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The sermon teaches that God preserves a holy remnant in Israel, the church, and individual believers, even when they appear spiritually barren. Genuine believers may lose joy, assurance, prayerful strength, and visible fruit, yet their life remains hidden with Christ and can be restored through repentance. This doctrine of perseverance is presented as comfort for fallen saints, not permission to continue in sin. Those without Christ, however, remain under condemnation and are urgently called to believe, repent, and receive salvation through Him.
Theological center: Salvation and perseverance depend on Christ’s saving grace and indestructible life within His people, not on outward appearance or human strength.
Applications: Repent and turn to Christ · Draw life continually from Christ · Visible barrenness is not death · True life is inward and Christ-derived
Primary texts: Isaiah 6:13 · Mark 16:16 · John 4:14
“But yet in it shall be a tenth and it shall return, and shall be eaten; as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves; so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof.” Isaiah 6:13 OUR first business tonight will be briefly to explain the metaphor employed in the text. The prophet was told that despite all the reproofs he was instructed to deliver, and notwithstanding the eloquent earnestness of his lips, which had been just touched with a live coal from off the altar, still the people of Israel would persevere in their sins, and would therefore be certainly destroyed. He asked the question, “Lord, how long?” that is, How long will the people be thus impenitent? How long will Your sore judgment thus continue? And he was informed that God would waste and destroy the cities and their inhabitants till the land should be utterly desolate. Then it was added, for his comfort, “Yet in it shall be a tenth.” And so it happened, for when “Nebuchadnezzar carried away all Jerusalem,” the historian gives this reservation—“none remained save the poorer sort of the people of the land.” They were left by the captain of the guard, “to be vine-dressers and husbandmen.” Thus in it there was a tenth. This small remnant of the people, however, was to be nearly destroyed too. “It shall return and shall be eaten.” The sense is eaten up or consumed. The poor creatures left in the land, many of them fled into Egypt at the time of the conspiracy of Ishmael (not Ishmael, the son of Hagar, but an unworthy member of the royal family of Judah), and there in Egypt most of them were cut off and perished. “But” says God, “although only this tenth shall be preserved, and then even this small part shall be subjected to many perils, yet Israel shall not be destroyed, for it shall be as a terebinth tree and as an oak.” Their “substance is in them, when they cast their leaves” and so lose their verdure and their beauty. Thus in like manner, a holy seed, a chosen remnant, shall still be the substance of the children of Israel, when the fruitful land is stript of its foliage and that fair garden of earth is barren as the desert. The figure is taken, first of all, from the terebinth or turpentine tree—here translated the teil tree. That tree is an evergreen, with this exception, that in very severe and inclement weather it loses its leaves. But even then the terebinth tree is not dead. And so the oak—it loses its leaves every year, of course, but even then it is not dead. “So,” says God, “you have seen the tree in winter, standing naked and bare, witho…