Isaiah 26:9-11. With my soul have I desired Thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek Thee early: for when Thy judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. Let favour be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness: in the land of up-rightness will he deal unjustly, and will not behold the majesty of the Lord. Lord, when Thy hand is lifted up, they will not see: but they shall see, and be ashamed for their envy at the people; yea, the fire of Thine enemies shall devour them.
This chapter is about the Lord’s goodness and favour to His Church and, correspondingly, His judgements upon the enemies of His Church. There are only two classes of people in this world – the righteous and the wicked. God deals with the righteous in one way and with the wicked in another. You are either righteous or wicked in God’s sight; there is no middle ground.
We learn from the Word of God that, from the time of Noah and the Flood, every deliverance of the Church of God brings corresponding judgement on the wicked. This was seen also when the Children of Israel were brought out of Egypt through the Red Sea; what was salvation to them brought drowning, in God’s judgement, on Pharaoh and his hosts. The Church of God may be brought very low, into great darkness and weakness in this world, but the Lord, time and again throughout history (and the Lord is in control of history) acts for the salvation of His Church and people. He is ordering all the events of your life and mine, and everything in this world. He works all things according to the purpose of His will.
We have here the various responses to the Lord’s dealings with the righteous and the wicked. The righteous respond to His dealings in one way and the wicked in another. “When Thy judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness. Let favour be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness.” We see different responses here to how the Lord deals with the inhabitants of the earth: with you, with me and with everyone around us. We need to learn, and the Lord is willing to teach us: “Yet show I unto you a more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31).
Are you learning? That is a great question. If we will not learn, if we will not take to heart the Lord’s dealings, whatever they may be, we will learn one day. There is no contradiction in verse 11: “Lord, when Thy hand is lifted up, they will not see” – that is talking about the wicked. And when the verse goes on to say, “But they shall see”, the prophet is saying that this characterises the wicked – the ungodly, the unbeliever – they do not want to see what the Lord does, good or ill. But one day they “shall see and be ashamed”. Therefore, for you and me, the great matter is to learn when the Lord’s judgements are abroad in the earth.
We desire to consider: (1.) God’s judgements are in the earth in our day. (2.) Those who learn from God’s judgements, those of whom the text tells us: “the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness”. There are some who benefit from God’s solemn judgements. (3.) Those who will not learn when God’s judgements are in the earth. See that you are not among them.
Preached in Dingwall on 1 March 2020.
1. God’s judgements are in the earth.
Verse 9 speaks of a time when judgement is apparent. The Lord is judging all the time; He tries the hearts and the reins; He is continually pronouncing sentence against sin. The Lord is Judge of all the earth; “justice and judgement are the habitation of Thy throne” (Ps 89:14), and “shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen 18:25). It is impossible for the infinitely righteous God to judge in a way that is not right. He has every right to judge us. We rebel against Him; we have gone astray speaking lies (Ps 58:3) and because judgement is not executed speedily upon men, their heart “is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecc 8:11). But a day is coming when God will judge the world in righteousness (Acts 17:31).
Remember when Belshazzar, that wicked king in Babylon, was feasting with the great people of Babylon, using the vessels from the temple in Jerusalem which were consecrated to the worship of God (Dan 5:1-2). All of a sudden the hand of the Judge appeared: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. Is God any different today? We will not see a hand on the wall of this church, but have you seen a hand in your conscience? Have you seen a hand writing on every deed, thought and word?
One of our ministers reprov’d a man for working in his garden on a Sabbath. The man retorted, “I don’t have a God!” The minister said to him, “Yes, but God has you!” God has you, friend, and even if we hide in the grave we cannot escape from the Judge of all the earth.
In the Book of Revelation, the whole destiny of the inhabitants of the world is symbolically and mysteriously portrayed, together with the future history of the conflicts and victories of God’s Church. In chapter 5, before the seals were opened, there is a book that no man or angel can open. Only Christ can open it and the seven seals were keeping the book locked. Christ opens the book and the whole of Revelation is unfolding what is in it.
In chapter 6, you have different horses going forth. The first is the white horse – Christ on it going forth conquering and to conquer. That is the gospel, which went forth after Christ’s resurrection. He went throughout the nations, bringing sinners into captivity to His love, to the obedience of faith, making them new creatures, who are righteous with His righteousness – and following the Lamb whithersoever He went, even at the cost of their lives.
What happens when sinners, and nations, reject the gospel? “There went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon, to take peace from the earth” (Rev 6:4). This has happened time and again; when nations turned their back on the Word of God, war has come in. What was the First World War but an immense judgement on Germany, Britain, France and other nations? Germany and Britain had the Word of God and the gospel with the Reformation, but they turned their backs on them. Think of the millions who perished in these conflicts. The Lord judges in history.
Then there is the black horse – that is poverty and famine. How many times in the history of the world that horse has gone forth to devastate! And there is the pale horse: “His name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth” (Rev 6:8). The Lord is executing judgements upon sinners of mankind in this world.
Now we must make a number of distinctions, so that we may be clear in these matters. Largely speaking, the Lord judges nations and groups of men in time, not on the Day of Judgement – but individuals in eternity. Yet the Lord does judge individuals at various periods in their lives. But the ultimate judgement will be at death and it will be ratified openly before the whole universe, at the great white throne on the last day. For “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement” (Heb 9:27). There is nothing more for the ungodly but judgement, whether at death or the last day or for ever in eternity.
You may ask – and we have to make another distinction – Do the Lord’s people come under judgement? The answer is not straightforward. The visible Church may come under judgements; it may lose God’s blessing to a great degree. Remember the Church in Rome: it was a flourishing Church – the report of their godliness and faithfulness had gone throughout the earth, but it degenerated into a synagogue of Satan. The Church of Rome became the mother of harlots and a spiritual Babylon (Rev 17:5). Churches, visibly, can come under God’s judgement; and no Church, however faithful, is exempt from losing the blessing of God if it becomes unfaithful.
But God’s children may suffer in the judgements that come on the wicked. They may suffer very severely – and they will – but here is a wonderful distinction: there is not a drop of wrath in the troubles of the righteous. This should encourage you to seek to be among God’s people. Christ has taken the wrath of God for His people in His death on Calvary. He drank to the very bottom the cup of wrath due to His people’s sin. And “no weapon that is formed against [them] shall prosper” (Is 54:17) – all their sins are forgiven through the blood of Christ. “I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more” for ever (Heb 8:12).
Child of grace, not a drop of wrath due to your sins – not a drop of penal justice – will ever come upon you, as the men experienced in the furnace at Babylon. Not a hair of their heads was singed, and no smell of the furnace was on their clothes. But when the Lord sends sorrows and trials, they are sent by a Father who chastises His beloved children. It is because He loves you that He afflicts you. “For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth”, and “no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby” (Heb 12:6,11). That accords with our text, does it not? “When Thy judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” The Lord’s people will learn righteousness when His afflicting hand is upon them.
Our society is ripe for God’s judgement. We have just said that His judgements will not come in wrath upon His people, for Christ took all that wrath. But if your sins are yet upon you, Christ has not taken away your sin. If you are not looking to Him to remove your sin, what a fearful, dangerous condition you are in! However good your providence may be, the wrath and curse of God is upon you. Now apply that to our society, to the nation, to Dingwall, to Ross-shire, to the Highlands, to Scotland, to Britain, to the nations of the world; apply it to every workplace, every school, every hospital, every institution. Wherever you look, we are ripe for judgement.
We have had the heritage of the gospel; we have had the Word of God. It is a fearful judgement if a nation has never had the Word of God. But how much more solemn is the accumulated guilt of a people, a family, an individual, a nation, a town, a village, who knew the gospel, had the godly among them, and the worship and day of God were honoured, if they turn their backs on it, and Christian morality is now despised or ignored. It is against God that people are fighting. How remarkably long-suffering the Lord is but, as we will try to show, great judgements are already upon us.
We will mention three kinds of the judgements of God in dealing with the inhabitants of the earth: physical, moral and spiritual judgements and He is using these in our day. Physical judgements naturally relate to physical things, including men’s bodies. But moral and spiritual judgements refer more to men’s souls.
Think of physical judgements. We hear of a fearful virus – we all have heard about it for weeks. One tiny microbe, passing from an animal in China to one person; and all the science and technology, all the precautions, all the wealth of all the nations, can do nothing to prevent the spread of what is sweeping souls into eternity. Spanish influenza, at the end of the First World War swept many away into eternity. And who is to say it will not happen to us? It may not be this plague, it may not be the next plague, but one day something will be too much for our bodies and we will be taken into eternity.
We were thinking of the Fire of London, with Charles II newly on the throne and sweeping godly ministers out of the churches in England and Scotland; preceding this was the great Plague of London. The fire started with one spark from a baker’s oven, and it razed the whole city. God has razed cities. We read in the chapter: “He bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city, He layeth it low; He layeth it low, even to the ground; he bringeth it even to the dust” (Is 26:5). Is it any wonder that one germ can leave all the governments of the world powerless. One sin would sweep you away to a lost eternity. The one sin of Adam plunged the whole human race into a state of sin. One sin is enough to bring the judgement of God.
We hear of swarms of locusts in Africa, and people there seem wiser, more ready to acknowledge God’s hand in this, than people in the Western world. But the Lord could break the staff of bread in Britain; the food in Britain would not last long. The Lord could bring us to great poverty and distress. He may; He may not. He may bring terrible physical judgements, but whether He does or does not, here is a terrible judgement – to be left to prosper in sin, to be left to material riches and not acknowledge God.
We are coming more to moral judgements. It is a fearful judgement on our society when people do not know they are under God’s judgement; they are spiritually dead and their moral sense is darkened; their hearts are hardened and the fear of God is not before their eyes. They do not realise that God is angry with the wicked every day. For people to be left with comfortable lives in a godless condition is a great moral judgement. There are lots of judgements on our society; there is the judgement of uncleanness – even two generations ago this degree of immorality would have been unimaginable. No one thinks anything of the sin of Sodom, the sin of fornication, or people cohabiting in sin. Young friend, flee from the least inclination to these things. There is evil on the internet, on television, in the newspapers, evil everywhere, evil in your own heart. There are fearfully many temptations to drink and drugs; this is a dreadful judgement on our society. People dabble in them; before long they are hooked and their lives ruined. I warn you against these soul-ruining, life-destroying inventions of the devil.
Then there are spiritual judgements; people are left to atheism and Sabbath-breaking, and the Church of God abets that Sabbath breaking when office-bearers sit on the boards of football teams that break the Sabbath. What a fearful condition the Church of God is in! Sinners are being swept away to a lost eternity; yet there is no desire to hear about Christ. What about you? How unspeakably awful is the position of a sinner under the gospel who hardens his heart from the fear of God; who had impressions, strivings of the Holy Spirit, whose conscience was touched, but now his heart is harder than the nether millstone. This is a spiritual judgement you should fear above all others. You may say, “I am gospel proof. I have heard so many sermons over the years – ministers pleading with me and warning me, and now I feel I cannot repent or believe”. Well, you cannot repent or believe without grace, but the solemn matter is that you will not seek it.
2. Those who learn from the Lord’s judgements.
“For when Thy judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” They recognise the hand of the Lord in judgements and in providence. That is clearly true of the godly, yet we believe the verse is speaking of those who are ungodly but, because God afflicts them, brings great catastrophes on them and on society around them, these things are blessed to them. It has a humbling effect on them and their eyes are opened. We know a number who have been awakened to a sense of their need of Christ through very sore providences in their lives – bereavement, illness and other sore trials, in which they saw the hand of the Lord coming against them. They saw the misery of continuing in a godless state and were brought to a better mind.
Do you recognise the hand of the Lord in the sorrows of this life? The Lord hides His face; Hosea 5 tells us that He will withdraw Himself and “return to My place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek My face: in their affliction they will seek Me early”. What set them seeking Him? Verse 9 of our chapter: “With my soul have I desired Thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek Thee early”. They were awakened; God’s judgements became a reality – “the hand of the Lord is gone out against me” (Ruth 1:13). They were brought very low: these are the souls for whom the balm of the gospel is welcome, who realise that God’s anger is against them. Can you say that of yourself? “That when Thou speak’st Thou may’st be just, and clear in judging still” (Ps 51:4, metrical). “If the Lord would deal with me for my very best endeavours, as well as for my very worst sins and all that I am and all that I have ever done, said and thought, I would be under judgement to all eternity.” Can you put your amen to that?
In Revelation 11, we read of a judgement that had a good effect: “The same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven”. Judgement should make us afraid to go on in sin, afraid of the reality of God’s wrath; it should make us cry out to Him for mercy. He is glorified in the judgement of the wicked; His justice, holiness, truth and righteousness are seen there but – wonder of wonders – God is more glorified in saving sinners than in destroying them in a lost eternity. Take this as an encouragement. It brings more glory to God to save your soul than to damn you.
The love of God is displayed in the salvation of the sinner that looks to the blood of Jesus to cleanse from all sin – and is that you? Will you give glory to God in the salvation of your never-dying soul by a crucified Saviour who is able to save you to the uttermost degree of sin, hardness and impenitence. The blood of Christ is able to cleanse from all sin; the power of the Holy Spirit is able to turn the hardest heart to God. Nothing is impossible to the God of salvation. Therefore seek Him early, seek Him in the night of your affliction, seek Him when the judgements of God are abroad in the earth. “Come, My people, enter into thy chambers” – enter into Christ, into justifying grace, into adoption, into sanctification, into the covenant of grace.
The door of the gospel ark is open for poor refugees to enter. Flee from the wrath of God to come. “The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe” (Prov 18:10). Will you not join them? “Hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast” (Is 26:20). Hide in the wounds of a crucified Saviour. Hide in God’s promises. Hide in the salvation purchased by Christ: “I am the door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (Jn 10:9). Any man – that includes you! If you enter into Christ you will be saved. That is learning righteousness.
What if you get coronavirus? It is a very serious prospect, especially for older people. What if it lays you low and takes you to the gates of death, even over the threshold into eternity? Young, fit, strong and healthy people have succumbed to it. But whatever the case may be, what will you do when the overflowing flood reaches you at last and the cold waters of death sweep you away to eternity? Have you learned righteousness? Have you learned from the Lord’s dealings?
3. Those who do not learn.
“Let favour be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness”. Whether it is the Lord’s solemn display of His anger against sin in judgement, or His goodness, the Lord is good unto all men (Ps 145:9), causing His rain to fall and His sun to shine upon the righteous and the wicked. He is giving fruitful seasons, food, health, your faculties, your families, a roof over your head, peace, prosperity, civil liberties, religious liberty – all these blessings, innumerable blessings from day to day, keeping you from evil, from evil people, from the evil that is in your own heart to a remarkable degree. If the Lord took away restraints we would make a hell on earth. There is enough evil in your heart and mine to create the most fearful desolations in the earth.
The wicked do not see when the hand of the Lord is lifted up, nor His majesty as Judge or Saviour. Blinded by unbelief, they will not acknowledge Him. Sin has ruined the soul; Satan has darkened the mind; the heart is obstinate, harder than the nether millstone. Is that not how Pharaoh was? “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice?” Fearful judgements were coming upon him and yet his heart was hardened. Are you like Pharaoh, not obeying Christ and not submitting to the glorious overtures of mercy in the gospel? Are you wilfully determined to despise the grace of God? “Let favour be shewed to the wicked” – the highest favour of the offer of mercy near you, though denied to countless millions of your fellow sinners – “yet will he not learn righteousness: in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly”. No matter how many privileges and restraints, or how much morality they have, the wicked have a wicked nature and cannot turn from sin.
Nothing will turn us from the world and the ways of sin but the new birth and faith in Christ. Even if a wicked man could be in heaven for a moment, he could not exist there. In the land of pure holiness, he would have no desire for the things of God. There is nowhere for the wicked to go but eternal judgement; so verse 11: “They shall see, and be ashamed for their envy at the people; yea, the fire of Thine enemies shall devour them”. “The simple pass on” – those ignorant of God – “and are punished” (Prov 22:3). The Lord will save His people in zeal and love, even when His judgements are abroad in the earth. But for the wicked He reserves a fire: “Ye have kindled a fire in Mine anger”, which shall burn to the lowest hell. Lay it to heart, your sins kindle a “fire in Mine anger, which shall burn for ever” (Jer 17:4).
They “will not learn”. Will you learn? Will you recognise the hand of God in His judgements? Will you admit that God would be just to bring great judgement on you? The Lord’s people have every right to say, For Jesus’ sake, “though Thou wast angry with me, Thine anger is turned away, and Thou comfortedst me” (Is 12:1). Do you recognise that we are ripe for destruction as a nation? You say, That is not difficult to agree to. But do you see your own fitness for everlasting burnings? “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek 18:20).
In the Scriptures of truth you have these words: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon” (Is 55:7). Would it not be good for you – for us – to go to Christ now together for forgiveness of our sins? Today is the day of salvation; “today if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts” (Heb 4:7).