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“Christ as Restorer of True Hope Amidst the Human Heart’s Misguided Expectations”
Isaiah 61
Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament
Preached by Mike Gruber at the Forestdale Community Church
25 November 2016
1.) Opening prompt. Isaiah 61. Pew Bible page number 1122. Read text. Pray.
2.) Introduction. Name. I’ve been given the gracious opportunity of being the pastoral
intern here at Forestdale. I’m a student at Gordon-Conwell and my wife and I live there on
campus. We are originally from Minnesota. For those I haven’t met yet, I’d love to get
acquainted with you between the services this morning. Above all, I’d like to note that my wife
and I have felt very loved and welcomed. It’s a testament to the community that is present here
with how loved we feel and I look forward to loving and growing with you all in that love and
fellowship in the years to come.
3.) Sermon. “On August 20, 1945, a white sky stretched out over Naoetsu, heavy and
threatening. There was a shout in the compound: all prisoners of war were to assemble outside.
Some 700 men trampled out of the barracks and formed lines before the building. The little camp
commander, gloves on his hands and a sword on his hip, stepped atop the air-raid spotter’s
platform, and Kono [the translator] climbed up beside him.
“He spoke. ‘The war has come to a point of cessation.’
“There was no reaction from the prisoners. Some believed it, but kept silent for fear of
reprisal. Others, suspecting a trick, did not.
“With the commander’s speech finished and the prisoners waiting in suspicious silence,
Kono invited them to bathe in the Hokura River. This, too, was odd; the men had only rarely
been allowed to go in the river. They broke from their lines and began hiking down to the water,
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dropping clothes as they walked. Louie dragged along after them, peeled off his clothes, and
waded in.
“All over the river, the men scattered, scrubbing their skin, unsure what was happening.
Then they heard it.
“It was the growl of an aircraft engine, huge, low and close. The swimmers looked up,
and at first saw nothing but the overcast sky. Then, there it was, bursting from the clouds. A
bomber.
“As the men watched, the bomber dove, leveled off, and skimmed over the water, its
engine screaming. The POWs looked up at it. The bomber was headed straight toward them.
“In the instant before the plane shot overhead, the men in the water could just make out
the cockpit and, inside, the pilot, standing. Then the bomber was right over them. On each side of
the fuselage and on the underside of each wing, there was a broad white star in a blue circle. The
plane was not Japanese. It was American.
“In seconds, masses of naked men were stampeding out of the river and up the hill. As
the plane turned loops above, the pilot waving, the POWs swarmed into the compounds, out of
their minds with relief and rapture. Their fear of the guards or of the massacre they had so long
awaited, was gone, dispersed by the roar and muscle of the Detroit-made engineering. The
prisoners jumped up and down, shouted, sobbed. Some scrambled onto the camp roofs, waving
their arms and singing out their joy to the pilot above. Other piled against the camp fence and
sent it crashing over. Someone found matches, and soon, the entire length of fence was burning.
The Japanese simply shrank back and withdrew.
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“In the midst of the running, celebrating men, Louie stood on wavering legs, emaciated,
sick, dripping wet. A walking skeleton. In his tired mind, [the only thing he could think of] were
two words repeating themselves, over and over.
“‘I’m free. I’m free. I’m free.’” Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken.
Hope is one of the greatest—and one of the most universal features—of the human
experience. It is, undoubtedly, the great driving force that motivates human action. Perhaps some
would point to hope as humanity’s greatest strength. And it can be found in daily experience,
right? Sunday morning example. What you consciously do as a person is motivated by the
expectation of a result, however indirect, that you will receive as a result of that action. We
belong to and believe in great narratives which capture our hopes. Our dreams. This is true for
even common actions. Hillenbrand’s account of prisoners of war at the end of the Second World
War is no exception. The impulse governing all of their behavior was, no doubt, the expectation
that some day—somehow, some way—the war would end and they would be liberated.
This text in Isaiah captures this ancient human emotion of hope. And as we’ll see, while
this text was written during the time of the Babylonian exile, by the time of Jesus, it had taken on
a special significance in the redemptive story of God’s people due to them being once again
“exiled” by Rome in their own land. During the time of Rome, the Jewish nation hoped that God
would come powerfully, that he would send his Messiah to rule on the throne of David, that they
would be free from the bondage of Caesar. That the Law would be elevated to its place of proper
respect once again, that Yahweh would be revered. That the sadness would be reversed. Psalm
137 records that “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered
Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and
our tormentors, mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the LORD’s
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song in a foreign land?” This sadness, despite no longer being exiled to Babylon, had continued.
The great hope of Israel now was that the occupation of Rome, the impurity of their rebuilt
Temple, and all of the bitterness their domestic exile had brought would be reversed and
redeemed to joy.
But hope as an experience is not always intertwined with the purest motivations of the
heart, is it? If we hold that there is something we all want to achieve, then we start increasingly
relying on the mechanisms we’ve developed to achieve them, right? Our desires, no matter how
commendable, always bring baggage with them, because we develop elaborate systems of how
to achieve those desires. You want prosperity, health? Well, you have to develop a system of
government where those things can be developed peacefully and efficiently. A piece of land
where they can be defended, politicians to oversee it, a military to defend it, rights to guarantee
it, money to attach value to it. And all these things are good. They are, on their face, good
desires. Wanting health, happiness and humanistic virtues are not a bad thing.
But they are capable of leading to something far worse. The systems we develop to
achieve what we hope for very easily become gods unto themselves. Take for example the
different expectations that the Jewish people had concerning who the Messiah would be—how
this passage was interpreted during the time of Jesus. So the question that was asked was: how
would the promised Messiah restore all things and proclaim liberty to the captives?
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1 Some, for example, espoused political revolution against Rome—these were the socalled “Zealots,” Jews during the time of the events of the New Testament who
desired a violent overthrow of the political order of Rome.
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2 The Sadducees, by contrast, advocated cultural compromise—a sort of tolerant
syncretism with the surrounding Roman and Pagan cultures.
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3 Some were more radical, however, and advocated complete withdrawal—grassroot
groups like the Essenes, who withdrew to secluded communities to practice a more
“pure” form of adherence to the Law.
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4 And finally there were the Pharisees: usually educated clergy who held to strict
religious, linguistic and cultural separation.
And while these different emphases perhaps started on amicable terms, by the time of
Christ, the expectations that people had developed to explain who the Messiah would be had
become gods unto themselves.
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1 Jesus comes promising no political revolution: he says “if my kingdom were of this
world, my servants would have been fighting” (Jn 18:36). “Render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s” (Mark 12:27).
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2 He doesn’t advocate cultural compromise: “‘The most important commandment is,
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one”’” (Mark 12:29)—he doesn’t say,
bow down or become accepting of the foreign deities of Rome or the Greek gods.
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3 He doesn’t advocate secluded withdrawal from the world: “‘I do not ask that you
take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one’” (John 17:15).
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4 He doesn’t accept strict linguistic or cultural separation—“A man is not defiled by
what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it” (Matthew 15:11).
In fact, Jesus himself fulfills none of the Messianic expectations that the people
commonly had during his time. By the time of his death, Israel still has no apparent physical
Davidic king, is still ruled by Rome, still pays taxes to Caesar, has no self-governance, is still
riddled by death and plagues, has no pure caste of priests, is still plagued by corruption, is still
riddled by idol worship and the majority of the Jewish people are still living abroad and have still
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not been gathered back to the land of Canaan. How then can Jesus take this text and say, as he
does in Luke 4, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing?’”
It’s because the Messiah had come and had achieved true deliverance, just not in a way
that Israel had expected. And the systems that they had developed to explain how the Messiah
would “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” had, instead of being a means to achieve hope,
had become prisons which had enslaved them.
Jesus comes not to deliver the God’s people from political oppression, not to deliver them
from a mixing of cultural customs, not to deliver them from impure forms of worship, not to
uphold the homogeneity of the Israelite culture and language, but to save us from our sin. Sin is
the true form of oppression, the true impurity, the true thing that defiles us.
Ah, of course! It seems so obvious, we say as pious observers.
But how could they have got it so wrong? It seems easy to us, doesn’t it?
But the temptation is much more common. We live in a world utterly obsessed with
providing you with the next, great hope. If only we can have racial reconciliation. If only we can
just get rid of religious extremism in the Middle-East. If only we can have better national
defense. If only I can bump up my Roth IRA contributions next year. If only I can get that raise.
That promotion. If only I can get that other job. If only I can buy that car. Sell that car. If only I
can promote awareness about this important issue. If only my rent would go down. If only we
can elect this or that presidential candidate.
All these things seem totally innocent on their face. But this is how it starts. Rejection of
Christ as fulfillment of all our hopes and expectations rarely comes from a position of total evil
for most people. And rarely does it come immediately. No, the rejection of Christ as the
fulfillment of all hopes and dreams comes much more ominously than “I don’t want any part of
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this.” It’s not an overnight development. Wholesale, immediate rejection rarely happens. Rarely
do we instantly become raptured and captivated by some new idea. Instead it comes much more
innocently, often even good.
Something urgent that slithers its way in, some pressing matter of our lives that demands
our attention. A baby on the way, kids moving out, college starting, grades, job performance,
retirement, grandkids. And the rejection of Christ as your hope instead comes as a result of those
kinds of expectations grabbing more and more and more of your heart until there is a war
waging between your expectations as to what gets the most real estate. The good things start to
slowly infect our hearts. Like some kind of creeping infestation that starts off as a small tumor,
multiplying and multiplying and multiplying until it finally can win a safe majority of our
affections.As one writer puts it, “the real problem with the world is not the bad things, but the
good things that have become the best things.”
This is why Jesus himself was rejected as the fulfillment of this text. It was not merely
that he came unexpectedly, or even that he offered something that no one wanted—clearly they
did, people followed him—it was that the expectations of who the Messiah would be had become
religions unto themselves, and the people who supported them could justify it as saying that they
ultimately wanted things that were good, which no one could dispute.
This is who we are. There is no use in denying that we aren’t exposed to this. We will go
home today, turn on the television or radio or internet or whatever and be exposed to hundreds of
different ideas. We will be exposed to different urgencies and needs in our lives that seem good
on their face but have the ability to slowly corrupt the affection of our hearts.
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So how do we protect ourselves from this? How do we protect the human heart from
running wild with a good expectation and making it a form of idolatry, instead of elevating
Christ as the fulfillment of all our hope?
The first is to identify what the substance of our hopes are. What drives us? What
consumes our attention? One writer, David Powlison, puts it this way: “What are the ways [we]
get identity wrong? Perhaps you construct a self by the roles and accomplishments listed on your
résumé. You might identify yourself by your lineage or ethnicity, by your job history or the
schools you attended, by your marital status or parental role. Perhaps you define who you are by
your political leanings or the objects of your sexual longings. Maybe you consider yourself to be
summed up in a Myers-Briggs category or a psychiatric diagnosis. Your sense of self might be
based on money (or your lack thereof), on achievements (or failures), on the approval of others
(or their rejection), on your self-esteem (or self-hatred). Perhaps you think that your sins define
you: an angry man, an addict, an anxious people-pleaser. Perhaps afflictions define you:
disability, cancer, divorce. Even your Christian identity might anchor in something that is not
God: Bible knowledge, giftedness, or the church denomination to which you belong.”
The point, brothers and sisters, is for us to identify what we latch onto for our sense of
purpose and being and to ask ourselves if we would be comfortable if all of that were taken from
us. Could we still be satisfied in Christ if we lost our wealth, our husbands, our wives, our
boyfriends, our children, our countries, our political parties, our cars, our houses, our jobs, our
ministry gifts? If all the temporary pleasures of this life were taken from you, could you and I
and this entire church be pleased with all the life and joy we have in Christ?
That’s a tall order. And I think if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us might be
answering that question “no. Probably not.”
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“But I want to be.”
So how? How do we build satisfaction in the suffering Christ? How do we reconquer our
hearts and beat back all the competing interests which constantly beg for our utmost attention?
We die. We die to our identity. We die to ourselves, we die to this world and we die to
the pleasures of this world.
This doesn’t mean that life isn’t lived. Of course there is life to be lived! There are still
kids to bring to daycare, grandkids to visit, health concerns to address, people to love, taxes to
pay, gifts to buy.
But what it does mean is that we are striving up the hill of Calvary. [Jesus] said to them,
‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’
(Mark 8:34) “Whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew
10:38). “[A]ny one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke
14:33). He means this: to take up your instrument of death and crucify yourself to the world so
that all of its competing gifts don’t even compare to the joy offered you in Christ, so that you
can say with the apostle Paul “I have been crucified with Christ, [yet] it is no longer I who live,
but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
This is how Christ himself did not match the hopes of his contemporaries. You cannot be
liberated from Roman oppression, from impure observance of the Law of Moses, from illegal
taxation, if the supposed Messiah who was meant to liberate you from those things has died. You
cannot “rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated” (v4) if you are crucified
as a common criminal. And it goes against our own intuitions. True happiness cannot be found in
apparent sadness: you can’t achieve gain from loss.
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But Jesus’ death is precisely to show this: that liberation is achieved not by gain, force of
arms, coercion, victory, strength, achievement but by death to self. That the weakness of God is
stronger even than the strength of the world. That the power of God is made perfect in weakness,
that the joy of God is made most known in times of need, not sufficiency.
This is what it means for Christ to be the Restorer of our hopes. This is what Isaiah 61
means to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor: that the captives, the brokenhearted, the
prisoners, that those who grieve for Zion are being issued the summons: “Hope in God by
following me on the suffering road of Calvary.”
One prolific early Christian writer who was captured by this vision put it this way:
“But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count
everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his
sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain
Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law,
but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—
that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming
like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead”
(Philippians 3:7-11).
May it be so for us. Let’s pray.
4.) Prayer.
5.) Benediction. Numbers 6:24-26.