3. (Prologue) “A Beauty That Saves the World” (Isaiah 60)

 

Isaiah 60

In this brief series preparing us to look at Acts, we’ve been talking about hope. We’re in an era when people are feeling more pessimistic than I can remember in my lifetime; despair seems to be the default. Hope is in short supply.

And the thing is, the church is not immune from this kind of pessimism. Studies of cultural trends speak of us in America now being in a “Post-Christian” society. In the last 25 years or so, around 40 million people in America have stopped going to church, which is a huge number. Perhaps more to the point, we feel the “Post-Christian” reality in the atmosphere. 75 years ago, the Bible was treated as an important and trustworthy book, even by those who didn’t live by it. Going to church was generally seen as a good thing to do even by those who didn’t attend church. Neighbors would often be grateful to be invited to come to church with you. Millions of people would come to stadiums to hear Billy Graham preach. It’s pretty different today. The Bible is seen as problematic and even offensive. Church seems irrelevant—why would I with my busy schedule want to go to church when I can do 1000 other things? 

And so when we think about the future of the church, and when we think about trying to help others to know about the hope we have in Jesus—well, it’s easy to feel kind of hopeless, and even helpless. How do we get our friends even to be open to exploring Christianity? We want to help others know Christ, but we don’t know what to do. So we kind of give up.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been reading a book about the early church and how it grew. It’s interesting to think about what it would have been like to be a Christian in the first century. If you were a Christian, you likely knew of only maybe a few dozen people in your entire city who followed Jesus. Christianity would have been seen as a strange cult: there were less than 10,000 Christians in the entire world. Not just a strange cult, but an unpopular one. If you became a Christian and joined a church, you almost certainly would have been viewed as strange. You might lose your job—you might even be imprisoned or killed. Imagine that being your reality: how hopeful would you have been about the church growing? 

And yet, of course, this small and insignificant looking religion did grow—a lot. Over the course of 100 years, the church grew from 10,000 to 200,000 Christians in the whole world. And by the end of the third century, it was 6 million.

So how in the world did that happen? What did the early church do amidst seemingly hopeless circumstances to bring about this growth? Could we today maybe learn something from the remarkable growth in the early church that might help us get a sense of what we are supposed to do in our own rather hopeless feeling context?  

To answer this question, I want to do something that might seem strange: I want to consider carefully what Isaiah has to say in the verses we just read. Here’s why: in our passage, we find God outlining his plan for how he in the future was going to grow his people. It’s a kind of blueprint God gives as a promise to Israel to give them hope in exile. And here’s the remarkable thing: it describes exactly what God ended up doing. Nearly 1000 years before the early church, here God calls his shot. And when we look carefully at these verses we find something surprising. God tells us here that he will grow his people and even change the world through beauty.

Beauty lies at the heart of this passage.

There’s a Hebrew word meaning beauty that appears in this section of Isaiah more than anywhere else in the Bible. We see it in verse 7—beautify my beautiful house; then in 9, “he has made you beautiful.” Also, verses 19, 21, and 61:3, though it says “glory” if you have your Bibles open you might notice a footnote that the word could also be translated “beauty,” because it’s that same word. To help us notice this theme, when I quote these verses later, I’ll use the word beauty rather than glory. And it’s not just this: the ideas of righteousness, light, glory all are connected. There’s a lot here about beauty. 

So what do I mean when I say that here we see beauty at the heart of God’s plan for growing the church? To understand what I mean, we need to notice 3 truths that we find in these verses.

God Is Beautiful

The first is simply that God is beautiful. Our passage begins with the image of God shining: the “glory of the Lord has risen, or shone upon you.” And the light that is shining here is not like a fluorescent hospital light that is cold and antiseptic. The “glory shining upon you” is about beauty. This is why in verse 19, where it says “the Lord will be your everlasting light it goes on to say “and your God will be your beauty.” When Isaiah here is the light of God, he’s speaking about God’s beauty.

Do you realize that our God is beautiful? By this I’m not talking about appearance—God doesn’t have a body; he can’t be seen with human eyes. When the Bible speaks of God’s beauty, it’s talking about who God is: who he is is beautiful.

Have you ever watched a movie that when the credits roll you’ve gone, “Everything about that movie was right”? Or maybe a song where every note, every word seemed perfectly placed. Or maybe you can think of a moment with friends or family together where as you look back you wouldn’t change a thing—everything was just right. That just rightness, well, it’s beautiful. 

That feeling of “just rightness”—that is a taste of who God is. Sometimes we imagine God more like a cold, antiseptic fluorescent light. Spotlessly clean, unyieldingly demanding, and therefore, if we’re honest, unattractive. But that’s not the true God. In every way, the true God is just right, or to use the biblical word, he is righteous. He is endlessly creative; he is passionately good; he is joyfully kind; he is unshakingly trustworthy; his love is resolute, whatever the cost. God is just right. 

We need only to look at Jesus, God become flesh, to see that. Some time when you have a spare hour, sit down and read one of the gospels—maybe John, maybe Mark, and as you read, ask a simple question: what is Jesus like? Not, “What can he do,” but “What kind of a person is he?” When you pay close attention to how he mentors his disciples, how he speaks gently to those society has overlooked, how he unflinchingly confronts what is wrong, and above all else how his love is so deep that he is willing to lay down his life for others, what you will find is a man who is just right in every way. He is beautiful. God is beautiful.

This is why Isaiah speaks at the beginning of our passage of darkness covering the earth. Because God’s beauty is so true and good and delightful that to be far from this God, disconnected from him is to be in darkness. The world is confused, hopeless, gasping for joy because it desperately needs the rightness, the beauty that is found in God.

Now one thing this means just as a quick initial application, is that mission begins with enjoying. Before you can ever help others to know Christ, you must first be someone who has yourself come to taste and delight in who God is, in how he loves you. To glorify God, you must also enjoy God and his beauty.

God Shares His Beauty

The second truth we need to know to understand God’s blueprint for growing his church: God says in these verses that he is intent on sharing his beauty. Verse 1 speaks of a day when God’s people will experience a change—there will come a day when it can be said, “Your light has come.” When it can be said that “The glory of the Lord has risen on you.”

After a long night of darkness where God feels absent, Isaiah prophesies, the sun will come over the horizon and shine on you, and you will be warmed. In other words, the God who is beautiful is going to draw near to his people, so that they experience a relationship with him. His face will shine upon them so that they enjoy his beauty, his love, his “just rightness.” God, our passage promises, will come. 

And when he does, it’s not just going to be that his people experience the warmth of his shining face. Because as God shines upon his people, they will start shining as well: verse 2 “The glory of the Lord will arise upon you and his glory will be seen upon you.” 

A number of years ago we were on vacation with extended family in Virginia staying at an AirBnB in the middle of nowhere. We were all sitting outside in the night, looking into the sky, amazed by all the stars we could see. A couple of hours into the night, a full moon rose, and it felt, well, not quite like dawn, but still, I was surprised at how much brighter everything got. The moon shone with a bright light; and it shone, because the sun was shining upon it.  

And that’s the idea we have here. As God shines upon his people, his people shine as well. This is why mission begins with enjoyment: because when God’s people delight in his beauty we too become beautiful. This is why in verse 9 it promises that in the coming of God “The Lord has made you beautiful.” This is why it says in verse 19, “The Lord will be your everlasting light, your God will be your beauty.” Another way of describing the same thing is verse 21: your people shall be righteous—they shall be “just right.” God will shine his beauty upon his people in such a way that they also shine with his beauty. 

Because that’s what happens whenever you become close to someone—you are changed by them. I am a different person than I was when I married Jennifer 30 years ago, and a lot of the best differences are things that I’ve gained from knowing her. My guess is many of you can say similar things. In an even deeper and greater way, the more we come to know God, the more we experience his beauty, his “just rightness,” the more we become “just right” like him. 

So what precisely is 60 talking about when it speaks of a day when God will shine, will rise upon his people? Chapter 61 gives us more information: he will draw near and will shine his beauty through the coming of a messenger.

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news…” news, as it says in verse 2, “of the Lord’s favor.” This is how God will draw near and shine, Isaiah says, God will send someone filled with his Spirit to speak a message of forgiveness, of the Lord’s grace, that will bring healing and hope and freedom; his words will, verse 3, “Grant those who mourn a beautiful headdress instead of ashes.” As they hear these words, they will experience God’s presence, his beauty, his grace. And they will be changed: verse 3, “They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may display his beauty.” That’s how God will shine.

If these verses at all seem familiar to you, it might be because 7 centuries after this was written, this was one of the very first texts that Jesus ever preached on. Luke tells us that Jesus one Sabbath in a synagogue in Galilee opened the scroll of Isaiah, read these words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” And then, rolling the scroll back up, here was Jesus’ sermon. It was simple and to the point. “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 

Jesus was saying in that moment “What God said through Isaiah 700 years ago: it’s starting. Right now, in this moment, your light has come! I am the Spirit-filled messenger come to proclaim the good news of God’s grace that will set people free.” 

In Jesus being born into this world, God was drawing near to his people. In Jesus’ words and ministry, in his death and resurrection, the light of God shone—people experienced the beauty of God. And when they did—when people encountered Jesus and came to understand who he was and what he had done, as people believed and took this in, allowing the light to shine upon them, these people were transformed; they grew in righteousness. They too became beautiful.

Acts 2 tells us that the early church was a group of people utterly transformed by the message of Jesus. In Jesus, they experienced God’s grace like a sun shining upon their faces after a long darkness. And so, Acts says that they are filled with gladness and love and generosity toward each other, so that those who were wealth provided for those with little, and nobody was in need. This new community was being made “just right.” As they experienced the beauty of their God they were made beautiful.  

This is the ongoing story of the church. Wherever the gospel of Jesus is shining—wherever people come to know that they are forgiven through Jesus by a loving, beautiful, gracious God, the light of God begins to change us. Sometimes slowly, but nevertheless truly, making us “just right”; making us beautiful.

To draw another quick application: if mission begins with our enjoyment of God, the next step here is for us to actively seek to grow in likeness to our beautiful God. The opening verse is a command: “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Shine. Allow the beauty and righteousness of God to change you and conform you to his likeness. Allow Christ’s righteousness to become yours as you study him, imitate him, seek to obey him and let him rub off on you in every way. This is a crucial part of mission.

How? How does us being changed, becoming more beautiful have anything to do with growing the church? That brings us to the third part of the blueprint we are meant to see in these verses. And that is that this beauty of God—it starts a movement.

This Beauty Spreads

When you put it all together, what is described in this entire passage can best be described as depicting a worldwide movement of beauty. In verse 3, after God’s glory is seen upon his people, it says that nations shall come. Nations who were once walking in darkness, those very same nations that once attacked God’s people—these nations, it says, shall come to your light.

Verse 4 envisions a moment when the beleaguered people of God will look up and see something surprising. We might imagine someone in the city hearing rumors of something strange and so he climbing up one of the towers on the city wall, and as he looks north, south, east, west, in every direction he sees caravans of people walking along paths to Jerusalem. People whose strange clothing show that they are obviously from foreign lands. They are coming, because they want to join God’s people, to be, as Isaiah puts it, new sons and daughters of Zion. They come wanting to offer their talents—later in the passage it says, “Foreigners will build your walls; kings will serve you.” They come with donkeys pulling heavy carts, for they are wanting to offer their treasures: “They shall bring gold and frankincense” it says in verse 6. 

Why? Because they have seen the beauty of God shining in God’s people and it’s so attractive, so compelling that they long to be a part of this. And as they come, as they enter, as they join, they add to the beauty: verse 7 says that as these things happen “I will beautify my beautiful house.” 

Do you understand what’s being described? Every tongue, tribe, and nation offering their gifts, offering all they have to this new community; maybe the music from Nigeria, the trees from Lebanon, the craftsmanship of Italy, everyone brings what they have, and the city will shine brighter and brighter, with more and more beauty.  And in the end the whole world comes to know the beauty of God.

This is God’s plan. He will shine his light upon his people to start a chain reaction, a movement of beauty that will continue until the whole world is filled with the joy of knowing the beauty of God’s love, his righteousness, his glory. 

Which, maybe sounds kind of out there—kind of artsy, kind of “woo”: a movement of beauty that will save the world? It kind of sounds like one of those unrealistic dreams that hippies in the 60’s might have sung about when they were high as a kite. And that’s also how it would have sounded to God’s humiliated powerless impoverished people exiled in Babylon. Could anything be less likely than them becoming so attractive that the whole world would seek to serve them?

Except here’s the thing. This is the story of the early church.

Let me return to the question we asked at the beginning. How did the church grow so incredibly quickly in such a hostile environment? And not just quickly, but across the Roman Empire? We have some of the writings from early church leaders, and as we study them we see that there wasn’t one or two dynamic guys, no Billy Graham speaking to crowded stadiums. There was no carefully orchestrated evangelism training or missions conferences to mobilize believers. Obviously, there was no online celebrity who could go viral via YouTube.

How did it grow? As we pore over these ancient writings, one of the simplest ways of summarizing what happened is, well, beauty. The early church even amidst many flaws, was beautiful.

There’s this writer named Justin Martyr who lived about 100 years after Paul, right in the middle of this remarkable growth period. In trying to defend the Christian gospel and say it’s worth listening to, what he basically says is, “Look at us who have become Christians. Look at how we’ve changed.”

“We who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons — our swords have become ploughshares, and our spears into implements of farming. Now we cultivate piety, righteousness, philanthropy, faith, and hope…” “We who formerly delighted in sexual immorality now embrace chastity alone; we who formerly used magical arts, dedicate ourselves to the good and unbegotten God; we who valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possessions, now bring what we have into a common stock, and share to every one in need; we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies.”

Now if that was just talk, his words wouldn’t have persuaded anyone—people could have just said, “I know Christians—they aren’t like that.”  Justin’s words had power because he was describing something that people could see. He was describing something that was real, something just right, something beautiful. “Look at how we’ve changed—do you know what you’re seeing? It’s the beauty of God.” Thousands, and hundreds of thousands and then millions of people from every nation and walk of life took notice of something remarkable, something inexplicable apart from the work of God. They saw his beauty displayed in the church, they listened to the gospel, and believed. From all over the world they entered God’s kingdom, bringing their treasures as offerings.

This is the blueprint. This is what God in Isaiah said he would do, and 1000 years later, and it’s happened. And it’s still happening. 

Perhaps more than has been the case in many centuries, the world around us needs a sign; as the world is in darkness they need light. They need to see something that is just right—they need to see the beauty of God in Christ. And though we will never do it perfectly, this is our calling, and this is our privilege: to enjoy God’s beauty, to be changed by his beauty, and to display God’s beauty as part of a divine movement by which God’s beauty is changing the world.