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How can those who have known God’s rescue still chase worldly compromise that looks so much like success? That is the exasperated cry of Isaiah 1:21 as the faithful city becomes a harlot—once full of justice, now only murderers, its silver turned to dross.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon opens with the image of a long-ruling leader who seemed untouchable for decades, yet whose very pursuit of power became his undoing. How does that example clarify the difference between worldly efficiency and the kind of success God actually values? Where do you see that same tension playing out today?
Isaiah describes a city that once was full of justice and righteousness but has gradually become something unrecognizable. The sermon compares this to rust forming under fresh paint—invisible at first, then impossible to ignore. What spiritual habits or honest conversations help you stay aware of slow deterioration in your own walk with God rather than just maintaining appearances?
The sermon insists that getting the “first table” right—loving God—is essential before we can truly keep the “second table” of loving our neighbors. How have you experienced this order in your own life? What tends to happen when you try to do good works or pursue justice without that foundation in place?
Isaiah calls Israel to defend the fatherless and the widow, yet the sermon notes that caring for those who have nothing to give you has never been a path to worldly wealth or respect. How do you navigate being called to mercy and justice in a system that rewards the opposite? What does faithfulness look like in that tension?
If worldly compromise ultimately rots out even worldly success, what would it look like for you to refuse that compromise in your current circumstances—at work, in relationships, or in your community? What specific thing would you have to trust God with in order to do that?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
I do suspect that probably all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, have had our minds preoccupied this weekend with what’s going on. When something like this happens, any kind of major war or battle in the world, I find myself just wanting to know exactly what’s going on, how it’s going to play out, and maybe a little too often getting glued onto X, where there’s the open-source intelligence folks that are telling you what’s going on, what they’re finding, and what’s happening. Then the news started to come out—the news that told how many might actually be dead. How can it be? How many times has someone thought that that Ayatollah would, in one way or another, face a shortened life, and yet he would pop back up; there he was again.
I thought about all the pictures we see of him over the decades, being the supreme leader of Iran since 1989. All these huge state dinners, presiding over military parades, being the puppeteer that runs the government, approves what everyone else can do in the government for all that time, all the grandeur, and an appearance of invincibility. Even last year, when there was a massive operation against Iran, he survived. Others may not, but he did. So if you looked at him last week, you’d say, well, there seems to be a showdown coming, but he seems to be secure. Whether you can laud what he does or not—which, of course, we can’t—he led to the death of countless many people and the suffering, the lifelong suffering, often of so many more. But you could say from a worldly perspective, he seemed to have executed his life efficiently because he had risen to power and stayed in power. How many dictators even manage to stay in power for that long? You look and say, oh, well, it seems, once again, the wicked succeed.
By most indications, he could have continued to succeed. But some of the things that seemed to show that he had success were actually some of the things that have now become his undoing—the fact that he insisted on building a nuclear program that could potentially threaten pretty much anyone in the world. Many, just being the average dictator in a country that is a middle power, we probably would have ignored them. Israel probably would have ignored them. But because of that threat, what seemed to show just how powerful he was—even when the nations of the world said, you can’t do that, the most powerful nations, and the most sophisticated intelligence operations said you can’t do that—he could do it. And it seemed to show his worldly status. But it also was leading to the effort that happened over the weekend that led to this demise.
I thought about, why don’t you take someone who had that much ability to hold on to power and use it instead for what was good and pleasing to God? That he, for one, had proclaimed the truth about who God is. But on top of that, he hadn’t caused section method, hadn’t acted as God’s agent in the world, truly bringing God’s healing. What would that have been like? Well, if he’d used all of his other wise abilities and that, he might very well still be leading the nation today. But in his world, by the measures of worldly success, he wouldn’t have looked like a stronger leader than he did, right? Because the strongest leaders are not the leaders reflecting Jesus. Let’s be clear on that. Because the things that we measure as strength in this world are not the things that the Lord calls us to.
So he might have looked like, yeah, you know, this guy that manages to stay in power for many years, but he never does much with it. Now, it’s worldly, much worldly success, but the rot underneath it would lead ultimately to this death that wouldn’t have been there. This is what Isaiah is challenging us with in this next part, because in both Israel and Judah, there appeared at times to be worldly success, much as Ayatollah appeared to have worldly success. But like the supreme leader of Iran, they had chosen worldly compromise to achieve it. And here’s the truth we find in God’s word: worldly compromise ultimately rots out even worldly success. You might not always see it in the moment. It might not be easy to measure, but it is rotting. Let’s pray tonight that we would be people who refuse that compromise but hold on to God’s integrity.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word that is always true and always relevant. As we look at the things happening in the world today, we realize we’re human beings that are sinful, and the challenges we face today are the same kind of challenges that your people faced even millennia ago. And as we see that and confront that, would you confront the sin in our hearts, that we would be those who do what’s pleasing to you rather than what’s pleasing to us and what appears to be successful in this world? We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, let’s turn, if you want, in your Bible to Isaiah chapter one, verse 21 tonight. “See how this faithful city has become a harlot. Once she was full of justice; righteousness resided within her, but now only murderers.” This is the real indictment that God’s putting against the nation, not just the city. Jerusalem is the model for the whole nation. He’s saying, look at this nation that was a faithful nation, that was the nation to represent me in the world. And he begins with this phrase we end up translating in most English translations something along the lines of how the faithful city, but it’s really more like, “How?” And then God goes on about the faithful city—it’s an exclamation. “How can this be?” The prophet is just exasperated here. “How can it be?”
You see the holiness of God. He knows the rescue that God’s provided. How can it be that those who’ve experienced that rescue are willing to chase after such worldly compromise? And it’s not because they’ve never known otherwise. We’re going to talk about the Apostle Paul tomorrow night on steadfast, and I don’t want to get too much into that now, but it’s notable that before Paul followed Jesus, he didn’t know he should follow Jesus, right? He thought he was doing the right thing by opposing Jesus. The people Isaiah is writing to can’t say, “Well, we didn’t know we were supposed to be faithful. We didn’t know we were supposed to value justice and mercy. We didn’t know that we needed to be faithful to one God.” Because, in fact, they did know. Jerusalem had been faithful, just, and righteous—or fair, depending on your translation. These are things that had been seen.
Now, we’re going through 1st and 2nd Kings right now in our Tuesday night Bible study, so if you’re going through it there, or you’ve gone through the history of the kings before, you might say, well, can we really say that Jerusalem is ever these things? Really? It reminds me of the old TV show All in the Family, the theme song, “Those Were the Days,” right? When Glenn Miller played, made their hit parade, oh, and that old LaSalle, how did it run? Sure rang great. Ah, good old days, right? What was the point of that song? It was meant to be ironic, right? Because no matter how fondly we might look at the past, I think, for the most part, even if we had the opportunity, we wouldn’t go back. We might go back for a moment. You know, the old, what if I could tell myself at a younger age something? We might do that. But most of us wouldn’t want to give up everything that is now. If you could go back 50 years or 100 years and give up everything that’s comfortable and pleasant about our current age, every advance we made in medicine, every advance we made in technology, all that stuff, give it all up. I think when we’re actually faced with what we’re giving up, we might say no. We might say initially yes, right? As Archie and Edith, Edith saying that the point is, they would say yes. But I know for myself, I really want to give up central air conditioning in the summer here in St. Louis? No, I’m not going back. I don’t even need to go into anything else. I’m just no.
I think beyond just creature comfort, though, the reason we don’t race back is because we actually look back and we’re glad for some of the things that we personally and our society have improved on. We don’t want to actually go back. We want to go back to an imagined perfect that might show up in a painting, but wasn’t actually. So what I’m going to ask here is this: if he looks at the current corruption in his nation, does he think, “Oh, those were the days when the old LaSalle ran great” and when Glenn Miller was still writing songs? But it’s not quite that. I was thinking, what’s the other reason why we wouldn’t mind going back oftentimes? Is because life tends to seemingly get more complicated, right? And maybe we think back to how simple it was during our childhood and all the things we didn’t need to worry about, all the family and friends that were still alive that maybe have passed since then, and how we miss them, and think about all those things, and say, you know, okay, it’s not that the world was so much better than it was—that there were things I didn’t have to worry about then, and people I loved that were around then—and that would be the part that would really be wonderful to go back to. There was a relational aspect to that time that I’ve lost that I yearn for. And there was something good in that time that I can’t have now that I could have then. That is what Isaiah’s talking about here.
Was everything perfect ever in Israel? No. If you go to the high point under King David, was it perfect? No. So, it’s worth asking then, what was better? Well, the very thing God yearns for: relationship with him. You see, King David did a lot of the same wicked things that the kings of this time did—the same wicked things that leaders today still do. But one thing incredibly rare in the history of the world is that King David was a leader who also happened to be a man after God’s own heart. We see that over and over again. We see that as David yearns for cleansing in Psalm 51. He’s done wicked things, but what bothers him? What bothers him is he doesn’t want to be separated from his God.
If we’re trying to understand what was better about Jerusalem under David than, say, where it is in Isaiah’s day, there’s the thing: a relationship with the Lord. A sense that worldly success isn’t the measure, seeming stability and peace aren’t the measure. Having peace with God is the measure. And even if we’re sinful and acting wrongly, and there’s injustices and terrible things that aren’t made fully right, if we’re seeking after God, we’re where we need to be in that moment.
Isaiah is thinking back to that, a time when the man leading Israel and the people under him were seeking to follow in that example or seeking after the Lord imperfectly, yes, a simple human being imperfectly, very imperfectly. But nonetheless, I think here we really see just how much we miss what God is seeking after, what God yearns for from us. What is God calling us to? It’s not that we’re successful in the world. It’s not that we rise up as a powerful church that everyone in the world knows about, or a powerful nation that everyone knows about and fears. It’s that we know him. There’s the mark of success. The mark of success is purely between us and God. And that’s the part that Israel missed.
What’s the mark of success for them? Well, even if they’re thinking about the Lord, maybe we can have a little bit more gold on the temple, maybe—as we were talking about on Tuesday night—a new, trendier altarpiece for the temple. God says, what I want you to do is actually know me. That’s what matters. That’s what makes the difference. Do you know me, or don’t you? But it’s really easy to confuse knowing and relating to the Lord with doing these worldly things that we think are what really matters. It creeps in. We’re not always aware of it in the moment. It’s like rust.
You don’t usually see rust at the first sign of rusting a metal, right? Your car gets rust on it, or you have a metal table on your deck. You don’t immediately see the first little dot of rust and think, “Oh, rust.” No, rust builds up over time. Maybe there’s a little chip in the paint, and the water gets underneath and starts to cause that deterioration. And the people of Israel have a nice finish on all their metal surfaces that look pretty good. And Isaiah’s saying is, by the measure that you have, it looks like this is a high point in our history, but you need to understand it’s not. There is deterioration happening under the surface.
That’s how it goes on, verse 22: “Your silver has become dross. Your fine wine is diluted with water. Your rulers are rebels, friends of thieves. They all love bribes and chase after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, and the plea of the widow never comes before them.” You’re hearing the sorts of things that happen when we’re not actually seeking after him.
Just look at this list again, thinking about that. This is God’s list of the fruit that comes out of not seeking after me. What do you do? Well, you don’t rebel against me. You’re not friends with thieves or those who love bribes. You don’t value those who chase after rewards. You defend the orphan. You watch out for the widow. Those are the things I value. Those are the things that get you worldly success. There has never been a time in history where seeking after and protecting the fatherless and the widow has been a ticket to being rich, important, and powerful.
Because if your mission in life is to watch over those who have nothing to give you, by worldly standard, you don’t make a lot of money. And oftentimes, you don’t even get very much respect. What gives you respect and attention? Things like taking bribes. Because the people that realize they can bribe you to get results—they like you. And if you do it right, where you don’t get exactly caught, and you just become rich and powerful, people respect you. “Oh, here’s the rich and powerful person. I’d like to be friends with that person.” Maybe you start receiving and giving bribes, right? Both ways. Expand your influence. And it looks good. That’s why Isaiah uses this image here of silver and wine.
Because it looks like right now that Israel has silver and wine. And silver not as lesser than gold, but silver is a precious metal. Let’s think about it that way. It’s not like they’re saying they’re second tier, saying, they have the really good stuff. And they have the really good wine. He says, “Well, you’re looking at it, and it looks really good—all that is just gilded on. It’s not real.” Because what? Your silver has become dross. Dross is the impurities you take out when refining metal. And so he’s saying, instead of having the thing that is of value, it looks like the thing that has value, but what you really have is the stuff that gets discarded when you’re trying to generate the thing of value.
When he speaks of wine, he says wine mixed with water. Now, to me, I don’t drink wine, so I don’t know if it might be good. But take whatever your favorite beverage is, whether it’s wine or coffee or soda or whatever, and imagine watering it down, right? There’s nothing like on a hot day when you get a soda at the fast food joint and it sits in your car for a little bit and all the ice melts in it. That’s this kind of thing he’s talking about. It might still look like it’s the right color, but it tastes awful. It’s flat and diluted. Coffee that has had too much water poured into it. I’m not talking about delicious Americano, well, Americano someone didn’t know how to make—it just got pouring water in over and over? Not good, right? And as I say, it looks good, but it tastes awful. So you have all the appearance, but it’s not ultimately what you’ve been seeking. You’re going to be left empty.
Notably, the rulers, they’re being compared to this: your princes are rebels and companions of thieves, or thieves. It could be translated “unruly.” You’re that your rulers are unruly, kind of a fun play on words. I think it’s actually using a play on words here. In other words, those who have been given by God the power to lead, that’s their job, their commission, are doing the very opposite of what they ought to do. It might make them world successful in the world. It always has and always will. You gain worldly power typically through compromise. It was no different then. Your princes are rebels, your rulers are unruly. So what do they do? Instead of being those who are agents of God’s justice and mercy in the world, they become those who find a way to enrich themselves. Come out of office wealthier than they went in. That sounds like something that might happen sometimes, right? I think that happens in our society today over and over and over again. We complain about it. We complain about it for decades. As long as I’ve been aware of it, we complain about it. It still happens.
Why? Because that’s what people do in power. How do you get ahead? What are the people that stand in the way? Again, it wasn’t any different then. Good bribes, nice gifts that they really shouldn’t receive, ah, now they’re getting ahead. Now they have what they want.
The parallel passage in Hosea 9, as Hosea speaks in the northern kingdom, says, “All their evil appears at Gilgal, for there I hated them. I will drive them from my house for the wickedness of their deeds. I will no longer love them. All their leaders—again, we could translate this—all their rulers are unruly.” I thought maybe even Isaiah’s intentionally invoking that phrase. But it’s an age-old human problem. And we, even if God’s people, often struggle with this. Because why? Because we see this success and we still think in the worldly way ourselves.
And time and time again, we will be drawn into supporting worldly success because in our own sinfulness, in that part that we do that we shouldn’t do, we don’t want to do, we still find it really, really appealing. And so much more so when it happens to be us that are actually the ones with the opportunity. I had a chance to cut corners at work and get a promotion. A chance to copy off the person next to you in school and try to get a better grade. It appeals. It’s very, very hard to resist. So how do we resist it? What’s the purpose of even telling you? If this is just what happens over and over again in human life, then why even talk about this? It’s just what we’re going to do, right? We’re going to do what we don’t want to do, and that’s not really me. All right, Paul said that? Okay, so I’m not really guilty.
That’s not what he’s saying. But crucially, the thing that Paul was able to say is, “Thanks be to Christ Jesus,” right? That there is his hope. Same thing with David, right? David, how does he have hope in his unruliness? He has hope because he turns to the one who is ruling. Who is faithful and just. You can look to him, even when he isn’t worthy of being looked to.
But God says here, the people are eager to look to those who will compromise because it appears to get them ahead. Because it appears to elevate them because it appears to get them praised because it somehow seems like it’s actually a good thing—and by earthly standards at the moment, it is. By earthly standards, if you lived in Iran 10 years ago, it looked like a good thing to befriend the Ayatollah and do whatever it was, no matter how atrocious it was, because that’s how you get into the inner court, and that’s how you get promoted, and that’s how you get resources in a society that’s suffering. That’s not what I want.
How do we do otherwise when it’s so tempting? Well, the key isn’t first to fix how we act as human beings. The key is to fix how we relate to our God. And here, as one commentator put it—I thought it was so to the point—we often talk about the Ten Commandments as two tables: the first table being how we relate to God, the second table being how we relate to other human beings. In other words, fulfilling the two sides of the greatest commandment according to Jesus: to love God and to love our neighbors.
Here’s the thing we need to understand as Christians really, really clearly: If we want to get the second table right—if we want to love our neighbors—first, we need to love God. First, we need to be in relationship to him. It doesn’t work otherwise. Because no matter how good of intentions it is that we enter into a position where we potentially can do something that’s displeasing to God, if we’re not focused on the Lord, and we’re focused on maybe even being, say, a just boss at work, or a good teammate on the team, there’s going to be that chance where we can bend it a little bit and fail in that spot and get a little ahead and get a little more comfortable, get a little more praise, get a little more of the things of the world. It’s going to be incredibly, incredibly hard to resist it.
The moment we give up the first table, we’ve already given in on the second table. Have to love God first. And that’s why we see how it plays out here, with this language of murderers and unfaithfulness. Why do we befriend murderers? Why do we do that? Well, when we trade the righteousness of seeking after the Lord, our human relationships break down. That’s what’s happened over and over again. The kings might talk a good game, but if they’re not truly, genuinely those who are seeking after the Lord, they’re going to ultimately fall.
It’s no different for any of us. We might seek to be those who are righteous, and even think we’re pleasing the Lord, but if the Lord isn’t our goal, if the Lord isn’t our aim, will we all become actual physical murderers? Maybe not, but we’ll murder people in our hearts, as Jesus talks about. Will not look after the needs of the oppressed, will find reasons to worry about ourselves more than others, even if at first we say that’s not what we’re trying to do. When we don’t get that first table right, when the spiritual rust that eats away at our heart is just rusting away and we say, “But we can code it really well. We’re going to paint over it. We’re going to paint this beautiful love of our neighbors and success in the world and whatever else. We’re going to paint all that over it.”
It works about as well as painting over rust ever does. And if you ever paint over rust, how does that work? Anyone successfully take a can of just plain old regular spray paint and spray over rust and found that work great? For about a day, right? It looks really good in a moment, right? And then what starts to happen? It starts to bubble up underneath, right? And soon the paint’s flaking off and there’s rust again.
What do you need to do? Well, you need to eliminate the rust. Enter Rust-Oleum. Why does Rust-Oleum exist? Because Rust-Oleum is a whole bunch of different products aimed at dealing with rusty metal and painting it in a way that doesn’t just immediately rust again. It’s kind of interesting. I was reading about Rust-Oleum this week, and they have their latest and greatest Rust-Oleum Rust Converter. Haven’t personally tried it, but a lot of people say it works really, really well. And what does it do? The chemical in the Rust-Oleum paint actually binds to the rust and converts it into a new, harder metal. And the idea is that the mineral in the paint is able to react to iron oxide, rust, and actually form some third thing that is desirable.
It doesn’t eliminate the rust. Like, sometimes you just need to cut the rust out, right, and just throw it away. But it converts the rust and actually turns it into something that’s desirable so it doesn’t bubble away.
You need to deal with the problem and not just cover it up and put some nice virtue on top, some nice smooth coat of paint, no matter how shiny, no matter how bright and beautiful the color it might be. We need to deal with the problem underneath and actually see a conversion of the heart of the metal, or it’s just going to keep rusting. And that’s exactly what the Lord calls us to.
We don’t like the moral degradation we see in our society today. We have that conversation a lot of times in the Bible study about some moral issue in the world and how it’s bad—and it is. But here’s our temptation: we look at the world and we see how the world accomplishes things. You gain power, and then you enforce your will to change something. I say, well, that film’s pretty good. Let’s see if we can do that, right? Let’s see, even in our own situation. How do you get things in the world? Well, sometimes you make people feel guilty, right? So we will guilt people into doing the right thing around us.
Sometimes that works if all you’re really looking for is, well, people don’t do obnoxious things around me, or they do things that are positive towards me. But in itself, it doesn’t actually change the person. The rust is still there. We just put pretty coat paint on it.
Do we see moral degradation today and are bothered by it? Good. We should be because it’s out there and it’s bad. But we get the wrong course of action. If we wanted to change it, we need to point to the Lord. That’s what we do. The only way we’re going to see anything change ever is for more people to know Jesus. That’s the only thing that will change our society, our town, changed us.
Last week, we talked about the difference between Peter and Judas, a regretter who ultimately dies in despair, killing himself, versus a repenter who does evil as well but renews his relationship with his Lord and repents. And ironically, while we see that and we want that for ourselves, how often both for ourselves and for others, do we actually just try to create a bunch of regretters? We tell people, this is wrong, this is bad, you’re doing these bad things, be a good person. We can create a great pool of regretters who are regretting what they’ve done, but they can regret it all the way to hell.
That says, I don’t want regretters. I want repenters. I know you are sinners; I want people who want me. I want my people to seek after me and trust in me.
When we seek after him, when we have a relationship with him, here is the truth: just as that Rust-Oleum can take that metal and convert it imperfectly, God has the ultimate rust converter. He doesn’t do it perfectly, but even more so, he doesn’t cut us out. Whatever rust you have in your life, he doesn’t just want to cut you out and throw you away and replace you with a new you. He wants to take you. He made you. He loves you. He wants to take you and convert you, and take all of our brokenness, all of our sin, take it into repentance where it becomes a testimony to him. Take all our failures and make them point to him.
If God can convert rust, and he converts the rust of our sin when we are people who seek after him, we pray with you: Father, would you help us to be people who take our rust and give it to you? We can’t even do that without the help of your Holy Spirit, but we pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit, we would seek after you and that we would turn away from the ways of this world; that we would say, we don’t want to have a beautiful painted surface that’s just going to bubble back up with rust, but Lord, we want you.
I praise you, Lord, that you don’t desire to destroy us but rather to convert us, to take our weakened, deteriorating parts and make them strong and use them for your glory. Help us to be people who seek that for ourselves and seek that for all around us; that many more would know you and experience the joy of being restored. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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