We Will Feast
October 21, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 25:6–12
Please open your Bibles to Isaiah 25. And I will follow the instruction given to me by my barista as I preach this passage. I will try my best.
Isaiah chapter 25, verses 6 to 12:
"On this mountain, Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for Yahweh has spoken.
It will be said on that day, 'Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is Yahweh; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.' For the hand of Yahweh will rest on this mountain, and Moab shall be trampled down in his place, as straw is trampled down in a dunghill. And he will spread out his hands in the midst of it as a swimmer spreads his hands out to swim, but Yahweh will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands. And the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust."
So reads the word of the living God.
Brothers and sisters, the reason it is worth it to be a Christian is because Isaiah 25 is true. In the deepest valleys of your life, in the longest nights, on the hardest days, this glorious glimpse of heaven is what makes it worth it — all of the promises that are fulfilled here.
When professing believers walk away from Christ, it can only be because they don't value what this promise is enough. They don't believe it's true, maybe? Or if they do, they don't think it's all that good. Or when you and I are tempted to settle for lesser feasts — feasts of the eyes, feasts of the mouth, feasts of the hands — when we do that, we are in essence saying, "No, it's not going to be that good. It's not really worth the wait."
But Isaiah in this text is urging us, plying us with the sweetest words, with his highest poetry, and with literally the greatest promises in the Bible. He is urging us to wait on the Lord. That's the point of the passage, the application of it. You probably noticed in verse 9: "Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him." And he repeats, "We have waited for him." We're going to see in chapter 26, verse 8, "O Yahweh, we wait for you." It's all about waiting.
What's the point of this whole apocalypse, chapters 24 to 27? Why does he tell us all about the end, about what's coming? Ultimately, it is so that you will be able to endure while you wait for it, so that you'll have the strength to meet it. You realize God could wrap up history any way he wants and not tell us a thing about it. He didn't have to. Why does he tell us? It's to give us strength to wait.
And if you're waiting for it, of course that means you haven't seen it yet. It means I'm waiting. It means heaven has not come. Death has not been swallowed. Tears are still flowing. And yet, as Habakkuk chapter 2, verse 3 says, "If it seems slow, wait for it."
The argument of this text is that heaven will be worth the waiting. There are a whole lot of things in life that are not worth waiting for. The Redskins to finally win a Super Bowl — it's not worth waiting for. Those long lines at Disney — you get to the end of them, and it's like a one-minute ride. It's not worth waiting for. Black Friday sales — not worth waiting for.
There are some things in life that are worth waiting a little while for. We just went to a wedding on Sunday. The couple was dating for four years. Feels like a long time, right? They waited for it. Now they're married. Praise the Lord. But if at the outset she had said, "You know, I'd be willing to get married, but in like thirty years" — probably not worth waiting for, right?
There are a lot of things in life that aren't worth waiting all that long for. But this day is worth every second of suffering, every long year after year after year of waiting. It is all worth being there for this. It is that good. It is a feast worth waiting for.
Samuel Rutherford said the following: "I exhort you and beseech you in the bowels of Christ, faint not, weary not. There is a great necessity of heaven; ye must needs have it. All other things, as houses, lands, children, husband, friends, country, credit, health, wealth, honor, may be wanted; but heaven is your one thing necessary, the good part that shall not be taken from you. See that you buy the field where the pearl is; sell all, and make a purchase of salvation. Think it not easy, for it is a steep ascent to eternal glory. Many are lying dead by the way that were slain with security."
And Isaiah is urging us: do not be one of them. But instead set your eyes on that day so that you might wait for it.
Of course, this glorious picture of the feast of God happens right at the center, in the middle of a longer section, Isaiah 24 to 27, that we've been calling Isaiah's Revelation. Some call it Isaiah's Little Apocalypse. It begins with judgment. In Isaiah chapter 24, at the end of the diatribe of chapters 13 to 23 — the judgment on all these individual nations — now God is bringing a deluge of destruction on the whole world. He's overthrowing every worldly institution that raises its fist against him. And at the end of chapter 23, he gathers the host of heaven and the kings of the earth in a pit, shuts them in there, after many days lets them out, destroys them, and then gets rid of the sun and the moon and reigns himself on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.
At the beginning of chapter 25, we noted last week, Isaiah just bursts out in song about God's glorious conquest over the nations. And that song is bracketed by another song at the beginning of chapter 26 about the strength of the city of God, where this feast will happen. But right in the middle, we have this description of a feast.
As we've looked at before, this whole section is what's called a chiasm, meaning it's parallel structures that are all leading your eye toward the center — the center here being the section that we're looking at this evening, the feast of final salvation. But in Isaiah's inimitable way, the center of this chiasm is yet another chiasm. It is yet another parallel structure, which at the center of it is a single sentence: "He will swallow up death forever."
That means the bullseye in the bullseye is verse 8. The end of the end is the death of death. Isaiah is marshalling all of his rhetorical skill to focus our eyes on this glorious day, and particularly on God's conquest of mankind's greatest and last enemy, which is death. This text is a celebration of the glory of God's fulfillment of his highest promises, stretching from the wedding supper of the Lamb to the eternal state of deathless life.
It can be confusing looking at this text. What exact time are we looking at? Honestly, I don't think that Isaiah is trying to give you a chronological explanation of things going on here. I think he's saying it's all coming; it's all future. Some of it seems to be in the millennial kingdom, some is in the eternal state. It doesn't really matter. The point is, it's all coming for the people of God.
As we examine this text, we'll see it in three parts to whet our appetite for that glorious feast. We're going to look at, first, what we will enjoy; second, what God will destroy; and third, how we will rejoice — all of it painting a picture of a feast worth waiting for.
So first, in this feast, we find out what we will enjoy on that day when God spreads the banquet table — what we will enjoy in the feast worth waiting for.
Isaiah begins this picture of fulfilled promises and heavenly blessings with an image of a feast prepared by God himself. You noted that in verse 6: "On this mountain, Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine."
You should ask yourself, then: why a feast? Of all the things that could characterize his description of this climax of human history, why a feast?
In some ways, food and drink are at the center of God's good design for man's blessing and pleasure from the very beginning, aren't they? Go back to Genesis chapter 1, verse 28: have dominion over the earth, fill it, and guess what? You get all the plants for food. You get to enjoy eating and drinking.
And then, of course, sin comes into the world. There's a fall. What's one of the first things that he curses? The ground — because you will eat from it by the sweat of your brow. He curses eating and drinking. The thing that is supposed to bring this beautiful, sensuous kind of delight to mankind is now laborsome and weary. The curse directly affects food.
And for the rest of redemptive history, every time there's some image of a kind of leaning back toward the garden, going back toward communion with God, there's always food involved. Do you notice that? In Exodus chapter 24, they seal the covenant at Sinai, and Moses and Nadab and Abihu and Aaron go up on the mountain with seventy of the elders. They see God in this sea-like glass, and then it says they ate and drank with God. The next chapter describes how they're supposed to eat in the tabernacle. The next book, Leviticus, is all about the sacrifices — food for the priests, food for the people, feast days on which people are celebrating and eating.
Then fast-forward to the reign of Solomon, sort of the apex of Israelite history. First Kings chapter 4, verse 20 says Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea. And then how do you describe an almost paradise-like existence? This is what he says: they ate and drank and were happy.
Of course, the idolaters then corrupt the feasts, and it's a downhill spiral from there. They start using food and drink as a way to get around God — just get what they want, sensuous pleasure without thanksgiving. And so the curse for disobeying God is also related to food: famine, droughts. When they're going into exile, what is it that happens? They're besieged, and they don't have any food. They become cannibals. They start eating their own kids.
The point is, God made us to eat and to drink and to enjoy it and to worship him. That's what Paul says in 1 Timothy chapter 4: everything made by God is good if it's received with thanksgiving. That's the point. You're supposed to be able to enjoy eating and drinking. You get the joy; he gets the glory.
And that plan does not go away with heaven, is what Isaiah is saying. That plan stays. It doesn't transform into some eternally disembodied reality — "Yeah, all the food and all of that, that was the base stuff that we've left behind," as some philosophers have thought throughout the ages. No. Heaven is marked by eating and drinking, apparently.
The kingdom, Jesus himself said, is like a feast. Matthew 22: the king invites people to his son's wedding feast. Matthew 25: the bridesmaids are waiting for the wedding feast. Revelation 19: the wedding supper of the Lamb has come. It's a feast.
So when Isaiah describes heaven — the millennial kingdom, the eternal state — it is fitting that he describes it as a feast, which highlights just one of the countless generous pleasures to enjoy there. Isaiah is not trying to be exhaustive by this. No, of course not. He's just trying to highlight: this is one of the things you'll get to do on that day.
And it's meant to be an intentional contrast, I hope you appreciate, with chapter 24. You remember in chapter 24, verse 9: "No more do they drink wine with singing." The earth has lost all of the wine. They're starving. They're not celebrating. They're not feasting. But the people of God — oh, they get to feast. They get to feast forever. And I'm guessing there are no weight-loss plans at this point. I don't know how glorified bodies work, but you just eat and enjoy it, it seems. And so he pictures the glory of that day as a feast.
Look back at verse 6. He says, "On this mountain, Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food." First of all, notice he says "on this mountain." He's referring to Jerusalem. I think he's going back to verse 23 in chapter 24, where he says, "Yahweh of hosts reigns on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem." So he's talking about the mountain of Jerusalem. "This mountain" is a reference to that mountain.
"Yahweh of hosts" — it's his military name, his conquering name. The one who just conquered the city of man is now spreading the banquet. Notice it says Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples. So this isn't a feast that's a potluck, where you bring the food. This is a feast where God provides the food. He spreads the bounty.
And notice who it's for: for all peoples. This isn't just for Israel. Israel is the geographical site of the feast, but it's not the only people invited. This is Jesus' point, isn't it? They were all invited, and they said, "No, I'm not interested." So he said, "Well, go out to the hedges and the highways and the byways and invite anyone — absolutely anyone." This is a feast for all peoples, all nations and languages.
And what is it described by? "A feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine." This word "feast" is derived from the word "to drink." There are different words, as you might imagine, in Hebrew for feasting. This is not the word that's usually used for the feast days in the Hebrew calendar. This is a different word. It's usually used for celebratory meals like weddings — Jacob's wedding, or Samson's wedding, which is a seven-day event; Nabal's drunken revelry; Solomon's banquet for his servants; Esther's banquet. Those are the mishteh, the feasts in view here.
This word is always associated with food and with drink, especially with wine. And it highlights particularly the act of eating, of drinking. The other words that you could use for a feast highlight the things that you do at the feast, the acts — the Day of Atonement, and sometimes the fasting in the morning, is also called a feast in that regard. But this is not that word. This is the word that focuses on delight in consumption.
The image here is certainly that of food, and it is enumerated and repeated with exotic detail — a tantalizing spread of a sumptuous meal. Did you notice he doesn't just say it once? He says it twice: "a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine." And then that's not good enough — let me describe it even better than that: "rich food full of marrow, aged wine well refined."
There is a ton of rhyming and assonance, by the way, going on in this passage. "Rich food" is the shemanim. The "well-aged wine" is the shemarim. And then the word for marrow and the word for refined also rhyme. He's being very poetic to highlight the beauty and the delight of this banquet.
The word here for rich food is literally just the word for oils, the shemanim, or fats. It's often in reference to olive oil, but here it's modified by "marrow," so it's probably implying animal fats — bone broth, marrow oil. You can cook bones and get the oil straight out of them, and it's this precious, very succulent additive to a meal.
I looked this up earlier. This is from the Seed Oil Alliance. It says that marrow oil is rich in oleic acid. I don't know why that's a good thing, but I guess it is. And then it says this: it provides "an intense, savory, umami depth that modern vegetable oils cannot replicate, which is why it remains a secret ingredient in ancient traditional cooking and high-end gastronomy." That's the picture there. He's reaching for the most exotic, delicious, most expensive, delightful food that you could get.
And then he goes to the most expensive drink that you could get: the well-aged wine. Of course, wine is better with age. The word here for wine is not the normal word. It's a word that means remainders, or dregs. The idea is that when you're fermenting wine, there's a bunch of sediment, solids at the bottom. If you leave those there for a while, they enhance the flavor. But then he also says it's "aged wine well refined." So after the flavor's gotten really good, they pour it back and forth. Jeremiah 48:11 describes this process of going back and forth to filter out the sediment, so that what you have left is just pure, really good wine.
Jesus himself says in Luke chapter 22, verse 18, "I am going to drink of the fruit of the vine with you in the kingdom." That's what this is describing.
In case you're unconvinced — I'm not a wine person myself, but whatever — this is from the Plume Ridge Bottle Shop. Quote: "Aged wine tastes better because chemical reactions over time soften harsh tannins, mellow sharp acidity, and transform fresh fruit notes into complex, tertiary aromas like leather, tobacco, and earth." Sounds delightful.
The point is, this is the best food and drink that you could get. Why all the detail? It's to make your mouth water, to make you anticipate, to whet your appetite for that day, so that you want to go there and experience that.
And listen, the point here is not just, "Hey, there's going to be a lot of good food there." Of course, that's true. But it's just one of the many glories of the joys of heaven that will all be of the highest quality — things that we know here in part that, he says, on that day will be so much better.
Think of the best meal that you've ever eaten. I just talked to someone the other day who said that they had the best barbecue they'd ever eaten in their life. One of the best meals I've ever had is at a sushi place that's in New York and in LA. It's called Sugarfish, and it's the best sushi you could ever have. It doesn't have any of that fishy taste. It's just buttery and nutty and so good. So good.
Another one of my favorite food experiences in my life — I'll admit, this is confession time — I was on my way to my brother's wedding, and we stopped at a Bojangles. And I had what's called a Bo-Berry Biscuit, which is a real cheap little butter biscuit with a bunch of glaze on it. Heaven came down in that moment. I have never done this before: I literally cried while I was eating. It was so good. I don't know what was wrong with me, but — yeah, I guess so.
The point is, you've had experiences like that. You know what it's like to enjoy a meal. And Isaiah is saying heaven's like that — always, and so much better, at the highest quality. These are just a bare foretaste of the dining experience to come.
And it's not just the joy of food. It's the joy of friendships, the joy of art, the joy of nature, of play, of work — all of it perfected, all of it enjoyed as it was intended from the beginning. God is a generous God. He made you with the capacity for taste and for sight and for hearing, so that you could see and taste and hear glorious, good things and enjoy them, and then thank him for it. And on that day, it'll be all the best: the best music, the best food, the best company — everything.
And so this picture of a feast worth waiting for begins with what we will enjoy.
Secondly, he says, what God will destroy.
Heaven is often described in terms of what will not be there, and so it is with Isaiah. This again is not some sort of chronological take. If you've got animals dying for rich food, then obviously death hasn't been swallowed up. So somehow these things are separated by time, it seems. But it is a description of blessings yet future, blessings in the kingdom to come. And so he starts by telling us what God gets rid of, noting what he will swallow up.
Though this section enumerates five different nouns that are taken away — the covering, the veil, the tears, the reproach, and death — all of this is really about one central reality: the death of death. God's destruction of death and all of its causes is what gives rise to the rest of these conditions — the removing of mourning and shame and sin and everything else. Right at the center of all of this is him swallowing up death.
And you noted he uses that verb twice: "swallow up on this mountain," "swallow up death forever." "Swallow up" is supposed to be an ironic, festal image. We're over there eating all the really good wine and fat food, and there's God — he's also eating. But he's eating something quite different. His food isn't marrow fat, but death itself.
The basic meaning of the metaphor is that he does away with it. He destroys it. He devours death. Of course, another irony of this is that death itself is the great devourer. Death is never satisfied. Even Scripture tells us that — Isaiah 5:14 says it opens wide its mouth to consume, or Habakkuk chapter 2, verse 5, where it says death is never satisfied. Death is seen throughout the Scriptures and human history as this open maw, constantly swallowing one person after another, seemingly without end.
And yet here the Grim Reaper is reaped. The icy hand is frozen. The insatiable grave is swallowed whole, never to swallow another victim again.
What exactly does he mean by swallowing or destroying death? Well, precisely what Isaiah is talking about is the end of the first death. Mortality is what's abolished. Nobody, believer or nonbeliever, from this point forward will ever decay and die in the normal way that we think about death.
The first death, swallowed by God, is the separation of a soul and a body. It's when the heart stops beating, the body ceases its vital function, and the soul goes to some intermediate state. We know, of course, that this is what happens. "To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord," Paul says. When you die, your body stays here, inanimate, but your soul lives on — either in heaven with Christ, in his presence, an intermediate state of heaven; or in an intermediate state of hell, called in Revelation "Hades." It's a spiritual existence. And this death is what is swallowed.
There is a second death. That's the lake of fire, as Revelation 20 describes it. And eventually the first death goes into the second death. What he's swallowing up here is that first death, the separation of soul and body.
You appreciate this: death is not an original occupant of God's earth, but it is a promised consequence of the fall of man, of sin. Paul says the wages of sin is death. Paul says that we know that all sin because all die. Sin is the crime; death is the sentence.
This goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 3, the curse. Adam and Eve sin, and God says not only is work going to be hard, such that eating is hard, but — Genesis 3:19 — "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
Then you get to Genesis 4. Nobody's actually died yet. Adam and Eve are still there, walking around. They have two kids. Who's the first person to die? Abel, by murder. So you might wonder when you get to the end of Genesis 4: okay, I understand murder can happen, but does that mean everyone will die? Can people die of natural causes?
And then you hit Genesis 5, and it's this generational timeline. Adam lived so many years — nine hundred–plus years — and then he died. And then his son Seth lived so many years, and then he died. And then his son, and he died, and he died. Some of these men live almost a thousand years, and yet they still are subject to death.
Every human being since the fall has earned death, because all have sinned. No one will escape. Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 20: "All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return." Meaning, east of Eden, there is nobody who feasts endlessly. All are consigned to one day leave behind the world of physical pleasures, the world of embodied worship, and live out their days as a spirit, a disembodied soul.
That is, of course, until Easter Sunday, when Jesus, having died for sin — the cause of death — himself conquers death by being the firstfruits of eternal, deathless life, the first glorified man. He's not the first person to be resurrected; Lazarus came back from the grave. He is the first person to be resurrected to never die again.
The resurrection of Christ is what begins the glorious resurrection of all men. Paul himself says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 20: "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death" — that's Adam — "by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ."
So Jesus is resurrected; then his people, the church, are resurrected at his coming, at the rapture. "Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death."
That's what Isaiah is describing — not just when the church is resurrected, as glorious as that will be, but when in fact all men are resurrected.
Paul describes the resurrection of the church later on in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 54. He says, "When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written," and he quotes Isaiah 25: "Death is swallowed up in victory."
He translates it "in victory." Ours is translated "forever." It's an odd phrase. It's not le'olam, which is the normal way to say "forever." It's a way of saying "to the end." It's asserting strength over death — finally conquering death — is a way of saying it. And so that's how Paul translates it here: "in victory." Death is swallowed up in victory. Paul is saying Isaiah saw this: that when God swallows up death, it's gone forever.
And not just for believers. If you go back to Isaiah 25, the all-encompassing language implies here that it's everyone, all over the world. It says the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that's spread over all nations, wiping tears away from all faces, et cetera, et cetera. The point is, this is not only the resurrection of believers, but the resurrection of all people — the resurrection, Jesus calls it, of life and the resurrection of condemnation. Or, as Paul calls it, the resurrection of the just and the unjust.
In Revelation chapter 20, John himself describes it, verse 13: "And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades" — the first death — "were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
This is what Isaiah is describing: when death meets the second death and it's abolished forever, and everyone is resurrected to permanent, imperishable, undying bodies, both in heaven and in hell. And Isaiah focuses for the moment on those left on earth in this glorified state, when death is gone for good, and all that would cause it.
And did you notice — surrounding the swallowing up of death, this dramatic, climactic event, which bookends not only the Bible but all of time — there are several consequences to that? Four things that deathless life does not have.
First of all, it doesn't have graves. He says in verse 7, he will swallow up on this mountain "the covering that is cast over all peoples." It's a word for a wrap. Literally, it's "the face of the covering," and then he repeats it, "the covering," emphasizing it. It could be a reference to mourning garments, some people think. I think it's probably actually a reference to the earth that covers all faces in burial — that when people are lying in the ground, all people have something on top of their face, a covering over them. He's saying God is swallowing up graves themselves.
Secondly, he says deathless life does not have funerals. The veil is certainly a mourning garment, a woven garment to cover the head and the body, which would be customary in Jewish mourning. To cover oneself in fabric is a sign of mourning. This is what they would wear at funerals, often for a whole month sometimes, mourning the passing of loved ones. So there are no graves; there are no more funerals.
He goes on to say there aren't even any more tears. "The Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from all faces." This is the product of any pain, not just death — any pain: of unmet longing, of heartache, of goodbyes, of sin, of the curse of death. And do you notice the gentle language — that he'll wipe away? Like a father tenderly caring for his children who are mourning and weeping. There's so much compassion in God's comforting of his people here.
Not only does deathless life not have graves or funerals or tears, he says it doesn't even have shame. It doesn't have any form of sin whatsoever. "The reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth." "Reproach" here could mean sin or its consequences, or both. Both are true. There's no more reason, he says, to feel guilty. Everyone on earth has a clean conscience forever. Their worship is untainted by distraction. Their enjoyment is never even one bit idolatrous. Their delights are only pure. All of it comes with the abolition of death.
You realize this is the first time in the Bible that this promise is made. We're kind of just used to reading a lot of this language in Revelation 21 — I'll read it for you in a second — so we're kind of used to it: "Yeah, yeah, I know that's in the Bible." But before this point, nobody knew that promise. They'd had maybe indications of something like that — that Satan's going to have his head crushed; maybe that implies it. They never got this level of explicit detail. This is astounding, what Isaiah is promising.
And it is exactly how the Bible ends, too. Revelation 21: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes'" — he's just quoting from Isaiah 25 — "'and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.'"
Brothers and sisters, can you taste that banquet? That deathless day? Just try to imagine it for a second. On that day, nobody will ever have to bury their parents or their children ever again. On that day, churches will be filled with people who occupied the earth under their lawns for centuries. On that day, there will be no doctors, no lawyers, no morticians, no police — and not one footfall of discontentment or envy, anger, or selfishness will haunt the blessed reunion of saints for thousands upon thousands upon endless years.
That's what it means for death to expire. God will swallow up death forever and remove every trace of the mess that we've made on this earth, and replace it with a perfect, glorified world.
Lastly, this is a feast worth waiting for because of what we will enjoy, because of what God will destroy, and because of how we will rejoice. And oh, how we will.
The conclusion of this picture of the glory of that day seems to be something like singing. It's at least a declaration — verse 9, "It will be said on that day." It's at least poetic. It's as if the joy of that day could not be increased anymore. But then Isaiah goes on to tell us what the highest joy of that day will be, which is worship — us enjoying God. The greatest joy of the saints for all eternity will be the unending praise of their King and Savior. He is right at the center of it.
Heaven, you realize, is not heavenly because of the food or because of the invited guests. Those are good things, but they are not the thing that makes it heaven. All of that without God would make it hell itself.
Isaiah shows us where we will fix our eyes on that bright, brimming day of expectation: on God. He says in verse 9, "It will be said on that day, 'Behold, this is our God.'"
There's so much bound up in that statement. It implies, number one, that they're beholding God — that they're in the presence of God, saying to one another, "Behold, look, there he is." Number two, it implies this and not any other god: "Behold, this is our God." We don't worship any other gods. There's no more idolatry there.
It implies belonging: this is our God; we belong to him, and in some sense he to us. It implies the fulfillment of Exodus chapter 6, verse 7, where he says, "I will be your God, and you will be my people" — the conclusion of that dramatic promise.
It implies a kind of exuberance, an outburst, a declaration of joy. It's like they can't hold it in anymore. It's just got to come out: "This is our God!"
And it implies that all that he has done in redemption has enabled us to behold him, to see him for who he is. It's like he's saying: this — what you're seeing around you, all of the glories and everything that led to this point — demonstrates who he is. It was all worth it because it shows us who he is. We get to know him more. This is our God.
And then he says, "We have waited for him." It's repeated because it is the application of this entire four-chapter segment. The only book in the Bible that uses this word "waited" more than Isaiah is the Psalms. But apart from that, Isaiah uses this word far more than anyone else in the Bible. Isaiah chapter 8, verse 17: "I will wait for Yahweh." Isaiah 26, verse 8: "In the path of your judgments, O Yahweh, we wait for you." Isaiah 33:2: "O Yahweh, be gracious to us; we wait for you." Isaiah 40, verse 31: "But they who wait for Yahweh shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."
To wait for God is another way of saying to trust in him, to hope confidently in his promises before they're fulfilled, to persevere, to endure in faith, in believing.
And please also notice it says, "This is our God; we have waited for him." I wasn't just waiting for the menu. I wasn't just waiting for immortality. I was waiting for him — waiting to see him, to be with him, to behold him.
And you can appreciate what this statement must have meant to Isaiah when he says, "We have waited for him." What did that waiting look like? We were waiting through Assyria, getting besieged. We were waiting through Babylon, which he predicted. We're waiting through the exile. We're waiting. We're waiting. We're waiting. To wait means that there will be a lot of suffering on the way. You get that, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be waiting; it would just be fulfillment all the way through.
But on that day, in an explosion of praise, Isaiah himself will stand next to us and will sing: he is worth waiting for. Oh, he is worth every minute. To see him, to know him, to become like him — oh, a thousand lifetimes of pain and uncertainty and anguish would be worth just the first day's welcome in his presence.
And notice what they waited for him to do: "We have waited for him, that he might save us" — probably better translated "to save us." We have waited for him to see him, but we needed him to do something in order to get to him, and it was salvation, which implies the whole panoply of acts that led to this deliverance: deliverance from and through every pain; salvation from wrath — his own wrath; salvation from our sin, from the curse, from fear, from Satan, from unmet longings, from every hardship and pain and toil. That's what we needed salvation from. And he has brought it on that day with himself.
And so he says at the end of verse 9, "Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." I mean, how else are you supposed to respond to a moment like that but with happiness, with joy? Everything that you've ever wanted, and more. Your heart has never been big enough to contain all of the joy that it will be expanded to experience on that day.
By the way, "Let us be glad and rejoice" is quoted also in the New Testament, Revelation chapter 19, verse 7: "Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come." Revelation chapter 22, verse 3 finishes: "And his servants will worship him. They will see his face … and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever." Oh, how we will rejoice.
And then Isaiah concludes with this opposite picture, which we're just going to look at really quickly. After wrapping it up, saying the hand of Yahweh will rest on this mountain — an image of peace, of finality — he casts his eye away from the mountain to the valley, to a picture, it seems to me, of maybe even the lake of fire itself.
He says, "And Moab shall be trampled down in his place." Moab here is the perennial enemy of the people of Jerusalem, already condemned in Isaiah chapter 16 — here representative of nations that oppose God, of pride, of human resistance. In Isaiah 16, God actually offered them a treaty, and they said, "No, we're not interested." Here they get the end of that.
They're trampled down in their place, "as straw is trampled down in a dunghill." This is a disgusting image. Commentators debate exactly what's being said here, but it's something like oxen treading out grain. There's straw that's lying in the grass, and obviously there are oxen, so there's dung. So what they do with the leftover straw and the dung is throw it into one big pile. Usually it rains on that, and it sort of turns into a big, watery mess. And it says that's where they get thrown. It's meant to be unbearable, and it's meant to be the opposite of a feast.
Verse 11: he might try to get out of it. "He will spread out his hands in the midst of it as a swimmer spreads his hands out to swim." It's like he's trying to climb out of it — this disgusting swimming through feces. "But Yahweh will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands." It's not going to do anything for him. He won't be able to escape. This is a final judgment, the lake of fire. "And the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust." This is the second death that they now experience.
This postscript about the lake of fire is also very much the way that Isaiah ends his prophecies. In Isaiah 66, he describes the glories of heaven, and then: "their worm shall not die." He's reminding us that glorious day is only for those who wait for him. There are those who won't experience the joys of that day. It's a sort of warning to the people of Israel: you want to be at that feast? Then wait on him. Trust in him. Hope in him, and it will all be yours.
Robert Burns, the famous Scottish poet of the 1700s — he died when he was in his thirties, thirty-seven, I think — was known for his love of this passage. It was said that he could not read Isaiah 25 without weeping. And so it shows up in a lot of his poetry in different ways.
One of my favorites is a poem called "The Cotter's Saturday Night." It's a lengthy poem about the industriousness of the earthy Scottish man, the cotter — someone who works the land under a landlord. It ends with William Wallace and the spirit of patriotism for Scotland, so it's a fun poem. You should read it sometime.
But in the middle of it, he has the image of that cotter, this hardworking man, going home at night after a hard day's work, having dinner with his family, and then leading family devotions on a Saturday night. He opens up the Bible and reads from it, from Genesis all the way to Revelation. Isaiah himself makes an appearance — he calls it "rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire." And then he says this:
"Then kneeling down to Heaven's Eternal King,
The saint, the father, and the husband prays:
Hope 'springs exulting on triumphant wing,'
That thus they all shall meet in future days,
There, ever bask in uncreated rays,
No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear,
Together hymning their Creator's praise,
In such society, yet still more dear;
While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere."
Brothers and sisters, do you think that feast is worth waiting for? Me too.
Let's pray.
God, we thank you. Oh, we thank you for such undeserved promises, purchased by the blood of Christ and secured by your faithful word. We know that this will come true one day. And so we just ask for clearer eyes to see it, and to believe it, and to wait for it. For my brothers and sisters here who are suffering in some way, would you minister to their hearts with this picture of heaven? Give them hope. Give them strength each day to cling to Jesus Christ, knowing that they will never be put to shame — that all of his promises are yes and amen, and they are all leading us toward this glory. Help us, O Lord, to live with our minds in heaven, so that we could be useful here in our time on earth. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.
