July 20, 2025 • 25 mins
In this episode, from a chapel service held on Friday 30 May 2025, Joel Atwood, missionary in Vanuatu with the Church Missionary Society Australia, speaks on Isaiah 45 and God’s word to the nation of Israel about his anointed one, King Cyrus.
He reminds us that the plans of God are not our plans. When we are tempted to ask, “Why is God doing that?”, we need to remember that he is greater and more wonderful than our crude and limited conceptions of him. We can’t force him or rush him; we can only follow along to his timetable.
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Find out more and register for the 2025 Donald Robinson Library Lectures on The Clapham Sect and their influence on Sydney (Sat 30 Aug).
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
Welcome to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, that seeks
to glorify God through biblically sound, thought-provoking and challenging talks and interviews.
In this episode, from a chapel service held on Friday 30th of May, 2025, Joel Atwood, missionary in Vanuatu with the Church
(00:32):
Missionary Society Australia, speaks on Isaiah 45 and God's word to the nation of Israel about his anointed one, King Cyrus.
He reminds us that the plans of God are not our plans.
When we are tempted to ask, "Why is God doing that?", we need to remember that
he's greater and more wonderful than our crude and limited conceptions of him.
(00:54):
We can't force him or rush him.
We can only follow along to his timetable.
We hope you find the episode helpful.
Thank you, Simon.
And can I say what a joy and honor it is to have spent this week with you guys
and to open up God's word for you now as we've shared a few times over the week?
(01:17):
The Pacific is big and so we travel a lot.
So we've had to work on the art of packing the essentials, uh, particularly coffee.
Everything has to be small and convenient.
Don't look, that's not my kit.
Coveting is a sin.
Everything's gotta be small and convenient to be useful.
A travel size apress, a little grinder, a little tiny pocket scale.
(01:38):
If you wanna get fancy, small, convenient to be more useful.
It's good travel advice, but it's also an unfortunate spiritual tendency where humans like a God that is small.
Convenient that that fits nicely around all the other things we pack into life, even here, deep into the theology books
(02:00):
as a danger that we, we pin God down, we, we make him fit into what we want him to be, what we think he should be.
The good news is that our travel sized God typically has very little to do with the God of the Bible.
The God who is.
(02:20):
Who won't be contained, can't be downsized, and most certainly is not compact or convenient.
And in Isaiah 45, we encounter the real God, his plan, his way, his priorities, his mission that exposes our
attempts to keep him contained and confronts our disappointment and our impatience and our shallow vision.
(02:48):
I'm sure that my God is too small.
I wonder if yours is too
A plot twists are a mainstay in fiction.
The sudden kink in the story that's meant to make us gasp and take us from the familiar to the unexpected, the strange the
new and Isaiah 45 throws us into the midst of the exile of God's people in ancient Judah having been given over to Babylon.
(03:14):
There's this national trauma.
Caused by their refusal to listen to, to love, to trust Yahweh, their God.
There's justice.
And yet, throughout Isaiah, there's this persistent thread of comfort that God's plan to save the world through his ancient people hasn't twisted.
It still stands.
(03:35):
He's disciplined them, but now he will save them.
But his people have some questions about how.
The problem of exile will be solved or rather whom will solve it.
Look at verse 13.
I have stirred him up in righteousness.
I'll make all his ways level.
He will build my city and set my exiles free.
(03:57):
Who?
We'll go back to verse one of our chapter and we hear that it is Cyrus who exactly.
In the middle of the sixth century BC Cyrus was a nobody king of a tiny town in a nothing kingdom.
He married up as all the clever people do, and then attacked his father-in-law, and he won, and he just kept on winning
(04:22):
battle after battle, gobbling up the ancient world, bite after bite, even in the end walking triumphantly into Babylon.
And as Isaiah 45 says, God did this.
Cyrus in all his savage genius and his clever diplomacy and his immaculate facial hair
didn't conquer by chance or by skill, or by good luck that he was a tool in God's hand.
(04:48):
This unstoppable killing machine is God's anointed, dare we say, his Messiah, his cry.
It's an uncomfortable little gloss to throw in there, isn't it?
The God's Messiah in Isaiah 45 is Darth Vader.
And we ask, well, how could God?
(05:09):
And we start to pat our pockets to find where we left our little God, to have some words with him about his methods.
And then the real God speaks.
Verse nine, does the clay say to him who forms it?
What are you making?
Or your work has no handles.
(05:30):
God says, good luck finding me in your pocket.
I made you.
And the clay does not get a say in what it becomes.
Hey, uh, hear me out.
What about we try a vase this time?
Right?
And in response to ancient Judas concerns about God's methods, verse 14 to
17 gives us his alternative response to what God is doing to save his people.
(05:53):
The rest of the world, the notoriously tough North Africans react very differently in this vision.
They submit, not interestingly to Cyrus though, is it, or to his Persian empire, who do they submit to the exiles?
Now here's a plot twist because God is behind this.
(06:17):
Cyrus's victories are actually Israel's.
Victory.
They win because he wins and he wins so that they can win.
Why not to become a new empire, but they, the once powerful nations will plead with
you, exile, saying, surely God is in you and there is no other, no God beside him.
(06:41):
God uses this warrior from the nations to bring the nations to ancient Israel, and God
brings the nations to ancient Israel so that he might bring them in the end to himself.
What is your God like?
Does he surprise you?
Because a tiny God and an he repressed God is safe.
(07:05):
We know how he's gonna act because he does what we would do.
I plan it.
He blesses it.
But the real God, our incomparable God chose Darth Cyrus to save his people to
reveal the glory of the one and only to those who are yet in ignorance and rebellion.
(07:27):
You see, God's plans are God's plans.
Different to anything we would ever dream up if you were gonna save the world, who
of you would think of God becoming a human living, suffering, dying on a Roman cross.
The real God's plans can be a surprise.
Unreservedly good, glorious moving us towards his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time.
(07:55):
We often feel disappointed when life doesn't go our way, don't we?
Our plans stall.
Our church plant folds, our family struggles and our next steps don't come.
Out of the 17 years I've been in ministry, the last four years in Vanuatu have been the hardest 'cause.
Nothing seems to work, by which, I mean, nothing works the way I want it to, but the glorious,
(08:18):
if shocking plans of the real God come to us with our heavy feet and our broken spirits.
And they're bigger and more wonderful and more surprising than we ever seem
to grasp, and he brings salvation through ways and people we never see coming.
We need to be ready for the true God to shock us and remind us how provisional our little schemes are, and for
(08:46):
us brothers and sisters to teach us that if our father is truly in control, there is no such thing as failure.
There is just a part of his plan.
We can't see.
Vanuatu is, uh, geographically close to Australia, but we are significantly bind in technology.
(09:09):
But weirdly for a country that is mostly Bamboo heights, we picked up AI generators very quickly.
My Bachelor students can't format a Word document, but they know almost instantly how to pop an essay prompt into copilot.
And local companies of Alto are pumping out these ads with that weird kind of plasticky feel to them, right?
And AI raises good questions about art and artists, right?
(09:31):
Who's responsible for these monstrosities, I mean creations, right?
What does it mean to create something?
And verse 18 here takes us in an interesting direction.
Four.
How does God justify his right to act However he wants to save his people, how does he guarantee his unexpected plan for the world?
(09:54):
He explains his credentials as an artist, as creator, thus says The Lord who created the heavens, he's God who formed the earth and made it.
He established it.
He didn't create it empty.
He formed it to be inhabited.
I am the Lord and there is no other.
Who am I to decide how to save you?
(10:16):
I made this.
I made it from the very beginning to be full and thriving.
Have you noticed how unnecessary so much of our world is?
There are six, maybe 7,000 languages.
Countless more that have come and gone.
There are 32,000 kinds of fish.
(10:36):
There are 360,000 kinds of Beatles.
There are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe.
Why?
What does that tell you about the God who made it?
If God were an engineer thinking only about efficiency, we would have one kind of fish.
We would all call it fish.
(10:58):
It would be brown and square and stack neatly, right?
AI is good for this, right?
This is what AI is for.
We'd have one flavor of ice cream.
God forbid we would have only instant coffee, but God loves us more than that.
He loves our world more than that.
He created with this, this incredible variety.
(11:20):
To fill this world with thriving and flourishing fullness for him and for us, for us humans to fill this world and enjoy it,
to dive into the oceans and see the reef steaming with life to be able to speak to each other in countless wonderful ways.
There's a language in our South Abram Island in Vanuatu that has the word for when you space out, right?
(11:44):
You're just not there.
Maybe you're familiar with that in class, I'm not sure, but the word is w Wang.
Which to me just feels on apic.
Wha Right.
We need that word in our life,
and God reminds us by appealing to the fullness of creation.
There's something much, much bigger at play than just Israel's immediate situation.
(12:08):
Cyrus and his wars are not ultimately to wipe out and destroy somehow even that.
He's part of God's plan for a new creation, for a full and thriving world gathered under his gracious and saving rule.
A plan, actually, that should not be a plot twist.
(12:28):
Look at verse 19.
I take it, this is actually answering verse 15.
Those lucky few who've dived into the glorious pool of Hebrew discourse analysis.
I know it's a bit tricky, and then the major prophets laugh at every book and article that's ever been written.
But I do wonder if we might gently move the quotation marks at the end of verse 14 to the end of verse 17.
(12:52):
So the nations are the ones saying, truly you are a God who hides himself as if to say, now we see you God.
Where have you been?
We've been wasting our time with these idols.
How did we miss you?
Why did your people not show us?
And God answers in verse 19.
(13:12):
The true God has not been hiding.
He's been speaking all along.
There are five verbs of speech in verse 18 and 19.
To make his point, God wasn't playing hide and seek.
He spoke plainly to his people.
The rest of us.
Well, the rest of us just weren't listening.
(13:35):
Too busy playing with our little convenient gods safe and silent.
What's your God like?
'cause a little God, a hideable God is easy to ignore.
Pick up when we want, put down, when we don't, he an equation we can already soul through our vast and erudite reading.
Right?
(13:57):
But we can't bring any real problems to him, can we?
What can he do that we can't?
The real God, our incomparable God stands apart from us, before us, over us.
So immense His love.
He made all of this for us.
From the very first molecules bumping into one another, the redemption of ancient Israel to the bumps and dinks of my own ridiculous little life.
(14:23):
It's all been him and marvel of Marvels.
He has shared himself, shared his purposes with us, his children woven is the very fabric of Israel, their
stories, their laws, their wisdom, their prophecies, revealing the plan for all of history from the Author of Life
itself, to bless all the families of the world through them, to bring all things together under the Lord Jesus.
(14:49):
I hardly to make the link with PTC, do I?
I am the Lord and there is no other.
This comes to us in our impatience, don't you think?
We want things quickly to grow up without growing to, to get essays without research, intimacy without commitment.
(15:09):
Church growth without setbacks.
The one good soil without the three that don't work.
Freedom.
Without learning responsibility, we sprint towards things we were never meant to get quickly.
Why did God not send Jesus in Abraham's day?
Why did he have to suffer an exile if Cyrus was gonna save them anyway?
(15:30):
Why hasn't Christ come back yet?
Why haven't the unreached people in North Africa come to God's people and say, now we see?
I don't know.
I don't think we can know.
'cause God's time is God's time.
(15:51):
He has made the heart of his plan clear to us.
We can't derail it or force it or hurry it.
He has been working out this plan before you and I were even thought of.
We follow his timetable, which means brothers and sisters in our ministry.
We play a long game.
CMS is renowned for a long application process, and I've come to believe it's just all
part of the training because long-term mission takes a long time to learn how to play.
(16:18):
Language, culture, context, history, people trust, love can't be hurried.
It's not easy.
It's how our God works.
Look, now the final verses, verse 22 to 25.
We just had a crack at our Australian tendency to rush, but things.
(16:39):
I have to admit are way more convenient here.
Fanau is a cash economy.
It's coins everywhere, right?
But here it's just, I don't even need a card anymore with the phone, right?
I don't have to line up for paperwork in government offices.
It just uploads and, and appears instantly.
And everything here is way more tailored to, I don't need to pay attention to your music or your shows.
(17:01):
I just get told what I'm gonna like, or what my children are gonna like.
If you look at what's up there, right?
But it teaches us that life is really about me.
Our eyes are ever turned towards ourselves.
And the final verses of this chapter, try to retrain Israel's eyes, their hearts, their minds, to see what
(17:24):
God sees, to understand what he is working towards, so that they can truly act as his people in the world.
See, when these exiles look around them at their world, they see.
Enemies threats to their national life.
The bad guys that if God's gonna use them, it's gotta be for target practice.
(17:44):
If anything,
God looks and sees a world that needs you.
A world that is deceived by false gods pathetic idols of no work, but of such incredible danger.
And so in these final words, God speaks kind of past Israel.
(18:05):
To the nations around them.
And what would you expect God to say after everything so far?
What's he gonna say to the people he's beating with his Persian Stick?
A victory song?
We have those in Isaiah A, a mockery of their idolatry.
We have those two.
Look at verse 22, turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth because I am God and there is no other.
(18:31):
I have sworn from my mouth, has gone out in righteousness, A word that shall not return to me.
Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear.
Allegiance
the plan to fill the earth, to choose little Israel, to discipline them.
To begin this, this plot twist, unexpected Rescue was this, to save God's world.
(18:59):
To gather up the fullness of this thriving globe and bring it to himself, and it wouldn't happen to Israel through Israel just yet.
Cyrus won.
Israel returned.
We'll take a few more world empires before we see the end of Israel's story.
And perhaps you've already caught the hint, the echo of Isaiah's words in an early Christian letter of an anointed.
(19:28):
A Messiah, a Christ who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God.
Something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant.
Being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, humbled himself by becoming obedient even to death on a cross.
Therefore, God has now at last in fulfillment of all of these plans, highly exalted him.
(19:56):
Bestowed on him, the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every
knee should bow and every tongue confess that he's Lord to the glory of God the Father.
What is your Jesus like?
(20:18):
So we did end up with a tiny, safe, convenience savior, isn't it?
The real Jesus, our incomparable.
Jesus entered into the world.
He formed a humble servant to death.
And as the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ rose again, ascended over all of God's full and thriving creation, and he summons the nations.
(20:41):
Every nation from every corner of this earth to himself turn to me and be saved.
I am Jesus.
There is no other
a plan that cannot be stopped and cannot be hurried and cannot fail.
(21:02):
As you look around, what do you see your own reflection, threats to our way of life.
Distractions from study numbers towards viability challenges to your carefully planned strategies.
Christ comes to us in our shallow vision, our limited scope, our obsessive self focus, our minimal mission, and he transforms our eyes to
(21:29):
see what he's, to see beyond what immediately concerns us to to do the work for which the potter formed us to fulfill this glorious vision.
To plead with our global God for his righteous plans to come true,
to go into our full and thriving world and all that stunning diversity and listen to learn with labor alongside our brothers and sisters.
(21:57):
And yes, to leave what is right in front of us to seek to confuse the idolatrous, those in a land of darkness yet.
And lift their eyes to see what was once in the glory of the risen Lord.
From the mouth of the Lord.
(22:17):
A word has gone out that shall not return until it has completed.
Its shocking and wondrous, slow and beautiful.
Global and life giving.
Undefeatable work the word of our incomparable savior.
There is none beside you.
(22:38):
What is your God like?
Thank you for listening to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College.
Our vision as a College is to see God glorified by men and women living for
and proclaiming Jesus Christ, growing healthy churches and reaching the lost.
(23:03):
In 1788, the Reverend Richard Johnson sailed on the first fleet with his wife Mary, to take up an appointment by the Church of England.
As the first chaplain of the Australian prison colony of New South Wales, the choice of Johnson was no accident (23:11):
it was due to the influence
of William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, John Newton, Hannah More, and other members of a group that later became known as the "Clapham Sect".
This collection of upperclass, wealthy evangelical Anglicans who lived around Clapham, which was at the time a small village
(23:35):
southwest of London, were interested in social reform issues, such as the abolition of slavery, the revision of the penal
code, the regulation of working conditions and factories, and the promotion of schools and other educational ventures.
Motivated by their Christian faith and their concern for justice and fairness for all, their legacy persists even today.
(23:56):
This year, the Donald Robinson Library lectures will examine the lives of key figures in the Clapham Sect, their
interest in the new colony and its social and spiritual development, and the evangelical legacy of Richard Johnson.
Join us on Saturday, 30th of August 2025 for a day of fascinating historical talks delivered by Stuart
Piggin, Mark Thompson, Michael Gladwin, Ruth Lukabyo, Nicole Starling, Colin Bale, Ed Loane, and Susan An.
Visit the Moore College website for further details (24:25):
that's moore.edu.au.
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You can find out more and register by going to the Moore College website (24:41):
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(25:03):
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(25:29):
The Moore in the Word Podcast was edited and produced by me, Karen Beilharz, and the Communications Team at Moore Theological College.
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Until next time.
Welcome to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, that seeks
to glorify God through biblically sound, thought-provoking and challenging talks and interviews.
In this episode, from a chapel service held on Friday 30th of May, 2025, Joel Atwood, missionary in Vanuatu with the Church
(00:32):
Missionary Society Australia, speaks on Isaiah 45 and God's word to the nation of Israel about his anointed one, King Cyrus.
He reminds us that the plans of God are not our plans.
When we are tempted to ask, "Why is God doing that?", we need to remember that
he's greater and more wonderful than our crude and limited conceptions of him.
(00:54):
We can't force him or rush him.
We can only follow along to his timetable.
We hope you find the episode helpful.
Thank you, Simon.
And can I say what a joy and honor it is to have spent this week with you guys
and to open up God's word for you now as we've shared a few times over the week?
(01:17):
The Pacific is big and so we travel a lot.
So we've had to work on the art of packing the essentials, uh, particularly coffee.
Everything has to be small and convenient.
Don't look, that's not my kit.
Coveting is a sin.
Everything's gotta be small and convenient to be useful.
A travel size apress, a little grinder, a little tiny pocket scale.
(01:38):
If you wanna get fancy, small, convenient to be more useful.
It's good travel advice, but it's also an unfortunate spiritual tendency where humans like a God that is small.
Convenient that that fits nicely around all the other things we pack into life, even here, deep into the theology books
(02:00):
as a danger that we, we pin God down, we, we make him fit into what we want him to be, what we think he should be.
The good news is that our travel sized God typically has very little to do with the God of the Bible.
The God who is.
(02:20):
Who won't be contained, can't be downsized, and most certainly is not compact or convenient.
And in Isaiah 45, we encounter the real God, his plan, his way, his priorities, his mission that exposes our
attempts to keep him contained and confronts our disappointment and our impatience and our shallow vision.
(02:48):
I'm sure that my God is too small.
I wonder if yours is too
A plot twists are a mainstay in fiction.
The sudden kink in the story that's meant to make us gasp and take us from the familiar to the unexpected, the strange the
new and Isaiah 45 throws us into the midst of the exile of God's people in ancient Judah having been given over to Babylon.
(03:14):
There's this national trauma.
Caused by their refusal to listen to, to love, to trust Yahweh, their God.
There's justice.
And yet, throughout Isaiah, there's this persistent thread of comfort that God's plan to save the world through his ancient people hasn't twisted.
It still stands.
(03:35):
He's disciplined them, but now he will save them.
But his people have some questions about how.
The problem of exile will be solved or rather whom will solve it.
Look at verse 13.
I have stirred him up in righteousness.
I'll make all his ways level.
He will build my city and set my exiles free.
(03:57):
Who?
We'll go back to verse one of our chapter and we hear that it is Cyrus who exactly.
In the middle of the sixth century BC Cyrus was a nobody king of a tiny town in a nothing kingdom.
He married up as all the clever people do, and then attacked his father-in-law, and he won, and he just kept on winning
(04:22):
battle after battle, gobbling up the ancient world, bite after bite, even in the end walking triumphantly into Babylon.
And as Isaiah 45 says, God did this.
Cyrus in all his savage genius and his clever diplomacy and his immaculate facial hair
didn't conquer by chance or by skill, or by good luck that he was a tool in God's hand.
(04:48):
This unstoppable killing machine is God's anointed, dare we say, his Messiah, his cry.
It's an uncomfortable little gloss to throw in there, isn't it?
The God's Messiah in Isaiah 45 is Darth Vader.
And we ask, well, how could God?
(05:09):
And we start to pat our pockets to find where we left our little God, to have some words with him about his methods.
And then the real God speaks.
Verse nine, does the clay say to him who forms it?
What are you making?
Or your work has no handles.
(05:30):
God says, good luck finding me in your pocket.
I made you.
And the clay does not get a say in what it becomes.
Hey, uh, hear me out.
What about we try a vase this time?
Right?
And in response to ancient Judas concerns about God's methods, verse 14 to
17 gives us his alternative response to what God is doing to save his people.
(05:53):
The rest of the world, the notoriously tough North Africans react very differently in this vision.
They submit, not interestingly to Cyrus though, is it, or to his Persian empire, who do they submit to the exiles?
Now here's a plot twist because God is behind this.
(06:17):
Cyrus's victories are actually Israel's.
Victory.
They win because he wins and he wins so that they can win.
Why not to become a new empire, but they, the once powerful nations will plead with
you, exile, saying, surely God is in you and there is no other, no God beside him.
(06:41):
God uses this warrior from the nations to bring the nations to ancient Israel, and God
brings the nations to ancient Israel so that he might bring them in the end to himself.
What is your God like?
Does he surprise you?
Because a tiny God and an he repressed God is safe.
(07:05):
We know how he's gonna act because he does what we would do.
I plan it.
He blesses it.
But the real God, our incomparable God chose Darth Cyrus to save his people to
reveal the glory of the one and only to those who are yet in ignorance and rebellion.
(07:27):
You see, God's plans are God's plans.
Different to anything we would ever dream up if you were gonna save the world, who
of you would think of God becoming a human living, suffering, dying on a Roman cross.
The real God's plans can be a surprise.
Unreservedly good, glorious moving us towards his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time.
(07:55):
We often feel disappointed when life doesn't go our way, don't we?
Our plans stall.
Our church plant folds, our family struggles and our next steps don't come.
Out of the 17 years I've been in ministry, the last four years in Vanuatu have been the hardest 'cause.
Nothing seems to work, by which, I mean, nothing works the way I want it to, but the glorious,
(08:18):
if shocking plans of the real God come to us with our heavy feet and our broken spirits.
And they're bigger and more wonderful and more surprising than we ever seem
to grasp, and he brings salvation through ways and people we never see coming.
We need to be ready for the true God to shock us and remind us how provisional our little schemes are, and for
(08:46):
us brothers and sisters to teach us that if our father is truly in control, there is no such thing as failure.
There is just a part of his plan.
We can't see.
Vanuatu is, uh, geographically close to Australia, but we are significantly bind in technology.
(09:09):
But weirdly for a country that is mostly Bamboo heights, we picked up AI generators very quickly.
My Bachelor students can't format a Word document, but they know almost instantly how to pop an essay prompt into copilot.
And local companies of Alto are pumping out these ads with that weird kind of plasticky feel to them, right?
And AI raises good questions about art and artists, right?
(09:31):
Who's responsible for these monstrosities, I mean creations, right?
What does it mean to create something?
And verse 18 here takes us in an interesting direction.
Four.
How does God justify his right to act However he wants to save his people, how does he guarantee his unexpected plan for the world?
(09:54):
He explains his credentials as an artist, as creator, thus says The Lord who created the heavens, he's God who formed the earth and made it.
He established it.
He didn't create it empty.
He formed it to be inhabited.
I am the Lord and there is no other.
Who am I to decide how to save you?
(10:16):
I made this.
I made it from the very beginning to be full and thriving.
Have you noticed how unnecessary so much of our world is?
There are six, maybe 7,000 languages.
Countless more that have come and gone.
There are 32,000 kinds of fish.
(10:36):
There are 360,000 kinds of Beatles.
There are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe.
Why?
What does that tell you about the God who made it?
If God were an engineer thinking only about efficiency, we would have one kind of fish.
We would all call it fish.
(10:58):
It would be brown and square and stack neatly, right?
AI is good for this, right?
This is what AI is for.
We'd have one flavor of ice cream.
God forbid we would have only instant coffee, but God loves us more than that.
He loves our world more than that.
He created with this, this incredible variety.
(11:20):
To fill this world with thriving and flourishing fullness for him and for us, for us humans to fill this world and enjoy it,
to dive into the oceans and see the reef steaming with life to be able to speak to each other in countless wonderful ways.
There's a language in our South Abram Island in Vanuatu that has the word for when you space out, right?
(11:44):
You're just not there.
Maybe you're familiar with that in class, I'm not sure, but the word is w Wang.
Which to me just feels on apic.
Wha Right.
We need that word in our life,
and God reminds us by appealing to the fullness of creation.
There's something much, much bigger at play than just Israel's immediate situation.
(12:08):
Cyrus and his wars are not ultimately to wipe out and destroy somehow even that.
He's part of God's plan for a new creation, for a full and thriving world gathered under his gracious and saving rule.
A plan, actually, that should not be a plot twist.
(12:28):
Look at verse 19.
I take it, this is actually answering verse 15.
Those lucky few who've dived into the glorious pool of Hebrew discourse analysis.
I know it's a bit tricky, and then the major prophets laugh at every book and article that's ever been written.
But I do wonder if we might gently move the quotation marks at the end of verse 14 to the end of verse 17.
(12:52):
So the nations are the ones saying, truly you are a God who hides himself as if to say, now we see you God.
Where have you been?
We've been wasting our time with these idols.
How did we miss you?
Why did your people not show us?
And God answers in verse 19.
(13:12):
The true God has not been hiding.
He's been speaking all along.
There are five verbs of speech in verse 18 and 19.
To make his point, God wasn't playing hide and seek.
He spoke plainly to his people.
The rest of us.
Well, the rest of us just weren't listening.
(13:35):
Too busy playing with our little convenient gods safe and silent.
What's your God like?
'cause a little God, a hideable God is easy to ignore.
Pick up when we want, put down, when we don't, he an equation we can already soul through our vast and erudite reading.
Right?
(13:57):
But we can't bring any real problems to him, can we?
What can he do that we can't?
The real God, our incomparable God stands apart from us, before us, over us.
So immense His love.
He made all of this for us.
From the very first molecules bumping into one another, the redemption of ancient Israel to the bumps and dinks of my own ridiculous little life.
(14:23):
It's all been him and marvel of Marvels.
He has shared himself, shared his purposes with us, his children woven is the very fabric of Israel, their
stories, their laws, their wisdom, their prophecies, revealing the plan for all of history from the Author of Life
itself, to bless all the families of the world through them, to bring all things together under the Lord Jesus.
(14:49):
I hardly to make the link with PTC, do I?
I am the Lord and there is no other.
This comes to us in our impatience, don't you think?
We want things quickly to grow up without growing to, to get essays without research, intimacy without commitment.
(15:09):
Church growth without setbacks.
The one good soil without the three that don't work.
Freedom.
Without learning responsibility, we sprint towards things we were never meant to get quickly.
Why did God not send Jesus in Abraham's day?
Why did he have to suffer an exile if Cyrus was gonna save them anyway?
(15:30):
Why hasn't Christ come back yet?
Why haven't the unreached people in North Africa come to God's people and say, now we see?
I don't know.
I don't think we can know.
'cause God's time is God's time.
(15:51):
He has made the heart of his plan clear to us.
We can't derail it or force it or hurry it.
He has been working out this plan before you and I were even thought of.
We follow his timetable, which means brothers and sisters in our ministry.
We play a long game.
CMS is renowned for a long application process, and I've come to believe it's just all
part of the training because long-term mission takes a long time to learn how to play.
(16:18):
Language, culture, context, history, people trust, love can't be hurried.
It's not easy.
It's how our God works.
Look, now the final verses, verse 22 to 25.
We just had a crack at our Australian tendency to rush, but things.
(16:39):
I have to admit are way more convenient here.
Fanau is a cash economy.
It's coins everywhere, right?
But here it's just, I don't even need a card anymore with the phone, right?
I don't have to line up for paperwork in government offices.
It just uploads and, and appears instantly.
And everything here is way more tailored to, I don't need to pay attention to your music or your shows.
(17:01):
I just get told what I'm gonna like, or what my children are gonna like.
If you look at what's up there, right?
But it teaches us that life is really about me.
Our eyes are ever turned towards ourselves.
And the final verses of this chapter, try to retrain Israel's eyes, their hearts, their minds, to see what
(17:24):
God sees, to understand what he is working towards, so that they can truly act as his people in the world.
See, when these exiles look around them at their world, they see.
Enemies threats to their national life.
The bad guys that if God's gonna use them, it's gotta be for target practice.
(17:44):
If anything,
God looks and sees a world that needs you.
A world that is deceived by false gods pathetic idols of no work, but of such incredible danger.
And so in these final words, God speaks kind of past Israel.
(18:05):
To the nations around them.
And what would you expect God to say after everything so far?
What's he gonna say to the people he's beating with his Persian Stick?
A victory song?
We have those in Isaiah A, a mockery of their idolatry.
We have those two.
Look at verse 22, turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth because I am God and there is no other.
(18:31):
I have sworn from my mouth, has gone out in righteousness, A word that shall not return to me.
Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear.
Allegiance
the plan to fill the earth, to choose little Israel, to discipline them.
To begin this, this plot twist, unexpected Rescue was this, to save God's world.
(18:59):
To gather up the fullness of this thriving globe and bring it to himself, and it wouldn't happen to Israel through Israel just yet.
Cyrus won.
Israel returned.
We'll take a few more world empires before we see the end of Israel's story.
And perhaps you've already caught the hint, the echo of Isaiah's words in an early Christian letter of an anointed.
(19:28):
A Messiah, a Christ who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God.
Something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant.
Being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, humbled himself by becoming obedient even to death on a cross.
Therefore, God has now at last in fulfillment of all of these plans, highly exalted him.
(19:56):
Bestowed on him, the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every
knee should bow and every tongue confess that he's Lord to the glory of God the Father.
What is your Jesus like?
(20:18):
So we did end up with a tiny, safe, convenience savior, isn't it?
The real Jesus, our incomparable.
Jesus entered into the world.
He formed a humble servant to death.
And as the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ rose again, ascended over all of God's full and thriving creation, and he summons the nations.
(20:41):
Every nation from every corner of this earth to himself turn to me and be saved.
I am Jesus.
There is no other
a plan that cannot be stopped and cannot be hurried and cannot fail.
(21:02):
As you look around, what do you see your own reflection, threats to our way of life.
Distractions from study numbers towards viability challenges to your carefully planned strategies.
Christ comes to us in our shallow vision, our limited scope, our obsessive self focus, our minimal mission, and he transforms our eyes to
(21:29):
see what he's, to see beyond what immediately concerns us to to do the work for which the potter formed us to fulfill this glorious vision.
To plead with our global God for his righteous plans to come true,
to go into our full and thriving world and all that stunning diversity and listen to learn with labor alongside our brothers and sisters.
(21:57):
And yes, to leave what is right in front of us to seek to confuse the idolatrous, those in a land of darkness yet.
And lift their eyes to see what was once in the glory of the risen Lord.
From the mouth of the Lord.
(22:17):
A word has gone out that shall not return until it has completed.
Its shocking and wondrous, slow and beautiful.
Global and life giving.
Undefeatable work the word of our incomparable savior.
There is none beside you.
(22:38):
What is your God like?
Thank you for listening to Moore in the Word, a podcast of Moore Theological College.
Our vision as a College is to see God glorified by men and women living for
and proclaiming Jesus Christ, growing healthy churches and reaching the lost.
(23:03):
In 1788, the Reverend Richard Johnson sailed on the first fleet with his wife Mary, to take up an appointment by the Church of England.
As the first chaplain of the Australian prison colony of New South Wales, the choice of Johnson was no accident (23:11):
it was due to the influence
of William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, John Newton, Hannah More, and other members of a group that later became known as the "Clapham Sect".
This collection of upperclass, wealthy evangelical Anglicans who lived around Clapham, which was at the time a small village
(23:35):
southwest of London, were interested in social reform issues, such as the abolition of slavery, the revision of the penal
code, the regulation of working conditions and factories, and the promotion of schools and other educational ventures.
Motivated by their Christian faith and their concern for justice and fairness for all, their legacy persists even today.
(23:56):
This year, the Donald Robinson Library lectures will examine the lives of key figures in the Clapham Sect, their
interest in the new colony and its social and spiritual development, and the evangelical legacy of Richard Johnson.
Join us on Saturday, 30th of August 2025 for a day of fascinating historical talks delivered by Stuart
Piggin, Mark Thompson, Michael Gladwin, Ruth Lukabyo, Nicole Starling, Colin Bale, Ed Loane, and Susan An.
Visit the Moore College website for further details (24:25):
that's moore.edu.au.
That's moore.edu.au.
You can find out more and register by going to the Moore College website (24:41):
moore.edu.au.
That's moore.edu.au.
If you have not already done so, we encourage you to subscribe to our podcast
through your favourite podcast platform so that you'll never miss an episode.
For past episodes, further resources, and to make a tax deductible donation to support
(25:03):
the work of the College and its mission, please visit our website at moore.edu.au.
If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend and leave a review on your platform of choice.
We always benefit from feedback from our listeners, so if you'd like to get in touch, you can email us at comms@moore.edu.au.
(25:29):
The Moore in the Word Podcast was edited and produced by me, Karen Beilharz, and the Communications Team at Moore Theological College.
The music for our podcast
was provided by MarkJuly from PixaBay.
Until next time.
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