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Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sin. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, two quick things this morning. Well, maybe not too quick. Number one, repentance is readiness, and then number two, forgiveness is full.
First, repentance is readiness. This was the job of John the Baptist, the last and greatest of the prophets, to come and to preach so that the people would be ready for Jesus. He was the way preparer, the voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths, every valley shall be raised up, and every mountain made low.” John the Baptist was the spiritual highway builder, lowering… it just reminds me of driving through the hill country, right, and all these cuts through the hills so that the interstate can be flat. That’s what John the Baptist was doing, taking down the mountains and raising up the valleys so there’s a straight way for the Lord in the wilderness, a plain. And he does that by repentance.
Now, John the Baptist is an incredible character for us to remember and to consider. In fact, I think we in the church know that John the Baptist was always the number two guy. I mean, even as John preached, when he pointed at Jesus, he must increase and I must decrease. John was always the second most important. He gave way to Jesus, the most important, but remember that John in his day was perhaps the most famous of all.
In fact, remember when St. Paul goes to Ephesus? This is on the third missionary journey, so we’re like in the mid-50s, so 25 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul gets over to Ephesus on the western border of modern-day Turkey, and he finds there people who had heard of John the Baptist and were following his teaching, but had never heard of Jesus. Now, that’s actually kind of wild to think about, that the news about John the Baptist had spread faster than the news about Jesus. And the popularity of John is emphasized in the gospel; it’ll say, it’ll tell us that all of Jerusalem went down to the Jordan to hear John the Baptist preach. That’s how popular he was. So they were all going to listen to him, and what was he doing to prepare the way for the Messiah? He was preaching repentance.
Now we can remember that there are two parts to repentance. This is one of these things where our Lutheran theology is really, really helpful because normally when we hear preaching of repentance, we normally hear that repentance means to turn. You’re going this way and you realize it’s the wrong way, so you do a U-turn and you go the different direction. There’s some truth to that, but the problem of that doctrine is that it puts it all on us, as if repentance is something that we are doing. That is not the biblical doctrine of repentance. Repentance, according to the Scripture, is done to us. We are turned, like we pray in Psalm 80: “Turn us, O Lord, and we will be turned. Repent us, O Lord, and we will be those who are repentant.”
So the Lord grants this gift of repentance, and he does it with two instruments: first the law, and then the gospel. The law is what the Lord uses to raise down the mountain of pride to humility, and the gospel is what the Lord uses to raise up the valley of despair. So first the law comes to show us our sin.
Now, we all know that we’re sinners. Everybody knows, I mean, almost everybody knows that they’ve made mistakes. It’s one of these mysteries of human existence. We know that there’s a law that we should follow, but we see that we can’t, that we don’t, that we fail. But the law of God does something more. You know, if you talk to your average everyday pagan, unbeliever, and you say, “Well, have you made mistakes?” They’ll say, “Well, yeah, I’ve made mistakes, I’ve done things wrong, but everybody makes mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. To err is human.”
In other words, it is possible to know that you have done things wrong and not yet have come to the full work of contrition that the Holy Spirit wants to work through the law. The Holy Spirit wants us to know more than just that we’ve made mistakes. That’s not enough. Everybody knows that. The Holy Spirit wants us to know that God is offended by our mistakes, that God is angry because of the things that you’ve done wrong.
We confessed it already. We said it. It’s almost, I mean, we should say this with sort of a weak and trembling voice that we say to the Lord that we’ve sinned and we deserve His temporal and eternal punishment. Can you imagine what we said when we said that? That we said to the Lord, “Lord, you are right when you judge. You are right to declare us to be sinners. You are right to give us all sorts of trouble in this life, and you are right to send us to hell forever.” That’s what we deserve, and it’s true, it is what we deserve.
The law, the brightness of the Lord’s law, the bright light of His holiness puts in stark relief the filthiness of our own sins. The things that we’ve done wrong, the things that we’ve said wrong, the things that we’ve thought wrong, all the good works that were laid out there in front of us to do that we didn’t do, all of it condemns us and makes us offensive to God. Here we are in our pride about being good people, or at least that we try hard, or who knows what we think about ourselves. It’s crazy. All the good accolades that we give to ourselves, and the law comes along and says no. By the law of God, every mouth is stopped. There’s no one who’s righteous. No, not one. And no one who does good, no one who seeks after God, all have fallen short of the glory of God. That’s you, it’s me; all have sinned. And we’ve deserved, because of that, God’s own anger.
Remember how King David confesses his sins? This always seems so wild to me. In Psalm 51, this is after – remember all these things that David did. He’s sinned with Bathsheba, and then she’s pregnant, and now he wants to cover it up, so he sins against Uriah, her husband, he even has her murdered. This plot to kill him, he thinks he’s gotten away with it, and Nathan the prophet comes to him and exposes his sin, and then David says this. He says, “Against you, how could he say this, against you and you only, O Lord, have I sinned and done what is wrong in your sight.”
And we want to stand up and say, “David, you sinned against Bathsheba? You sinned against Uriah? I mean, he’s buried in the grave. You sinned against your family? You sinned against the Lord’s people? There’s hardly a person alive that you didn’t sin against, and you say against you and you only, O Lord, have I sinned?” How can you possibly do that? But that is the work of the law, is to realize that the person that we have offended by our sins is none other than God. The One who created you, the One who gave you everything, the One who looks upon you in kindness and mercy, you have offended Him, truly offended Him. And your life is rising up now as a stench to His nostrils.
To know that is for the mountain to be made low. That’s the first part of repentance: contrition. But that is not where the preaching of the Lord’s Word ends. The Lord not only has law for you, He also has gospel. He not only makes the mountain low, He’s going to raise up the valley of despair. When we realize that we are offensive to the Lord, then the Lord Jesus comes along and He says, “That’s why I died.” You see that by nature, this is a mystery, by nature we think well of ourselves and evil of God, but the preaching of the Word flips it around so that we think poorly of ourselves but see the goodness of God.
When we realize that Jesus is truly the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and that means your sins and mine, every one of them, everything you’ve done wrong, every broken commandment, every stray thought, every bit of not loving God and loving your neighbor, every single bit of it, the Lord has taken upon Himself on the cross and died for you truly. Jesus says, “I came to save sinners, to give my life as a ransom for many.” That’s what He did on the cross. That was the whole business of the incarnation, the suffering, His death, and His resurrection is to win for you the forgiveness of sins.
Now, you might think, “Well, maybe everybody else’s sins are forgiven because probably they haven’t sinned as bad as I have, but my sins are so great. I’m such a fantastic sinner that Jesus is not a good enough Savior for me.” Repent. You cannot out-sin Him. You cannot be a better sinner than Jesus is a Savior. You cannot manage by your sinful flesh and by all your sinful ways to somehow squeal yourself out or squeak yourself out of the Lord’s mercy. He will have mercy on whoever He wants to, and He wants to have mercy on you.
Now how do I know that? Because Jesus gave His life for all the world, and because God the Holy Spirit has you right here to hear it, and right here at the altar to taste it. That your sins are forgiven by Jesus. Now this is, there’s a fullness to this, and this is maybe point two, that forgiveness is full, because I think we normally think of forgiveness as like simply on the first part of forgiveness, which is the taking away of all the things that we’ve done wrong.
Now, it’s true enough that forgiveness is taking away our sins, but there’s more to it than that. This is what Isaiah is preaching in the text that I read to you, and I think this is heard wrongly so many times. It says, “She has received from the Lord’s hands double for all her sins.” And I think we normally hear that, at least I normally hear it like this, that I’ve sinned and so the Lord is going to punish me, but He’s going to give me a double punishment. Like maybe I deserve ten years in prison, but the Lord is going to give me twenty.
He has received from the Lord’s hands double for all her sins, but that’s not what Isaiah is preaching. Listen, it says, “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, cry to her that her warfare is ended, her sin is pardoned. She has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” This is all gospel, and it works like this.
If you can imagine that your account is like a blackboard, and on that blackboard is written all of the things that you have ever done wrong, all of your sins, and you think to yourself, “Now pastor, we’re going to need a pretty… make it as big as you want.” Here’s a blackboard with all of your sins, and we normally think that forgiveness means He’s taking a bucket of water, the Lord Jesus takes a bucket of water or a bucket of blood, and He splashes the blackboard and He erases everything that you’ve done wrong so it’s perfectly clean. There’s not a single thing written on it. Fine, that’s right, but that’s only part one.
Because once all of your sins are erased, once they’re all gone, once they’re all taken away, then the Lord Jesus Himself takes up the piece of chalk and He starts writing on the blackboard, on your blackboard, all of the things that He did right. Oh boy. His perfect keeping of the law, His perfect keeping of every commandment, His perfect love for God with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength, His perfect love for His neighbor, His active and passive obedience. That’s how the theologians talk about it. All of that is now applied to your account, to the blackboard with your name on it.
Now you say, “Pastor, that can’t be possibly true. It’s too good to be true. You’ve got to be making it up.” Well, it is too good. We have to hear it from the Scriptures. So here’s how Paul says it, 2 Corinthians chapter 5. He says that he who knew no sin, that’s Jesus, God made to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. God’s righteousness, God’s perfection, that’s given to you so that the Lord looks at you, He doesn’t see your sin, but He sees, He doesn’t just see you like some sort of neutral in-between kind of; He sees you as righteous and as perfect and as holy as Jesus is Himself.
That’s the righteousness that’s given to you in the gospel, in the absolution, on the altar, in the forgiveness of sins. Your sin is taken away and the perfection of Christ is applied to your account. That’s a doctrine of justification. That’s what that means, that you have the holiness of Christ. Oh, God be praised.
Now think about facing the judgment day this way. We think about facing the judgment day on our own sins, but you’re going to face the judgment. It’s going to be as hard for you to get into heaven as it was for Jesus. That’s the gifts that the Lord has for you. That’s the double that you have received for all your sins. That’s the lifting up of the valley so that the way of the Lord is prepared, and it is prepared now by this gift of repentance.
So God be praised. We are not those who are defending our own righteousness. We are not those who are arguing for our own justification, self-justification. We are not those who are declaring our own perfection by no means. We are those who confess our sins and receive from the Lord His gift of forgiveness and life and salvation.
This is the comfort that John the Baptist preached as the Lord commanded. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Your warfare is ended. Your iniquity is pardoned. You’ve received from the Lord’s hand double for all your sins. God be praised, Amen.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.