sinful pattern of behavior in my life of which I have not repented?” Now sometimes the answer will be no—sometimes we’re just going through a difficult time, or circumstances have worn us down. But the problem is that we will often assume that the problem is our circumstances. And we do that because the alternative is too painful. We don’t want to consider that we are the ones making life so hard on ourselves, that we’re having a hard time living because we keep going back to what kills us.

Do you see how this text changes the way we ought to think about repentance? We always think of repentance as “what I have to do in order to be saved,” when God describes repentance as “what I do in order to live.” That’s very different. Repentance is not the box to check in order to get into heaven; repentance is the life we live in order to be happy, forever. In order to be satisfied, forever. Repentance isn’t a task to accomplish but a life to enjoy. Is it hard? Of course it is. Most good things are hard, and they’re all the better for it.

So stop resisting. Discipline yourself. Listen to what God says in his Word, and come to him, so that you may live. Reject your ways and learn to follow in his. It will be a radical recentering of every area of your life—but it will be good. Water for the thirsty, good food for the hungry.

And believe that when you come to him, when you seek him, when you call on him, and when you repent, he will answer. He will have compassion on you. He will pardon you. He will feed you. He will give you life. It may not happen the way you expect, but it will happen. God’s word will not return to him empty.

This is the life he invites us into, that gives us a foretaste of heaven, where all the earth will rejoice in the glory of God’s name, through the finished work of his Son.

Texts like this remind us that as good as we think God is, he is infinitely better. So since he is so good, let us come to him and drink.