Filthy Rags

So, you can see here Isaiah, directed by the Spirit of God, writing some very sorrowful things pertaining to the people and pertaining to the state of their sin for which God brought Israel into judgment, took them away into a foreign land. I believe this is prophetic historically looking forward to that time when Babylon would come and devastate the land and that the Temple would be destroyed of which he spoke there in verse 11. It’s spoken as if it had already taken place, although Isaiah wrote this several hundred years before it was accomplished. But it’s given here for one reason and this is the reason: to show any of us that are reading this our own desperate need before the Lord as sinners. We can read this just purely from an historic perspective and walk out of here just as dead as what we walked in.

I’m not here to give us a history lesson, although this is rooted in history but prayerfully for each of us here reading this portion together, to consider our own state before the Lord and to see that it is no better than even the best that men would consider the best. You can see here in verse 6, it doesn’t say in all our sins are as filthy rags, does it? Take the best righteousnesses, plural, and put them all in a heap before the Lord. You hear people talking about standing before the Lord one day and presenting their good works to him and hopefully, as they think and say, the good will outweigh the bad. Well, you’re already in trouble because the Scriptures declare that the best that men could consider before God is nothing but filthy rags.

But Bob read it for us in Romans 3, in the reading just before I came up here to speak, that “there is none righteous, no not one.” Until the Lord is pleased to show us that in our lost depraved mind, we’re going to continue to think that there is something in us that can commend us to God. And so, that is my prayer that if that is your thought, even now, that the Lord by his Spirit would cause you to see that there is nothing good in you, nothing good in me and that even my best righteousnesses are but filthy rags.

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An Impenitent Heart

Well, the first thing we need to do is to describe what is an impenitent heart. And everything I have read here [Isaiah 57:4-14] with regard to these charges brought against the people of Israel was in the way that they worshipped, the false worship, coming in some other way than what God had ordained. That is important, because we need to deal with a society today where everywhere there are professing Christians who would tell you I have repented and I am believing God. And yet when you weigh their profession of faith and... against the Scriptures and you listen to them talk about what is their righteousness and their works, I have to conclude based on the Scriptures that we are dealing with an impenitent, religious generation. That is who Isaiah faced and that is who we face. There is nothing new under the sun.

Now we could go to a dictionary, a Bible dictionary if we want and so-called and look up what it is to be unrepentant or impenitent, but I believe the Scriptures themselves are their own best interpreter. And so I want to look at a couple of verses with regard to what is an impenitent heart. And we will begin, there is a lot we could cite, but we will begin in Proverbs chapter 27 and verse 22. I love the language of Scripture. It is picturesque. It is designed to give us a visual of some of these things. And God by his Spirit has so written this Word to give us these pictures. And here is one right here in verse 22 in Proverbs 27. We read:

“Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”

That word bray it means to literally pound or grind. How hardened is the heart of a sinner in its impenitence? Well, here it is describe as a fool that if you were to take and put that fool in a mortar along with wheat... of course, when you take wheat and put it in a mortar and beat it with a pestle, it is designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. But such is the hardness of the sinner’s heart that with all of the evidences, even with all of the warnings of God’s providence and his Word, all the declarations of the gospel, left to himself that one will never change. That one will remain what he is in his blindness and ignorance and never sense the urgency of even the desperate state of their own soul. That describes an impenitent heart.

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