March 15, 2026 - 4th Sunday in Lent - Isaiah 42:14-21

Reading the Bible and following the story of the Israelites will lead you on a lot of ups and downs. There are the high points, when God is doing amazing things, when the people are faithful, when problems that seem insurmountable turn out to be nothing at all because God is at work actively defending his people. There are the lows, when nothing seems to be going well. The people aren’t faithful and so they are seeing firsthand what happens when you refuse God. The times, even when they’re bad, are often just as eventful.

Reading their story can also be a little strange because it can be hard to keep track of time. If you are discussing American history and you talk about the Cold War, for instance, many of us were alive during at least part of it. Some of you probably remember events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs. You go a little further back to the Korean War and memories start to drop off a bit more. You get to WWII and we have trouble finding people who remember it very well, much less fought in it. Going back to the Civil War and all of those people are gone. Still, those events are familiar enough to any student of American history that you have at least some sense of when they happened. If you’ve studied the events of American history beginning with the first colonists to arrive, then you can kind of fit all of the pieces into the timeline. There’s a lot going on in our country at any one time, we’re busy people. Seeing how one piece connects to the next is how you tell the story of our country and how we ended up where we are today.

It’s a bit different when it comes to talking about Israel. It’s not that history works any differently for them than it does for us. It’s still a matter of connecting one piece to the next and watching as things go up or down. You’ll still see their triumphs and their failures. You’ll still see some of the big personalities and how they shape the course of their peoples’ history. But, the scale is a bit different. Depending on where you consider the start of American history, you might take the signing of the Declaration of Independence. You might take the pilgrims’ landing. You might take Christopher Columbus. Even with that broad view, you’re still looking at, at most, about 400 years of American history. For Israel, again it depends on what you consider the beginning. Do you take the beginning as when the kingdom was formally established and Saul began to reign? Do you take it as when the people as a whole entered the Promised Land? Do you take it from when Abraham first set foot in the land? However you slice it, the time from any of those until the Year of Our Lord 70 is 1500 to 1700 years, give or take. The Biblical record only gives us a handful of the most important highlights from all of that. There’s a lot there in the Bible, to be sure, but given the length of time it covers, there’s really only so much it can do. Even the highlights are chosen more for their theological considerations, rather than political or cultural. Numerous kings come and go and are little more than footnotes in the chronicles.

The story of Israel isn’t really a story about the land, its borders, its landmarks, or anything that’s defined by its geography. It’s the story of its people. The same is true for America. Sure, you could talk about our wars. You could talk about Manifest Destiny and how it drove western expansion, but at the heart of it all is still the people. Any look at history, whether it be times of war or times of peace, times of desperation or times of prosperity, you’re looking at the people who are driving it, the people who are caught up in it, and the people who are on the sidelines watching it all happen.

In with all of the big events of Israelite history are the millions of smaller events, the little moments, the ordinary lives, the everyday people who are caught up in it. The eventual fall of Israel wasn’t effected by one man. Sure, Solomon made a number of pretty costly mistakes later in his life. He gave into idolatry and ignored God’s warning. But, he wasn’t alone. His son, Rehoboam let his pride run the show too. The new king of the northern kingdom, Jeroboam, had his own problem with pride. The Israelites could try and lay the blame for the fall of their nation at the feet of these notable men, but nearly every king after them also made the conscious decision to pursue their own course, to trust in their own decisions, to follow their own gods.

Still, those are the big names. Maybe they have a comparatively bigger influence on what happens in their land, but they don’t dictate the actions of everyone who lives there. They also don’t dictate what God has commanded, nor what he has promised to do. No Israelite can lay the blame for the downfall of the country solely at the feet of the king. More importantly, no Israelite can blame the king for the collapse and ruin of their own individual lives.

In our own country, the political aspect to our society is almost all your hear about on the news. You could argue whether it’s a good thing for the media to spend to much time talking about what the president is doing, what congress is doing, what the courts are doing. The government and its actions certainly have an effect on all of our lives. But, the government doesn’t dictate who you are and what you do. It doesn’t dictate who God is and what he does.

Even just through the book of Isaiah, life is a bit of a rollercoaster. There are ups and downs in abundance. In this passage, there are few ups to be found. The people have a lot to answer for. They have utterly failed to do the job they have been given. They don’t serve God even in the most basic sense of worshipping him alone. Since they don’t do that, there’s no chance at all of them living a life that gives glory to him, much less sharing his glory with the world outside of their borders.

He had revealed his glory to them. He had proven not just what he was capable of doing, but why he did it. He gave them the Law, which helped them see their place in the world and how the whole world worked. All of this has been revealed to them and yet they are blind.

God has given them eyes to see, but they would rather turn off all of the lights. They refuse to see and they’ll make sure no one else can see either. The nation as a whole has forsaken the Lord and God will deal with them according to their transgressions.

But, what applies to the nation also applies to every individual within it. The nation is God’s servant, but so is everyone who lives in that nation. It wasn’t a country that was saved from slavery in Egypt. It was a collection of people with a common ancestry. They were all rescued by him. They all owe their lives to him. They were all commanded to serve him only. Any punishment that came down would be completely deserved by everyone there. Very few were left who could honestly say they served God alone. They, unfortunately, would get caught up in the disaster that was about to strike the kingdom, but God would continue to keep his promise to them and care for them.

Playing the blame game is, quite literally, the oldest trick in the book. Passing the responsibility on to someone else is how sinful humans have dealt with things since the very beginning. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.

Each person’s sin falls on them and them alone. Bad things may befall you because of someone else’s actions, but you stand condemned entirely because of your own. God recognizes how, despite revealing himself to you, you repeatedly act like you would rather be blind.

The season of Lent continues. We continue to follow Jesus, just as we do each year. With each passing Sunday, the events of Holy Week draw ever closer. Jerusalem is only a couple of weeks away now, and Calvary is only a few days after that. Soon our Lord will ascend the hill. Soon he’ll be nailed to the cross. Soon the sky will turn dark in the middle of the day. The blindness of the people will be evident to the world. They could see, but they chose the dark instead.

We can’t sit here, 2000 years later playing the blame game though. Our sin contributed to his death just as surely as those of the priests and Pharisees of ancient Jerusalem. We are called to be his servants too. We stand condemned for our failure and refusal to live up to the responsibilities given to us. If not for God’s promise to not forsake us, we would remain just as lost.

The God who promises to never leave us or forsake us, the God who promises that he is with always, to the end of the age, keeps his promises to his people. In spite of our own actions and choices, God turns the darkness before us into light, the rough places into level ground. The darkness and death of Good Friday are turned into the light and life of Easter. God doesn’t sit by passively to let our bad decisions dictate his actions or our life. He involves himself in our lives.

He honors and fulfills his promise to his people and so his glory is magnified. His righteousness is on display for all to see. Jesus dies for his people and his risen glory pierces through the gloom. We were blind, but now we see. We were deaf, but now we hear. His glory opens our eyes and his promise opens our ears.

The message God gives to his people here is a reminder of who he is and who we are. Lent is more than a call for generalized sorrow at the state of the world. It’s an acknowledgment of our own active participation in bringing it all down. Lent is a call for humility, personal humility.

Lent is also a look at who God is. Our God is a God who keeps his promises. Our God is a God who loves us more than he loves his own life and he is willing to give his life in order to bring us out of darkness. Lent is a season of penitence, but it is also a season of humble thanks. We give thanks that our savior was willing to offer himself on our behalf and never once hesitated to do so.

Lent also calls us to look to what we do as people who have had their eyes and ears opened. Refusing to play the blame game is a good start. Taking ownership of our own culpability isn’t just a good idea, it’s essential. God will be glorified through the whole world, either through each person’s sin, by condemning it, or through each person’s innocence, by his mercy.

We can’t open the eyes of the blind, but we can point to the one who can. We can tell the story of the one who keeps his promises and who dies to save his people from themselves, people like you and me.