“Does Jesus tell the truth?”

Isaiah 57:3-13

My friend Dennis called last night to discuss Mark 12:30, “And you shall love the Lord your 

God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your 

strength.”  It was a great exchange of thoughts, and it led us to why so many people have a 

problem with the claim Jesus made in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth and the life.   

No one comes to the Father except through me.”  There is only one intellectual question 

that can be asked at this point: “Does Jesus tell the truth?”  If your answer is anything but yes, 

drop Christian from the club you’re a member of, for God has stated, “God is not man, that 

he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not 

do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? (Numbers 23:19 ESV)

In these verses God is dealing with people who cannot be counted among the righteous, in fact they have chosen to follow the minds of man, they have decided, as many in our world today, that God cannot be trusted.  Listen to God’s portrayal of these people; son of a sorceress, offspring of an adulterer, and a prostitute.  Now listen to God’s question to them: “Who is it you are mocking?  Who is it you are opening your mouth and sticking out your tongue at?”  Often God does not wait for our answers, but it is clear in Scripture He knows us better than we know ourselves.  God tells the prophet Jeremiah about seeing him before he was born in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”  So when God warns you about the coming judgment, as He has these people, He is not mincing words about your character, and a wise person would listen.  And there lies the problem, they were so wise in their own eyes they did not see and hear their Creator.

In Israel’s past all kinds of illegitimate worship took place, and at times they even did child sacrifice.  We in the United States of America call that choice, but a God who formed that child in the womb, and who does not change, calls it murder.   God is addressing through Isaiah the idolatrous rituals in verses 6-10, and most of them have sexual practices outside of God’s guideline of a man with his wife, and many of them were adopted from the fertility religion of ancient Canaanite people.

What we had at the time of Isaiah and today are a lack of fear of God.  God was silent for what seemed to man a long time, but now He is exposing the people who go by His name, it makes one wonder how long before God pulls back the bed sheet of the church and exposes our unrighteousness?

In the past we have gone over the idols of today, and idols do not have to be bad, they may 

be good; like a child, wife, husband, job, money, golf, sports, fishing, it is anything you place 

before God.  We have many idols and someday God will say to us what He said in verse 13,  

“When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you! The wind will carry them all off, a 

breath will take them away. But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall 

inherit my holy mountain.”  (Isaiah 57:13 ESV)  It has always been your choice, but choose 

wisely.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice