God is good.  He is working in ways that we see and in ways that we do not.  The remaining part of Chapter 52 deals with God working to liberate His people from the Babylonian captivity, the all for His people to live in His liberation (ie get up and leave Bablyon) and the coming of His Servant.   

Verses 3-6:  God will be with them and nothing is too difficult for Him by using a buying a selling metaphor.  God reminds them through Isaiah how He as worked in the past and present by reminding of the Exodus from Egypt and the recent conquest of the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians.  Then He moves onto the future to the Babylonian captivity.  God is being mocked and disrespected and therefore will act in such a way is that His people know that it is the Lord Who is working.

Verses 7-12:  The good news is that God will liberate His people, but they must go.  It is the Lord Who will free His people from the Babylonian slavery, but He call His people to live in the freedom.  They must get up and leave Babylon and return to Jerusalem, their ancestral home.  The Lord will work in such as way as that they will not leave as a conquered people, but they will leave as a free people.  They were also not to take any of the Babylonian culture with them.

Verse 13-15:  We see how God is going to liberate.  It is through His Servant.  Here we find a prophecy of the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ.  God will prosper Him, but not in the ways that one would expect.  He will be disfigured horribly and as a result, He will influence will be great.

What does this mean for us today.  God has freed us from the bondage of sin.  We need to live in that freedom.  Sin includes not only the action, but the attitude behind the action.  At its core, it is the love or worship of self over the love or worship of God.  Basically, we love ourselves more than we love God and when we do this we make ourselves out to be our own god.  The results are disobedience toward God and we see this self worship in the forms of what His Word calls the deeds of the flesh.  Jesus defined them as evil thoughts, murders, sex outside of marriage, robbery, lies, and abusive speech (Matt: 15:19)

Living in this freedom means that we are essentially walking with our Lord.  Christianity is not a philosophy of life but a living relationship with the living God through Jesus Christ.  When we are walking with our Lord we cannot be living in the "flesh."  What are those things of the "flesh" that you and I are hanging onto?  May we no longer live as slaves, even though our Lord has purchased our freedom with His life.

Merry Christmas!

Pastor Steve