[Machine transcription]
Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and will not be afraid. For the Lord God is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints, it was early on in the church’s history that the book from the prophet Isaiah was called the fifth gospel. And I don’t think it’s very hard for us to see why. I mean, the entire thing is just saturated, full of messianic prophecies, beautiful image of the new creation, and then just stunning declaration upon declaration of love and mercy from God, who promised his people a son named Emmanuel and Almighty God.
And because of these rich promises, we’re used to hearing from Isaiah, especially in the season of Advent, when we are both looking backward on our Lord’s first coming in His incarnation and then ahead to His returning glory. But today we’re hearing from a different part of Isaiah, and we hear a hymn of praise, erupting from the prophet’s lips who is simply brimming with joy. And it’s wonderfully appropriate for us today to hear this hymn and to consider it on cantate Sunday.
Cantate being the Latin term, the imperative sing. Now, the passage we have today is more than just a descriptive hymn of praise. It’s also a prophecy. The prophet spoke of that day as a future event. He says, you will say in that day. So, in order for us to understand Isaiah and to know who this song is for, we need to know what day he’s talking about.
Now, fortunately for us, he makes this very easy. Because just prior to our reading for today, back in chapter 11, Isaiah gives one of his more famous messianic prophecies where he writes, There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, that a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And it’s this coming one, Isaiah says, who will gather in his people from the corners of the earth, from all lands, and gather them together in righteousness and bring them to a new and perfect creation.
And it’s after this declaration that he begins a new list of prophecies, including the one we have today, each one beginning with the phrase, in that day. So we understand that Isaiah is telling us about the time of the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us, who we know to be our Lord Jesus Christ.
In other words, Isaiah is prophesying about the New Testament church. So whose song is this to sing? Well, it’s ours. Isaiah is putting the words right into our mouths. And one of the beauties of such a song that God has given us to sing is, I mean, that not only do we get to sing it in the first place, but also that the song teaches us to know and love the God about who we’re singing.
In fact, it’s so good that today we’re going to do something unusual. If we’ll all turn together to page 261 in our LSBs, we’ll find a musical setting of most of the verses of this hymn, and we will sing it all together. Page 261. What an incredible blessing that we get to sing this song together as the people of God.
And it’s important for us to spend time thinking about this song because, well, after all, if it’s our song, it would be a good thing for us to know what it means so that we can take greater delight in it. Now, the very first thing we see in the opening line of this passage is that our praise has a rationale. There’s a reason given for why Christians give thanks to God. I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, that you might comfort me.
And so our thanks is a response to the incredible fact that God was angry with us, but he isn’t anymore. And this is a concise and very powerful statement of the law and the gospel. The law in that God’s anger towards sinners is very real. And it’s holy and just. He is right to be angry at sin.
But the gospel in that his mercy and love toward those very same sinners is equally real. But we want to be careful to not take this from the passage, that God is somehow just, you know, closing his eyes to sin and pretending like it’s not there, as if he hasn’t mastered object permanence. Now, this isn’t, you know, apathy or ignorance. Instead, his anger is turned from us to someone else, the suffering servant by whose stripes we are healed, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
And it’s for this reason, for this substitution, that God now comforts us with the gospel. He is no longer angry with us but delights and mercy and steadfast love toward those against whom he counts no iniquity for the sake of Jesus. And if that’s not clear enough for us, well, then Isaiah makes our salvation even more explicit in the following verse.
Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation. And I want us to read that as concretely as we possibly can. Because, yes, God forgives our sins. He grants us his salvation and it’s in him that we place our trust. This is all true and it’s wonderful.
But God does more than just give us these things. He becomes them, we confess in the song. This verse is very concretely about the incarnation of the Son of God. In fact, the Hebrew word for salvation is the same word that will go on to become the name Jesus. Salvation and Jesus in Hebrew are the same word. It is not at all stretching the text to read it this way.
The Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my Jesus. He became our salvation when he emptied himself and took on the form of a servant, becoming a man and dwelling among us in order to bear our sin and be our Savior. And in his obedience to the Father, The one through whom the universe was created, was humiliated, beaten, put to shame, and nailed to a cross so that we might not face that fate, but rather be saved.
The incarnate Lord took your place in mind so that we can sing a song like this one in Isaiah. Because for him, our Lord, the love of God turned to anger, so that we who rightly held that anger might instead be favored with love and overflowing mercy. And so for our Lord on the cross, as he hung there, perhaps the passage from Isaiah was inverted to something like this.
I will cry out to you, O Lord, for though you loved me, your fierce anger has come upon me that you might destroy me. Behold, God is my holy judge. I weep and am in distress. For I, even the Lord God, have taken up weakness and I cry out. And I have become a curse of condemnation. With anguish I have drawn water from the well of God’s wrath and drank until it was dry.
Now maybe this was a song our Lord could have sung from the cross, a song of lament. But because he sang it, we don’t have to. And our song is now made immeasurably better because in His incarnation and substitutionary death, the Son of God became salvation for us in a very tangible, very concrete and beautiful way in an instance of pure grace.
And it’s in this way that God is consistent in His justice on account of His holiness by punishing sin, and yet he is also consistent in mercy on account of his son. The prophet Isaiah, who had foreseen Christ in the virgin birth and the suffering servant, would have each one of us join in singing over that Savior in this song. A song of pure joy.
And it’s in this Lord we place our trust, knowing that because of him we are strong in our weakness and we sing of our living hope in a world characterized by death. Now, up to this point, the song has been sung by individuals. The pronouns are in the first person. I will give thanks. I will trust, etc.
But now the song switches to plural verbs and corporate praise going from you to y’all, if you will, where each Christian joins together in the church to proclaim the source of her life to the world, who does not know it. With joy, y’all will draw water from the wells of salvation. And y’all 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.
Sing praises to the Lord, for He has done gloriously. Let this be made known in all the earth. Now where does our water, our source of spiritual life come from? Well, not just any old well, but from the wells of salvation. Concerning this well, our Lord says to the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4, whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.
The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. And indeed, how great is this water, this faith from the word of God that our Lord gives to us. And that he not only gives to us what we need for daily sustenance, he gives us our clothing, shoes, food, drink, house, home, etc., etc. He gives us all things that we need for this body and life.
But He gives us more than this. He gives us forgiveness, eternal life, and the promise that every one of us is beloved of God and has our sins forgiven in full. And He continues to pour out on us the Holy Spirit, who always points us to the crucified and risen Lord and gives us a living hope through the Word, always glorifying Christ in the Scriptures.
And so the Christian faith and hope that we have, this living water wells up in us, bubbling to a spring of eternal life by the power of the Holy Spirit. And all of it comes from our Lord, who gives every good and every perfect gift freely. Now John goes on in his gospel to provide for us another image of living water.
When from our Lord’s pierced side on the cross flowed water along with the blood. One of my favorite stained glass windows that I remember seeing as a little kid was, it was an image of the crucifixion. Jesus was on the cross and from his side were coming the blood and the water, but each one was falling in a different place.
The blood was falling into a chalice and the water was falling into a baptismal font, both sitting at the foot of the cross. And this vivid image reminds us that just as God created Eve and gave her life from the side of Adam, her husband, so too does he create and give life to the church, the very bride of Christ, from the side of her Lord, where we receive water and blood.
And he gives us the Holy Spirit. Christ is indeed our great well of salvation that gives us eternal life and he never runs dry and having received eternal life and every good and perfect gift from her Lord, the church is now joyfully and uniquely equipped to sing praises of thanksgiving and praise to God.
Confessing Him alone as her Savior and remembering His great works throughout every generation while we wait for our Lord Jesus and His glorious return. And while we wait, the church proclaims the gospel in its purity. It makes disciples of all nations and it administers the sacraments as we’ve been given to do by our Lord. Confident in the knowledge that he is continually with us always.
Now as we heard in our gospel reading, our Lord’s presence is not visible in the same way it was for the apostles nearly 2,000 years ago. And that is actually to our advantage, Jesus says. Because he who is now seated at the right hand of the Father, ruling over all things in his divinity and humanity, he has sent us the Holy Spirit, who continually works faith and its fruits in us, bringing us to the word through which that faith comes, and declaring to us all the things of the Father and the Son that pertain to our salvation.
And so it is that our Lord is present in His word and sacraments, that the Holy Spirit draws us to these things and creates faith. And Jesus teaches us today that all three persons of the Holy Trinity are actively involved, working together in unity for our salvation.
To summarize, the Holy Spirit shares with us the great mercy and love that the Father has for us on account of the Son. And for those of us who hear and believe this, it becomes easy to sing and confess with the prophet Isaiah that God, the holy one of Israel, that is, the Holy One of the Church is indeed great in our midst.
That He is strong to save and working gloriously on our behalf when we can do nothing. So this cantate Sunday, let us sing our songs of hope, of confession and thanksgiving with life and a renewed vigor. Because our God’s mighty deeds have won our salvation in full. And He is with us always.
May God grant that we ever sing with the prophet, shout and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel. Christ has risen. He has risen with you. Hallelujah. Amen.