Waiting Well

What are you waiting for?

That's a serious question to think about. What's something you're currently waiting for? How long have you been waiting for it?

What's the longest you've ever waited for something?

Have you ever thought about how much of your life you spend waiting? Surveys have been done which have tried to add up all of the time that people wait in their lives. Waiting for traffic, waiting in line, waiting on hold, waiting for someone to get ready, waiting for someone to show up, waiting for someone to text you back.

And if you take all of that time and add it up, it works out to years of our lives spent waiting. We spend a lot of time waiting.

As Christians we have an even bigger perspective on this because we know that the life of faith is a life of waiting. Last week, we heard from Isaiah as he looked forward to the day when it will be said, “It will be said on that day, ‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation’” (Isaiah 25:9).

And that day is coming. But for now, we wait. Unlike Isaiah, we can look back and see how Christ has come and inaugurated these great promises. But still, like Isaiah, we wait. We spend, not just hours, not just years, but our whole lives in faith, waiting for God to do what He's promised to do.

How are we supposed to do that? What is our waiting supposed to look like? What does it look like to wait well?

I want to suggest those are helpful questions to guide us as we make sense of this chapter of Isaiah before us today. There's a lot going on in chapter 26, but taken together I think this chapter helps us learn how to wait well.

1. A Glimpse into the Future (vv. 1-6)

This chapter begins in much the same place as last week, with a glimpse into the future. Isaiah is still looking ahead to that day of salvation when our waiting is over. In that day, Isaiah tells us that a song will be sung in the land of Judah.

And here's the song. Verse 1: "We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks." Jerusalem was a strong city, but not strong enough to hold off the Assyrians. That's why Israel was so freaked out in the days of Isaiah, and wanted to make alliances with other nations to help defend themselves. Jerusalem wasn't strong enough to hold of the Babylonians, or the Romans after them.

But in this day, the people recognize the true source of their strength and help. God's salvation is their walls and bulwarks.

And the people know it. Finally, after how many centuries of faithlessness, the people have come to recognize who their God is. That's what should grip us about these verses. Look at verse 2: “Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in” (Isaiah 26:2).

The righteous nation that keeps faith? Who's that? Haven't we seen over and over again that Israel and Judah, except maybe for short little periods of time here and there, for most of their history, were anything but righteous and did anything but keep faith?

But Isaiah is looking forward to a day where God has not just preserved Jerusalem, but has transformed the hearts of His people. He's finally overcome their rebellion and their faithlessness.

And just look at what this righteous nation goes on to sing to each other:“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock” (Isaiah 26:3–4).

Hasn't this been the message of these past 13 chapters? Trust in the Lord, not the other nations. Keep your mind stayed on Him, instead of geopolitical turmoil, and you'll experience peace. And finally, God's people have gotten it. They're experiencing the peace that comes when we set our minds on the Lord and really trust Him to do what He's promised to do.

"Trust in the Lord forever," the song goes on, "for the Lord God is an everlasting rock." The Lord is a solid foundation that can't be moved. Proof? Verse 5. He took down the high and lofty city. It's hard to miss here the reference to Babel, the high tower that stands as a symbol of people's pride and arrogance and desire to take God's place away from Him.

He's humbled the inhabitants of the high city, casting it to the dust, and the feet of the poor and the needy trample over it as they go walking around. And rather than being something still something they are hoping for, this song describes the fall of Babylon as a past event. It's already happened.

So just think about this vision of the future here that Isaiah gives. This is a day in which a transformed, faithful and righteous people sing about their peace and security as they trust in the Lord who has done all that He promised to do.

If you were to step into Isaiah's day, Isaiah's mind and heart, there might not be a better future you could describe or even imagine than this.

2. A Prayer for the Present (vv. 7-12)

But if you were to step into Isaiah's day, into Isaiah's mind and heart, you would know for certain that this future was still very much in the future. This was not at all what Isaiah saw or experienced in 700 BC as he spoke the word of God to a people who were doing anything but sing this song to one another.

So what happens next is Isaiah prays. Verses 7-12 are his prayer for the present. His present-day calling out to God in the midst of his present-day experience.

And no surprise, Isaiah's experience is one of waiting—verse 8. A waiting filled with desire (verse 8), yearning (verse 9), seeking (verse 9). He aches for everything he's only heard about or seen in visions. He aches for all that he does not have.

a. Obedient Waiting

But his aching isn't just a feeling. It's not just a pointless experience of existential angst. Isaiah's waiting has two major aspects to it we don't want to miss. The first is how Isaiah's waiting is an obedient waiting. He's waiting, as verse 8 says, "In the path of your judgements."

"Judgements" here is not referring to God's acts of judgement. It's referring to the right and just decisions He's made. Just like a human judge makes decisions that "lay down the law," so the Lord has given us His judgements—His decrees and decisions about what is right and good and what is not.

And it's walking in the path of those judgements that Isaiah waits for the Lord. He actually started this section by describing this path in verse 7. It's a path that is level, made level by the Lord. In a day when most travel happened on foot, a level path would have been a big deal.

Like the Proverbs remind us over and again, walking in the path of God's righteousness isn't a twisted, turn-y path full of danger and surprises. It's a straightforward, level way to live. And it's walking in that straight path that Isaiah obediently waits for the Lord.

Down in verse 9 Isaiah expresses a desire for God's judgements, His righteous decisions, to be in the earth, so that the people of the earth would learn righteousness. In verse 10, he wants the wicked to be treated appropriately so that they will learn righteousness.

So Isaiah waits with obedience, and a desire for all to walk in obedience to the Lord.

b. God-Centred Waiting

Second, Isaiah's obedience is God-centred. Which is another way of saying that Isaiah is waiting for God Himself. Isaiah is not just waiting for God to do something for him that he wants him to do. Isaiah longs for God himself.

Look back at verse 8-9: “In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.” (Isaiah 26:8–9).

God is not some means to an end for Isaiah. A genie in a bottle who gives him what he wants. A vending machine that spits out the real treat. No, Isaiah longs for God himself.

Verse 8 says that "your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul." "Name" in the Bible doesn't just speak to the sound that we use to call someone, but often speaks to their reputation and fame. Like when we say "he made a name for himself." Or when we pray, "Hallowed by your name."

Isaiah longs for God's fame, for God to be remembered and renowned. In the night, his soul longs for God, earnestly seeking Him and Him alone.

Don't we see the same heart in the Psalms? Like we sang earlier today from Psalm 84, “My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God” (Psalm 84:2).

Isaiah waits for God. He does not just wait for God to do something. He waits for God Himself because God Himself is who Isaiah wants.

And Isaiah doesn't just want this for himself. In verse 9 and 10, he longs for God's judgements to teach people righteousness so that the wicked will see the majesty of the Lord. God is the goal here.

And so Isaiah prays. He prays in verse 11 that the wicked would see and experience the upheld hand of the Lord, His holy jealous zeal for His people. And he's confident, in verse 12, that his waiting will not be in vain—that God will ordain, or establish, peace for His people.

Because God is the great actor here, the one who has done for His people all of their works.

What another beautiful God-centred statement. Any work they've done was actually the Lord. Haven't we seen that over and over in our recent journeys through Genesis and Joshua and Judges? This is not a story about amazing people doing amazing things, but about a gracious God who works for His messed-up people.

It's the same story all the way up to Christ, who came to work for us. He came to pick up the baton we'd dropped, live the perfect life we didn't live, earn the righteous status we could never earn, and pour out on us blessings and eternal life that He bought and paid for.

So Isaiah's waiting is a God-centred, through and through. He waits for God. He longs for God. He yearns for the God who zealously works for His people.

3. Looking Back, Looking Ahead (vv. 13-19)

So, we've seen Isaiah's glimpse of the future, and his prayer for the present. As he continues to pray, we see his attention turn in another direction—the past. He looks back at the history of God's people as a way of confirming and affirming what will be true in the future.

He starts in verse 13, where he considers how, in the past, Israel's sin led them into slavery to other lords—human or otherwise. "O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us." This could be a one-line summary of the book of Judges, and all the foreign nations who ruled over Israel as they kept turning away, again and again, from the Lord.

But God made sure that none of that lasted. His name is the only one that His people will remember, because all of these other would-be lords died and were wiped out, as verse 14 says. Verse 16 recalls how time and time again God's people cried out to him when they were in the midst of his discipline, and we remember how again and again God sent deliverers to rescue them.

All that is true. And yet, and yet, where had all of that landed God's people? For all the times God saved them, it didn't stop them from running back to other kings and other gods. Most of their kings were wicked and made the people sin even worse than they did in the days of the judges. All of God's discipline never got them anywhere.

And Isaiah seems to point to this sense of futility in verses 17-18, where he compares God's people to a pregnant woman, writhing in pain, right at the point of birth, but only giving birth to wind. For all of Israel's struggles, they don't seem to have anything to show for it.

But as Isaiah once again turns his attention to the future, he knows that all of this is going to change. Transforming, resurrecting grace is coming for God's people.

We get a glimpse of this in verse 15 where he speaks about God glorifying Himself by increasing the nation and enlarging the borders of their land. We know that Isaiah must be looking ahead here, because at his time in history they were pretty much as small as they'd ever been. So with the eyes of a prophet he speaks about a future event as if it was as certain as the past. God is going to do this.

But even if God does that in the future, what does that mean for all of those who laboured and suffered and trusted and waited and got nothing for it? Is the good news only that some good things are going to happen to some people who will be born years in the future?

Not at all. Verse 19 introduces us to the great hope of God's people—a hope that His power and transforming grace cannot be overcome even by death.

“Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead” (Isaiah 26:19).

This is the ultimate hope to which God's people look. We kind of got a hint of this in verse 14 where we heard that the wicked kings who oppressed them will not live, will not arise, but will remain as "shades," or disembodied dead spirits. Ghosts inhabiting the underworld.

But the faithful dead will live. Their very bodies will arise, awake, and sing for joy as the earth gives birth again to its dead.

This is one of the key verses that gave God's Old-Covenant people a hope beyond the grave. This is one of the key passages that made them look forward to and long for the great resurrection at the end of the ages.

And we know that this great resurrection will come because it's already started. It started the day Christ's body arose—when, after three days of dwelling in the dust, he awoke. And I don't know what you picture Jesus doing with his first few gulps of air but I would not be surprised if He sang.

And the New Testament tells us how this resurrection life has become our life as we are born again, and though our outward bodies are wasting away, our inward bodies are being renewed day by day with a resurrected eternal life that is already ours.

And this gives us confidence as, with Isaiah, we hope and wait to be glorified with Him, as Romans 8 tells us.

And this is where this great hope of the resurrection joins up with Isaiah's God-centred longing for God Himself. See, our longing for the resurrection is not just about getting a new body without aches and pains and aging.

Our great longing is for a new body which with we can glorify God and enjoy Him forever. In these mortal bodies, we don't have the capacity to be with God in the way we long for. We can't see him without death. Our brains can only handle so much. We can only sing to him so loud and so long before our voices get hoarse or our brains run out of oxygen. We can't sustain the focus and the wonder and the worship that God deserves.

So we long for God, and we long for new bodies, glorified together with Him, in which we can enjoy Him fully forever. This is the promise. “And so we will always be with the Lord” says 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

This promise is one that I love lingering on at the graveside of Christians. Jews and Christians have, for most of our history, practiced the burial of the body, because we believe in the resurrection of the body. Of course God can resurrect a cremated person, but burial is a very important symbol that recognizes that the earth will give birth to its dead.

And so when I preside over a funeral of a Christian, I love to stand at the edge of that hole in the ground and defy death and proclaim that from this very spot this person will arise to new life at the return of their Lord Jesus Christ. Though we go down quiet, we're going to come up singing.

4. Present Patience (vv. 20-21)

We're not there yet, though, are we? We're still waiting. And so this passage ends with a final call for present patience.

The language in these final two verses comes from the Exodus and the Passover. The night before Israel left Egypt, God came and struck the land with a final plague. The people were to be dressed and ready to go, but were told to spend that night inside their homes, behind the doors smeared with blood, that the destroyer of the firstborn might pass over them.

And when the judgement was over, they could emerge and leave and go out to the wilderness to be with their God.

And using this language, Isaiah says, in verses 20-21, “Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed by. For behold, the Lord is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain” (Isaiah 26:20–21).

God is coming to judge the world. All of the sins hidden for ages will be made clear. Everything hidden will come to light, like Jesus told us. And the just fury of God will give to each person exactly what they've earned.

After passover, there is the exodus. After judgement, new beginnings. After wrath, resurrection. Until then, we wait.

5. Three Questions for Those Waiting

And, like we said at the beginning, one way of describing today's passage is to say that it's been about waiting well. And what we want to do now is just sum up what we've seen here today and sum up how this all can help us who, like Isaiah himself, are still waiting.

And we're going to do that by asking three questions.

a. Who Are We?

The first question we ask is, "who are we?" What I'm pointing to here is the way in which Isaiah 26 points to two basic categories of people in the world.

The first is "the righteous." We hear about "the righteous nation that keeps faith" in verse 2, and "the righteous," as a group of people, are pointed to again twice in verse 7. "The righteous" are conected to the poor and needy in verse 6 and the people of God in verse 10.

On the other hand are "the wicked" in verse 10. We can assume these are the kinds of people who live in their own towers of Babel. They're the ones who deal corruptly in verse 10, and are identified as God's adversaries in verse 11.

Let's just acknowledge that dividing humanity into these basic divisions is not a way that we often think in our world. It seems simplistic, juvenile even. Just recently I was telling my kids how the "good guy/bad guy" division doesn't really work in real life. Real life is really complicated.

And that's why we need to remember that "the righteous" in Isaiah 26, and indeed across all of Scripture, aren't just inherently good people. The "good guys." "The righteous" are people who have been made righteous by the grace of God.

We saw that in verse 2. For Isaiah to speak of a "righteous nation that keeps faith," some kind of miracle needed to happen. And that miracle is pointed to in the rest of the chapter. Verse 12 speaks about God doing for them all their works. Like we saw, this points to the active obedience of Christ, by which He gives us a righteous status.

Verse 19 speaks about the resurrecting, transforming power of God, which we experience today as we are born again by God's power. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—” (Ephesians 2:4–5).

And being given a righteous status and a new spiritual life, we are enabled and empowered to live righteously in the path of God's judgements as we actively, obediently wait for Him to come and save.

See, who we are makes all the difference to how we wait. If you are among the arrogant, Babel-building wicked, which is where we all start, than all we wait for is God's fiery judgement.

But if by faith we receive the righteous status and the resurrection life offered to us by God, we begin to walk in the path of righteousness, and wait for His salvation.

So who are you? And could this be the day you receive God's gift of righteousness, bought and paid for by Christ, offered freely to all as a gift? If you want this, and you're not sure what I mean, please come talk to me afterwards. I've love to help you answer this question: "Who am I?"

b. What Do We Really Want?

The second question is "What do we really want?"

This passage has shown us as the righteous wait for their God, it is their God whom they wait for. "O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul years for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you." (vv. 8-9).

We can't be like the people in John 6, chasing Jesus around for more fish and bread, but uninterested in the true bread of life that came down from heaven to satisfy us eternally.

Do you know the Lord as your truly satisfying treasure? Do you look at this world God made, do you look at the Word he's revealed, and know that nothing else, no one else, can compare with Him? As you eat the bread with us here every week, do you understand, through the symbolism, that Jesus is the bread of life that you need more than anything else? Do you pray the prayer of Psalm 90: "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days" (Psa 90:14)?

If you've been treating God like a vending machine, could this be the day you repent, and ask God to give you the appetites of Isaiah—that you might wait for and desire and yearn for Him as the source of all of your joy? That He would become what you really want?

c. What Time Is It?

Finally, we ask our third question, "What time is it?" What I mean by that is, in order to wait well, we need to know where we are in the waiting process. Did you notice in this chapter how deliberate Isaiah was with time—looking ahead, looking back, and applying that to the present time.

Many people have started off waiting for God but have lost the plot because they forgot what time it was. Growing up, I went to churches that taught people to expect the Isaiah 25 experience today. To expect the promised future glory here and now.

And one of the big problems here is that when life hits you hard, and you suffer, and you realize that you're not in heaven yet, you get discouraged and disillusioned and I've seen so many people lose their faith entirely.

On the other hand, if we forget the glory that is coming, and think that our present suffering is all there is, we'll also get discouraged as we get stuck in the mud. We need to know what time it is.

And for us New Testament Christians, we have a perspective of time that even Isaiah didn't have. We can see the exile and the return, the manger and the cross and the empty grave, the steady advance of the gospel and the reign of Christ from heaven. We know what we've already received even as we wait for what is not yet here.

So brothers and sisters, know what time it is. And for all that is not yet ours, hear the call of Isaiah to come and shut the door and wait for final judgement to pass over us and give way to final glory.

Once a year Israel re-enacted the passover with a meal that celebrated God's deliverance from Egypt. They didn't know it also looked forward to the greater and deliverance from sin and death. "This cup is a new covenant in my blood."

And now every week we re-enact, not only the passover, but the last supper. When we eat and drink we remember the exodus from Egypt and the exodus from sin's dominion that Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

And each time we eat and drink the bread and the cup we proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. We proclaim that the final judgement for our sins has already passed over us when it fell on Christ, our true passover lamb. And we proclaim that Jesus the Lord is coming out from His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity and to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him (Hebrews 9:28).

So we wait. We eat and drink to remind ourselves of who we are, what we really want, and what time it is. And we pray for the grace to go into the next six days, walking in the obedient path of God's judgements, waiting for Him with confidence that our hope will not disappoint.