Look at the Book
Isaiah 48:9–11: For My Name’s Sake
In this session of Look at the Book, we focus on Isaiah 48 9 to 11. So Father, I pray that the focus of these verses on your supremacy, your praise and glory and name would be precious to us and that we would see them not as offensive but as the very ground of your love for us. I ask this in Jesus' name, Amen. God says to His people, "For my namesake, I defer my anger for the sake of my praise, I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver, I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it. For how should my name be profaned? My glory, I will not give to another." So one, two, three, four, five, six times. The Lord refers to His radical commitment to His name, His praise, His self, His own sake, His name again and His glory. So we just pause there and ask, how do those relate to each other? The name, the praise, the self, the glory. Here's, this is the way I think anyway, when I see a list like that of traits about God, I ask, so do they include each other? Are they the same? Are they different ways of expressing the same thing? Does one lead to the other? Here's the way I wrote it down for myself. There's God's self, His being, which I see in this word for my own sake, His being. And then there's His name here and here. And then there's His glory. And then there's His praise. And I think they're moving out, you might say, from the most essential and central out to the response. So you've got God's being or His self. And then His name is the capturing of His being in a designation. And then His glory is a description of the character, quality, beauty of that name being. And then we praise that. And He is, according to these six statements, passionately committed. This is God's supreme zeal or commitment or passion, which raises this question. Most of us grew up in, if we're evangelicals, perhaps in churches and families and youth groups and campus ministries, where God's love for us was made paramount. And His zeal for us and His commitment to us was what was continually celebrated. And here in this text, we have God celebrating Himself and His name and His glory and His praise. And the question then is, how does this relate? How does it relate to His love for us? And that's what this text is about. So shift gears for a minute and go through the text again for my name's sake. I defer my anger for the sake of my praise. I restrain it and it is His anger for you that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver. I have tried you, tested you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, I do it. I would refer to this refining and this deferring. How should my name be profaned? My glory. I will not give to another. So here you have expressions of God's amazing patience with us and love for us and commitment to us. He's deferring His anger. He's restraining His anger. He's refining us rather than consuming us. I'm really not quite sure what not as silver means. I've read six commentaries on this and they don't seem to know either. Perhaps it just in the refining so far the effect of smelting silver and getting rid of all its draws hasn't worked yet. So it's not like silver in the sense that you haven't responded to the refining. I'm refining you. I'm trying you. All of these deferring, restraining, refining, trying, doing it are acts of love for us. And here's the amazing thing. The foundation of His love for us is His commitment to Himself. It's for my namesake that I defer my anger. It's for the sake of my praise that I'm restraining it. So the the most profound thing to see here. Let's draw it like this. So this is this is the foundation here. And this is what's being supported here. This is God's zeal for His, and let's just say His name. We could say His glory or Himself or His praise. God's zeal for His name. Hallowed be your name is what He tells us to pray. Is the support for His love? I didn't leave much room. Did I love for us? So it's not as though love for people is the most foundational thing in God's being. This text shows that there is a foundational reason why He's committed to His people, namely He's committed to Himself. And that's so crucial because it's all over the Bible. It's it makes sense out of so many texts. Let me show you one other thing that seems to me absolutely crucial here. He is deferring His anger. He's angry. He's angry at His people. He's restraining it, the anger. So why is He angry at them? Well He's angry at them because they need to be refined. That is there's there's draws of sin in their life. And what's the nature of sin? The profaning of God's name. In other words, they have not lived as though God's value were supremely important to God and therefore to themselves. They've diminished God and belittled God and He's angry about this. And His anger is about to bring down final judgment upon them. But His commitment to His name is restraining punishment for the belittling of His name. That doesn't seem to make sense. Something's got to give here. For His namesake, He is postponing or restraining anger that ought to be shown for the vindication of His name. So this deferring of His anger, this restraining of His anger is no resolution of His anger. Where does the resolution of His anger come from? And isn't the answer Isaiah 53? What's that? Five chapters later versus four following. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. We esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God. He was pierced for our transgressions wounded for our iniquities upon Him. That is the Messiah. Jesus was the chastisement that made us whole. This anger does eventually get expressed. And Paul in Romans 3.25 shows that the point of the cross most deeply is to vindicate this name, to vindicate this praise, to vindicate this self, to vindicate this glory, which He sums up as the vindication of God's righteousness. That is, His unwavering commitment to Himself. God cannot deny Himself, which is why Christ vindicated His commitment to the preciousness of His glory. And we were saved in the process. So most fundamentally, God is utterly and totally committed to Himself. He cannot deny Himself. And because of that He remains committed to those who trust in Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
We should be constantly comparing lists of characteristics about God to determine if qualities are the same, different, or overlapping. In this lab, John Piper models this and uncovers God's love for us and his commitment to his own glory.