Transcript
The Word Accomplishes God’s Purpose
First Baptist Richmond, December 14, 2025
The Third Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 55:1-13
Ho! Everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
I’ve been looking at Isaiah 55 for a week, trying to find the story in it. Because it’s from the Narrative Lectionary, right? And narrative means “story.” But there’s no story here; there’s only the promise of a story. And maybe that’s what makes it the perfect text for Advent: because it describes the wonderful thing that’s about to happen before it actually happens. That poem we love so much, The Night before Christmas? It’s not about Christmas; it’s about the night before. Isaiah 55 is kind of like that. But before we get to the thing that’s about to happen we need to look back at the thing that already has, and for the people of Israel that thing is the Exile.
We’ve been talking about it for the past few weeks but today let’s look at it through the eyes of one person. Let’s call him Jacob, and imagine that he’s a Levite with a wife, and a couple of children—maybe even a couple of grandchildren. Let’s imagine that he was there in Jerusalem when the Babylonian army started coming over the walls; when they started killing men, women, and children indiscriminately; when they looted the temple and set it on fire. Jacob would have had his family gathered around him, hiding in the safest place in his house, but eventually the soldiers would have found them, pushed them out into the street, and started them on the long march to Babylon.
He may have been one of those they asked to sing when they got there. He was a Levite after all—a worship leader—he may have had a very fine singing voice. But he,
along with the others, refused. They hung up their harps on the willow trees. They sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept when they remembered Zion. It may have been Jacob who wrote those immortal words, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” But things weren’t as bad as they might have been. The Babylonians didn’t lock them up in prison, they didn’t keep them in chains. They let them settle there on the banks of the river in their own communities.i The exiles built houses and planted gardens, just as they had been instructed by the Prophet Jeremiah. They worked at menial jobs in the city but some of them did more than that: they worked at trades, they opened their own shops, and as you may recall from the Book of Daniel they held positions in government. Life in exile, for many of them, was not so bad.
And that created its own set of problems. Jacob would have worried about his grandchildren. They would have gone to the Babylonian schools, they would have started speaking the language and following the customs of their classmates. One day his grandson would have come home with a Babylonian haircut and Jacob would have said, “That’s it!” From then on he would have made it his duty to see that his grandchildren remembered how to speak Hebrew, that they kept all the Jewish religious traditions, and that they remained devoted to the only true God. But the Israelites were in exile for a long time, nearly seventy years. Eventually Jacob would have died, his children would have died. His grandchildren might have gradually given up speaking Hebrew, might have stopped observing the Sabbath, might have even turned their backs on God. That is, they might have assimilated so completely into the Babylonian culture that most people couldn’t tell the difference.
It happens.
But then this other thing happens: after all those years in exile the prophet Isaiah (or maybe it’s his grandson) gets up on a soapbox in the middle of the marketplace and begins to announce the new thing that God is getting ready to do, and he does it in Hebrew. It catches the ear of Jacob’s grandchildren who are there. Above the hubbub of that place they can hear it and understand it. It’s the language of the old country, and it takes them back to those days when they sat at their grandfather’s feet and heard him say, “Never forget!” But now this prophet is saying something new, he’s saying:
Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
And then he asks:
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
And that’s a good question, because these grandchildren would be middle aged by then, just about the time you start wondering what you’re doing with your life. The prophet says:
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
It’s as if God knows that his people have been away from home too long. They have gotten comfortable in Babylon. He has to woo them back, and so he begins with this
incredible offer of a feast where every good thing to eat and drink you can imagine is available free of charge. “Come!” God says. “Come and eat! Come and enjoy!”
But then he says this other thing:
I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
This is a different kind of offer altogether. This is God promising that the same covenant he made with his beloved David he will now make with his beloved people, so that the same kind of honor and glory that came to David in his day will now come to them in theirs. “Nations that you do not know will run to you,” God says, to this ragtag bunch of refugees, “for the Lord your God has glorified you.” And while their ears are still ringing with those two amazing offers—a free feast and a future glory—the prophet says this:
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
Because you don’t want to ignore an offer like this. It may have been years since you called on his name but now it’s time to seek the Lord while he may be found, to call
upon him while he is near. “Let the wicked forsake their way,” the prophet says, “and return to the Lord. He will show mercy on them. He will pardon them.” But it sounds too good to be true. Jacob’s grandchildren may have stood there wondering how God could offer such a thing, but in the very next verse God explains:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
We often hear that verse to mean that we can’t even begin to understand the thoughts and ways of God, but what if it means we can’t understand how God could love and forgive people like us? Or like the exiles? Remember they were in Babylon because they had forsaken their covenant with God, turned their backs on him. Now here he was saying he was ready to forgive them and bring them home. For us that’s unthinkable! But not for God. His thoughts are not our thoughts. He says:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
And this is where this text becomes the perfect Advent text. Because God is saying, “I haven’t yet done the thing I’m about to do, but I promise you:
“It will happen.”
He uses two analogies: One is the rain and snow that come down from heaven. God says, “These two don’t return to me until they have accomplished their purpose, that is, until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout.” The other analogy is the seed itself. God speaks as if his word is the seed, promising that it won’t return to him until it has done what seeds do—until it has sprouted and grown. And that made me think of Paul’s analogy in 1 Corinthians 15, where he’s talking about what our resurrection bodies will be like. He says, “You fool! What you sow does not come to life until it dies!” And what he means is that there, inside the seed, is all the genetic information needed to produce a tomato, or a cumquat, or a hyacinth. But you have to plant it first. You have to put it in the ground and cover it up, and then, with enough rain and sunshine, the seed will grow. It will become the thing it was meant to be.
I remember preaching through the story of David one summer at my church in Washington. I told the congregation before I began, “We’re going to work our way through more than fifty chapters of the Bible this summer and not all of it will sound like a sermon. But in Isaiah 55 God says, ‘My word will not return to me empty.’ And so maybe, if we prepare the soil of our hearts, the seed of God’s word will fall there, and take root there, and grow.”
And that reminds me of Jesus’ parable about the sower: how some of that seed fell on the path, and some fell on rocky ground, and some fell among thorns, but some of that seed fell on good soil and yielded thirty, sixty, and a hundred fold. I hear God saying through the prophet, “My word will accomplish what it sets out to do. You can’t stop it. But you can do something: you can prepare the soil of your heart so that the seed of my word will take root there and grow.”
And I’m still thinking of Jacob’s grandchildren standing in the marketplace, hearing all that, and wondering: “Is it true? If we open our hearts to the prophet’s word will all that he says actually happen for us?” What would the prophet say? “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! You can’t keep the word of God from accomplishing what it sets out to do. You just have to stand back and be amazed!” And then he ends his speech by telling them what God is getting ready to do: God is getting ready to take his people home. After all those years in Babylon they are finally going back to Jerusalem. And what a homecoming! Listen:
For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle, and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
“It’s going to be better than Christmas morning,” says the Lord, “I promise you.”
Now, the truth is that those grandchildren may not have been thinking about any of that. They may have gotten resigned to their life in Babylon, such as it was. They may have come to believe that the way things were was the way they would always be. But the way this prophet talked brought something alive inside them: a memory of home they had almost forgotten, and the promise of going home again. “You shall go out in joy,” the prophet said, and that word—joy—may have fallen like a seed on the soil of their hungry hearts, it may have sprouted there and grown. As one source puts it,
“Advent joy is exile-ending joy. It’s the joy of realizing that God’s future is already on its way. That’s what give Advent its emotional content: it’s not Christmas morning joy, but almost there joy.”ii
Do you know what she’s talking about? Sometimes that “almost there” joy is better than the thing itself: looking forward to Christmas, anticipating it, imagining what might happen on that morning is often so much better than the feeling you get when it actually comes, when you’re sitting in the middle of the living room floor surrounded by all your new toys and a big pile of ripped-up wrapping paper. “Is that all?” you ask. “Is that it?” How many people do you know who are living their lives that way right now? Looking at everything they have and wondering, “Is that all? Is that it?” Maybe what they need is a good dose of Isaiah 55. Maybe, while they’re out there shopping for Christmas presents at Short Pump, they need the prophet to climb up on his soapbox and say again,
Ho! Everyone who thirsts
come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
And here’s a good question:
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
You may know some people who need to hear that message. Your grandchildren may need to hear it. My grandchildren may need to hear it! But if they do, if they can, if they can prepare the soil of their hearts so that that word can fall, and take root, and grow, it may be the best thing that has ever happened to them.
Even better than Christmas morning.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
