Page 8 - Isaiah Student Worktext

V. 10-11 Haughty men will be brought low, and only God will be exalted.

There is a litany of things in V. 12-18 in which people took great pride. The cedars of Lebanon, the oaks
Bashan, high towers, walls, ships of Tarshish. All of this would be brought low. None of the people
realized that the things in which they took great pride were gifts of God.

Think about all those places today. Lebanon still exists, but when is the last time you have heard of
Bashan or Tarshish?

V. 19 The formerly proud will hide in holes in the ground. Remember the capture of Saddam Hussein?

V. 22 Along with V. 5, an invitation to avoid all this. Sever yourselves from men like this. Stop trusting in
human wealth, human talent, human pleasures, and human glory. There is coming a day when God
alone will be exalted. Why wait?

Isaiah 3-4

Main idea: God clears the wreckage of His people’s sins so that He can build a
perfect Zion in its place.

‘We used to have wooden ships and iron men; now we have iron ships and wooden men’.

Possibly you are less familiar with the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City.
My wife and I were privileged to go to New York City in 2009, and there, we saw the gigantic hole left
there. Since that time, an entirely new building has been built on the site. But before a new building
could be built, the debris had to be cleared away.

We have some from our church that have gone on what we call “Disaster Relief Missions” to clear up
debris from tornadoes, floods, fires, ice storms and other natural disasters. Sometimes we go to clean
up, sometimes we go to rebuild.

The point of all that is: before God builds a new ‘you’ the debris of the old you has to be removed.
That’s what the first 3 verses deal with.

V. 1-3 God takes away the leaders, through exile and through the sword. It may seem like it takes a
long time, but God will eventually clear the slate.

God will take away the stock and store; the whole supply of bread and water. He will take away the
mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet. He is going to remove the old to make way
for the new.

Of course, God eventually removes every ruler, every ‘pillar’ of this world. I think about Billy Graham…it
just seemed liked we would always have Billy Graham. The WW II generation thought that FDR would
always be President.

But God is also at work raising up a new generation of leaders: in the world, the nation, the church.

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