Isaiah 1 And The Cost Of Going Our Own Way

Consequences are not the opposite of love. Sometimes they are love, loud enough to wake us up.

We open with Isaiah’s call to come up to the mountain of the Lord, then Pastor Carl takes us straight into a tough but hopeful truth: we provoke God’s anger when we ignore who He is and choose a lie. That anger isn’t petty rage. It looks a lot like a good parent who gets serious when a child runs toward traffic. If you’ve ever wondered why God allows the fallout of our choices, Isaiah 1 offers a clear lens: rebellion doesn’t make us freer, it makes us sicker, and the warning is mercy.

From there we step back and see why the Book of Isaiah is essential Bible study for anyone who wants to understand the gospel. Isaiah holds together God’s justice and God’s grace, showing the weight of holiness and the promise of deliverance. Pastor Carl walks through Isaiah’s historical setting, then unpacks the opening “courtroom” scene where God lays out His case against a people who no longer even consider Him. The imagery gets vivid: untreated wounds, a corrupted mind, and a country falling apart while people blame God instead of returning to Him.

We also engage a challenging section on how covenant breaking spreads into wider social anarchy, and why Isaiah’s hope ultimately points to the coming Messiah and a restored kingdom. If you’re hungry for peace, stability, and real hope, this message will meet you where you are. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review. What’s one area where you need to stop arguing with the warning light and start walking back toward the Lord?

Come On Up is the radio ministry of The Mountain Cross in Waynesville North Carolina. To learn more about us please visit: TheMountainCross.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, and we shall walk in his paths.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to Come On Up, the radio ministry of the Mountain Cross in Waynesville, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

We provoke God's anger when we ignore the truth of who he is and walk in a lie. A lie that we come up with ourselves, or a lie that the enemy comes and brings to us, and we say, Oh, that's a good idea. But either way, we've resisted God and we've gone our own way, and it makes him angry. Why does it make him angry? Because he loves us. Why do parents get angry at children when they run out on the road?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Because you love your children, you don't want them to get hit. We all have memories of getting into trouble with our parents. Maybe it was when you arrived home after curfew, and your dad was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed upon your arrival. Uh-oh. You knew there was a consequence coming. But deep down you also knew you deserved it. Parents set rules to keep their kids safe. In today's message, Pastor Carl reminds us that God is our Heavenly Father. He set rules in place because he loves us. Why are we surprised when there are consequences for not listening? And now, here's Pastor Carl.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

The book of Isaiah, chapter one. It's interesting. The book of Isaiah is really an encapsulation of the message of the gospel. And Isaiah is about two parts the judgment of God in the first half, and the deliverance of God in the second half. The judgment of God, of course, is like the Old Testament with the law being given. This is the requirement of the holiness of God. If you're going to enter into God's presence, you need to be holy with the righteousness of God. And of course, as we look in the New Testament, Paul reveals to us that the law was given to us as a schoolmaster to teach us that we don't have the righteousness of God, right? And so in the New Testament, uh, the second half of the Bible is that you cannot fulfill the righteous requirement of the law because you've been born into sin, but I can, the Lord says. And I've become a man, and I've died on the cross to give forgiveness, to pay for the price of the sin that all creation, all mankind has had. And all you have to do is accept it now. It's the grace of God, it's the deliverance of God. And in the deliverance of God, we look at three areas: the supremacy of the Lord, as the servant of the Lord, and the future plan of the Lord. The Lord is still at work, and there's still things that are happening in the future, and Isaiah will look at all of that. And so in the first part, uh we emphasize the law and the judgment for disobedience. In the second half, we look at God's grace and deliverance. He brings comfort, he brings promise, and he brings hope. We all need hope, especially in our world today, don't we? We need a message of hope. And this is really kind of neat, and I kind of alluded to it already. Do you notice the first part of Isaiah is 39 chapters long? The Old Testament has 39 books in it. And the New Testament, and when you put them together, the Old Testament and the New Testament is 66 books, and Isaiah has 66 chapters, and so the New Testament kind of aligns with the second half of the book. And so it's kind of a Bible within the Bible, which is kind of cool, which kind of fits in with the year of the Bible, doesn't it? So I think God wants us to go through Isaiah this year and learn and grow with what he has for us. It's about the justice and the mercy of God. Is God a judgmental God? Yes. Does he exact justice? Does he pour out his wrath? Yes. But he's also a merciful God, full of grace, not willing that any should perish, but all that would come to knowledge of him. And so we'll be looking at that as we go through the study of Isaiah, the book of Isaiah. So let's get right into it, shall we? Isaiah chapter 1 and verse 1. It's the vision of Isaiah, the son of Amos, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, the kings of Judah. Isaiah was called to ministry in this work, and he did this work during the reign of all these kings, uh, four kings in the southern kingdom of Judah. Now, if you remember, Israel was divided into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and they were in the north, and the southern kingdom was Judah and uh or Judea, Judah, and their capital was Jerusalem in the south. And these kings all reigned in the south, although the northern kingdom was taken captive by the Assyrians during the time of King Hezekiah. So some of these warnings were applicable to the northern kingdom as well, but they were specifically given to the southern kingdom during this time. His work covered about 81 years, and it began in the year Uzziah died in 739 B.C. And last the last dated event in the book was the 14th year of Hezekiah in 701 BC. So between that time is when Isaiah is doing his work and proclaiming his visions and his message. It's something interesting, and we will probably touch it way down the road. But in 701 BC, all calendars were changed that year. At the end of Isaiah's work, all the calendars were changed. And so you'll have to come back later to find out why that is. Jewish tradition says that Isaiah was sawed in half during Manasseh's reign. Manasseh was a very, very evil king that came after Hezekiah, who was a very, very good king. Apparently Manasseh did not like the things that Isaiah had been saying before he became king. That's who it is. That's who we're talking about, and that's who Isaiah is talking to, and this is what he's saying. Verse 2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not consider. It's the opening scene to this book, almost like a like a movie. It's the opening scene. And it's kind of like a trial, you know, and and and the heavens and and the earth are witnesses, or they're the jury, and and God is making his case. He's saying, I have I've raised this nation. I've poured my heart into this nation. I've nurtured this nation. I've given this nation everything it needed to know. But they don't acknowledge me. They've rebelled against me. Even the ox and the donkey, who are two of the most stubborn animals in the world. Even they acknowledge their master, but Israel didn't acknowledge theirs. They don't even know who I am. They don't even consider me. They don't seek after me. That's the opening scene. Israel is not seeking after God. Israel is the chosen nation, isn't it? And yet, they were rebelling against God and not seeking after it. Alas, a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a breed of evildoers, children who are corrupters. They have forsaken the Lord. They have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel. They have turned away backward. They have turned away backward. They've turned from following God and went their own way. When we turn away from God, we're not moving forward. We're moving backward. And he said they're so they were so stuck in their sin. They're soaked with iniquity. They have this heavy burden of sin on them. They're just a brood of evildoers. That's all they know how to do. And they reproduce themselves. They're corrupters. You know, when we rebel against God, we don't make things better. We corrupt his creation. We corrupt ourselves. We corrupt one another. And they provoke the anger of the Holy One of Israel. We provoke God's anger when we don't walk in his grace. We provoke God's anger when we ignore the truth of who he is and walk in a lie. A lie that we come up with ourselves, or a lie that the enemy comes and brings to us, and we say, Oh, that's a good idea. But either way, we've resisted God and we've gone our own way. And it makes him angry. Why does it make him angry? Because he loves us. Why do parents get angry at children when they run out on the road? Because you love your children, you don't want them to get hit, you don't want them to get hurt. You want them to be strong, happy, fulfilled in their life, and the best way to do that is to walk in your ways. The Lord is that's his heart. I have the best way for you. The way is to know me and to walk with me, and I have an abundant life for you, but you want to go your own way. Do you not see that this is not good for you? Verse 5. Why should you be stricken again? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick and the whole heart faints. From the sole of the feet, even to the head, there's no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying uh sores. They have uh not yet been closed or bound up or soothed with ointment. You guys are so far gone you don't even realize what state you're in. You have these sores from your sin, and and and you don't even recognize they're there. They're getting infected. You're not doing anything about it, you're not coming back to me, the one who brings wholeness and healing and life and forgiveness. But you're going your own way and you're thinking you're you're fine. You're all sick. You ever hear people that pray, I pray the blessing of the Lord on you from the from the bottom of your toe to the top of your head? The Lord is saying an opposite thing here. You guys are so far messed up, you're messed up from the foot to the head. I want to bless you from the foot to the head, but you want to go your own way, and you're you're just totally sick, you're corrupted, you're headed to death. Do you not see it? Verse 7. Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire, strangers devour your land in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a hut in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. Unless the Lord of hosts had left us a very small remnant, we would have become like Sodom. We would have been made like Gomorrah. So here's a little glimpse into the grace of God. If God just would have given up, they would have been like Sodom and Gomorrah. And what was the end of Sodom and Gomorrah? They were destroyed by the wrath of God. Fire came down from heaven and just wiped them out. But don't you see Isaiah is saying, the heart of God, the message coming from the Lord? Your country is falling apart. Can you not see when that's happening? The city is falling apart, and people start to blame God for it. God says, we're his chosen people, but our cities are just being destroyed. Why is he destroying us? Have you been seeking him? Do you know him? Are you walking in the safety of who he is? So often we blame God for the things that happen in our country. But so often the things that are happening are logical outworking of doing things God told us not to do. And it's not necessarily God coming and punishing us and letting these things happen. It's when you put your hand over the hot fire on the stove, it will get burned. I'm not going to punish you with a burn, but I'm warning you, your hand will get burned. It's not my fault, the Lord says, when you burn yourself because I told you not to. Right? Did that make sense? And so these things are happening, and either we ignore them, saying, ah, it's not so bad, or we blame God. How could a loving God let this happen to me? I thought you were on my side, Lord. And the Lord says, I thought you were on my side. Where'd you go? And so the glories of Jerusalem, the majesty of the temple, he's foreseeing a time when it's all destroyed. And in 70 AD, it was, wasn't it? Even before then, it was destroyed. And this is talking about when Babylon took the southern kingdom captive and brought them away to Babylon for 70 years. And this city was destroyed at that time, and they were desolate. And what happens? You run out, if you're not taken captive, you run out into the wilderness and find a place of safety. And instead of having your your grand palaces and stuff, now you're living in a place like this. This is what he's describing. You're out in the vineyard, and this is all you have left. Because you're forsaken me. Because you went your own way. The enemies took you over. You thought it would be fun, you thought it would be great, but this is where you end up. You had to run out to the wilderness and just build something to keep shade or to keep the rain off. But that's all you had because you've rejected the Lord. You've gone your own way. And this would happen. When we reject the Lord, we put aside a sound mind. We enter into a deranged mind. Isn't sin derangement? You know, it makes no sense. We think it's fun and we think it's great, but it really is destroying us and pushing us further away from God. And so the more and more you do that, your heart gets hardened, and the more sin you justify, your head, you don't think right anymore, right? The thing is, when we walk away from the Lord and his wisdom, we get corrupted in our mind, we get affected in our bodies, our souls are corrupted, we're just headed to death. And you run away to the wilderness to try to find some help, and and there's not much out there. That's the message that Isaiah is bringing to us. This fellow named uh John Rankin, who is um a theologian, a modern-day theologian, that has a great way of bringing the truth of the biblical assumptions from the book of Genesis. There are certain things that that we we gather from the Word of God that are assumptions that we move forward on. If we don't build our lives on these assumptions, we come up with other ideas and other paths, and it corrupts our thinking and it leads us astray and makes us want to be at enmity with God instead of coming into fellowship with him and experiencing all that he has. In describing Sodom and Gomorrah, he said this in his book. He said the nature of Sodom and Gomorrah is so often misunderstood as only referring to homosexuality. Rather, it refers to a comprehensive reality of lawlessness rooted in the brokenness of the marriage covenant of one man and one woman. God's whole plan was built on marriage, on the marriage bed, between one man and one woman. And from the very beginning, Satan has been corrupting that relationship. Because it's the relationship that healthy families come out of, it's the relationship that happy children, families, societies are born out of. It's a picture of Christ and his church. Christ is a faithful God that's looking for a faithful bride to come alongside and be connected forever. And yet, all the sin that we see is a result of what we do and how we look at the marriage relationship. This is a simple way that he looks at how things happen. God is the beginning of all things. He's a good God, he's a just God, he's a loving God. He wants to live life with us, he wants to give life, he wants to sustain life. So God is the giver of life. And yet with the creation of mankind, we were created in his own image. And in his own image, we were given the ability to choose. Free will. And he's given us a choice, and we can either choose to follow him and believe him, or go in our own way and suffer the result. Another way he puts it, John puts it, is he's given us the power of informed choice. He just doesn't send us out there and say, go and see what you come up with. He reveals himself to us. He shows us what's good, he shows us the way that he is the way, the truth, and the life. And he says, now make your choice. And then, this is kind of controversial, he comes and he gives us sex. But sex is something that we need to be talking about in the church, but we're afraid to because it's embarrassing. So the society is taking over and corrupting it all. Sex is an outpouring of part of the image of God that He's put within us. Because God is a creating God, and in that He's given us the power to recreate, to participate in His creation. And so that's not only physically between a man and a woman, but it's also spiritually. You know, we have spiritual children, but if we corrupt the truth of the gospel, if we become spiritually adulterers, if we we seek after another God, if we put up idols in our lives, and we start teaching philosophies that are other than what is true about the Lord, then we corrupt people spiritually as well. Same thing physically, if we're outside of the bonds of marriage, it's not just homosexuality, but any kind of sexual immorality, which begins in our hearts and our minds, doesn't it? It begins with lust, i pornography, cheating, sex outside of marriage before you get married, all these things. If you go out there, you know there's a whole number of other sins out there that are just way off base. And this is not what God intended for us. He intended one man, one woman for life in order to be part of who he is here on earth to bring life. When we turn it around, which is a lot of what we hear today, my sexual fulfillment is the goal, it's the starting point. Everything else I do is based on that. And so my choice is my fulfillment, no matter what it does to other people. And it destroys lives, it destroys yourself. And in this life that God has given us, we're really destroying it. And when it comes down to it at the end, when we see God on the other side, we resist God or we pretend that He's not there. Isaiah is giving us the same sort of idea. Uh, John goes on to say the assumption in place is simple. When the God-given trust for man and woman in a faithful marriage is broken, when that faithful marriage union is broken, all forms of sexual and social anarchy follow. Idolatry, sorcery, violence, murder, rape, adultery, promiscuity, homosexuality, child sacrifice, we'll call that abortion today. Mockery of parenthood. Mockery of parenthood. How many TV shows do you see that have a godly, manly, fatherly figure? They're all doofuses, aren't they, or they're not there? Prostitution, theft, deceit, slavery, flaunting of wealth, public self-shame, etc. And the most vulnerable in society suffer the most as a result. In other words, we note the wholesale breaking of the Ten Commandments and rejection of the goodness of covenantal law, the complete absence of the Sabbath ethic back to creation. Christ is our Sabbath. We find our rest in Him, our hope in Him, our life in Him, our fullness in Him. But when we reject His ways and think we can get what we want with some of Him and some of this and some of that, it doesn't work. It's all corrupted. And that's the message of Isaiah. Let me show you something else that John talks about in his book. He tries to put things together real simply. Isn't this the heart of every man to live the posh lifestyle? Every human. Do we not? Want peace in our lives? Order? Stability and hope? Anybody, ask anybody if they're following God or not. Are these not good things to desire now? You want peace. You want to be able to get along with other people. You want other people to get along with you? You want to be liked? Right? Order. Some people might like blowing stuff up, but really, there's something to having order in your life where you know where to find stuff, and you know other people are doing the things they're supposed to do. There is something that's satisfying about order in life, isn't there? Stability. I know next week I'm gonna have a house to live in. There's gonna be food to eat. I know my wife is gonna stay with me. We like stability. We're not looking for things to change in our lives to destroy our situation and what we're seeking. Everybody wants that, right? Am I wrong? Is anybody saying, I I I I love instability? I I my my life is to be as instable as possible, unstable, everybody hating me and things going against me. I just love that. I don't think anybody, I mean, we we live that way sometimes with the choices we make, and well, why are we doing that? But really, in deep, we don't want that. And hope. Hope. Why is suicide the greatest cause of death in teens today? Because there's no hope. People need hope. We want hope. We see everything falling around around us, uh falling apart around us, and we either blame people or or we just say, well, that's just the way it is. Am I wrong in thinking everybody wants hope? And then he says, look at this: the four L's live, love, laugh, and learn. Isn't that what you want out of life? You don't want to, you know, close yourself up in a corner and not let the world come at you. You want to live life, you want to experience life. There's so much out there that's glorious.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

You're listening to Pastor Carl of the Mountain Cross as he teaches through the book of Isaiah on today's episode of Come On Up. Isaiah is an important book for us to read in the Old Testament because this is where we read many prophecies about the coming Messiah. While we now know Jesus as our one and true Messiah, the people who originally read Isaiah's prophecies did not know when the promised Savior would arrive. So while the book of Isaiah calls the nation of Israel to repentance, it also inspires its readers to have hope in the coming Messiah who will establish a new heavenly kingdom on earth. Well, if you would like to learn more about what it means to follow this Messiah we know as Jesus, we have some resources online to help get you started. Just visit us at themountaincross.com and head to our How to Know God tab. You can also find a link to our podcast feed in case you want to catch up on past teachings from Pastor Carl. If you'd like to get connected with us in person, we'd love to have you join us here at the Mountain Cross. We meet every Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Smoky Mountain Cinema in Waynesville, North Carolina. We also host a Faith Film Night on the first Monday of each month. To learn about our next film, visit us online or search for Faith Film Night on Facebook. Thanks for tuning in today. Well, that's all for today. Come on up to the mountain with us again next time as we seek to learn more from the Lord through His Word. Come on Up is sponsored by the Mountain Cross, a Calvary Chapel fellowship.