Provision

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We are in the fifth Sunday of Lent and nearing the end of this season. This is the season of the Church's life where we consider the suffering and death of Jesus on our behalf. We do so anticipating the great day of Easter and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We explore the implications of that throughout the Easter season. But this journey in Lent has been called by many the season of bright sadness because it begins with Ash Wednesday, with that reminder that from dust we came and to dust we shall return. With it comes the call to embrace humility and repentance instead of hubris and pride and self-reliance that we are all so prone to give ourselves to. But Lent is a journey toward Easter, so what begins with ashes and darkness and sadness ends in resurrection. It ends in resurrection light and hope, and what began in sorrow ends in celebration. This is where Isaiah is taking us this morning as well: from a dry and arid dusty land to a transformed world. That's Isaiah 35, and that's what I want to look at this morning. Let's give our attention to God's word.

¹The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;

the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus;

²it shall blossom abundantly

and rejoice with joy and singing.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

They shall see the glory of the Lord,

the majesty of our God.

³Strengthen the weak hands,

and make firm the feeble knees.

⁴Say to those who have an anxious heart,

“Be strong; fear not!

Behold, your God

will come with vengeance,

with the recompense of God.

He will come and save you.”

⁵Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

⁶then shall the lame man leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.

For waters break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

⁷the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water;

in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down,

the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

⁸And a highway shall be there,

and it shall be called the Way of Holiness;

the unclean shall not pass over it.

It shall belong to those who walk on the way;

even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.

⁹No lion shall be there,

nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

they shall not be found there,

but the redeemed shall walk there.

¹⁰And the ransomed of the Lord shall return

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain gladness and joy,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Background

I don't know if any of you have seen this in the news, but Death Valley, California has been in the headlines quite a lot in the last few months. Back in August 2023, Tropical Storm Hillary came through and brought a deluge of water and rain to a parched land, and now there is a lake called Lake Manly that exists in Death Valley. Death Valley is one of the driest, most desolate, hottest places in all the world, and now there's a lake there. It's been there now for several months. It's six miles long, three miles wide, and one foot deep. To use Isaiah’s language, “the burning sand shall become a pool.” This is actually here, in some way, happening a little bit. This lake apparently has captured the attention and the imagination of those who are interested in life in the desert. Now people are showing up not just to see the heat and the contours of the land but to see this lake. People are kayaking on it, and they're canoeing on it, and they're wading through it. Anytime a desert is transformed to this extent, people want to see it. They want to explore it. They want to understand it, and even ask, “Is this a place that we could not just visit but even inhabit and live?” Might a transformation like this even make a place like Death Valley even inhabitable? The answer generally is no. This lake is going to fade away. It eventually will evaporate. The transformation, while it's kind of cool, also has meant a lot of destruction for Death Valley because the same rain that brought the lake has also wiped away so many of the roads in the surrounding area.

The reason I bring this up is because for those familiar with the desert — with its heat, with its inhospitality — any transformation at all sparks wonder and astonishment, because the one thing about the desert, generally, is that it never changes. It never changes. It never stops being harsh. It never stops being hot. It never stops being unforgiving, and it never stops being dangerous until you get a rainfall and something amazing happens like what’s going on in Death Valley.

This is what Isaiah is getting at in this passage. Isaiah is giving us this grand and beautiful vision of a wilderness, of a desert, that is transformed — something that makes what is happening in Death Valley actually look like just the faintest of shadows of what is to come. Isaiah has been our guide through these weeks of Lent, and this morning he's going to guide us into the wilderness. He's going to send us into the desert.

Israel and Isaiah were very familiar with the reality of the desert wilderness. It was so much a part of their history, and it was about to be part of their future. Their ancestors, Isaiah’s ancestors, had spent 40 years in the wilderness wandering. It was very much part of the reality of their future as they're about to head out into the wilderness again, where they will be in exile, living as foreigners in a foreign land. Even their life in Jerusalem, even during their time when they finally had these generations living in the Promised Land in Jerusalem, it still didn't feel quite like a settled place. There was always conflict and war and enemies always lurking and threatening. Their lives didn't always make sense to them. They lacked clarity. They didn't know what was going to happen next. They lacked control. There were nations far greater than they were who were dictating their very future. This was their reality.

Lack Clarity

So often for us, we share the same reality as well. You know what it is to lack clarity in your life. You don't know what to do with yourself, with your desires, with your career, with your family, with your lack of family, with your hopes, with your dreams. Oftentimes we simply don't know what to do. We do whatever we can to somehow make sense of our present circumstances and hopefully figure out what we should do for our future, and yet this kind of clarity remains absolutely elusive. The wilderness is the place and the time when you seek clarity, and yet you just can't find it.

Lack Control

The wilderness is also the place where we lack control. We might convince ourselves that we have control over our lives and over our circumstances — that we can control our future — but that illusion gets quickly shattered all the time. By a phone call, by an email, by a meeting you didn't expect, by words or actions of others that are constantly putting us in a direction of our lives that we never quite intended. We realize that we are not in control of our own lives, and we're certainly not in control of the lives of others, even those that we are closest to.

Isaiah is very familiar with this wilderness that is your life, because Isaiah is living and prophesying in one of the darkest times in Israel's history. The southern kingdom of Israel, where Jerusalem is now, has nations looming in the north, coming and threatening to send them into exile. Isaiah doesn't shy away from looking at the landscape before him and seeing the darkness and the despair that's coming for the people of God. But at the same time, he gives us this beautiful picture of hope — hope of a future world that is completely transformed and made new. Mountains where God will dwell and where nations will stream to be with his people. This poetic vision we have before us this morning is out of the wilderness in the desert made new — places where no life or very little life can exist. This place, being transformed into places that are now teeming with water and flowers and blossoms. The people who are in the desert are transformed as well. They move from being weak and feeble and scared to now rejoicing and singing, being joyful and hopeful.

This is why this vision in Isaiah is so important for us to reflect upon, because Isaiah is telling the people of Israel who are staring out at the desert — who are scared to death of a future that they cannot control, that they're going to be sent out into the desert — that there's actually a way through the desert. There's a way through the wilderness. And not just that. It's not just that there's a way through the desert, but the desert is going to be the place where they are going to meet God. They're going to meet the God that they long for not in the Promised Land but in the wilderness. It's in their wants, it's in their emptiness, that they will find God. That’s what I want to see this morning. We're looking at three ways in which God shows up for us in the wilderness and in the desert of our lives. In the wilderness we find: 1) God's presence, 2) God’s protection, and lastly, 3) God’s path.

God’s Presence

In the wilderness we find God's presence. Listen again to verses 1-2:

¹The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;

the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus;

²it shall blossom abundantly

and rejoice with joy and singing.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

They shall see the glory of the Lord,

the majesty of our God.

That last part in verse 2, “They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God,” this beautiful hope here is that those wandering in the wilderness do not have to wait. They don't have to wait until they get up a mountain. They don't have to wait until they get to a certain place of clarity in order to sense the fullness and the joy of God's presence. God is coming to meet them in the wilderness. He's present with them in the journey. This is the very thing that happened generations earlier as Israel left Egypt and went off into the desert. It was in the desert, in the midst of their wandering, that they met God. They witnessed his presence when the Lord went out before them in the pillar of cloud during the day and in a pillar of fire by night. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire never left them. It was in the wilderness that they saw, that they found, that they experienced the presence of God.

It's not just in the wanderings. It's not just in the Exodus that they see this. At other times, in one of the darkest times in Israel's history, at the height of their rebellion against God, God says something rather shocking. He says it to the prophet Hosea. He says he's going to lure Israel, his adulterous bride, into the wilderness, into the desert in order to propose to her once again. This is Hosea 2. I want you to listen to this. This is Hosea 2:14-16:

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,

and bring her into the wilderness,

and speak tenderly to her.

And there I will give her her vineyards

and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.

And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,

as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.

And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’”

That's a remarkable statement, that God, in order to get his people's attention, is going to bring them back out into the wilderness, not to punish them, not to make them pay, but to renew his covenant vows with them. The wilderness for God is a place of intimacy with his people. Time and time again, it's in the wilderness that God's people see and experience his presence. Here in this passage in Isaiah, God's presence once again is found in the wilderness. They shall see the glory of the Lord and the majesty of our God, but this time it's not a pillar of cloud, it's not a pillar of fire. It's this radical transformation of the landscape that reveals to them God's presence. The crocus are blossoming, and in verses 6-7, “waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool.”

God's presence is transforming this desert landscape from a place of emptiness and death to a place of life and fullness. It's only in the desert that Israel sees this. They have to be in the wilderness to see the burning sand becoming a pool. This is what I want us to see as well. It's only when we are emptied — when we are emptied of our pride and our self-reliance and our self-satisfaction — that we actually experience the fullness of God's presence in our lives. Not all of you are familiar with the Bible, but it's really important you understand the story that the Bible tells over and over again, and it's this: You and I — all of us, every man, woman, and child here — were made for the fullness of God. The Bible tells us that we were made in the image of God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He was meant to be our home. He was meant to be our joy and our fullness and our delight. But we sinned and we rebelled against God. We sought and still continue to seek, in our sin, to fill ourselves with other things, with lesser things. Whether it's ambition or resentment or anger, we fill ourselves with this constant search for love or power or comfort. We try to fill ourselves with these things that will never satisfy us, that will never ever fill us. And yet for us, the search continues. We are hoping to find the fullness of life in something or someone else because that's what we were made for.

But God loves you, and because he does, he wants to fill you with his own life. He wants to fill you with the fullness of his life. The very thing that you were made for, the very thing that you and I are actually searching for, he offers to us. But in order to fill us with his life, he first has to empty us. That is where the wilderness comes in. God must create a wilderness inside of you, inside of us, to cleanse our hearts so that we can be filled by him.

This is what Lent is all about. As we ponder our frailty and our sin, as we consider the cross of Jesus and his death for us, as many of you take up practices during Lent refraining from something or some practice, we acknowledge in all of this that all too often we fill ourselves with things that bring death rather than life. Only Jesus, only his life can fill us and satisfy us. He is the living water in the desert that we need and we long for. He is the life that you and I are always looking for, and he promises to fill us with it. That is what Isaiah is anticipating as he tells of this glorious, transformed desert in this passage. God will come to his people in a parched and dry land and renew it. We see this most beautifully and clearly as we see all things in Jesus. Jesus enters the emptiness of the world. He comes into a wilderness filled with Roman power, with empty religious leaders and spiritual darkness, and he promises to fill it with his very presence, with his resurrection life. What I want you to see is that even as you lack clarity, what you are promised is God's presence. The promise God makes to us is that he is always with us, that he will never leave us and that he will never forsake us.

God’s Protection

In the wilderness we see God's presence, but also in the wilderness we see his protection, we experience his protection. The transformation of the wilderness is protection in and of itself. The presence of water is a sign of life. Also notice the second part in verse 4, where we see that,

“Behold, your God

will come with vengeance,

with the recompense of God.

He will come and save you.”

In both the Exodus story and the exile story that Israel lived out, Israel was completely helpless. They're always completely helpless, every moment of their existence. They're weak. They're tired. They're hungry. They're completely exposed to all sorts of other enemies, other nations, the elements of the desert, predatory animals. They have no way to protect themselves. It's only in the wilderness that they find God ready and able to protect them. When they were not in the wilderness, Israel was always under the illusion that somehow they could protect themselves. The kings are always trying to go after their own way. They're trying to amass and build their own armies, relying on their own strength and their own provision, starting their wars, and living their life according to their own plans. But in the wilderness, they seek God's protection because they so desperately need it. It's then and only then that they hear these words from God himself. Hear verses 3-4,

Strengthen the weak hands,

and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who have an anxious heart,

“Be strong; fear not!

Behold, your God …

He will come and save you.”

But they only see that, they only hear that when they're in the wilderness. This reality can sound fine and even beautiful when we are here, sitting at church on a Sunday morning. But if we're honest, as we live out our daily lives, that's really not the message that we want to hear. That's really not the message that we are searching for. What we want to hear as we face the wilderness of our lives is, “You got this. You can figure out your life. You can do this. You've been through school. You have your degrees. You're enlightened. You're smart enough. You're savvy New Yorkers. You can figure this out.” Or even if you don't have it, you should, on some level, at some time in the future, be able to figure out whatever predicament you are in. At a minimum, you should be able to figure your life out — whatever your obstacle is and however far into the wilderness you might find yourself. You can get yourself out. Honestly that’s oftentimes what I want to tell you when we're sitting together and talking about your life. And that’s oftentimes what I want you to tell me. That “Together we can do this. We can get through the desert of our lives. We can somehow figure out what it means to follow Jesus in a profoundly secular world. Somehow, we can do it on our own.”

But it's just not true. You know it, and I know it. It's a lie that we so often tell ourselves, or at least we want to hear. But it's during Lent that we once again get to admit this deeper reality. As we look to the cross of Jesus, as we see that it was our failings, that it was our sin that put him there. As we confess our own weakness, we also admit that we are in a desert. We admit to ourselves that we find ourselves without clarity. We actually don't have the control over our lives that we want to think we have. Oftentimes our lives seemingly lack consequence and impact like we hoped it would. More often than not, we are weak, and we're tired. Lent is also the time when we get to hear these words, that your God has come. Be strong. Fear not. God will come and save you.

God has come in the flesh in his Son, Jesus, and he has gone into the wilderness of death in order to rescue us. He is coming even now in his Spirit, and he will come again. He is going to draw near to you and provide for you. In fact, he sends you into the wilderness, not because he hates you, not because he's forgotten about you, not because he wants to make you pay for something you've done. He sends you into the wilderness, because he loves you. Whatever wilderness experience you find yourself in, it's not a mistake. I want you to know, it's not an act of a vengeful god. It's not the circumstances caused by a distracted or an absent God. It's not because God can't rescue you out of something. It was so that you would find and hold on to this one truth: God has us in the wilderness because he has come to save us and rescue us, because he loves you. The only place Israel ever learned that was in the desert. Only when they were stripped of all their pride and of all their foolish notions of power, only when they were made weak in their knees and humbled in their hearts could they see a God who makes streams in the desert.

Please hear me. I'm not saying this glibly or in some way trying to put some happy face on the wilderness that you might find yourself in this morning, because I know that many of you are suffering greatly. Your bodies are failing you. Your relationships are broken. Your mind is turning against you. Your life has not turned out the way that you had expected it. The wilderness for you is not some theological illustration as part of a three-point sermon. It's a real thing. It grieves you and it's painful. But you need to hear the hope and the truth of this passage, that we are emptied in the wilderness so that we may be filled with the fullness of Christ. That's what Isaiah is showing us here. The wilderness is being filled and transformed with life. Crocuses and streams and burning sand turning into pools of water. This is emptiness and the desolation of the wilderness being filled with life. This is a picture of what happens to us in the wilderness.

We too are filled with the life of Christ, and our collective job, our vocation as the people of God, as a Church — in our life together, in our Community Groups, in our Bible studies, as we serve together, as we see one another on the sidewalks, as we gather around in conversations at our church, as we share meals together around dinner tables — our job is to help one another, to see the streams of water emerging in the wilderness of our lives and to help one another see that the wilderness is not proof of God's absence. It's an opportunity to see and experience his power and his presence in our lives and to trust in his protection. That's why gathering together in the things that we do as a church, as a body, as a community is so vitally important, because we need help from one another seeing this reality: It's in the desert that we find God and that God comes to meet us.

God’s Path

That's the last point. In the wilderness we see God's presence, we experience his protection, but lastly, we find God's path. This is what I want you to see in verse 8.

And a highway shall be there,

and it shall be called the Way of Holiness;

the unclean shall not pass over it.

It shall belong to those who walk on the way;

even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.

It doesn't seem to be too hard to find this path that Isaiah describes. It's not some narrow dust-covered trail, that if you're not looking close enough, you're going to miss it. This is a highway, and it's clear for all to see, and even fools shall not go astray. Maybe there's guardrails on it? I take great solace in the fact that the fools aren't going to miss this one. This highway isn't just the way through the desert; it's also, and maybe more importantly, the path that God takes to us.

When the last prophet, John the Baptist, who was literally living in the wilderness came to announce the coming of the Lord, he takes up Isaiah’s imagery when he announces the coming of the Lord. He takes us up and he says,

A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

This highway isn't just for Israel to travel on, and this highway isn't just the path that you and I take on our journey through the desert of our lives, the highway is the path that God takes. It's the path that God takes to get to you. That's what's in view here. That's why John the Baptist comes out of nowhere in the Gospel of Luke and says, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Get the highway ready, he's coming. The king is finally here. Get the streets ready. Level everything out. He's coming to us, into our world, into our streets and into our paths. He's coming to rescue us. He's coming into our wilderness, into our desert, just like he did with Israel, and he's going to do it again. That's what Isaiah is telling us.

These are people who are being led out of the desert on a highway by God himself. At long last they can finally see the God that they've been looking for, the one who's provided for them, the one who comes to offer protection for them. This is why there's so much joy in this passage. I don't know if you noticed it, but there's a lot of singing in Isaiah chapter 35. In verse 2 the desert is singing, and then in verse 10 we read this:

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain gladness and joy,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

These people are singing for joy because in the wilderness, despite all of its confusion, with its lack of clarity, with its lack of control, these people have met God. They've seen his presence, they've witnessed his protection, and they see this highway, and it is the path that they are on most assuredly, but more importantly it's the path that God has taken to get to them, to rescue them, and to fill them with his life. This is what Isaiah wants to see, and this is what John the Baptist wanted us to see as well when he announced the coming of the Lord: Jesus himself has come into the wilderness, and that's where he finds you.

As we continue through the season of Lent and as we anticipate Easter, we are called to strengthen our weak hands, to make firm our feeble knees, and to say to one another — all of us with anxious hearts — be strong. Fear not, for your God has come. Why should we do that? How can we say this to our anxious hearts, to our feeble knees, and to our weak hands? How can we say “Be strong and fear not?” Because at some point we're going to gain control of our lives? Do we say it because at some point after searching, we're finally going to get the clarity that we are looking for? No, that's not why we say it. We say these things, we say “be strong and fear not,” because in Jesus, our God has come to save us. He has come to rescue us. And he is making his home in us. He is the stream in the desert. He is the light in the darkness. He and he alone is our life. He is the one who opens up the eyes of the blind. He makes the deaf hear. He's the one that comes to heal the sick. He comes to strengthen our weak hands, and to make firm our feeble knees, and to comfort and to heal our anxious hearts. He is the one who finds us. He meets us, and he dwells with us. Jesus fills us in the wilderness. That's the promise that you and I have before us this morning.

It's the promise of the coming one, of Jesus Christ coming into the desert of our world to fill us and to make us new. His promise to transform you and to transform the world will not fail. It cannot fail because God's path to come to us goes through the cross. It is the death of his son Jesus that makes this promise sure. It is the way that you and I now can meet God in the wilderness and the desert of our lives — where we lack clarity, where we lack control, where our lives lack the consequence we had hoped for. This is the way we find God. Because Jesus comes to us, and in our weakness, and in our frailty, and in our lack, he promises to fill us. May God give us the vision that Isaiah gives us in the hope and the promise, to find the life that we are looking for in the only one who can offer it — in Jesus.

Let's pray.

O God, we thank you for your Word, and we thank you for this vision. Lord, I pray that as we navigate the wilderness of our lives in this world, as we struggle with our lack and our wanting, O God, would we see these promises to be sure, that you bring us into the wilderness because you love us, to get our attention, to draw us closer to yourself. O, may we be people who give that testimony each and every day of our lives, that you have come to meet us and to rescue us in your son Jesus. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.

Sermons

Jesus Through Isaiah’s Eyes: Provision

Background

God’s Presence

God’s Protection

God’s Path