God, Angels and Demons

Text: Isaiah 1:10-20

Focus: Justice

Function: To help us seek justice as a sincere form of worship.

Form: Story-telling.

Intro:

This is a scathing reproach of insincere worship. God hates it because although they claim to love God and are expressing it with all of their worship practices, they still do not love God enough to care for the poor. Justice is indeed a condition for salvation. And this morning, I am going to show you how.

In the first verse, he says “Sodom and Gomorrah.” He isn’t speaking to those ancient cites, because at this time, they are already ancient. They were destroyed almost a 1,000 years before the prophet shouts out these words.

No, he is speaking to their sinfulness. He is saying, you are about to face judgment. It is a warning. You will be condemned like Sodom and Gomorrah. Ezekiel 16:49-50 points it out this way: “…lived… …in the lap of luxury—proud, gluttonous, and lazy. They ignored the oppressed and the poor. They put on airs and lived obscene lives…”

In that list of sins against them, there is only one reference to their different bedroom practices, he says they: “…lived obscene lives.” When pleasure is god, then any pleasure is okay and the violence of same-sex rape seemed normal to them.

How about a little Halloween as we look at the forces of evil behind selfish living?

I remember one “fall party” we had at church. They wouldn’t call it Halloween. But we did let the kids dress up, as long as they dressed as Biblical Characters. So one kid, always kind of rebellious dressed up as Satan and got a couple of his friends to dress as demons.

What about the Devil? Did God create evil? Can God use evil?

Does God send, or allow, evil in order to accomplish His purpose?

Do we need to fear Satan?

How much power does he have?

Does God just barely beat him with the cross of Christ? Or did God overwhelmingly defeat Evil at the cross of Christ?

These are deep questions that theologians wrestle with.

But all we can really know is this: Evil exists. God hates it.

So what does this have to do with God rejecting the worship of the Israelites because they, as a nation, were not diligent about insuring justice?

In our passage this morning, God said that they needed to repent. The exact words: ¹⁶Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil…

We look at that verse, wash yourselves, be clean and we see the concept of moral purity. But the problem is, sometimes people stop right there and point fingers at the impurity of Sodom and Gomorrah and refuse to listen to the rest of the passage.

So Isaiah gives them a description of what repentance looks like:

¹⁷learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow

The greatest expressions of evil are manifested in the way the weak and the powerless are treated.

That is what God is saying. In the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers” the soldiers take the citizens of this German town into the death camp the Nazi’s set up. There is one scene where this man, a man like you and me, a baker, too old to be a combatant, stands in the midst of a pile of dead bodies looking at the American commander with this terrible look of sorrow that this kind of evil could have gone on, by his people, just a few miles from where he lived.

The greatest manifestations of evil are expressed in the way the weak and the powerless are treated.

There are three big sins in the OT.

I can categorize these three sins as 1), Lack of faith –a refusal to trust God and His promises 2). Idolatry and 3). Injustice –the lack of concern for the poor.

The Bible records a couple, a married couple, the king and queen of the Northern Kingdom who were poster children for this kind of evil. The queen was probably the most notoriously evil woman in the bible, Jezebel. She and Ahab did whatever they pleased without fear of God.

She had the prophets of God killed. She hunted Elijah for 3 years. She outlawed the worship of God, she had her husband board up the temple and the list goes on.

But her worse sin, the one that God killed her husband for is what she did to Naboth. Naboth had a beautiful vineyard right next to one of Ahab’s fields.

Ahab, wanted the vineyard for himself. No. He threw a fit because Naboth wouldn’t sell it to him.

So Jezebel hired a couple of other evil people to lie about Naboth in court. They lied that Naboth had cursed God, the same God whose worship she had outlawed. Naboth was sentenced to death, and she gave her husband the vineyard.

It was a classic case of this insincere worship. Claiming to defend the honor of God, she had Naboth murdered. It was a classic case of the abuse of power.

Naboth’s family mourned over the way Jezebel used Ahab’s signet ring to murder their loved one just because the king, who was wealthy beyond their imagination was so greedy that he just had to have Naboth’s vineyard for himself.

And God was angry with him and Jezebel. He sent a prophet and told Ahab that he would die and the dogs would lick his blood up in the very field he coveted, the field he coveted to the point of murder. And Jezebel would not be buried, not only would the dogs lick her blood, but they would also eat her body before she could be buried. And they both died just as God told them.

And how God managed to do that is fascinating. 2 Chronicles 18 tells the story of God, angels and demons.

God wants to kill Ahab to punish him and he wants Ahab to die in a nasty way, with his blood flowing over the vineyard that he stole from Naboth. He wants to kill Ahab because he didn’t care about justice.

So, the scripture gives us a picture of God in heaven, holding court and asking a question.

He says, “How can I entice Ahab into a battle that I have already decided he will lose?”

And a demon appears before God. The bible merely says “a lying spirit.” Well we know, that Satan is the father of all lies. This is one of his imps. And the demon tells God, “I’ll go and be a lying spirit in the mouth of his false prophets, promise him a victory so that you set him up to die. Listen, this is right there in the bible.

And the story unfolds. Ahab, the ruler of the Northern Kingdom and Jehoshaphat, the ruler of the Southern Kingdom are friends.

Ahab is a devout pagan. Jehoshaphat is a devout follower of God.

All of Ahab’s prophets are prophesying to him that he will win. One of them makes a set of iron horns and is running around his courtroom shouting that he will gouge his enemies with horns of iron. And remember, we know, that behind all of this is a demonic force. These guys are absolutely convinced that they are right. The feel it in their spirits.

Ahab is asking Jehoshaphat to help him with his troops as well and Jehoshaphat simply says: “what about a prophet from Jehovah? Has anyone consulted God’s prophet?”

As it turns out, Micaiah, the prophet of God. Ahab knows him, but he’s not on his list of favorites.

They call Micaiah. Before he goes in, the pagan prophets beg him to concur with them.

Micaiah is a true prophet of the Lord. He tells them that he will only say what the Holy Spirit leads him to say.

So he stands up, and he starts prophesying and he agrees with the pagan prophets.

And that is where it gets interesting. Ahab yells at him for not telling the truth.

Ahab knows his pagan prophets are lying to him. He knows that Micaiah is lying to him.

How?

This is a personal encounter between God and Ahab. Ahab knows that Micaiah is lying. He knows it in his heart.

God loves everyone. God has been trying to reach Ahab for years. It is just like the story of the Rich man and Lazarus from Luke 16 that we looked at a month or so ago. The rich man goes to hell because he refused to care for the poor man who was laid at his door. The rich man, in hell, asks Abraham to send someone to his brothers who also refuse to care for the poor.

Abraham answers him: “it has been right before you all for hundreds of years in the words of Moses, -that is the only part of the OT that the Sadducees followed- and the prophets, the part that the more conservative sect follows. It is throughout your writings, if you refuse to believe your own scriptures, then you will also refuse to believe, even if someone rises from the dead.”

Abraham says: If you won’t believe the Bible that God cares, a lot, for the poor, then you stand condemned.

Apparently, God has already spoken to Ahab about this. I am guessing that is why he wants Jehoshaphat with him. He knows the Jehoshaphat is a follower of God, and perhaps his presence will protect Ahab.

How does he know? Maybe a nightmare that God has been speaking to him and now the prophet puts flesh to his terror.

God killed Ahab for his lack of justice, He killed Jezebel for her idolatry.

What does this have to do with Isaiah 1?

God killed Ahab for this personal sin of coveting and acting on his covetousness by allowing Naboth to be murdered.

Ahab did a lot of evil things, but this is what God judged him for.

This is God’s passion for justice.

And our personal salvation is tied into this repentance.

Ahab knew the prophet was lying. He already knew. God had already been trying to reach his heart. So he asks Micaiah why he is lying and Micaiah explains the story we already spoke about, how God wanted to entice Ahab into a battle that God decided he would lose, allowing a demon to speak to his pagan prophets, and then to speak through Micaiah.

Micaiah says, “I saw your whole nation scattered like sheep without a shepherd because you were dead. And here is how God did it.”

Ahab throws Micaiah in jail for telling him this and promises to release him when he returns from battle. Micaiah tells him that if he returns, then he is indeed a false prophet. We don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he rotted in jail. Micaiah refused to preach a popular message, like the other prophets, he told the truth, from scripture. They didn’t like it, but that didn’t mean he would compromise God’s message to God’s people.

Isaiah, who writes our text this morning also had an hard time getting his message across. In the 10^th chapter, we read that he literally went around naked for 3 years, not even wearing sandals. When asked, he told them, if you don’t repent, you will be stripped naked and carried off as slaves. He gave them a visual message.

I have a pastor friend who is getting back into pastoral work after 7 years. He took 7 years off because he got beat up pretty bad by people who wanted control over the church. I told him, “But Wayne, when I was in Bible College, the promised us that if we were faithful to the Word, if we refused to compromise it, if we refused to preach a cultural adaptation to it, if we just said what it meant without fear, (and it says a lot about injustice), then God will automatically bless and grow the church.”

Wayne said, “apparently they didn’t read the story of Jeremiah who was continually thrown in jail, in a dry well, in a muddy well, kept on short rations.”

Now let us finish our scripture from this morning. Right after he finishes telling them that repentance is caring for the oppressed, the widow, the orphan he says:

¹⁸"Come now, and let us reason together," Says the Lord, "Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool. ¹⁹"If you consent and obey, You will eat the best of the land; ²⁰"But if you refuse and rebel, You will be devoured by the sword." Truly, the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

CONCL:

So why this fail? Why did these people, with the word of God so deeply embedded in their culture miss this?

As Jim Wallis says, it is impossible to read the Bible without seeing God’s concern for justice on both a spiritual and social level.

These people hadn’t seen the cross of Christ.

They hadn’t understood the lesson that Jesus taught us. He gave up the entire Kingdom of heaven, to lower Himself into an human body.

The bible says that Jesus , “Learned obedience through the things suffered.”

He was broken for us. He was broken and He calls us to pick up His cross and follow Him.

The lack of love for the poor, the abandonment of caring for the least of these, the selfish concept that the Church exists for the good of the members instead of the good of the world comes from the fact that we have not been broken. If we still think it is about us, then we have missed the point!

So, let us surrender ourselves as we finish this service.