A Famine Not of Bread

Click here to listen to this sermon. “Ah, you who hide deep from the Lord your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, ‘Who sees us? Who knows us?’ You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, ‘He did not make me’; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, ‘He has no understanding?’” (Isaiah 29:15–16).   Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! Like the plot of a good action thriller it goes down to the wire. At the last minute, God mercifully intervenes to deliver Jerusalem from the Assyrian horde poised at the city gate. But something is wrong. The people do not see beyond the immediate threat they have just avoided. They fail to recognize the hand of the Lord or their sin and idolatry that brought them so close to utter ruin. God’s deliverance does nothing to turn them to repentance and the promises of the Messiah. And so the deliverance will only buy them...