Saturday, January 15, 2011

Blessed with a new name

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem's sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch. The nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will bestow. You will be a crown of splendor in the LORD's hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God. No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married. As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you (Isaiah 62:1-5).

Have you ever felt as if God is really mad at you? Do you feel weighed down by guilt over bad decisions that you’ve made? Do you worry that God could never forgive you for the things you’ve done? Does your life feel like a constant string of mistakes and punishment?

If you have ever felt this way, Isaiah offers you words of hope. During his years on earth, the prophet saw God’s people ignoring the Almighty, breaking His laws with no concern that anything bad would happen as a result. Isaiah warned God’s people that to anger the Lord is to invite disaster, but few listened.

But Isaiah had more than just words of warning; he wrote not just for his contemporaries, but also for their descendants. A time was coming when God would desert His people and allow their enemies to make the land desolate. When this disaster came, the survivors would need words of reassurance that all was not lost, that God still cared about them and that there was hope for the future. Today’s Old Testament lesson shares some of those words of hope.

The nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will bestow. In Bible times, each person’s name meant something. For example, John means ‘God is gracious’, and Sapphira means ‘beautiful.’ When someone received a new name, it signified an important change in his or her life. Abram’s name meant ‘respected father’; when God promised him more descendants than could be ever be counted, his named was changed to Abraham, which means ‘father of multitudes’. Simon’s name meant ‘one who listens’; when Simon firmly stated that Jesus was the Son of God, the Lord changed his name to Peter, which means ‘solid as a rock’.

This custom of name changing continued into the early Christian church; when people were baptized, they were given a new name, a Christian name. This baptismal name showed how God had taken hold of their lives and changed them. It’s like adoption—when you are legally adopted, you receive a new name. When God makes us members of His family, we are legally adopted by Him as Paul tells us in Ephesians chapter one: In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ. This makes God’s Son our brother, as Jesus affirmed with these words: "Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:33-35).

Through Isaiah, God promises that He will give His people a new name, one spoken by Him. This new name identifies us as children of God through faith in Christ—we are named Christians. This name replaces the old one God gave to His people through His covenant with Abraham; this name is the gift of God’s new covenant sealed by Christ's blood, shed on the cross. This new name gives us Christ’s righteousness and His glory, gifts so obvious that the peoples of the world, blind though they are by sin, can see how different God’s people are from those who follow other faiths.

No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married. ‘Deserted’ referred to Jerusalem, the place where God’s Temple had offered humanity a way to approach God for mercy. But God’s people grew bored with their religion, and so He abandoned them to their enemies. The Temple would be destroyed, because in His anger God had Deserted His people. Without God’s protection, the nation fell victim to invaders; most of the Israelites were deported to other countries, and the land they left behind became Desolate.

But in his great mercy, God refused to give up on His wayward people. And so He promised a time when these tragedies would be reversed. A time was coming when the people of God, once Deserted, would now be called Hephzibah, which means ‘My Joy In Her.’ When the Lord once again showed delight in His people, the land they lived in—the Desolate land—would become known as Beulah, which means ‘The One Who Is Married.’

As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you. In what sense would the land be married to its sons? In this verse, we get the sense of ancient wedding customs where the husband took possession of his wife, making her his alone; in the same way, God promised the Israelites that a time was coming when the land they had lost would become theirs again; this promise was fulfilled in 538 BC when the exiled Jews were allowed to return and take possession of their homeland once more.

As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you. The image of marriage is also applied to the people of God, but in this case it is God who is the groom and His Church who is the bride. This imagery is used throughout the Bible. In Exodus chapter 34, God warned the people to remain faithful to Him, using the following language: Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same. Notice how God compares the worship of false gods to prostitution. He warns us away from sharing our love with false gods, saying You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God (Exodus 20:5). Here we get the picture of God as a jealous husband, unwilling to share the affections of His wife with other men. But it is not just other religions that tempt God’s people into faithlessness; our desires for earthly pleasures are just as dangerous, as Moses warns in Deuteronomy chapter 4: remember all the commands of the LORD, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by going after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. But in spite of these warnings, the Israelites still fell into temptation; shortly after Moses died and they settled in the land God had given them, Scripture tells us they would not listen to their judges but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshiped them (Judges 2:17). For hundreds of years this sort of behavior went on, prompting Hosea to write (chapter nine) Do not rejoice, O Israel…For you have been unfaithful to your God. And in Jeremiah 31, God speaks of his wayward people as a husband who has been cheated on by his wife: they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them. This is the reason that God deserted His people and allowed their beautiful land to be made desolate.

Thankfully, our Lord did not leave things there. Through Isaiah, He promised a future time when He would rejoice over His people as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride. Although the bride had cheated on God, He would not divorce her as she deserved; instead, He sent His Son to shed His blood on her behalf, with the wonderful result spoken of in Ephesians chapter 5: Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. And isn’t it interesting that in the very next verse Paul writes, In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives.

Jesus is the bridegroom of the Church. Many religious people starve themselves to show their piety; when His disciples were criticized for eating full meals, Jesus replied: How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast (Matthew 9:15). In the parable of the ten virgins recorded in Matthew chapter 25, Jesus speaks of Himself as the bridegroom who will return at the end of time to celebrate His wedding day with those who are faithfully waiting for Him. In Revelation chapter 19, John is given a glimpse of that future wedding day: Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude…shouting: "Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear." (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.) And in 21st chapter of Revelation, we see that Jerusalem the golden, the community of all God’s people, is that bride: I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

You will be a crown of splendor in the LORD's hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God. In Bible times, men and women wore fancy headdresses for their wedding day. In Proverbs chapter 12 Solomon writes, A wife of noble character is her husband's crown. In 1st Thessalonians chapter two, Paul tells the congregation that he thinks of them as a crown: For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? This is why Christ suffered and died for us—so that we can be worthy to compliment Him as a magnificent crown compliments the king who wears it. Our Lord treasurers us, and has spared no expense in making us beautiful in His sight.

I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch. This is a wonderful promise. Throughout Scripture, our world is described as a place of darkness—a darkness of ignorance, a darkness where people feel safe in carrying out all kinds of despicable acts. It is a darkness which conceals danger and traps people because they cannot see to find their way. But God has sent His light into this darkness. His light is like a torch that drives back the dark; it is like the arrival of dawn, fresh with hope and new possibilities. That light is Christ. He is the light of our salvation. He ends ignorance by sharing God’s truth with us. His light reveals evil acts for what they are and shows us the danger of flirting with sin. His light shows us the path to God and happiness and eternal life, as we are told in Psalm 119 verse 105: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.

God promises that He will not rest until all these things are accomplished. Jesus said, My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working (John 5:17). And His work for our future does not end just because we cheat on Him; 2 Timothy 2:13 says, if we are faithless, he will remain faithful. Every moment you are alive, the Savior is working to ensure that you will be among those who are His bride at the end of time; no matter how often you anger God by loving other things more than Him, He still wants you to end your affair with sin and return to the comfort of His almighty arms. Paul writes, I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).

The Israelites angered God to the point that He deserted them for a time and allowed their homeland to become desolate, but He promised that as bad as things looked, they still had a future with Him because He was their Savior. No mater how bad your sinful life may look, be assured that God offers you the name Hephzibah, ‘My Joy in Her’, and if you accept that name, you will have Beulah, the home made by God that you can possess forever as your own.

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