Obtain a Greater Sight of Yahweh

So we're continuing our series, Unveiling Yahweh, and we've already been looking at Isaiah 40 this morning. Let me just give you a quick backdrop of the context of Isaiah 40. I'm sure most of you understand that that's the second major part of the book of Isaiah, and it was written prophetically to the Jewish people of 200 years later, who would be in Babylon and would be looking to return, and the Lord is bringing a word of comfort to them.

They have been under the severe chastisement of the Lord, and now He wants to comfort them, and the first thing that the Lord wants to make real to them is His greatness. He is so great that you can't even begin to compare Him to anyone or anything. That's what's behind chapter 40 all the way to 66.

Really, that's the foundation of everything shared there. When we think about the Lord's greatness, if God looked inside of you, I suspect that He would have to kind of cut through a lot of religious jargon and things that kind of accumulate in our minds that we pick up over the years about subjects like this, but get right down to it. The Lord is very concerned about how you view Him.

He's very concerned about that, not in a prideful way like we would, but He's concerned. In fact, it's the same thing that you hear with Jesus with His disciples, when He said, who does man say that I am? Who do you say that I am? He wants to know what you think of Him, and reality is God lives with the sight of our inner man before Him all the time. Everything that's going on inside of us, He is aware of.

He's watching all the time, and the reality is that most Christians have a pretty low view of the Lord. I mean, in our heads, intellectually, we may say, oh, God is great. He's infinite in love and mercy and power.

Intellectually, we think of that, but it needs to be in our heart, and if it isn't in our heart, then it's not going to affect the way we live our lives. We can theoretically believe in God's greatness. We can store information in our minds, head knowledge, and just have all these wonderful accolades about God, but if it isn't the reality of what's transpiring in our hearts, it's not going to affect the way we live our lives.

People don't tend to magnify the Lord. They tend to minimize Him. That's just the way of fallen nature.

You know, to magnify something, we've developed means of doing that, and we use lenses, so if you have something that's tiny and you want to magnify it, that's what a microscope is for. Something that is infinitesimal, we can make it to where we can see it. But something that is great or big, large, huge, immense, but is like a far ways away, looks tiny, so we use binoculars to bring that thing into its proper size in our minds, and that's what we mean, spiritual binoculars, when we think about the Lord.

And when you see the Lord in the right way, everything in life takes its proper proportions. You know, it's amazing to me, no, I don't mean to say this, this is gonna, that would sound really high-minded the way I was gonna say it, but I'm gonna say it. It amazes me how petty-minded people can be, and I think about myself 40 years ago, especially back then in the day.

Man, the things that I thought were so important, that I built my whole life around, and I look at them now and just shake my head, what in the world was I thinking? But when God is in his right place in your mind and in your heart, things just sort themselves out in the proper perspectives. That's why it's so important that we see the Lord for who he is. The Bible actually says quite a bit about the greatness of God, and we can't go through all of it today, but we can touch on some of it.

But the problem is the word great, like the word love, has been gutted of its meaning, because we use it for everything. You know, I love my baseball team, or so-and-so on my baseball team, he's a great hitter. You know, and we use great for, yeah, all kinds of things, and we've taken the greatness out of the word great by overusing it and exaggerating its usage like that.

In the Greek, the word for great is mega, and if you read through the Old Testament especially, some of the things expressed about the Lord in the Old Testament, his greatness is spoken of in many ways and in many occurrences. And if you look at it in the Greek, you know, his great mercy, his mega mercy, his mega power, his mega faithfulness, his mega glory, his mega indignation against sin, his mega works and wonders. Mega and awesome is the day of the Lord.

John says, see what mega love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God. Those things are worthy of the name or word great or mega. This sheet that I brought up here, this is a list of some of the subjects that I sent to the other speakers, subjects that we could, you know, preach on through this series on unveiling Yahweh.

So, you know, you've got all kinds of stuff in here. The greatness of God, it figures I go right to that, right? Wow. Hand of God, the immortality of God, the joy of God, the light of God, you know, down the list, and you could put mega before all of these, because everything about the Lord is mega, really.

For the sake of time, we'll have to cut it down to three things. So, here's my message for today is God is great because He's incomparable, and God is great because He is eternal, and God is great because He's incomprehensible. So, let's look at the first one here.

God is great because He's incomparable. We're in Isaiah 40. Look at verse 12.

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand and marked off the heavens with the span? Verse 13. Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows Him His counsel? Verse 15. Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket and are accounted as the dust on the scales.

Verse 17. All the nations are as nothing before Him. They are accounted by Him as less than nothing and emptiness.

You just see the words and the metaphors flowing out of Isaiah's heart as he's trying to capture the greatness of God and articulate it in such a way that the people of his time and the people of 200 years later would be able to grasp what the Lord is really like. Now, think of how or what God was seeing as Isaiah is expressing these things about these nations. He's looking at these nations, all the nations of the world.

Assyria, which was dominating the entire Middle East at the time. Egypt, which had a long history of controlling a vast reign. Babylon, the Medes and Persians, the Greeks, not to mention the great dynasties of China and all the thousands of tribes roaming around the earth.

God sees it all, and he says this mass of humanity is like a fleck of dust on a scale. Doesn't even move it at all. Isaiah 40, 18.

To whom then will you liken God or what likeness compare with him? One of the things that the Lord was up against with his people during that time was idolatry, of course. That was the big, major issue of the day, and it was Satan behind all of it. All these pagan gods, and throughout different places, I mean, he goes into talking about idolatry here, but he doesn't mention the gods, which are mentioned many times elsewhere.

Like Deuteronomy 10, Moses said, for the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God. In Psalm 86, it says, there is none like you among the gods, and in Psalm 96, for great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods.

Excuse me. So these gods that supposedly, well, they did, actually. They ruled over people groups.

So you had Baal, and you had Chemish, and Molech, and these different gods in different regions and stuff. That's the way they saw things in those primitive days. But they were actually just principalities and powers and domains, Paul tells us.

Then Satan is ruling all of them. In our DNA, DNA, that's what I meant to say, age. Yeah, I get a little confused up here.

When I was putting this message together, when I first started thinking about it, one of the first things that came to me is what these fanatical Muslims cry out right before they're going to murder and maim whoever, whatever amount of people they can possibly, as many as possible. Al-Akbar, as if crying that out justifies what they're about to do to other people. I don't disagree with what they're saying.

What that says is Allah is great, and Allah is great. He is a great principality that rules millions of people in our day. Billions, actually.

I think it's like two billion people are under the rule and reign of these tyrannical leaders, these leaders of these Muslim nations. He is one of the greatest principalities alive today, but who's behind him? Satan. He's just one more of Satan's lieutenants controlling how this earth moves and so on.

Satan is really a great monster, and he's roaming the earth, the Bible tells us. And if these nations, all the nations of the world, are but a drop in a bucket, then that means that Satan is nothing but a germ swimming around in that drop. That's all he is compared to God.

Psalm 89, let the heavens praise your wonders, and we're going to get to this word, wonders, here in a minute. Let the heavens praise your wonders, oh Yahweh, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh? Who among the heavenly beings is like Yahweh, a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him? Nobody can compare to Yahweh, nobody.

And my hope is today, maybe just a little bit, you'll have a little bit of a greater appreciation for who he is, and be able to see him more clearly, a little bit maybe, and to see yourself for who you are in light of that. All right, the second thing I want to bring out is, God is great because he is eternal. Verse 28, have you not known, have you not heard, Yahweh is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth.

You know, from the Lord's vantage point, he sees all of time laid out like a film strip on an editor's bench, and he can see everything going on all at the same time. You know, all the way back, all the way forward, he sees it all. So at one moment, he can see the multitudes perishing in a flood, he can see the Christ in the manger, and then on Calvary on the cross, he sees the conversion of Saul the Pharisee, he sees the dark ages, he sees Luther nailing the 95 theses on the church door, he sees William Carey getting off the boat in India the first time, Billy Graham nervously preaching his first sermon, the antichrist being thrown into the lake of fire, the Lord sees all of it, all at one time, because he is the great I Am.

Generations come and go, kingdoms rise up, become complacent, and get taken over by some other kingdom. It's been that way for 6,000 years, but God rules and reigns in eternity. Let me see if this can't help you to understand it a little better.

This represents the 6,000 years of man's history, so you have creation up here, and the flood down here somewhere, and Jesus on the cross down here somewhere in the dark ages, and down here, you see that little line there? Can you see that? That's your whole lifetime right there, almost to the end. And the Lord looks at that, and he sees it all in one glance, all the time, everything that's going on. That's why, you know, foretelling the future and stuff like that, it's nothing to the Lord, because it's just sitting right in front of him.

When I was out there, you know, I went for a prayer walk earlier, and got out to the end of the bridge. Actually, every time I go out there, I always remember, remember? 1991, Kathy and I went out there, took a walk out there with the real estate agent, and we purchased this property, and the Lord is looking at that right now. He knew what was going to happen, what he was going to build in this place.

He knew you were going to be here one day, and that he was going to be working in your life here all the years. 1991, how many of you were even alive in 1991? Five of you. Well, Deary and I were here, and God was leading us, and he established this place for you to this day.

So, you know, getting back to this, this is the entire 6,000 years of mankind's history, and this, actually, you know, this should be outside, because there's confines in this room, but you can imagine this realm, this is the realm of God, and time is sitting in the middle of it, except that there are no walls with God. He's infinite. He's infinite in his duration, and infinite in his power, and everything else.

So, when we talk about the presence of God, the power, the knowledge, the love, the grace, yes, even his wrath, they're all endless. They all go on forever and ever. There's no limitations to anything with the Lord.

God is great because he lives outside of the realm of time. All right, number three. Oh, we're getting right through this, aren't we? God is great because he's incomprehensible.

The second half of verse 28 there, Yahweh does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. Okay, just like in the English, this word is, it's a contraction, isn't that right? Contraction, you put two words.

So, it's un, just like unsearchable, unwise, ungodly, unhealthy, whatever, and it goes with the word that's called shakar. Shakar means to examine something in such a way that your mind is able to penetrate that subject and really comprehend it. And what is being said here is that God's understanding, and it can be taken to everything about the Lord, it is unsearchable.

Our human finite minds cannot grasp all that's involved with this great being. You know, we can study, and we should. We can think about it, and we should.

We should meditate and contemplate and pray over what God really is like, and we should. In fact, He wants us to, but we're never going to fully comprehend who God is and what He is. And Job 11, Zophar, uses this word when he asks, can you find out the deep things, shakar, of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven, what can you do? Deeper than Sheol, what can you know? Its measure is no longer than, I mean, is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.

Yahweh's ways are unsearchable, His character is unsearchable, His attributes are unsearchable. Psalm 145 says, great is Yahweh, and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is shakar, unsearchable. Praise the Lord.

And Isaiah uses this word to describe God's understanding of things. For instance, take the subject of getting saved, someone getting saved. We can, you know, kind of guess at some things about it from what scripture talks about, but no one can understand how a salvation really occurs in a person's heart.

It's an unsolvable mystery to us. Who can understand how the Holy Spirit puts it in a believer's heart to really pray for their mother or father or sister or friend or whatever? Who can understand how the Lord inspires a believer to pray for another? And who can understand how the Holy Spirit can bring conviction on a person's heart for the way they're living their life? And who can understand how the Holy Spirit can quicken a dead soul and bring life, the life of God, into that person? We can't understand it. We can see the evidence of it, but we can't understand it.

And Jesus said, the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. You know, we can't grasp it.

It's beyond our comprehension what goes on deep inside of a person's heart. Another example would be the end times. Scripture gives us all these little, tiny tidbits of information, prophecies, about what's going to be happening on earth in the last days.

And you get one here and there. You know, sometimes you get whole passages and stuff. But it's really a great mosaic.

And we can't comprehend it all. No one can. How things are going to unfold in the future.

There are some things we can pretty well guess, but not the whole picture. No way. And just like the first coming of Jesus, you know, in the Old Testament prophecies, there's prophecies right here in this passage, in fact, talking about Jesus, the servant coming, you know, leading his people.

So if you were a first century Jew, you could not have taken all the prophecies in the Old Testament and accurately predict, oh yeah, Jesus, the Messiah is going to come. He's going to be born of a virgin in Bethlehem. He's going to live his life, and he's going to go around preaching and healing people and so on and die on a cross.

No one could have predicted that. And it's only after the fact we can look in hindsight and we can see, oh yeah, look at in Isaiah 53, it talks about Jesus and all the different passages. In hindsight, we can see it.

But looking at the end times, it's the same thing. We can guess, we can have certain, you know, kind of ideas about it, but no one can figure out all that's going on. It's unsearchable.

It's beyond our abilities as humans to understand. But don't worry. The church has got plenty of know-it-alls out there, got it all figured out.

You know, just get their books and they'll lay it out. They got all their diagrams and stuff, you know, the rapture and the tribulation and this and that and all this stuff. They've got it all figured out down to the detail.

You know, all I can say is, I'm going to keep a very loose grip on things like that because it's a mystery that God has left as a mystery. He has not explained it all. He's left it unknowable for us for a purpose to keep us humble, to keep us from thinking we know everything.

You know, but there are those who just have their doctrinal systems, and those doctrinal systems are more important to them than what the Word of God actually says. And so when they look at the Word, all they can see is what they've been taught and what they've bought into and stuff with things like that. Any honest student will understand that there are many mysteries in Scripture, and that is there because God wants us to go forward in life, in faith, even though we don't understand everything.

It's part of the faith life. All right, one more verse with this word shakar in it. In the 5th chapter of Job, Eliphaz says that God does—it's not Eliphaz, the guy's not laughing, okay? Eliphaz, man, wow, messed that up.

Eliphaz says that God does great and unsearchable things. There's shakar. And then this word again that I mentioned, wonders without number.

Wonders without number. When we think of something wonderful, we tend to think of, you know, something that is so amazing that it leaves us full of wonder about it. And, you know, maybe some synonyms would be phenomenal or awesome or whatever.

That's how we use the word wonderful. And the Hebrew term for this is peola. That's the word for wonders.

And it does incorporate that thought of something just leaving you in amazement to consider it. Yes, that is in there. But it's even more beyond that.

It's further than that. And really, incomprehensible is really the best term you can come up with to describe this word. God is beyond our comprehension.

And yet, even though He understands that we can't comprehend Him, He expects us to try. He expects us to desire to know Him. This is what we heard two weeks ago, right? Pastor Nate was preaching about knowing the Lord.

God wants us to desire to know Him. You know, if a guy meets a girl, I mean, the first thing, he wants to know all about her. He's very interested in her.

And that's how we, supposedly the bride of Christ, or at least hopefully to be, when we come into this relationship with our heavenly husband, that desire to know Him should be a very strong passion within us. It just should. And heaven is for people who care enough that they want to know the Lord, that they desire to know Him in an intimate way.

Let me read this quote from Tozer. It's a little bit lengthy, but it's really good. It comes out of that same book Nate was speaking out of a couple weeks ago.

The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source. The divine being dwells in obscurity, hidden behind a cloud of unknowing.

This cloud is between the seeker and God so that he may never see God clearly by the light of understanding, nor feel Him in the emotions. But by the mercy of God, faith can break through into His presence if the seeker but believe the word and press on. And that's really the key.

You know, does it mean enough to us to push through and want to know the Lord? I was just listening to a Leonard Ravenhill message, and he said in that message, you know, I can't explain Him, but I can experience Him. Can't explain Him, but we can experience Him. And that's the truth.

But you know, what we tend to do is, because He is so far beyond our comprehension in His infinitude, we tend to try to reduce Him down to manageable terms, a manageable level. And what Eliphaz is saying is that we could spend our entire life, and should, in trying to know what God is like, trying to understand His greatness. We should and we could spend all of our life doing that.

But at the end of the day, you know, He is just beyond comprehension. Later in his book, when Job has already been humbled, he exclaims there at the end, I have declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful. Here's the word pala again for me, which I did not know.

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. And this is exactly where this quest to know the Lord should take us.

That's where it should be taking us, flat on our face, humbled before the Lord. All right, so what is the takeaway of this message? And I will say this, that the takeaway I think here is that arguably the most important thing that could happen for you while you're here in this program is to receive a revelation of the greatness of God. That's arguably the most important thing.

That's not why you came here, but that's arguably the most important thing that you can receive while you're here. And I hope that you can make that more important to you rather than the things that you tend to focus on. Well, how does that happen? How can you receive that revelation? I'll just give you a couple of things real quick.

First of all, obviously you must seek Him for it. You have to seek the Lord for it. You have this Isaiah 40 passage here, and the idea was to spend the quiet time before the service to meditate on this subject.

And what are we meditating on? The greatness of God. I mean, some of the things expressed in there are just amazing. I love that song he started off with, and it came out of that passage.

It was awesome. Verse 9, Isaiah says, Behold your God. That word behold is, you know, it means more than just taking a glance at your God.

It means to sit and really focus your attention on Him. You know, just really drink in who this person is. Concentrate on Him.

Meditate on Him. And verse 26 says, Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these. The inference throughout this whole passage is the importance of doing that, of meditating on the greatness of God.

These people that Isaiah was prophesying to desperately needed to do that, because they were in Babylon. They were in the throes of hell itself on earth. You know, the stronghold of the most powerful demonic beings on earth at the time were all congregated right there in Babylon, and that's where the people of God were.

God is great because He's incomparable. He's great because He's eternal. He's great because He's incomprehensible.

And it's so important that we take the time and put the energy out to consider these things. So let me ask you a question. Do you feel faint in your battle with sexual sin? Do you feel like you are lacking power to overcome? You came here because of that, right? And maybe some of you are coming out of that sense of utter helplessness.

Well, Isaiah ends this chapter with the word for you. He, God, gives power to the faint. And to him who has no might, he increases strength.

Even youth shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted. But they who wait on the Lord, they who wait on the Lord. I know some translations say, wait for the Lord.

I'm really surprised they would do that, because it's not the—that isn't the way to—it's like someone standing out at a bus stop waiting for a bus or something. That's just like so—I don't know what the word is, carnal. Wait on the Lord means something.

It means to sit in His presence and drink in who He is. That's what it means to wait on the Lord. People who do that shall renew their strength, shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Those who will learn to wait on the Lord will receive His power in their daily lives. That's a truthful statement, that you can hang your life on. And the second part to it is you must come down.

How is the Lord going to reveal Himself to someone who's full of Himself? Right? How is the Lord going to express who He is to someone who is utterly just stuck on themselves? You know, you're only going to be able to comprehend the greatness to God to the extent that you've been humbled by God. If you're great in your own mind, meaning that your self-life is fully intact, strong, robust inside, you're going to be at the center of everything in your life. So you're going to go through life, and everything's going to be about what you want, the way you want it, how you want it, when you want it, what's important to you, your opinions, what you think about things, your likes, your dislikes.

You're going to be great in your own mind, in your own thinking. If you haven't been humbled by God, that's the way you go through life, full of yourself. And when you're full of yourself like that, and you are great in your own thinking, there's no room for God and others.

They become very tiny. And you know, many of you men, I read some of your stories, or I hear about them anyway, and how you've treated your loved ones in the past, before you came here. That's about how much love you had for them.

You know, look, I'm not looking to beat up on you for what you were like, but the only way you're going to change is to start acknowledging it, and realizing how you've treated others, and more importantly, how you've treated God. You're never going to come into a life of victory where His power can be unleashed on your behalf, until you can put Him in His proper place in your life, and put yourself in your proper place. So we've been talking about the greatness of God, and I could have could have had a second part to this whole thing.

The greatness of God, the ungreatness of us. Because I promise you, you and I are not great. There's nothing great about us, but He's great.

He's the one who we need to adore, and worship, and follow.