Transcript
Tim Keller (0:04)
Thanks for listening to Gospel and Life. Today, Tim Keller is teaching on the surprising expectation, defying and surpassingly hopeful meaning of the Christmas story. After you listen, we invite you to go online to gospelandlife.com and sign up for email updates. Now. Here's today's teaching from Dr. Keller.
Narrator (0:29)
Tonight's scripture comes from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 35, 1:10 the desert and the parched land will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom like the crocus it will burst into bloom. It will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon. They will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God. Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way. Say to those with fearful hearts, be strong, do not fear your God will come. He will come with vengeance, with divine retribution. He will come to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer and and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs. In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow, and a highway will be there. It will be called the Way of Holiness. It will be for those who walk on that way. The unclean will not journey on it wicked fools will not go about on it. No lion will be there, nor any ravenous beast. They will not be found there. But only the redeemed will walk there. And those the Lord has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing. Everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. This is the word of the Lord.
Tim Keller (2:27)
The Book of Isaiah is filled with prophecies about a future Messianic age brought by a future messianic king who would put all things right. And because Christians believe that that Messianic king was Jesus, who was born at Christmas, what we've been doing during the month of December is we've been looking some of these prophecies about the future Messiah in the Book of Isaiah because it helps us begin to grasp the richness of what Christmas means and who it was that was born in the manger. Now, we've each week looked at a different one of these passages and therefore a different theme or different, you might say, take on Christmas today. Tonight, the theme which is actually a more Important theme in Christmas stories than you might think is home and exile. Or maybe I should say exile and home. Let's take a look at the text itself, this passage. Let's just walk through it, then see what that tells us about Christmas, then see what that means for how we live our lives. So what the text means, what Christmas means, and what it means for how we actually live our lives. All right. First. First, like I said, let's just walk right through the text. Verses 1 and 2 says, the desert and the parched lands will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it. The splendor of Carmel and Sharon. They will see the glory of the Lord. Now this is saying, someday the glory of the Lord will so come to pass that the actual natural order will be renewed. When it says the desert and parched land, the wilderness will blossom, it means there won't be deserts anymore. We're talking about a real change, a renewal in the world. The images of Lebanon, Carmel and Sharon. Lebanon was a place of great soul fertility. Sharon was a place of great physical beauty. Carmel represented orderliness. These different countries or lands had these traits. But we're saying here, he's saying that when the glory of the Lord shows up, everything will be. The soil will be perfectly fertile, the landscape will be absolutely beautiful. There won't be any deserts anymore. You'll have a renewed world, which we looked at somewhat last week in Isaiah 11, where it says, the lion will lie down with the Lamb, and so on. So here we're talking about a future renewed world. And then how's it going to happen? It says in verse 3 and 4, your God will come. Be strong. Do not fear. Your God will come. He will come with vengeance, with divine retribution. He will come to save you. Now this is saying that the reason why this is going to happen is God himself is going to come to earth. Now you might say, well, isn't God already here? Isn't God present everywhere? Yes, he's invisibly present, and he's also resistibly present. That is to say, he's present in the world. But it's possible to resist him. You can disobey him. You can be evil. Plenty of people are. But this is talking about a day in which God is visibly present and irresistibly present, that all evil, all corruption, everything that's bad or wrong will be ended, will be put down. And in that day it says, then will the eyes of the blind be opened. Verse 5 to 7, the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Does that sound familiar? Do you know the Isaac Watts hymn? Hear him, ye deaf, his praise ye dumb, Your loosened tongues employ ye blind, Behold your Savior Come and leap, ye lame, for joy. That's a versification of what this is talking about. A time in which there won't be blindness anymore, There won't be lameness anymore. There won't be disease, there won't be aging, there won't be death. Now, finally, the end of this wonderful passage says, only the redeemed will walk there. Those the Lord has rescued will return. And that word return means come home, to come home out of exile. Now, this is the theme and one of the great themes of the Bible. How so? Well, if you look at the history of Israel, which is a big part of what the Bible's about, you'll see exile and homecoming constantly. Israel is exiled to Egypt and then is brought home to their homeland. And later on, it's Israel is exiled to Babylon, and then they're brought home to their homeland. But even when they come back to their homeland, then when they're under Roman occupation, you know, in the time of Jesus, even though Jews lived in their geographic homeland, there was a lot of talk about still being in exile because they were under Roman oppression. They were enslaved, see, in their own land. And therefore home wasn't home. They still really weren't home. But if you stand back and look at the whole Bible from first to last, you begin to realize that the story of Israel is actually a kind of small version of the story of the whole human race. Because in the beginning of the Bible, Genesis, we see Adam and Eve, we see the human race losing their home. They were made for the Garden of Eden. The world was this paradise. But because we turned away from God, we lost it. And at the end of the book of the Bible, which is the end of the book of Revelation, at the end, we see God recreating that Garden of Eden, the garden city of God coming down out of heaven. And therefore, here is the teaching of the Bible, every human being is actually in exile. Spiritually, we are homeless. Now, what does that mean? What does it mean to be spiritually homeless, spiritually in exile? Well, if we're going to come to grips with what the Bible says about exile, we probably need to come to grips with what home is. What does it mean to be home? You know. You know, the term a house is not a home. And many of you know that, especially if you live in New York, because when you move to a new house or to a new apartment, it takes quite a while to make that place a home. Oh, you have a roof over your head, you got a bed to sleep in, you got a place to fix and eat your meals. But home is where everything fits, where everything is the way you want it, where everything suits you, where things are the. Where they want you want them to be. Years ago, when Kathy and I were in our first church in Hopewell, Virginia, there was a family in our church who were all very tall. The husband and the wife were both six feet tall. And they had four children, two girls, two boys. And they were all, even in their teenage years, all like 6ft tall or close to it. And they built their house. They built a house, their dream house. And I remember first going over to their house, they invited us out and you know, for me, I'm six four. If you were six foot something, it was an amazing place. They built the house to suit them. So the silverware drawers were right where they should be right here, which was basically eye level. For my wife, it was just barely five foot something, just barely. In fact, I don't think there's any something. And the cabinets, the cabinets were, they went, you know, the roof went to like, you know, there were like nine or ten foot ceilings and they brought the cabinets way up there. And it was incredible storage space. But only they could reach them and I could reach them. What they had done was they created a place that really fit them. Why do you think it wears you down to be on the road? When you're traveling, you're sleeping in a bed, aren't you? You've got a roof over your head, you got places to eat, but it's not your bed, it doesn't fit you. Home is a place where you arrange things. So home is a harbor. Home is a place of restoration. Home is a place that doesn't drain you, it nourishes you, it strengthens, because everything is the way that fits it suits you. A homeland or a home place is a place where you don't have to struggle to understand the language of people and where the landscape just delights you and where maybe even the food and the customs make sense to you. And literal homelessness is brutalizing. To literally be homeless, to be literally sleeping in the street and on the park benches, and that sort of thing is destructive to you physically. You're wearing down emotionally. Now, Martin Heidegger, famous 20th century German philosopher, says that modern people in particular Human beings are characterized by what he called Unheimlichkeit, which means we're living in a world that doesn't fit our deepest desires. We all feel homeless. We're characterized by a sense that this world doesn't fit us. We're basically out of place. We're alienated. Why? The biblical answer to that is Psalm 90, where it says God has been our dwelling place from all generations. Isn't that kind of interesting? Psalm 90 calls God our dwelling place. And there's another Isaac Watts hymn that talks about that. God is our eternal home. Oh, God, our help in ages past. You know, he says, in our eternal home, the Bible says God is your home. What does that mean? It means that we were built. We were originally designed, you can see it in the book of Genesis, to serve God, to love God, to be so delighted in his beauty that we serve him just for the joy of doing it. And that's what we're built for. And if we're doing anything else, it doesn't really fit what we're designed to do. If you live for anything more than God, if you're. You may believe in God, but if your career or your family or some political cause, anything else is more important than God. What you're doing is you're turning something that's not. Not a real home into home. And it can't bear up the weight of your soul. And it's spiritually like living in a box in a New York City park in the dead of winter. They're good things, but they're not home. And because we don't center on him, because he isn't the most important thing to us, and yet we were built for that. We experience Unheimlichkeit. And we're not talking here, by the way, just about psychological, inward. Oh, no, you know, this world is no longer our home. That's what the Book of Genesis is about. It says, in our primeval origins, human beings were made for paradise, were made for the Garden of Eden. But because we decided we were going to be our own masters, we were going to be our own lords, we were going to be our own saviors. We're going to call those thoughts ourselves. We lost home. And that's not so surprising. When you violate a relationship, you're expelled from that relationship. You violate a relationship, you betray somebody, you turn on them, you use them for your own ends, what happens? You're expelled. You lose that place. You lose it. And so we were told, we're told by the Bible that we have lost Home. And this world is not the place God designed anymore because we turned from him. What's happened to the world we were not built for? A world in which there was death. And you know that. We're not built for a world in which there's aging and there's withering and there's disease and there's blindness and lameness and deafness. No, we weren't. Now secular people would say, of course we were. We weren't built for. I mean, of course we were. You know, we're the product of natural selection. Nature is red in truth and claw. But you know, better. Dylan Thomas is right. We rage against the dying of the light. This world is not our home. This world doesn't fit our deepest desires. It doesn't suit us. It doesn't fit us. And therefore we're in exile. Every one of us, internally and externally. But all the pages of the Old Testament are wrestling with the promise that the Messiah will come and take us home. And the New Testament says, Jesus is that Messiah. And he comes back twice. And the first time he came, he began to heal our homelessness. But when he comes back at the end, and this is what this is describing, he will make this world home again. You say, how? How could he do. How will he do that? And the answer is Christmas. See, now we're looking at Christmas because here's what we see in Christmas. Do you realize now how much one of the themes of Christmas is homelessness and exile and brutality and rejection? We've sentimentalized. Now, look, I don't want to make you laugh, even though some of you will at certain points, you know, because we so often do the Nativity scene, you know, we kind of. We recreate the Nativity, the tableau of Nativity, you know, at Christmas. And we do it for children. We have really, really, really sentimentalized and sanitized the story. And now go. We have is. We have songs like the Little Lord Jesus Asleep on the Hay. Aw. You know, this hay is very sweet smelling and soft and there's furry animals all around Jesus and, you know, it's kind of nice. I'm so glad we were out here in this time instead of in the motel. You know, that is not the story.