Sermon: Atonement, Fasting, and Isaiah 58
Why Do We Fast?
#1895
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 21-Sep-26; 84 minutes
description: The Day of Atonement's three commands—afflicting the soul, doing no work, and keeping a Sabbath of solemn rest—teach profound spiritual truths. Abstaining from work points to salvation as God's work, accomplished entirely through Christ's atoning sacrifice and His removal of sin. Fasting, or afflicting the soul, calls us to humility, dependence, and genuine repentance. Isaiah 57-58 shows that true fasting is not outward ritual but inner transformation: breaking sinful patterns, seeking reconciliation with God, and preparing to serve others selflessly. As Matthew 6 teaches, fasting is directed toward the Father, not human recognition. Properly observed, Atonement fasting reminds us that salvation is God's gift, develops Christlike character, and prepares us for a life of service in His coming Kingdom.
transcript:
If I would ask you to tell me the most striking and obvious element of the Day of Atonement, most of you would probably reply pretty quickly, fasting. That is called the Fast in Acts 27. And it is what everybody knows this day for. Ask anybody in the world what fasting is, and a large percent of the people would probably just give you a blank stare. What does it mean to fast? What is fasting?
At least the all-day food-and-water fasts are becoming a fairly archaic practice. Not very many people practice fasting as a religious exercise. Some advocate juice fasts or intermittent fasts for health purposes, but fasting like we are doing today has fallen out of vogue. In a land of plenty, why fast? We have so much there is no need to, well, as God would say, afflict our souls. But indeed, why fast? That is a good question, and I think it was on Austin's mind as well as my own.
God was foresighted in commanding us to rehearse the meanings of His holy days, not just this day, each year. If we were not frequently reminded of Atonement's purpose, we would forget. We would soon lose the significance of the day and lose the significance of fasting. Before long we would simply fast because that is what is required. We would merely be abstaining from food and water for 24 hours, and it would do us no good. We would be keeping it like most of the Jews keep it, legalistically, just going through the motions, having no true insight into what God is doing—what He is doing in the world, what He is doing in His plan, what He is doing within us.
Clearly, fasting is more than just abstaining from food or water for a day. That is a classic letter-of-the-law understanding of what we are doing here today. And frankly, the letter of the law is not good enough.
We have to be understanding fasting in a way that is spiritual, that is truly helpful, that will actually help us to grow. So under the New Covenant, fasting has been raised to a much higher spiritual level of meaning, and that meaning affects our relationship with God, with others in our lives, and our preparation for the Kingdom of God.
Now, as we always do, we would like to touch base with the command. So let us go back to Leviticus 23. We are going to read the instructions on this day, about this day. And I really suggest use of colored pencils in passages like this because you can mark different things in different colors and see how often they are mentioned, and it pops out at you that God is emphasizing something here. I mean, you do not have to do the coloring right now—probably you do not have handy pencils—but it is something that really pops out in this one, especially about what God wants us to do.
Leviticus 23:26-32 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: "Also the tenth day of this seventh month shall be the Day of Atonement. It shall be a holy convocation for you; you shall afflict your souls [Well, that is the first one I have underlined in a color. That one is in yellow.], and offer an offering made by fire to the Lord. And you shall do no work on the same day [I have got that one underlined in orange.], for it is the Day of Atonement, to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. For any person who is not afflicted of soul [yellow] on that same day he shall be cut off from his people. And any person who does any work [orange] on that same day, that person I will destroy from among his people. You shall do no manner of work [orange]; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings. It shall be to you a sabbath of solemn rest [actually I have got that one in blue] and you shall afflict your souls [that is in yellow.]; on the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall celebrate your sabbath [blue]."
(I actually had the Day of Atonement in verse 27 in blue, and I forgot to mention it.) But I hope you saw there that there were three different things that He told us three different times to do on this day. So God goes to great lengths to impress on us how serious it is, and the Jews have picked up on this. They believe that it is the holiest day of the year, the most solemn day of the year.
But God tells us, emphasizing these things three different times, that we must: 1) afflict our souls; 2) do no work or be cut off if we do—and is that not an emphasis; and 3) keep a Sabbath of solemn rest. And we have said a long time in the church, if God repeats things three times, you better take notice of them. So make sure to get the point: God wants us to afflict our souls, not do any work, and to keep a Sabbath of solemn rest.
There are really, on this day, no celebrations, at least outwardly. You can have an inward celebration if you like. No outward rejoicing, although we do sing worship to God—that is normal that we would do that on a Sabbath day. Certainly no feasting on this day. It does not come across as a feast at all. It is called a fast, not a feast. Instead, this is a day of affliction, of atonement or expiation, and great solemnity.
Before I go on, just keep those three things in mind, afflicting our souls, doing no work, and keeping a Sabbath of solemn rest. We are very much aware of the atonement ritual outlined in Leviticus 16. We will not turn there, at least not right now. We are going to go back there, but not to the ritual part. We know about the two goats. We have learned a lot about them over the last several years. Actually, we have been on that subject since the teens, thinking about it, writing about it, and speaking about it. So it has become quite an established topic in this church.
But we know about the two goats. The two goats make up one sin offering. God uses two goats to illustrate two separate works of Christ. However, we must understand together they make one offering per sin. God just had to split them apart so that we could understand, through the illustration of the ritual, what each part, which work Christ was doing, and some of the significant details that we need to understand about that. So God set the ritual up to explain, in these separate actions, the two necessary parts of Christ's atonement.
Now, the first goat, upon which the priest does not lay hands—that is, there is no symbolic transfer of guilt—represents the sinless Christ shedding His blood as the payment for, or the cleansing for, sin—human sin. He was an innocent, like an animal who could not sin. But Christ was an innocent who chose not to sin and lived a sinless life. And because He is the Creator God, in whom is life, who gives us life, His life is worth more than all of humanity combined.
So His blood makes atonement for sin before God in the Holy Place, and by it we are justified. By it we are redeemed. We can say, by it, we are saved.
Now the second goat, called Azazel, the goat of departure or the goat of going far away—or maybe we should say far, far away—represents Christ bearing away the people's sins, removing them forever. Just as Austin was telling us earlier, in this part of the ritual the priest does lay his hands on the live goat's head, signaling a transference of their sins to it, to the goat. It is then led into the wilderness. Their sins are not just covered by a payment of innocent blood but removed as far as east is from the west, as Austin said—that is from Psalm 103:12. Once that is done, once the work is completed—both the blood and the removal—it is as if those sins never existed. They are gone. Their record is completely erased.
Let us see this in Colossians 2, verses 13 and 14. I think it is abominable that the world has chosen these scriptures to make a picky, proof-texting point about what was nailed to the cross, but these two scriptures actually explain what is happening with the two goats and what happened in Christ's sacrifice.
Colossians 2:13-14 And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
So He has forgiven us our sins through His blood, and He has taken all of those handwriting of requirements, the record of our sins, and nailed it to the cross. All that died with Him. It is passed away. It is not the law that was done away with, it was our sins. It is just like humanity to try to do away with the law, which shows them their sins and what they must repent of, and instead try to get rid of that rather than the expiation for it, for the sins. It is just weird. Humanity is weird.
Let us go back to Leviticus, this time into chapter 16, at the end, where the instructions for the Day of Atonement are repeated. Actually, this is the first time they are given—it is Leviticus 23 that they are repeated. But let us start in verse 29 and read down through verse 31.
Leviticus 16:29-31 "This shall be a statute forever for you: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict your souls [that is in yellow], and do no work at all [that is in orange], whether a native of your own country or a stranger who sojourns among you. For on that day the priest shall make atonement for you [I forgot that one in blue], to cleanse you, that you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord. It is a sabbath [blue] of solemn rest for you, and you shall afflict your souls. It is a statute forever."
So in wrapping up His instructions for the atonement ritual, God mentions these three aspects of this day again: fasting or afflicting our souls, doing no work, and keeping a solemn Sabbath rest. Are we doing that? That is my question.
Let us take these one at a time. I am going to start with work, no work. In the list of the holy days in Leviticus 23, we could, if we wanted to take the time, go through and see how each holy day instructs us in terms of work. Most of the time it says you shall do no customary work, or servile work in some translations. I have even seen occupational work in some of the more modern ones. And these are the other holy days.
But for Atonement, like the weekly Sabbath, He commands no work shall be done, or as it is here in Leviticus 16, you shall do no work at all. Zero, none. It is a significant difference with a significant meaning. Now, on this holy day we do no work at all under penalty of being cut off. That is even ramped up from what it says about the Sabbath, although we know that the Sabbath rest too, people were stoned for working on the Sabbath.
It is emphasized this way so often so that we understand: in the atonement achieved by Christ, we do no work. We are living out, by doing no work, that we do no work in our justification, our expiation, our atonement for us, our redemption. We do nothing to assist Christ in His expiating work. Christ did a great deal of it, and the Father did some of it, because Christ did all of that work that He did so that the Father could say, "I accept, He is justified."
We can do nothing to pay for our sins. We cannot make up for them by being good. It just does not work. Our atonement must be done by Christ Himself. Our redemption, our justification, our salvation—however you want to put it—is by grace. This is what Paul was pounding out in Romans, in Galatians, in Ephesians, in various places, to try to get the Jews to understand that they had nothing to do with their justification, that all they had to do was believe in Christ's work, in Christ Himself, and then that wonderful gift was given. That is what it says in Ephesians 2:8. You have been saved by grace, not by works.
Now what happens when we work on the Day of Atonement? What does that tell God? Well, it is saying, "Hey, I want a part in my salvation, in my justification. I want to play a role in my own atonement." If you take it down to its basic meaning, working on this day tells God that we do not need Him. We can work out our salvation without it. It tells Him we are self-sufficient, which is a great lie. It is a self-deception.
Getting into this next part, having a solemn rest emphasizes this point about self-sufficiency and that we actually need to do no work. The phrase in Hebrew, if you translated it literally, would be a Sabbath of Sabbaths. It is Shabbat Shabbaton. And it is like the phrase Holy of Holies, like the phrase Song of Songs—it tells that this holiness is the best holiness, this song is the best or the highest. It is a superlative.
And so this phrase, which repeats the word Sabbath, means that this is the highest or holiest of Sabbaths. It is the Sabbath of Sabbaths, one to be observed more carefully, more seriously, more attentively than any other Sabbath. It should be a day—because we are not doing any work, we have got to fill up our day somehow, right? It should be a day of contemplation and meditation, in prayer, and also of thanksgiving and praise in your prayers, because of our realization of what God and Christ have done for us.
We do not deserve this. We do not deserve it one bit. But God decided to call us and allow us the free gift of salvation, should we accept His offer of belief in His Son and the work that He has done. And so this day becomes a day when we think about these things, especially what Christ did for us in order to make atonement for us.
As Austin said, we fast in empathy of the suffering, of the afflicting of His soul that He went through on the tree, with all of mankind's sins placed upon Him—upon Him who had never known sin except intellectually. But from the time He called out, "Where are you, Dad?" to the time He died, He had to bear the suffering, the pain, the agony, the stress of billions of sins. Plus His body, His skin was flayed from His bones, and He was bleeding out, suffering more than anyone ever has.
And here we complain about our stomach rumbling, our mouth is dry, that our breath stinks, and we feel weaker. How does that compare with what He went through, bearing our sins, bearing the agony of our sins, the great burden of our sins? For that time, they killed Him. That was the final straw.
However, the thing that God has positively stressed that we should do on this day, the thing that most stands out about this day, is to afflict our souls. It is almost like Paul was saying—as he did—that he had to fill up the sufferings of Jesus Christ in his own body. In that sense, we get a flavor, a little bit of a taste of that on the Day of Atonement. Not much.
I was just talking with my sister on Sabbath and saying how it is not hard to get through one day of fasting. Most of us, by the time we reach the, you know, late teens, we are adults, we can take a day of fasting and it does not really bother us all that much. Maybe only until we get to be older and more feeble does it really hit us hard again, or we have some sort of health problem where it pains us more, it weakens us more.
But most of us, as adults, we can take a day without food and drink without hardly feeling it. Maybe a rumble in the tumble, or a "rumbly in the tumbly" as Winnie the Pooh said. But you know, we can take it. I can stand up here and speak for three hours if you want me to—I will not, but I know that I have the strength to do so, even though I have not eaten since last night.
So what God makes us go through every year on Atonement is, for most of us, not difficult. But we are supposed to take the opportunity on this day to really think it through, to think through the afflicting of our souls, and comparing it to what Jesus Christ did when His soul was afflicted.
But that is your work for today. God cleared your calendar. He said, "You're not going to do any work today, under penalty of death. I have a job for you. I have a task for you to do on this day, and that's to afflict your souls. That's what you're going to be doing for this 24-hour period. You're going to humble yourself."
It is a day on which we are to see ourselves as the proverbial "I am a worm and not a man," as David said of himself. When we go without life-sustaining food and water, we remember—we are reminded, painfully or no—about how much we depend on God to provide sustenance for life. And we are to then take this idea of how dependent we are, how much we need Him in a physical life.
We are to see how He ultimately provides all we need for eternal life, and come to the conclusion that we are totally dependent on God for everything. And if we try to take the position of provider and show our self-sufficiency before Him, we fail.
Let us go to Matthew 6. This is actually, believe it or not, this short three-verse section in the Sermon on the Mount is the only extended instruction on fasting in the New Testament. It is not very much. It is mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament as a part of Christian's toolkit, or that certain persons fasted for a time, but any extra teaching is usually not thrown in. So we have these three verses starting in verse 16.
Matthew 6:16-18 "Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance, for they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly."
In these three verses, Jesus deals primarily with hypocrisy during our personal fast throughout the year. He is not necessarily talking about the fast we do on the Day of Atonement, when people know we are fasting. All of us here in this room, and many others beside, know that we fast on the Day of Atonement. I mean, that is just the way it is. There are millions of Jews out there that are fasting for Yom Kippur. And so the hypocrisy idea does not hit quite as well as it would on a fast that you would do during just some random day of the year.
But I want you to note verse 18 here. Let's pick it up—actually, I'll just read it again:
Matthew 6:18 So that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place, and your Father who sees you in secret will reward you openly.
So note here that in this verse Jesus directs our fasting toward the Father. He's the only one who matters. He's the only one that you could say needs to see that you're fasting. Everybody else doesn't need to know.
You know, wash your face, put on your clothes as normal, go about whatever you do in a normal day, and keep the idea that you're fasting to yourself, because you're fasting to the Father. You're fasting so that He will notice, and your thoughts are directed toward Him, and of course if they are, and you're praying and meditating in that direction, then He will know. And you've done a good job, because that's what you are doing it for. You're doing it in the relationship that you already have with the Father.
OK, we can take that from this section, but other than that there is no further instruction in the New Testament about fasting, except the fact that we need to do it. Most of the Bible's instruction about fasting appears in the Old Testament, and there we learn a lot of the elementary knowledge about it. We learn from various places that fasting is going without food and drink for a period of time. That's a very basic bit of knowledge. These fasts are a full 24-hour day, evening-to-evening fasts. They do not have to be necessarily this long, they can be longer, but the main point is no eating or drinking during this time.
And we understand—Johnny and I were just talking about it a couple of hours ago—about how eating and drinking are so time-consuming. You get up on the Day of Atonement and you do not have to cook breakfast or get lunch, and you've suddenly got all this time. How do you fill it? And in that way we can understand that eating and drinking are not only time-consuming, but they are inherently selfish.
You're feeding your gob, you're stuffing your face. You're taking care of your body, sure, but that's a selfish activity. It's all about you. And so when we are told to fast on the Day of Atonement, it's supposed to take our mind, our energies, off of ourselves and point them toward—as we saw in Matthew 6—toward the Father and toward Jesus Christ.
So when we sacrifice eating and drinking, we indicate to God how serious and selfless we are about the reason for the fast, that we are going to devote ourselves, our time, and our energies toward what He wants, not toward what we want, not toward our satisfaction at all. We are interested in His satisfaction with us.
But we've still not necessarily answered why we fast. We've kind of taken some shots around the answer. We do fast to show our devotion and our appreciation to God and Christ for what they have done. We do not fast to be seen as righteous by others. We certainly do not fast for fun—I hope not, you're kind of a strange person if you do.
So what is the purpose of fasting for us? What is it supposed to do for us? Does it rebound to us in any kind of spiritual way? I mean, does it really help? And if so, what does it help us do? What's it supposed to teach us?
Now the only place that directly answers any of these questions is Isaiah 58. However, we are going to begin in Isaiah 57, because 57 sets up 58. It lays the groundwork for what God instructs the people about fasting in chapter 58. We're going to read the last third of Isaiah 57, that is verses 14 through 21. And I will go through this verse by verse and give you kind of a theme, or a central thought—maybe that would be a better way to say it—in each one of these verses, so that we understand what He wants us thinking about, these various principles, as He goes into Isaiah 58.
OK, starting in verse 14. First I will read all the way through it so we get the flow, and then I'll go back.
Isaiah 57:14-21 And one shall say, 'Heap it up, heap it up, prepare the way, take the stumbling block out of the way of my people.' For thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: 'I will dwell in the high and holy place with him who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry, for the spirit would fail before Me' [that is, the human spirit would fail before Him] 'and the souls which I have made. For the iniquity of his covetousness I was angry and struck him; I hid and was angry, and he went on backsliding in the way of his heart. I have seen his ways, and will heal him; I will also lead him, and restore comforts to him and to his mourners. I create the fruit of the lips: peace, peace to him who is far off and to him who is near,' says the Lord, 'and I will heal him.' But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. 'There is no peace,' says my God, 'for the wicked.'
OK, let's go back to verse 14 and pick up here the central thought of each verse as we go through.
Isaiah 57:14 And one shall say, 'Heap it up, heap it up, prepare the way, take the stumbling block out of the way of my people.'
Now, heap it up, heap it up, as we've learned, is a way that they built roads. They heaped up dirt and stone and whatever else that they put onto their roads to make a highway. You know, it's called a highway because it's higher than the rest of the ground around it. And so they heaped up soil or rock or whatever to make this way. So He is making a straight way. Remember, He says, Take away the stumbling block before My people. So we are making a road that's smooth, one that can be easily traversed. And you know, John the Baptist was supposed to do this for Christ—he was the messenger that came before and said, Make way for the King.
So He's saying here that there is a process that needs to get started, and it begins with a smooth way, one without stumbling blocks. So the central thought here is that this is not done by human hands—that God Himself prepares and smooths the way and takes away the stumbling blocks before the people that He's talking about here. And they are mostly sinners, and He's trying to smooth the way for them to salvation.
OK, verse 15:
Isaiah 57:15 For thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: 'I dwell in the high and holy place with him who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.'
OK, this is a mini sermon preached by God Himself, introducing Himself, introducing His character, His position, His holiness. And He says that in order to live with Me you need to have certain attitudes—a contrite spirit, a humble spirit. Those are the kind of people who can live with God—who shall dwell on My holy hill, that sort of thing—not sinners, but the humble.
So the central thought here in verse 15 is God is everything. He's eternal. He's holy. He's superior to all. But He will accept and live with human beings who are humble and contrite, and change them, revive them even. You can even see a little bit of resurrection happening here in the word revive. But He's talking about—He's not, even though He's making the way smooth and straight for His people to return to Him—He's not going to just accept them willy-nilly. He's only going to accept them if they are humble and contrite, if they come back to Him weeping and confessing their sins and believing in the Son, Jesus Christ.
OK, let's go on, verse 16:
Isaiah 57:16 For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry, for the spirit would fail before Me, and the souls which I have made.
So this gives us an idea of the great tribulation, the day of the Lord, when He says that it had to be cut short or no humanity would be saved. So God's wrath has an end. He is, as Charles Whittaker once said, explosive in His wrath, but it is short. But on the other hand, He gives grace, and His long-suffering and rebuilding is a long time.
So He said, Look, I will have mercy. I will not punish until everybody is dead, but I will punish enough to make a difference. So we can say that the thing to take out of this is that God does not want an adversarial relationship. He doesn't want us to stay angry with Him forever either. We do not want to go up against God. He tells us here that if we did, we'd be annihilated. So it's best to give it—best to submit.
Verse 17:
Isaiah 57:17 For the iniquity of his covetousness I was angry and struck him; I hid and was angry, and he went on backsliding in the way of his heart.
This describes God's relationship with Israel to a T. But it describes God's relationship with everybody who is unconverted. Even though He does things—as God does things to try to get their attention—they just continue backsliding. So the key bit to take from verse 17 is that God's often severe correction sadly does not faze the carnal person very much, even if they recognize it as God's correction.
Verse 18:
Isaiah 57:18 I have seen his ways, and will heal him; I will also lead him, and restore comforts to him and to his mourners.
God says, I will be persistent. I will keep trying to change him, and I will eventually heal him, meaning spiritually. So what we take from verse 18 is God's desire to heal the sinner of his carnality and save him and bless him will come to pass ultimately, or the person will totally reject God. There is just that—'cause if the person refuses to be humble and contrite, well, we will see.
Verse 19, He says,
Isaiah 57:19 I create the fruit of the lips: peace, peace to him who is far off and to him who is near, says the Lord, and I will heal him.
That's God's confidence. God wants reconciliation and peace. He wants a right relationship, even with the carnal backslider. That's the thing to take away. God will work and work and work for a right relationship with people. He's determined to save people.
OK, verse 20 and 21:
Isaiah 57:20-21 But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.
So even though God has determined that He will save, there will be some who decide not to accept that. You can't do anything with people like that. They do not have the right attitude. They will not submit. They will not confess. They just—they're not clay that can be worked anymore. And so the takeaway here is that God cannot have peace with unstable, vile, wicked people. They will continue to have trouble, and if they continue to the end, they will die and not have any hope of salvation.
OK, this is the setting for Isaiah 58. Overall, we see from this passage that God does all that He can to reconcile with human beings, but the process is neither easy nor simple. Humans are proud and hardhearted, and they love to sin, because it gives them pleasure or advantage in one way or another, makes them feel strong, increases their pride. Whatever reason, humans are fixated on sin.
So the only way that they can be saved is by softening their hearts, by making them see that they are killing themselves both now and spiritually in the future. They must be humbled to the point that they confess not only their sinfulness but that God is right, and He is worthy of all worship, all obedience, and all praise. OK, this is how you're supposed to be thinking as you go into Isaiah 58. So you're thinking about this process of softening the heart of a very wicked people, of proud people, a people who have rejected God time and time again. So something drastic needs to occur.
OK, verse 1, chapter 58:
Isaiah 58:1 Cry aloud, spare not; lift up your voice like a trumpet; tell My people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.
Getting people to recognize their sins is the first step in repentance—I should say, repentance leading to reconciliation. One can repent, maybe not fully, and never come into a relationship that's reconciled. A lot of people falsely repent. But God wants a repentance that leads to reconciliation and long life, eternal life. So until that happens, until there is repentance leading to reconciliation and a right relationship, no progress can take place. Maybe that's a little too extreme—little progress can be made.
Verse 2:
Isaiah 58:2 Yet they seek Me daily, and delight to know My ways, as a nation that did righteousness, and did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of Me the ordinance of justice; they take delight in approaching God.
Oh, these are a hypocritical people. They have been full of sin for ages, and God has given them His law, had given them instruction through the prophets and the priests and the kings, and they think they are doing pretty well. They act as if they are not sinners. They are a very religious people.
They think they know—let me put that—they think they know and are doing what is right. They not only know it, but they are practicing what is right, that's what they think. In their minds they have not forsaken God at all. In fact, they think they are close to God. They do things by the book.
God has given them—what does it say—they ask of Me the ordinance of justice. They go into the scripture to figure out what is just and what is right, they think, but they are not fully understanding. Moreover, they love religious practices, their religious practices, because their religious practices make them feel good.
They do so many things to honor the baby Jesus. They do so many things to find rabbits' eggs in the grass on Easter Sunday morning, and it makes them feel good. It's so good for the children. It brings the family together. They do so many things that they think honor God, and they are wrong.
Verse 3, I want just the first couplet here—22 couplets:
Isaiah 58:3 Why have we fasted, they say, and You have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?
Now they are getting on God's case. Their words are a complaint against God for not responding to their sincere worship. Look, we hung up stockings on the fireplace, we put up trees, we did all this stuff in Your name, and You aren't blessing us. Why are You doing this? Why are You not doing this? Why have You turned Your back on us?
See, to them, they have done nothing wrong. They did it all out of the sincerity of their heart to worship God, and they see that God has turned from them. Which is real, because He did not tell them to put up trees or hang stockings. He did not tell them to search for stupid eggs in the grass. He did not do any of that stuff. He did not tell them to do—probably 99% of the trappings of the holidays. He did not tell them to put up little manger scenes, or sing carols, especially not that day.
You see how it is—we are talking about the public here and their approach to God. They think they are living in a Christian nation and they are Christian people, and they are just so wrong. But they say, This is what we heard in church. We got this out of the Bible. No, they did not, and their preachers are preaching false things.
God has indeed turned from them. He has indeed ignored their so-called righteous works, because their attitude is clear—they totally lack humility. They haven't submitted to God or to His word. But they think they are innocent, when they are actually full of self-righteousness and pride.
OK, verses—the end of verse 3 and verse 4:
Isaiah 58:3-4 In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure, and exploit all your laborers. Indeed you fast for strife and debate, and to strike with the fist of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day, to make your voice heard on high.
OK, let's get back to fasting and afflicting one's soul here. I use the people out in the world as an illustration of how far away people can get from God even though they still claim to follow Him. Now, fasting here in that scenario could be any kind of work that they do for God that they do religiously in order to worship God. I'm going to get back though to fasting specifically.
And notice here—because let's take this back to ancient Israel—they would have fasted in the same way as people today would do some of their other, their own religious works, you would call them, like put up an advent calendar, or do Lent, or some of those things that they do. OK, we are going to go back to fasting here.
God's conception of what is right behavior during a fast is far different from theirs, just as God's idea of what He requires as worship is far different from what people today would use in worship. In fact, what He says here is they are actually doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing. In the day of your fast, you find pleasure. It's not a day of pleasure, especially not the Day of Atonement. Their fast was not an affliction of soul but a good time.
I do not know how that happened, but God says it right here. They enjoyed fasting. And part of it may have been that they had time to do a lot of pleasurable things while they fast. Remember, I just said when you do not eat, you have a lot of extra time. So maybe they were spending that extra time doing things that they found pleasurable.
It says here that on the day of their fast they oppressed and abused their employees. So while they went out and had a good time one way or the other, others had to work slavishly to pick up their slack. And it says here that they fasted to win arguments and fights. They wanted God to back them. They fasted in order to put the other guy down, to deal him an injury in some way.
See, their fast was all about them. It was not about God at all. It was like the Jews in the first century—what Jesus said, these people fast just to be seen. It gives them a religious advantage to be seen out there with their sackcloth and ashes and their hair all rumpled up, and it looks like they are indeed fasting.
OK, verse 5:
Isaiah 58:5 Is it a fast that I have chosen, a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast, an acceptable day to the Lord?
So here God questions their understanding of what a fast is. Indeed, a fast is afflicting the soul—they understood that. But He's trying to get them to understand that afflicting the soul is a means to an end. They thought that they could fast, they could afflict their soul, they could show that they were fasting, and that would score them points, but God says, You've totally missed the point.
The afflicting of the soul is supposed to do something. It's supposed to produce something. It's not something you just do and forget. Experiencing it is supposed to produce something good. God wouldn't tell us to do something that produces evil. He wants us to see that something good is produced, something acceptable to Him.
So going through the motions of fasting—not eating, not drinking, looking somber and grieved, dressed in mourning clothes, sitting in ashes, those sorts of things—accomplished nothing, nothing. All they get out of it is hunger and thirst, which is stupid. You might as well not fast if that's what you're doing—just fasting to be seen, or fasting to win arguments, or going out and having fun while your employees slave away. You might as well just not do it at all.
Like Jesus in Matthew 6, He is here addressing hypocrisy, but this—verse 5—adds an element of futility and meaninglessness to the fasting that they were doing. They were doing a fast essentially just to be able to check it off their daily planner: I fasted. And they were really getting nothing out of it. That's certainly not what God wants in a fast. He doesn't want us to go through the motions.
OK, verse 6. Verse 6 and verse 7 are a pair. Verse 6 touches on something, and then verse 7 touches on something else. So we are going to read them separately. Verse 6 first, so we can get the point here, or the two points:
Isaiah 58:6 Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke?
Now here, verse 6, the overall concept is freedom, or freeing others, liberating, loosing, or unburdening others. It's not necessarily yourself—there is some unburdening and freeing and loosing that happens if we do this properly, of ourselves. But the whole viewpoint of God here has been outward. People had been doing this for themselves and not thinking about how they could grow to help others.
A fast is supposed to begin a process of taking steps to lighten others' loads, especially loads that have resulted from sin and oppression. It starts with humbling ourselves and seeking God to free us from sin and wickedness. So, yes, that's what helps us—we become humble, our attitude changes to being submissive, to being poor in spirit, and we readily then turn to God for forgiveness of our sins and changing our hearts. And once we are free ourselves, then we are free to help others.
Let's look at John 8—keep a ribbon here in Isaiah 58—John 8, Jesus' famous argument with the Pharisees here, verse 30 through verse 36:
John 8:30-36 As He spoke these words, many believed in Him. Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, 'If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' They answered Him, 'We are Abraham's descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can you say, You will be free?' [They had a really weird understanding of freedom—they were taking it also very physically.] Jesus answered them, 'Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever' [that is, he doesn't abide permanently] 'but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.'
Now, while the Old Testament context there in Isaiah 58 may imply freedom from literal bondage—helping people escape the bondages that they are in, there is slavery to this or that—the New Testament clearly here emphasizes freedom from sin. And Christ's sacrifice frees us from sin. But He mentioned truth—truth, and continuing in it, keeps us free.
Now, we have to know some truth before we are baptized and accept Jesus Christ as our Savior, but the truth keeps coming, or it should, and it should help to keep us free as we accept the truth more and follow it. A proper godly fast helps to free us from sin, because it puts us in the frame of mind that is a humble, dependent, poor-in-spirit attitude to submit to God and live in unity with Him.
Then we are able—then we are fit, I might say—to help others and lead by example. So we afflict our souls not only to be free but to continue to be free and grow, so that we are fit, we're able, we are prepared to help others along the way.
Think about this—how successful are slaves in freeing other slaves? If you're both in the same pit of misery as slaves, how do you get out? How do you free yourself? How do you free the other person? I mean, there could be a slave rebellion, but historically, you can check this out, they mostly fail because the slaves have nothing.
They can't free themselves. A lot of slaves end up dying in the revolt, and many others, especially the ringleaders, end up being executed. A slave freeing another slave ends up back in slavery or dead. But with outside help, from people who have already successfully gone through the process of being freed, the slaves have a far better chance to achieve freedom.
That's the exodus. One, they had Moses, who was not a slave but an heir to the kingdom, who had been raised and educated in all the things that were necessary for a governor, a king. But he was just a man. We find out that Moses just did what God said, and God was the one that freed them. But Moses was the free agent, if you will, who was able to free the rest of the slaves.
It only took one—with God's power, it only took one free agent to free millions of Hebrew slaves, because he had agency and he had the power of God. And God effected their freedom in miraculous ways.
Now, in the past we've kind of applied this metaphor that we see in this, of preparing ourselves and the church for evangelism, to help people convert to the truth in this age. That's fine. But I believe the greatest fulfillment of loosing the bonds of wickedness and all that—they said there in Isaiah 58:6, I'll get back there—loose the bonds of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, let the oppressed go free, that you break every yoke—the greatest fulfillment of those things will occur in the Millennium and the Great White Throne Judgment, when the children of God, having experienced the conversion process which frees them from the ways of this world, will help to break every yoke and usher millions or billions into belief in the truth, and ultimately eternal life in the kingdom of God.
Back to Isaiah 58:7:
Isaiah 58:7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh?
This is the second concept that God addresses. Essentially, these are doing good works—feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked. Again, the New Covenant concept, while not ignoring the physical fulfillment of these things, emphasizes the spiritual application of these things.
Feeding the hungry—that's teaching the gospel. Sheltering—what does it say here—bringing to your house the poor, sheltering people who have no roof over their heads—well, that's welcoming people, being hospitable, and bringing others into the fellowship. Clothing the naked—that is strengthening others' faith, to help them grow in righteousness.
And it all begins with humility. It begins with understanding our dependence upon and place under God. We are bond servants, to serve Him and to serve others, to treat others better than ourselves, to look out for others' well-being before our own.
Do you know that in Matthew 25, verses 31 through 40, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus Christ uses these same things to show which are sheep and which are goats: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked—you remember, He added a few, visiting those who are imprisoned, and that sort of thing. Those who do these type of things as a matter of course, as part of their natural way of life, are classified as sheep—that is, those who will enter the kingdom of God.
And in the context of Isaiah 58, God teaches us that properly afflicting your soul prepares you for this selfless, outgoing work. That's why you fast. You fast to grow in Christlikeness. You fast, as Austin taught us earlier, to experience His sufferings and to be humble. But that humility also helps us in our service to others. It prepares us for the kingdom of God and our work that we will be doing there.
Let's read verses 8 through 12 here in Isaiah 58. Notice the future aspects here that are thrown in, in this reward, this blessing:
Isaiah 58:8-12 [after you've properly afflicted your souls and fasted properly before God,] Then your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. Those from among you shall build the old waste places; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.
This is a list of blessings for those who afflict their souls properly, who use fasting to prepare for helping others now and in the kingdom of God. In short, if you do that properly, God's blessings will cascade down upon you. Light here is a metaphor for goodness and glory—that's one of His blessings that He wants to give you. And if we are humble and we can ask Him for these things, He will say, Here I am, and give them to us.
The image of a watered garden in verse 11 brings an image of fruitfulness, that you produce so much you can give. And a spring of water in the next little clause there hearkens to the living water that Jesus spoke of in John 4 and John 7. Remember what He said there in John 7 especially—I'll go ahead and read it, I'm already way over time:
John 7:37-38 If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.
And in this, back in Isaiah 58:12, it ends with a millennial image of repairing and restoring what was ruined. And I believe this was what was ruined during the time of Satan's rule—rebuilding Jerusalem, rebuilding the nation of Israel, rebuilding all the things that need to be rebuilt to make a functioning society again.
So why do we fast? To realize our dependence on God, to grow in humility, and to align ourselves with God as we prepare for our work in His kingdom.
THE END.
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