Isaiah 30’s Warning About Trusting The World Over God

When pressure hits, most of us don’t stop and pray, we start negotiating. That’s the tension at the heart of Isaiah 30, and Pastor Carl walks us straight into it with a warning that feels uncomfortably current: God’s people see danger coming and sprint toward Egypt for an alliance instead of seeking the Lord for counsel, provision, and protection.

We talk through why “Egypt” isn’t just ancient geopolitics. It’s a living metaphor for worldliness, self-reliance, and the false security we buy with our time, attention, and treasure. The message challenges the subtle ways we drift after coming to faith: starting by grace, then trying to finish by effort, entitlement, or “I can do what I want because I’m forgiven.” Along the way, Isaiah names another temptation we all recognize, the craving for “smooth things” that comfort us without correcting us. Truth can sting, but it also heals, because God doesn’t tell us hard things to shame us, He tells us hard things to bring us home.

The turning point is simple and hopeful: “In returning and rest you shall be saved… in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” We slow down, look at what repentance actually does in everyday life, and end anchored in the gospel promise that Jesus takes our sin and gives us His righteousness, so we can draw near without fear. If this encouraged you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs rest, and leave a review so more people can find this teaching.

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_01 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_00 0:13

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

SPEAKER_02 0:20

You came to me knowing that there's nothing that you could do to be acceptable in my sight except my gift of grace. That should be our attitude every day in our Christian walk. But we seem to think, oh, now I've arrived, I've done these things, I've had victory, and we think that it's us that's had the victory, and God didn't have anything to do with it. When the truth is, God had everything to do it, and he allowed us to be a part of the work that he's doing in our lives.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Sometimes we feel like we're entitled to things merely because we've adopted the attitude that the customer is always right. While in principle that may make a good business practice, in reality, the customer can indeed be wrong, and nobody deserves any special treatment. In fact, what we all deserve is hell. In Pastor Carl's message today, he aims to point you back to the grace of God. It doesn't have anything to do with what you're entitled to, but it's about God's grace toward you. And now, here's Pastor Carl.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Woe to the rebellious children, says the Lord, who take counsel, but not in me, and who devise plans, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin, who walk and go down to Egypt, and have not asked for my advice, to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt. Do you hear the Lord's heart? You're my children, you're my chosen people, and you're not coming to me for advice. You're not coming for me for provision, you're not coming to me for protection. But you're going your own way, you're devising your own plans, and above that, you're going down to Egypt to negotiate with the Pharaoh. An alliance. You see, Assyria was coming in. They saw Assyria coming and taking over the northern kingdom, and they realized they needed some help to protect themselves from Assyria. So their idea was to go, let's make an alliance with Egypt. They're strong, they can help us. And the Lord says, I'm so much stronger than Egypt. And do you remember Egypt 700 years ago? You were slaves to Egypt, and you're praying to be freed from Egypt, and I freed you. I'm that same God that loves you, that wants to give you freedom and protection, but you're not seeking after me. You're going your own way. Verse 3 said, Therefore the strength of Pharaoh shall be your shame, and the shadow of Egypt shall be your humiliation. For his princes were at Zoan, and his ambassadors were in Hanes, and they were ashamed of a people who could not benefit them, or to be a help or a benefit, but a shame and also a reproach. In your wisdom, you're going down and sending ambassadors to Egypt to make a deal with the Egyptians, and it's going to become your shame. You're going to be embarrassed for it, you're going to bring a whole bunch of money and you're going to lose it all, and they're not going to help you. They're not going to save you. Now it's interesting when we look at the definition of the words of Zoan and Haynes, Zoan is the place of departure. They had left Egypt. Again, they were freed from Egypt. 700 years before that, they were given freedom from their slavery. And now they want to go back. And because they're going back, haynes means grace has fled. And more like you fled from grace. You know, when we come to the Lord, we realize the grace of God has saved us and it's not of our works, that lest any man should boast. But something happens once we become Christians. Where we think that we have to start doing the right thing in order to please God. And then we even put that aside, and we're just going to do what we want to do because we've been blessed and forgiven by God. I could live my life any way I want to. And we start deceiving ourselves and we go adrift. And essentially, we leave God's grace. We leave the protective covering of his umbrella over our lives. We need every day to seek God's grace. Paul talks about when he talked to the Galatians, he says, You foolish Galatians, and this is a paraphrase, you begun in the spirit. Why do you want to finish in the flesh? You came to me knowing that there's nothing that you could do to be acceptable in my sight except my gift of grace. That should be our attitude every day in our Christian walk. But we seem to think, oh, now I've arrived, I've done these things, I've had victory, and we think that it's us that's had the victory, and God didn't have anything to do with it. When the truth is, God had everything to do it, and he allowed us to be a part of the work that he's doing in our lives. Do we realize that? Let's not flee from grace, like the folks from Jerusalem did. And then verse 6 talks about the burden against the beasts of the south. Through a land of trouble and anguish, from which came the lioness and the lion, the viper and the fiery flying serpent, doesn't that sound like a dragon? They will carry their riches on the backs of young donkeys and their treasures on the humps of camels to a people who shall not profit. For the Egyptians shall help in vain and to no purpose. Therefore I have called her Rahab Him Shebeth. Rahab Him Shebeth. Rahab is an old name for Egypt. It's not Rahab of Jericho. This is Rahab that refers to Egypt. Their strength is to sit still. All that Egypt is good for is sitting under bottoms, is what the Lord is saying. And you go and try to find help from them. You pack up all of your animals with all these treasures to try to build an alliance with Egypt. You bring it down there, they accept it all, and they leave you high and dry. That's the way of the world. Egypt is a picture of the world. And when we seek to find happiness and wholeness and protection from the world, it's going to leave us high and dry. You put all this effort into bringing all your riches and putting all these animals to work to go down there for nothing. For nothing. Why don't you seek after me because I have everything you need for life and godliness? Seek after me because I love you. Haven't I shown that to you? That's the heart of the Lord. So he says, now go, write it before them on a tablet and note it on a scroll that it made be for them for time to come, forever and ever, that this is a rebellious people, lying children, children who will not hear the law of the Lord, who say to the seers, do not see, and to the prophets, do not prophesy to us the right things. Speak to us smooth things and prophecy deceits. That's what we want to hear. Now, would anybody admit that's really what they want to hear? I want to hear lies. Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies. That's what I want to hear. Right? If we're honest, we don't want to say that. But if we're honest, that's what the heart of Jerusalem was. I don't want to hear what God has to say. I know better. And I want you to tell me this. And isn't that what it is in the church today? We go to church to hear what we want to hear. You know, Paul talks about tickling ears, seeking teachers that will give them tickling ears that will say nice things to them to build people up. And we do come together to build one another up, to edify one another. But we edify in the truth. The truth that says you are a sinner, but God. Right? Not you could do whatever you want. God just loves you the way you are, and everything's good. God loves you, and He doesn't want to leave you where you are. He wants to change you, He wants to mold you, He wants to make you like Him. He wants to conform us into His image. And so now the Lord is telling Isaiah to write these things on a scroll because this is happening before it's happened, right? He's seeing the attitudes in Jerusalem and He's prophesying, he's saying, Jerusalem, you're gonna go down to Egypt, and this is gonna happen. And God is saying, write it down because God is outside of history, and prophecy is a great way to prove who God is. And this is another specific example where he says, write it down, so they'll see afterwards what I said was true. This is what's gonna happen. And even today we read it, and it's it's a testimony against those in Jerusalem that exalted their hearts above the Lord. And the Lord takes it one step further. In verse 11, he says, This is what you're saying. Get out of the way, turn aside from the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us. Not only do I want to ignore God, but I want God out of my life. This is the heart of pride. This is dangerous. This is not saying, not my will be done, but yours, but this is my kingdom is most important. And I am something else. And I've fooled myself into believing these things, and I'm gonna continue leaving my life this way. What a warning it is when our hearts go adrift, when God starts taking us in a direction where we really don't want to go in. Our flesh says, no, no, no, and we start fooling ourselves. And ultimately what we're saying is, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us. You know, it's been said that God doesn't send anybody to hell, they choose to go there. You know, the lake of fire, and we'll talk about this at the end of the sermon today, the lake of fire was designed for the devil and and his and his angels, the demons that fell with him. It wasn't intended for mankind. And yet, for those who have rejected the one and only way to be restored into relationship with God, because we're all born into sin thanks to Adam and Eve, right? It's not like we become bad, we are bad. And that's not popular speaking either. We're born sinners, but God became one of us because he was the only one that could take care of the sin problem. He became one of us so he could be in our place and take our sin, take the wrath of God upon himself so that we could be given the righteousness of God. And for those that refuse that gift, it is narrow-minded, isn't it? Jesus is the way, the truth, the life. If it wasn't for him, there would be no hope whatsoever. That's pretty narrow-minded, but it's true. For those that refuse to accept this gift, they say, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us. The only place where you can go and be outside of the influence of God completely is in the lake of fire. Let's not have that attitude. May the Lord prick our hearts when we start going down this path. This path that's going off the right path. The Lord has a way for us, He has steps for us to take. And when we go our own way, we get off of His path. It's called perversity. We we pervert the path that He's put us on, and we go our own way, which leads to death and destruction. Verse 12. Therefore, says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, the one that you want to cease from your presence. Because you despise this word and trust in opposition and perversity. Did you get that? You despise the word of God, the true word, the word that's filled with compassion and love and hope and answer. You despise that and you go your own way, and you'd rather trust in oppression and perversity. Do you remember what it was like? Of course not. It was 700 years ago. But don't you remember what your fathers and their fathers and they said, what happened, being slaves? You like the idea of being slaves? When we serve the world, we become slaves to sin. If we're Christians, we become free from slavery to sin, right? And it's so perverse, we think that we're free to do what we want to do, but but the truth is we are slaves to sin and we can't do anything but sinning. And we think it's good, but it's killing us. And so the Lord saves us from that. We realize now we have a choice. I can live the abundant life, or I can live death. I think I'll choose the abundant life. But then we wax and we wane and we start looking at the things of the world, and and they get us excited again, and we we start falling into this path, and and we'd rather be oppressed and walk in perversity. Strange, isn't it? And we rely on them. Why do you rely on the world that can't fulfill anything it promises? And therefore, this iniquity shall be to you like a breach ready to fall, a bulge in a high wall, whose breaking comes suddenly and in an instant. Cities had walls around them to protect them. And spiritually speaking, we have walls around us. That wall is Jesus Christ. He's there to protect us, he's there to guide us, to show us the way, to say where it's too far and where it's where we need to be. But when we start ignoring his words and start going down, you know, where our flesh wants to go, the things that the world is showing before us, you know, something little sparkly and exciting. We're going to go after that. We're starting to put breaches in our wall. And we had some dams, I think, up in Wisconsin or Michigan that broke because of the rains. And it's the same sort of thought where that protection is going to break because the foundation and the stability of it is being eroded because you're no longer seeking after the Lord, but your own ways. You're seeking after the ways of the world that can't promise that that looks so exciting and fulfilling, and yet in the end, you're left empty. The Lord saying, Be careful. This is what it's leading to. In verse 14, and he shall break it like the breaking of a potter's vessel, which is broken in pieces, he shall not spare. So there shall not be found among its fragments a shard, or take a fire from the hearth, or to take water from the cistern. In other words, he's going to break this pot. And there are going to be so many pieces, we can't do a thing with all of them, with any of them. Because the tendency is if the Lord breaks it and there's some pieces that might be used for something, we're going to grab that piece and use it to lead to death some more. Use it for our purposes, use it to fulfill our desires, which leaves us empty. And the Lord doesn't want us to get there, so he destroys it completely. The same sort of destruction, the same sort of judgment that he puts on his enemies. And we'll be looking at Assyria in a few minutes, that he would destroy Assyria completely. He uses that same language for his people that have abandoned him. God's not a mean God, but he doesn't want his people to continue down a path that leads to destruction. And if he has to destroy the things in our life that lead to destruction so that we might come to a place to find wholeness, he's going to do it. Does that make sense? God is full of love and compassion, but that doesn't mean that he lets us go and get stuck in our sin, which destroys us. He uses tough love as well as compassion and grace and peace. It's all how we approach him, isn't it? It's all how we approach the Lord. Do we believe him? Do we trust him? Or do we go our own way? For thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, in returning and rest, you shall be saved. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. But you would not. And you said, No, we will flee on horses. And the Lord says, Therefore you shall flee. Yeah, if you're going to run, you're going to run. And uh we will ride on swift horses. Therefore, those who pursue you shall be swift. Yeah, you're going to run, and you better be running fast because those come after you are going to run pretty fast too. Jerusalem is saying this in their pride. If the enemy's going to come after us, we're going to run. And we're going to run fast, and they're not going to get us. And the Lord says, Yeah, you're going to run. But the enemy is going to get you. What is the secret? Returning to the Lord. Return to the Lord. He's just waiting for us to return. You remember the story of the prodigal son. The Father's just waiting and welcomes his son in open arms. Repentance is big in the economy of the Lord, isn't it? Repentance is what realigns our hearts with his and gives us access to the grace that he offers. So return to him and rest in him. I find my rest in the Lord. My rest in trying to find things that fulfill me. They're all found in him. My rest in trying to fulfill the law so that when I stand before God, I can say, Well, I did all these things, you should let me in. We can't fulfill that list. I rest from that, knowing that he's done the work for me and he's given it to me. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. This idea of waiting before the Lord. This idea of slowing down and saying, Okay, Lord, I've said my peace, I've I've shared my heart, which he wants to hear your heart. He wants to hear what you're saying. But most of the time, as the people of Jerusalem here are an example of, we don't even talk to the Lord. We talk to ourselves about the things we want to do and the things that we want to accomplish. Lord says, Come and find rest in me, and then be still and know that I'm God. Be still and know that I've got this. That I have your best interest in mind. And I want to bless you, I want to strengthen you, I want to protect you. And in that we find great confidence, don't we? Great confidence and boldness to speak forth what is true. Not because of anything that I have done, but because of what Christ has done in me, because of who he is and what he's done. When we really believe it, when we really rest in him, he gives us a confidence and a boldness to stay there and to say no to our flesh, say no to the world, because we know where it's going. Because the one that is true has told us, and the one that is true has proven himself to us again and again and again. The problem is, most of Jerusalem did not do that. They went their own way and in their pride thought that they could accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. Verse 17: one thousand shall flee at the threat of one, and the threat of five you shall flee, till you are left as a pole on top of a mountain, as a banner on a hill. In your pride, you will run. And in your pride, you're quickly gonna lose that confidence because your enemy is gonna pursue you, and you're gonna become afraid of everything. You know, a thousand of you will flee at the threat of one because you've lost that confidence because you've seen the enemy come and take you over. And when it's all said and done, you're left as a pole on top. Top of a mountain as a banner on a hill. It's an interesting phrase. I went to the New Living Translation to get a little more insight into it. And listen to this. You will be left like a lonely flagpole on a hill or a tatted banner on a distant mountaintop. You will have run to the mountain, and all it's left is just shambles. And you become an emblem to the world. This is what happens when I go my own way and do my own thing. There's not much left to show for it. May we find wisdom in that. In the fact that they showed us that the word of God is true, even though they weren't going in that direction. They showed us this is where it ends. In destruction, in humiliation, nothing left. Therefore, the Lord will wait. He told us to wait on the Lord, and He's also waiting on us. He's waiting for us. That He may be gracious to you. He's telling these things to Jerusalem in advance. So that they would turn and that they would find hope and healing and mercy. And even after the judgment comes, even after the result of their foolishness happens, the Lord's mercy and grace is still shown out. And there'll be glimmers of this in the next few minutes. But even in the future, there's even a more glorious time set aside for Israel when they are restored, when they come to faith in the Lord during the millennial reign. It'll be a glorious time. Therefore, the Lord will wait that he may be gracious to you. And therefore he will be exalted, that he may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all those who wait for him.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Thanks for joining us for Come On Up. We've been hearing from Pastor Carl, the pastor at the Mountain Cross in Waynesville, North Carolina, as he teaches us about the book of Isaiah. Toward the beginning of this book, the prophet Isaiah receives a vision of God's glory, and he is certain that he and the entire nation of Israel will be destroyed in the presence of a perfect creator. But God chose mercy on Isaiah and purifies him of his sin. This is an illustration of how God had mercy on us by sending his Son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. We don't have to be afraid to enter into the Lord's presence because the blood of Jesus has already paid the debt of our sin. We are made righteous and holy because of his sacrifice, which was prophesied to us all the way back in the book of Genesis and reaffirmed in the book of Isaiah. We're called to spread this message of hope to all who will hear it. And that is why this program that you're listening to is on the air. If you'd like to hear more from Pastor Carl, you can do so by visiting us online at themountaincross.com. If you're local to Waynesville, we'd also love to invite you to join us in person at the Mountain Cross. We meet every Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Smoky Mountain Cinema. You'll find more information about our services and our monthly faith film nights on our website. Pastor Carl has plenty more to share from the book of Isaiah, so be sure to 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.