CHAPTER 13

Our Response to the Triumph of Grace

Chapter 12 brings Isaiah’s vision of God’s grace to a climax. Chapter 13 begins, “The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.” That seam marks a division in the book. Chapter 13 will change the subject. But before he moves on, Isaiah shows us ourselves at our best, fully enjoying God in the kingdom of our Messiah.

As God catches us up into his purpose sweeping through history, what do we contribute? Nothing to be proud of. What does God contribute? Grace greater than all our sin—grace for Isaiah (Isaiah 6:6, 7), grace for Judah (Isaiah 8:9–22), grace for Israel (Isaiah 10:16–34), grace for us. Isaiah is saying, “We have all failed God. But he is not defeated. He has a remedy—his saving grace in our Messiah (Isaiah 9:1–7; 11:1–16). He will triumph.”

When the Apostle Paul brings to a climax his argument about the overruling love of God, he asks us, “What then shall we say to these things?” (Romans 8:31). That is, how shall we respond to God? What can we say to him? We can’t just sit here. “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” That is where Isaiah takes us now. When we consider the grace of God restoring to us what we have bungled and giving us even better than what we had before, what shall we say to these things?

“You will say in that day” (Isaiah 12:1, 4). We are listening here to our own voices from the future. Isaiah is describing the revival of the church in the latter days.[1] He is not giving us details about the end times. He is creating an impression, giving us a foretaste of what it means to live in a spirit of praise. The structure of the text is simple:

1. A. Grace individually personalized: confident testimony (Isaiah 12:1, 2)
   B. Grace deeply accessed: rich enjoyment (Isaiah 12:3)
2. Grace corporately proclaimed: universal mission (Isaiah 12:4–6)

What empowers the testimony of verses 1, 2 and the mission of verses 4–6 is the rich enjoyment in verse 3. Verse 3 is the key to a spirit of praise flooding our hearts. It is out of our delight in God that we find our prophetic voices. True Christianity isn’t primarily a matter of control; primarily it’s overflowing fullness. That is the triumph of grace.

The subtlety in Isaiah’s text is this: English uses one word, you, the second person in both singular and plural. But Isaiah’s Hebrew uses different linguistic forms for the second person singular and plural. The “you” in verse 1 is singular. Isaiah is saying, “In that day, each of you individually will say . . .” Hence, the pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my” in verses 1, 2. But the “you” in verses 3, 4 is plural. Here he is saying, “All of you together, as God’s remnant people, will draw water from the wells of salvation. And in that day, out of that ever-fresh fullness, you will all say . . .” Then we see corporate worship and mission in verses 4–6.[2] So the difference between “you will say” in verses 1, 2 and verses 4–6 is the difference between personal testimony and corporate witness.[3] Each of us will have a story to tell, and together we will fill the world with the praises of God.

1

Your Confident Testimony

First and foremost, God gives you your own experience of what it means to be saved. There is no secondhand salvation.

I will give thanks to you, O Lord,
for though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
that you might comfort me. (Isaiah 12:1)

Our deepest problem is not whether we will love God, but whether God will love us. After all we have done to him, why shouldn’t he hate us forever?

It would be interesting to poll Christians with the question, “What is the greatest wonder in all of your salvation?” Isaiah’s answer would be, “God is your former enemy. Now he comes to comfort you.” Have you transitioned from being frustrated with a reluctant God who isn’t cooperating with your agenda to being comforted by a God who is lavishing you with grace upon grace? How does anyone turn that corner? By going back to the gospel that made us Christians in the first place.

Listen to it again. The wrath of God at our real guilt is warranted, even required for God to be true to himself. His condemnation does fall, and with full force, but not on us. It falls on our Substitute. In his great love for guilty people, Jesus changed places with us at the cross. His sacrifice is the reason why God’s grace is morally entitled to treat us like royalty, which he does. If Jesus bears our condemnation far away, then all-forgiving grace toward us is not an extravagance; it is the morally beautiful meaning of our new relationship with God. For us to go boldly now into his presence for comfort, to receive mercy and find grace whenever we have a need, brings God’s own purpose to fulfillment. He wants every one of us to be able to say to him, “You comfort me.” If we will discover what that means for us now, we will be saying it forever.

Behold, God is my salvation;
I will trust, and will not be afraid. (Isaiah 12:2a)

Isaiah spent his life trying to persuade people to trust in God and not be afraid and not give themselves to false saviors. His book makes the question unavoidable for us today: Will we trust God through our crises? Or will we fearfully surround our trust in God with mechanisms of self-help, just in case God fails? Do we feel secure with God alone?

One of the striking things about this testimony, this voice out of the future, is its simplicity. We complicate our trust in God. We mix in other things. We trust in our trust in God. We trust in our theology of God. We trust in our worship of God. We cling to God plus whatever makes us feel comfortable and superior. And the more props we need, the more insecure we become. But when the grace of God overrules our folly, real faith comes alive, and our outlook is simplified so that we say, “Behold, God is my salvation. He is enough. Period.” We then discover that we have been safe all along.

For the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation. (Isaiah 12:2b)

When we experience how strong God really is on our behalf, better than we thought he’d be, he becomes our song. Remember the old musicals like Singin’ in the Rain? Gene Kelly is walking down the street, happily sloshing in the rain and puddles, wonderfully in love, and he just starts singing. It’s crazy. To enjoy that scene, we have to suspend belief just enough to play along with the movie. We have to let the spell come over us and identify with a grown man out in the rain, soaking wet and not caring at all and singing his head off. Why do people make films like that? Why do we watch them? The reason is that it isn’t really crazy. God has put into our hearts that very capacity, the freedom to break out into song as the wonder of his saving love fills our hearts. That holy delight is what we were created for. We sense that is so. And in the kingdom we will glorify and enjoy God with unrestrained song.

The heart sings when we accept how little it matters that we are in control and how much it matters that God is in control for us, when we discover how little it matters that we are able and how much it suffices that God is able on our behalf. The day we step into the messianic kingdom and find that God has been true to his word, we redeemed will erupt in music as never before. The gospel says that we will sing a new song. It will sound “like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder . . . like the sound of harpists playing on their harps” (Revelation 14:2). We have not yet heard that sound—sustained intensity like a waterfall, punctuated bursts like claps of thunder, overwhelming sweetness like an orchestra of harpists, all rolled into one. There is no such sound in all the world. But someday we will be a part of it. Our fully saved hearts will become capable of it. It will pour out of us forever.

Isaiah is echoing the Song of Moses, sung after God rescued Israel through the Red Sea (Exodus 15:2–18). They were weak. But it didn’t matter. Why? Here is the confidence of the Biblical gospel from cover to cover: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). His power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). When that assurance enters our hearts, we see that even the frightening experiences of life are leading us more deeply into our salvation. We can stop thinking like victims and start singing even now.

Isaiah describes God in an unusual way. The English Standard Version translates verse 2 “the Lord God.” The New International Version translates this more literally: “the Lord, the Lord.” Isaiah is overusing the Old Testament’s personal name for God, because grace enriches us with a strong sense of personal possession in God himself. The text literally reads, “Yah, Yahweh, is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.” In the triumph of grace we stop standing outside the store, looking in wistfully at the treasures in the window; we walk right in and receive more than we could ask or imagine, because this Owner refuses to do business upon the basis of our payment. Everything is free (cf. Isaiah 55:1, 2). And we will share him all together.

2

Our Rich Enjoyment

With joy you [plural] will draw water from the wells of salvation. (Isaiah 12:3)

David said to God, “My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1). Our prejudices see this world as the satisfaction of our thirst, and sometimes God feels like a dry and weary land. The truth is the opposite. We live in a burning wilderness, and God is all our satisfaction. He opens up to us wells of life-giving fullness, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit (John 4:13, 14), enough for all of time and eternity.

The prospect of thirsty, weary, dirty people pulling up bucket after bucket of fresh, cool water in endless supply—drinking deeply, pouring it over their heads, dunking their faces into it, splashing one another—that is a vision of God’s gifts of salvation widely shared. Joyfully drawing water from the wells of salvation is the very life of God, openly accessible to us all, entering into our actual experience. And the deeper we drink, the greater our praise.

Jesus said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37, 38). One commentator explains it this way:

When the believer comes to Christ and drinks he not only slakes his thirst but receives such an abundant supply that veritable rivers flow from him. This stresses the outgoing nature of the Spirit-filled life. . . . There is nothing of the piety of the pond in Christianity.[4]

Stagnant experience—the piety of the pond—is not of God. His salvation flows in endless freshness.

Isaiah says, “. . . wells of salvation.” How many are there? What different kinds are there? The well of love, the well of delight, the well of healing—wells of every grace and favor. We will enjoy every one. The gospel says, “For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17).

3

Our Universal Mission

And you will say in that day:
“Give thanks to the Lord, call upon his name,
make known his deeds among the peoples,
proclaim that his name is exalted.” (Isaiah 12:4)

Isaiah foresees one message spreading over the world, exalting the truth about God, awakening all peoples to the infinite greatness and majesty of God revealed in his saving deeds. As we embrace this mission now, we exalt his name very profoundly.

In 1993 three New Tribes Mission missionaries were kidnapped in Colombia by terrorists. For eight years their families and friends wondered and prayed and worried. Eventually they were informed that the men were dead. Dan Germann was the NTM director in Colombia at that time. In an interview he said that their prayers changed through those long years of uncertainty. They started out praying that God would bring the men home safely. They ended up praying, “God, even if we never know what has become of them, you will still be God.” Dan said, “There is a very special sense of awe at who God is and how sufficient he is when the miracle doesn’t happen, but the wonder of his sufficiency is still present.”[5] This too is the triumph of grace. We come to realize that God is God. Our living and our dying take on a very special sense of awe, no matter what price we pay to spread his song. His cause is the one cause on the face of the earth that will finally succeed.

Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously;
let this be made known in all the earth.
Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion,
for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel. (vv. 5, 6)

There we are, out in the future kingdom, no longer hanging back but alive with joy in God alone. John Trapp, the Puritan scholar, wrote, “No duty is more pressed in both Testaments than this, of rejoicing in the Lord. It is no less a sin not to rejoice than not to repent.”[6] In his great prayer, Jesus asked his Father on our behalf “that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves” (John 17:13). Paul defined the essence of Christianity as “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17). Isaiah foresees “a day yet to be when a restored people will in hilarious celebration delight in their only asset—the Holy One.”[7]

The reason why Christian missions will write the last, happy chapter of history is the great presence of God with his people: “Great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” He is not content to stand off at a distance. From the beginning, God wanted to dwell among his people (Exodus 25:8). He dwelt among us in Jesus (John 1:14). He comes to us through the Holy Spirit (John 14:21, 23). And in the messianic kingdom, his presence will be great among us, uniting the world in holy delight (Zechariah 2:10, 11).

Content taken from Isaiah: God Saves Sinners by Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., ©2012. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All Scriptures are quoted from the English Standard Version

[1] By repeating the literary marker “in that day,” Isaiah is dovetailing chapter 12 with 10:20, 27; 11:10, 11 as the immediate context.
[2] Verse 6 shifts to feminine singular forms, but only because Isaiah is referring to the people of God corporately as the “inhabitant of Zion.” The grammatical form must change, but the logic of corporate address remains.
[3] See Will Metzger, Tell the Truth: The Whole Gospel to the Whole Person by Whole People, 2nd edition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984), pp. 21–27, regarding the difference between testimony and witness.
[4] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973 reprint), pp. 425, 426.
[5] World Pulse, November 12, 2001, p. 5.
[6] Quoted in Derek Thomas, God Delivers: Isaiah Simply Explained (Durham, UK: Evangelical Press, 1991), p. 119.
[7] Oswalt, I:295.