Jesus Gives You More Than Rose-Coloured Glasses

Isaiah 35:1–10

1 The desert and the parched land will be glad;
    the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2 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.

3 Strengthen the feeble hands,
    steady the knees that give way;
4 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.”

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
    and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
    and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness
    and streams in the desert.
7 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.

8 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.
9 No lion will be there,
    nor any ravenous beast;
    they will not be found there.
But only the redeemed will walk there,
10     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.

Jesus Gives You More Than Rose-Coloured Glasses

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s something peculiar about this Sunday’s candle in the Advent wreath…

It’s pink.

Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you have one sitting at home right now. Maybe you realized it for the first time when you walked in and saw it was lit. But do you know why it’s pink?

The simplest answer is that it’s a happy colour. The Third Sunday of Advent has been historically titled “Gaudete Sunday,” which means “Rejoice!” The rose-coloured candle is meant to match the rosy theme of joy that pops up all over the Christmas story, from the shepherds in the field to Mary herself. Isn’t that nice?

And then we hear readings like Isaiah chapter 35, where there’s nothing but good things—the land itself rejoices, the desert bursts into bloom, the weak are strengthened, the disabled become able-bodied, and everyone makes it home safe—happily ever after, the end. It’s quite the rosy picture! It almost seems too good to be true.

That’s the thing about Sundays like this one. When we make it this big deal about joy and rejoicing, is it tempting to think it’s all a bit superficial? Almost like we’re putting on rose-coloured glasses—we’re just going to put this happy filter over everything and say things are great, even when reality doesn’t seem to match up.

But a rosy filter is about as helpful as a mirage in a dry desert—it may feel like you’ve found a lush oasis, but shiny sand can’t take away your thirst. Having a positive outlook can’t guarantee you’ll be out of the hospital and back home by Christmas. Bank accounts don’t accept silver linings or glad tidings as legal tender. Thinking sweet thoughts about baby Jesus sleeping in a manger won’t magically make depression and anxiety disappear.

If all Isaiah gives us is an encouragement to look on the bright side, we aren’t much better off than before. Take off those rose-coloured glasses again, and you’ll still see hands and knees that don’t work like they used to. You’ll still feel that sharp pang of guilt every time you remember that moment where things went so wrong, and the consequences that came from it. You’ll still wonder if your life will ever stop being so messy and chaotic and nothing like you imagined it would be. What good does it do us, if our joy is just an optical illusion?

We need more than a wish, more than a dream to hold onto. We need a promise. We need someone who doesn’t just change our perspectives, but someone who changes our reality.

As he sat in prison, John the Baptist wondered if he had been wearing rose-coloured glasses. He had been pointing to Jesus as the long-promised Messiah, the one who would come to bring freedom and glory to God’s people—the one whom countless God-fearing generations had placed their hopes in. And yet, at what he thought was the cusp of ultimate victory, here he sat wasting away until, whether he knew it or not, the day of his execution. Where was this vengeance and divine retribution that Isaiah foretold the Messiah would bring with him? What happened to, as Isaiah prophesied elsewhere, “freedom for the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners”?[1]

If John had been looking through rose-coloured glasses all this time, he had to know. So he sent his disciples to ask Jesus:

“Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”[2]

Jesus didn’t address their doubts by telling them to have a more optimistic outlook, or to avert their eyes and ignore the problems they saw in front of them. Instead, he pointed to what they had already seen and heard themselves:

“The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”[3]

The signs were all there. The Messiah had come—in Jesus’ ministry, Isaiah’s prophecy was actively being fulfilled. No one else could perform the miracles he did: the disabled become able-bodied; diseases disappear as if they were never there; grieving families get to hear their loved one’s voice again. All from a man who proclaims to them the kingdom of heaven is theirs. After thousands of years of hoping in the promised coming, this was more than just wishful thinking—this was reality.

But then why didn’t it look like what they had expected? These miracles were great for the few who received them, but wasn’t the Messiah supposed to bring this restoration to everyone? Why were some people raised from the dead, yet faithful prophets like John the Baptist still had to die for their message? Why wasn’t life as a God-fearing Jew getting any easier?

Even now, long, long after Jesus completed his earthly ministry, we can still ask similar questions. Is this really it? Why didn’t he simply make handicaps and hardships disappear entirely? Where is this paradise that Isaiah describes, and the Holy Highway that keeps us safe from all the things that threaten to tear us apart?

Isaiah’s prophecy doesn’t tell us to don rose-coloured glasses and pretend those problems don’t still exist. Instead, he points us to the far greater problem that the Messiah came to address. A problem that goes much deeper than mere appearances.

It’s not just that we live in a broken world. We’re broken people. People whose sight from birth is not just tinted but totally blind to God’s righteous law. Our sinful, doubting hearts chase after every mirage, hoping to find some sense of joy in health or wealth or stability or anything that catches our eye. But it’s never the oasis we think it is. No illusion can wash our sin-stained souls or bring us any closer to a holy God.

We don’t just need a change of perspective, or even a change of circumstances. We need redemption, and rescue. We need someone who changes our reality. And that’s exactly the Messiah Isaiah points us to:

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 to save you.”[4]

The miracles Jesus performed during his ministry pointed to his mission—but they weren’t the point of his mission. Your God did come, in real time and space, to completely reverse the effects of sin—to heal not only bodies, but souls. He came to fulfill everyprophecy, including the ones that looked anything but rosy. He came to take away our guilt and shame by taking them on himselfas he suffered and died on the cross. He came back from the grave to show us that not even death is strong enough to separate us from him and his love.

Jesus came to make this your reality. When he created faith in the barren wasteland of your heart by the power of his Word, he poured out streams of lifegiving water that washed you clean. Through his Word and sacraments, he continues to soothe your doubts and droughts, refreshing you with springs of joy and confidence in your redemption.

Are your hands weak with worry? Jesus holds you with his nail-pierced hands that will never let you go. Has life brought you to your knees? Jesus lifts you up and gives you his love and forgiveness to lean on. Is your troubled heart racing? Jesus comes to guard and guide you with peace beyond understanding.

When Isaiah says we can shout for joy, it’s more than just a rosy outlook. In Jesus, we see and hear our reality.

These gifts of redemption and renewal are already ours to treasure and rejoice over. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t still face grief and pain every day. We don’t expect this life to be a paradise—because we’re not meant to stay here. We have something higher and better. God gives us more than comfort for the moment, more than just the hope of a “someday”—he puts us on his Holy Highway, driving us day by day closer to our home in Zion.

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.[5]

This is not just any path through a park—this is a road raised up, set apart as holy by the Holy One for his holy ones. Our guilt and sinfulness would have disqualified us from ever stepping foot on this path to God’s presence. But God, in his love for us, removed our impurity—not by looking at us through a rosy filter, but by colouring us crimson with Jesus’ righteous blood.

God calls us to this road that leads us home, and he makes it clear that nothing in this world can pull his rescued people off 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.”[6]

From our perspective, we still see many dangers on our walk to Zion. We may still feel the sand in our shoes, reminding us of the desert we came from—the desert of sin and its consequences. Yet by faith, we also see our destination clearly: our eternal home, the inheritance promised to us by the one who has kept every promise and fulfilled every prophecy. Our hands and knees may lose their strength; brutes and beasts may bring us harm; life may look nothing like we thought it would. But no danger visible or invisible can steal from us God’s promise that we, his redeemed and rescued people, will return safely to our eternal home, where everlasting joy will crown our heads. Because when God makes a promise, he makes it reality.

By faith, we can see not just the destination that lies ahead, but the joy we’ll have when we get there. Every Sunday, we echo the songs we’ll sing together when we enter Zion as fellow redeemed. When we encourage and uplift each other in Christian love, we preview the day that all sorrow and sighing will take off running forever. When we break from the bustle and busyness of life and instead find rest in the gospel’s words of forgiveness, it’s like joy and gladness finally catch up to us and become our traveling companions on the long road home.

We still aren’t blind to the broken world we live in. We know life here is far from a paradise. But we don’t need rose-coloured glasses to see real reasons to rejoice. Our circumstances don’t have to be happy for us to shout for joy that our God came to save us and reverse the effects of sin forever. Our joy comes not just from hope in a “someday,” it comes from confidence in a God who keeps his promises. Our joy is grounded in the knowledge of what our Messiah has done to put us on his Holy Highway and lead us safely home. Our joy is so much more than a rosy outlook. In Jesus, it’s our reality. Amen.

[1] Isaiah 61:1

[2] Matthew 11:3

[3] Matthew 11:5

[4] Isaiah 35:3-4

[5] Isaiah 35:8

[6] Isaiah 35:9,10

Don't Be Stumped by Jesus' Judgment

Isaiah 11:1-10

1 A  shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
    from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
    the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
    the Spirit of counsel and of might,
    the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
3 and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
    or decide by what he hears with his ears;
4 but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
    with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
    with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
5 Righteousness will be his belt
    and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

6 The wolf will live with the lamb,
    the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
    and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear,
    their young will lie down together,
    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
    and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
9 They will neither harm nor destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

10 In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious. 

Don't Be Stumped by Jesus' Judgment

Tear it down to the studs.

Do you ever find yourself on a project – for work or school or just around the house – that requires a complete do-over?

My wife was given this Advent calendar Christmas tree when she was a girl. It’s seen better days. Some of the branches had broken off. Several of the stars had fallen off and are completely missing. We tried to push some of the branches back in, but they never stayed for long. So, this year I finally decided to fix it. New dowels. Screws instead of glue. I bought a bag of 130 little wooden stars to replace the ones that were missing. I’ll paint the whole thing so that it won’t look patchwork or makeshift anymore.

It'll take tearing the thing down to the studs to do it, but soon enough we’ll have the tree as it was always meant to be.

Isaiah tells us a similar story today. He says:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.[1]

Jesse was the dad of King David. It's no surprise that God would compare David’s royal family to a stately tree. But there are two surprising things we learn about this tree. The first is that it is described as a stump.

In Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesse’s tree had been cut down. Sure, by the time of Isaiah’s writing there had been a devastating civil war in which David’s descendants divided the kingdom into two. But those kingdoms were still very much alive… at least, for the time being.

What most of Isaiah’s original audience didn’t know, though, was that before Isaiah finished writing this book, one of those two kingdoms would be completely destroyed, and the other was going to be conquered and carried off into captivity no more than 100 years after that.

There were problems with the people of Israel – problems that required more than a tweak here and a patch there. The people had lost their way. They were worshiping false gods. They were perverting justice, exploiting weakness, inventing new ways to do evil. Sending prophets didn’t work; they just ignored them and found people to tell them what they wanted to hear. A new king wouldn’t solve anything; each generation just got worse as they strayed further from the Lord. They needed to be stripped to the studs. The tree needed to be cut down to a stump if it had any chance of survival.

That’s the first surprising thing Isaiah tells us about King David’s royal family tree: it would get chopped down. The second is that Isaiah doesn’t refer to it as King David’s royal family tree at all. He refers to it as the stump of Jesse. And that’s no accident. Jesse wasn’t a king. Israel didn’t need another king like David – especially not with the expectations the Israelites had for that kind of king. No, this Branch would be something else. He’d bear fruit. He’d be everything that God intended – and God’s people needed – him to be.

In Isaiah’s prophecy, we learn three things about this tree – what kind of person he would be, what he would come to do, and what the results would be.

The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him – the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord – and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.[2]

Some of the members of Jesse’s family tree would have some of those qualities. His son David possessed the fear of the Lord; God described him as a man after his own heart. Jesse’s grandson, Solomon would be given unparalleled wisdom from the Lord, more than all his peers. But that didn’t stop of either of them from sinning – committing adultery and murder, being foolish enough to have hundreds of wives and concubines.

There was only one descendant of Jesse that all these words could apply to – Jesse’s greater son, Jesus. The Spirit of the Lord rested on him; we even see it visibly at his baptism. He possessed otherworldly wisdom and understanding, even teaching the temple teachers at twelve years old. He possessed the Spirit of counsel and of might as he preached to the poor and his disciples, and as he performed miracles for their benefit.

But above all, Jesus had the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord, and he delighted in it. He had a perfect understanding of his Father’s holy will, and he accepted it. He knew what he was sent to do, and he didn’t back down from it. In the words of Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus came to judge.

That’s maybe not what Isaiah’s audience wanted to hear, especially after he predicted the downfall of their kingdoms. I’m sure what they wanted was restoration and might and power and authority and sovereignty. Not judgment. Maybe that’s not what you want to hear either, especially the way that Isaiah describes our Judge:

He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears… He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.[3]

Blind justice. Meaning that he is impartial and shows no favourites. He won’t rule in your favour just because he likes you. He’ll hear the case the Accuser makes against you and see the evidence of your wrongdoing, that you can’t talk your way out of. And he will strike the earth and slay the wicked.

Now, I doubt that you have done all the things Isaiah’s Israelites did. To my knowledge, none of you brought your own household gods to worship today, or erected a monument to a false god outside. But it’s always good for us to remember that idolatry isn’t limited to loving bad things; more often it consists of loving good things too much – your work, your play, your family, security, stability, health, wealth.

I don’t know any of you that have actively subverted justice or intentionally exploited weakness. But don’t we face that temptation ten times a day in all its small and secret ways? Benefiting from your client’s or your rival’s ignorance or urgency. Taking advantage of the fact that you have something other people want and making them pay for it, even if it’s just your love or attention.

And the ancients aren’t the only ones who invented ways of doing evil. We even have AI and an algorithm to help us do that – greed, envy, jealousy, lust, anger, you name it, we give it time and space in our hearts and on our minds, and in what feels like greater proportions every day.

At first, I’m not sure I want blind justice. But when I remember the kind of judge Jesus came and will come again to be, something changes:

With righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth… Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist.[4]

Righteous, not wrathful. Faithful, not fearsome. He will have to strip us down to the studs –strip away every pretense and false sense of security, expose our sin and depravity, but only so that he can forgive it and restore you; cause a little shoot to grow from the stump of your heart that’s not tainted by sin, but is good and God-pleasing, and to cause the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord to rest on you too – to know the love your God has for you.

Your God loves you so much that he sent his Son to be your judge – to be the one to render verdict on your soul – and there’s no one better for the job. In his Letters of Spiritual Counsel, Martin Luther once put it this way:

When the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: “I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!”

The one who judges you impartially, is also the one who saved you completely. He knows all your sin – every one – because he paid for every one on the cross. There’s no double jeopardy allowed in God’s court of law. If your sins have been paid for, then justice has been done. Jesus blotted out your transgressions with his blood so that there’d be no more record of your guilt, but so that you could be acquitted, set free, to live at peace with God, and what a peace it will be.

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat…[5]

Seven times Isaiah paints that picture, with the ultimate conclusion:

They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.[6]

God’s picture of heaven is the perfect peace of Eden restored because of the perfect justice of our Judge Jesus. He came to bring us peace. Not between nations. Not among beasts. But between guilty sinners and a righteous God. Through his blood for our good. It required him to strip us down to the studs, to expose our sin, so that he could forgive it and cause that new shoot to arise to live in our hearts for him.

It can be scary sometimes to think of judgment, but not when we remember that Jesus is our Judge. Because of him and his love for us, the words of Isaiah prove true:

In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.[7]

Rally to him, dear Christian, the Root and Shoot of Jesse, the Branch that will bear fruit for you forever. Find your rest in him. Amen.

[1] Isaiah 11:1

[2] Isaiah 11:2,3

[3] Isaiah 11:3,4

[4] Isaiah 11:4,5

[5] Isaiah 11:6

[6] Isaiah 11:9

[7] Isaiah 11:10

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