The sermon, 'The Promises of Christ's Millennial Reign' by Peter Allison, explores Isaiah 11 and its depiction of Christ's millennial reign and the blessings it brings. Isaiah's prophecy speaks of a 'root of Jesse,' referring to Christ, who stands as a banner for all people, including Gentiles, symbolizing unity, hope, and victory. The sermon draws parallels with historical events like the defense of Fort McHenry and the Star-Spangled Banner, illustrating the concept of Christ as a beacon of strength and salvation. The sermon emphasizes the church as Christ's glorious resting place, which reflects his glory and serves as the instrument of his millennial rule. It discusses the unity and reconciliation among God's people, including the restoration of Israel and Judah, and the promise of gathering the dispersed of His people. The sermon concludes with a call to faith and trust in God's promises, highlighting the church's role in spreading the gospel and achieving victory over spiritual and worldly challenges.

Our Scripture reading this morning is Isaiah 11. I'd like to begin reading at verse 10 through the end of the chapter. Isaiah in this chapter is describing the blessings that would come through Christ in His millennial reign. Hear God's word. And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse who shall stand as a banner to the people, for the Gentiles shall seek him, and his resting place shall be glorious and it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people who are left from Assyria and Egypt from Pathros and Kush from Elam and Shinar from Hamath and the islands of the sea, and he will set up a banner for the nations and he will assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

Also the envy of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off. Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not harass Ephraim, but they shall fly down upon the border of the Philistines toward the west. Together they shall plunder the people of the east, they shall lay their hand on Edom and Moab, and the people of Ammon shall obey them. The Lord will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt. His mighty wind will shake his fist over the river and strike it in the seven streams and make men cross over Dryshod.

There will be a highway for the remnant of His people who will be left from Assyria, as it was for Israel in the day that He came up from the land of Egypt. May our lips utter His praise as He teaches us His statutes. Oh, Father in Heaven, we pray that Your Word might come swiftly from our head to our heart, from our ears to our heart, and that it might not return void this morning, but accomplish the purpose for which you have sent it. Grant us, Lord, to mark Your Word, to inwardly digest your Word in such a way that by the patience and comfort of your Word, we may embrace and hold fast the sure and certain promises of it to us this morning. In Jesus' name we pray.

And I ask that you would sanctify my sinful lips that through them the riches of your grace might come to us this morning in Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, when the British Army was returning back to their base after burning Washington, DC in the September of 1814, in that war we call the War of 1812, An elderly doctor had made an arrest of a couple of drunk and disorderly soldiers that were causing a disturbance in this little Maryland town on their way back to base. And he arrested them and put them in jail. But one of the soldiers escaped and returned with the full army and arrested the doctor who had earlier arrested him.

He was taken as a prisoner onto one of the British warships in the Chesapeake Bay. Francis Scott Key, who was a local lawyer and a friend of this doctor, along with another experienced negotiator who had negotiated the release of other prisoners from the British. They went on a special mission, visited the commander of the British forces in that area on his warship in the Chesapeake Harbor and successfully negotiated the release of this doctor. And I think there were a couple others as well with him. But they were not allowed to return in their truce boat back to land in order to prevent them from carrying anything that they might have heard on the ship in their visit there about the attack that they planned to launch on Fort McHenry and on Baltimore that night.

So they were sort of restrained, forced to tie up to this man of war that was about eight miles or so from Fort McHenry. And they watched through the night then as this unrelenting attack for 24 hours was unleashed upon upon Fort McHenry. A horrific naval shelling, some 2, 000 shells that fell on that fort in that 24-hour period. There was also an attack they didn't know about against Baltimore that was also repelled. And it was in the morning following this all-night bombing That key saw the flag, the US flag still flying over Fort McHenry.

And it symbolized to him that the bombardment had failed, that the fort had not surrendered, that the country was still free. And the joy of that news moved Key to write a lyric about the defense of Fort McHenry. We know that of course as the Star-Spangled Banner But the flag that was flying over Fort McHenry after that British naval attack was a banner. It was a banner to Francis Scott Key and to all who saw it. A banner is a signal that's raised up on high on a point on a pole on a high mountain to gather together people for a specific purpose such as to assemble for war or it's raised as a sign of hope or victory.

A banner is a symbol or a sign that represents a cause or a person. Or in the case of our passage this morning, it represents God Himself. In that day, Isaiah said, there shall be a root of Jesse who shall stand as a banner to the people. The root of Jesse, of course, we've seen is the Messiah. This is Christ, the shoot that came from that stump of David's family.

And Jehovah-Nissi is the name of God, meaning the Lord, our banner. The Lord, our banner, ness. Because Christ is the banner for His people. He is that sign around which His people gather. His standing as a banner for the people declares that He is the power preserving His people.

He has not been defeated. After their victory over the Amalekites, that was recorded in Exodus 17, you remember as the Israelites had just come out of the land of Egypt, Moses built an altar, and he called that altar Jehovah-Nissi, the Lord my banner. The altar, you see, was a sign of God's victory over the Amalekites, that they were still preserved as the people of God. And of course, as we saw earlier, we mentioned earlier, this is a moment when they worshiped God. When the people were struck with a plague for their complaining in the wilderness, Moses made a bronze serpent and put it on a pole, right, or a standard, and all the people who looked on that bronze serpent on that pole were healed.

See, the bronze serpent was a sign declaring God's healing power to all those who looked on Him. And Jesus told Nicodemus in that well-known chapter in John 3 that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes on him should not perish but have eternal life. And the next verse, of course, is the most well-known verse probably in all the Bible What Isaiah says here And what Jesus told Nicodemus is that Christ himself is that sign? He is the one who stands He is the one who is standing. And to stand means that you are remaining in position.

He stands as that immovable rock. He stands as the symbol and in a position of power and strength. The prophet Micah also describes the Messiah Christ as standing in strength and majesty. In Micah 5-4 he said, And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of Jehovah, and in the majesty of the name of Jehovah his God. Christ is the banner standing, proclaiming his victory, proclaiming his power and his strength, just as Francis Scott Key saw the flag standing.

But specifically, Isaiah says that Christ stands as a banner to the Gentiles. A banner to the Gentiles. And Jesus said that he would be lifted up so that whoever believes in him would be saved. And whoever includes the Jews and the Gentiles, slaves and free men, women and men, young and old, whoever believes would be saved. Isaiah's Prophecy here is an early promise that God would gather the Gentiles, that they would seek Him.

Imagine hearing this in Isaiah's day. Gentiles were more than just unclean people. They were the pagans, the goyim, who had no knowledge of God and His ways. These are the people that cut themselves in their idol worship until the blood flowed out, hoping to appease these inanimate objects that had no consciousness whatsoever. These were the people who tattooed themselves with many strange symbols and practiced what today is euphemistically called body modification.

They were given over to all manner and forms of gross sexual immorality. These are the people who abandoned the weak to die. They sacrificed their children in the fires to the demons. These are the Gentiles. And Isaiah is saying that these Gentiles will seek me.

Yes, I will cause these Gentiles to seek me. The pagan nations that once attacked the Israelites and desecrated the temple will now come seeking him to know, to know him, to learn of him. You see, because of this promise we can testify to the gospel of the grace of God to all people today. No matter how depraved, how lost, or how irreverent, or how wicked they seem to be to us. God's promise is that these people, the Gentiles, will seek Him.

And so we can testify even to these people. They don't have to seem like they might be ready. The gospel of Jesus Christ is powerful. It is what changes even these Gentiles, who we all once were. The psalmist said, my mouth will tell of your righteousness and your salvation all the day.

Why? Because I do not know their limits. I don't know the limits of God's righteousness and His salvation, so I will simply tell it all the day to all the Gentiles. The other thing that Isaiah says about this day, when Christ would begin His reign, is that His resting place there would be glorious. It's actually a noun, just would be glory.

Now resting place is a term for where someone permanently dwells. It's a habitation. It's a home. We think today of resting places as a place to take a temporary break during a trip. A place we plan to spend only a few moments to refresh ourselves.

But that's really the opposite of what resting place means here and generally in the Scriptures. In the Old Testament, it means a place where you can rest from your labors, where you live, where you're home, you dwell. Psalm 32 declares, for the Lord has chosen Zion. He has desired it for his dwelling place. This is my resting place forever.

Here I will dwell, for I have desired it." His resting place is where God dwells. Or in 1 Chronicles 28, too, where David says, I had it in my heart to build a house of rest for the ark of the covenant of Jehovah. Christ's resting place, Isaiah says, will be glorious. It will be glory. Zion, we know, is God's resting place forever.

It is his dwelling place from which he rules it is especially the place where his glory dwells. God's glory dwelt in the wilderness tabernacle until the temple was built, until Solomon built the temple around just after 1000 AD. And except for the time of the Babylonian captivity, that same glory cloud then dwelt in that temple for almost 1, 000 years until it departed on Pentecost in AD 66. And it stood on Mount Olives for about 3 and 1 1 half years until it ascended to the heavenly temple in 70 AD During that Babylonian exile Ezekiel tells us the glory cloud departed from the temple and went to Babylon where the remnant of God's people was then dwelling. In Ezekiel 43 then speaks of the glory cloud returning to the temple, to the rebuilt temple, through the eastern gate where it then remained until Pentecost in 8066.

And so the promise in verse 10 here is that his resting place would be glorious. This promise is that the Gentile church would be no less glorious than the glory of the Jerusalem temple. The New Jerusalem, the church comprised of Jews and Gentiles, would have the same glory, indeed even brighter glory, than dwelt in that temple. Christ's resting place, His dwelling is His church, isn't it? He dwells among His people.

He inhabits our praises. In Revelation 21, John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband and he hears a loud voice declare behold the tabernacle of God is with men and he will dwell with them and they shall be his people God himself will be with them and be their God this tavern apple is glorious because it has the glory of God and Paul exhorts us in first Thessalonians 212 to walk worthy of God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory. God is calling us into His glory. He says the same thing in John 17 in his prayer. Of course, the kingdom has, and the church should say, has no glory in herself.

Her glory is a reflected glory, like the moon reflects the light of the sun. The church shines with the reflected radiance of the finished work of Jesus Christ. The church is glorious because Christ is her head and she is His body. And His glory fills the church. It's like His glory filled the temple.

The church, through her living union with Christ, partakes in his glory. In her origin, she reflects the eternal or the glory of the eternal counsel of the triune God established from before the foundation of the world. The Father has chosen her, the Son has redeemed her with his precious blood, and she is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The church is also glorious in her mission and in her office. She is the pillar and the ground of truth.

It's through the preaching of the Word of God that the church exercises the power of the keys, binding and loosening as it declares the Gospel and admits or bars from the sacraments. You see, the church is the instrument of God's millennial rule. The church is the means to which his gospel is proclaimed. And Christ is presented as that one riding on the white horse who with a sword proceeding from his mouth, that sword is the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God with which his enemies are defeated, either in his grace or in his wrath. And the church, of course, has a glorious destiny as the fallen people, fallen sinful people, are called out of darkness and made into a Holy nation, pure and holy, without blemish, set apart for God's praise.

That's our calling. Paul tells us in Ephesians 5 that Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of the water by the word. Why? So that he might present her to himself a glorious church. A glorious church.

Not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. That's the glorious destiny of the church. In Revelation 21, the angel told John, Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb's wife. And He showed him the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God. And how did he see this church?

He was descending from heaven out of God, having the glory of God. And the church having the glory of God. See, the church is glorious because she is being prepared as the bride for her bridegroom. And so all of her current struggles and her persecutions and her imperfections, they're temporary. They are temporary.

We don't need to be ever ashamed of Christ or His people or the sufferings of His people. We have a glorious heritage. We have a glory. We have the glory of God. And so Peter could say, if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter.

We don't need to be ashamed of the foolishness of preaching through which the Lord saves those who believe. We don't need to be ashamed of the weak or the foolish things which God has chosen to confound the wise and the mighty of this world because the church is glorious. The glory is with the church. Faithful mothers raising a godly seed never need to be ashamed in the presence of women with lofty careers and high incomes who have sacrificed their families because yours is the glorious calling. You are the ones who are raising up the godly seed.

We can be completely unashamed to speak to anyone about Christ, regardless of their station and power or glory in this life, because we are the church who have the glory of God. There's nothing on earth that is more glorious than the Church of Jesus Christ. We are those who are clothed with that glory. We are members of this glorious body of Christ. Well there's more.

There's many more in these promises of Christ's millennial reign. It goes on in verse 11 to speak of restoring the lost sheep of Israel. He's going to recover the remnant of his people who are left in Assyria and Egypt, Pathros, Kush, Idlem, Shinar, Hamoth, and the islands of the sea. Well, Assyria, we've been hearing a lot about, it's the nation that dwells in the northern part of Mesopotamia, or that fertile crescent. And the Israelites were scattered throughout Assyria by Sargon when that northern kingdom fell in about in 721 BC, 720 years before Christ.

Egypt is Misraeum. The Hebrew word is Misraeum. Misraeum was a descendant of Ham and settled what is now Egypt. So that's why we translate Misriam Egypt. The land of Egypt extends from about the second cataract on the Nile on the south end to the Nile Delta at the Mediterranean Sea on the north end.

That's the land of Misriam. Many Israelites fled to Egypt after the Babylonian army captured the southern kingdom and destroyed Jerusalem, contrary to what God had commanded them. In Jeremiah 42, God said, Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, as my anger and wrath were poured out on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so my wrath will be poured out on you when you go to Egypt. You shall become an ex-creation, a horror, a curse, a taunt. The Lord has said to you, O remnant of Judah, do not go to Egypt.

Of course, some of them did. Pathros and Cush. Pathros is the southern part of Egypt that was settled by Pathrusim. You can look him up in Genesis. He was the son of Mizraim, one of them.

And so it roughly comprises the region between the first and the second cataract on the Nile River member in the it's in the what's the southern Egypt or what is also called upper upper Egypt because it's higher right and it good flows down the Nile flows down to the Mediterranean so path roses upper Egypt from the second cataract to the to the first roughly and some of the Israelites also went to path rose after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. Kush was another son of Ham, a brother to Misriam, and he settled what is essentially today northern Sudan. That would be the region between what is the second and the fourth cataract on the Nile River and what would be today northern Sudan. The Greeks called Kush Ethiopians, but they're not the same. You should not be confused with the modern Ethiopia, which is a different people, and it's much farther south and west than Kush.

So it's south and over toward the Gulf. Most of the time, I think without exception, when you read Ethiopia in the Bible, it's always Kush. And some of the modern translations have been more consistent about it. The older ones, the King James, are mixed. Sometimes it's Kush and sometimes it's Ethiopia.

But I think, I believe, every time you read Ethiopia in the Old Testament, it's referring to Kush. Elam and Shinar are in the Middle East. So Mizriam, Kush, Pathros, it's all what we would call the African continent today. Elam in Persia is Middle East. Elam is Persia, which is roughly modern day Iran.

Shinar is the land of Babylon, which is roughly modern day Iraq. The plain of Shinar would have comprised the region roughly south of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. Shinar was a part of the kingdom of Nimrod, who was a son of Kush. The Tower of Babel was in Shinar. Two of the four kings in Genesis 14 who captured Sodom and Gomorrah with Lot and his family were the kings of Elam and Shinar.

But most relevant to this passage here is the fact that Shinar was where Nebuchadnezzar took the temple utensils and the Israelites that he took captive from Judah, the land of Judah. So God has his remnant over here in Shinar. And that's where the glory cloud was during that time. Hamath is the far northern border of Israel under King David and Solomon. It was recaptured by Jeroboam II of the Northern Kingdom around 840 BC.

Sargon apparently settled captives from Samaria there when he conquered the northern kingdom in 721. So God's promise is that all these people, all of His people that have been scattered all over the world, among all these pagan people, that He would draw them back. He would restore a remnant of this apostate Israel. But as always, it wasn't because these people had done anything to earn his favor. In fact, it's just the opposite.

These are a rebellious and stubborn people. That's why God judged them so severely and destroyed so many of them. But he is faithful to his covenant promise. He's faithful to the seed of Abraham, to be God, to him, and to his descendants after him. In Jeremiah 44, I'll just read to you just how stubborn these people were.

God gave Jeremiah a message concerning all the Judeans who lived in the land of Egypt at Migdol, Taphanees, and Memphis. Those are all what we call lower Egypt. And in the land of Pathros, upper Egypt. He said he would punish them. In Jeremiah 44, 11, God says, Behold, I will set my face against you for harm to cut off all of Judah.

I will take the remnant of Judah who have set their faces to come to the land of Egypt to live and they shall all be consumed. I mean this is after the destruction of Jerusalem. These people are still in rebellion, they still refuse to obey, to follow the Lord, and God's saying, I'm going to judge you. I will punish those who dwell in the land of Egypt as I have punished Jerusalem with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, so that none of the remnant of Judah who have come to the land of Egypt shall escape or survive or return to the land of Judah, to which they desire to return to dwell there. For they shall not return except some fugitives." And what's the reply of these people?

It is shocking in its brazen disregard of God's word. Jeremiah goes on, Then all the men who knew that their wives made offerings to other gods and all their women stood by a great assembly all the people who lived in Pathros and the land of Egypt they answered Jeremiah as for the word the Lord you have spoken to us. In the name of the Lord, we will not listen to you." Wow! Step back 500 feet from them. But it's these people that God's saving grace reaches.

It's while we were yet at enmity that Christ died for us. These are the covenant people, the apostate covenant people that God is promising to bring back. My own family history is one of many countless, countless, countless examples of God's covenant mercy. My great-great grandfather was an elder in the Presbyterian Church in its Bible-believing days in the 1800s. He was born before the war between the states.

But his son, my great-grandfather, followed the culture of the early 20th century in turning away from the scriptures. And his apostasy pretty much paralleled the unbelief and apostasy of the Presbyterian church in that day, as they denied the inspiration and authority and infallibility of God's Word. And that culminated, as you know, in the Auburn Affirmation in 1924. That said, we don't even need to believe in the Virgin Birth or the Miracles or the Bible. You can if you want, but you don't have to.

It's not important. Outwardly, my great grandfather continued to attend church. But it was fast becoming a spiritually dead church. And their own personal lives reflected the same spiritual deadness and apostasy, or more accurately, I should say, the apostasy of the church was simply a reflection of the apostasy of the people in it. And my great-grandparents' first son, my grandfather, was born out of wedlock at the turn of the century.

There was church discipline. But although they continued to attend church and practice the outward form of Christianity, it was not a Christian home. My grandfather also conceived his first child out of wedlock. But by then, there was no church discipline. And shortly after he did that, the Bible-believing people began to leave the dead church that now had formally denied the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth, the miracles of the Scriptures, and so on.

They continued to pretend to be Christians. But before she died, I heard my own grandmother. She may have been even holding one of her grandchildren, who all her life had gone to church, outright deny the need for any atoning work of Jesus Christ. Deny any need for a blood sacrifice for sin. I still have relatives in that church.

I even have a second cousin that means we share the same great grandfather who's a pastor in one of those churches, I found out. I've never met him. It was a church founded by women about the time of the Auburn Affirmation. But see, God was faithful to his covenant promises. And though there were two generations that fell away, one of my grandmother's 13 children God brought to faith.

And from that, he has raised up two more generations of sinners cleansed by the blood of Christ. And there's probably others that I may have lost track of. You see, we can pray to the Lord in confidence for the Lord to restore the wandering sheep, to pray for the lost loved ones on the basis of this covenant promise that He will be God to us and to our descendants. And He will preserve that remnant. We can pray for our lost loved ones, whether they're below us in the center, even above us.

The day of grace lasts as long as there is life. In verse 13, Israel and Judah, the brothers that separated and at one time fought each other, are now being reconciled. Their past injuries and wounds have been forgiven and cast behind their back, never to be remembered again. That great scandal in Israel's history began with the schism under Jeroboam. He's the one that caused Israel to sin.

You remember with the golden calves that he made in Dan and Bethel, and he tried to rewrite Israel's history, and because that's always necessary in apostasy, to say that these calves were the ones that delivered them. God sent prophets to this apostate nation to call it to repentance and to point it to the Messiah Who alone could heal this breach in their family? The promise of this verse is that in crisis breach is healed In the time of Isaiah's day member there was there seemed to be little hope They were fighting each other they were killing each other they were sending their armies against each other. But God did heal it after the captivity. And today we see, again, there are many fractures within the Church of Jesus Christ around the world.

There are those who claim to be a church and are not. They don't believe the Bible. And then even among those who do believe the Bible, we have many differences. But the promise of this verse is that these doctrinal differences will be resolved. The unity of the church will be restored.

And we can pray for that because that is the promise of Christ's millennial reign. That in Christ all the national divisions, all the regional divisions, all the doctrinal divisions that divide, we know the truth is one. And that in Christ there is true unity. And then in Christ, these breaches, these divisions, these errors, We can't all be right. We can't all be right.

But in Christ, there will be unity in the truth. And what Christ does in His church, He does in families too. Siblings, They fight each other, don't they? If we let them. But the grace of the Gospel is that in Christ they can be reconciled.

They can learn to live in peace and to edify and bless one another. And so we know that because God is the Prince of Peace, who is bringing this reconciliation, we can pray and work and teach our children So that there can be peace even between siblings, even if they've become enemies, and even if they've grown up and left the home, the Lord can bring peace between brothers. That's what He's doing here in verse 13. The envy of Ephraim shall depart. Ephraim shall not envy Judah.

Judah shall not harass Ephraim. But God is going to give them victory. In Christ these now brothers that had become enemies are now restored and they have a unity that cannot be destroyed. And from the mountains of Palestine, they are pictured as swooping down like a great bird conquering the enemies of the church. It's a beautiful picture of the unity that God will bring in the saints, obtained not from their own works, not because of their own power, but through the blood of Christ and through that church, God is conquering all of the enemies in His world.

We know that Christ's church is prevailing, and it will prevail over every enemy. And Therefore, we can work in faith and in hope to restore truth and righteousness without compromise in every square inch of this world, everywhere. There's no government. There's no nation. There's no town hall.

There's no city council or county commissioners or judge that God in His grace will not conquer through the prayers of His saints and the blood of the Lamb. And of course, the last verses is how the Lord fights for His people. Christ is preparing the way, raising up the valleys, flattening the mountains, and making the way plain before us. May He give us faith to believe His Word and to fight in the power of his Holy Spirit. Let us pray.

Almighty Heavenly Father, we thank you for these great and precious promises in your word for the picture that they give of your victory over every foe, your righteous judgments over every nation, judgments over every nation. Your sovereign control over the natural world, the rivers, the oceans. Your sovereign control over the hearts of men and the kings whose hearts are in your hand, and you turn with her whichever way you will. We pray that you would prepare the way before us, that you would raise up the valleys, flatten down the mountains, And that you might go before us and go with us. And that you would give us faith to believe your promises, all of your word.

To read your word for all that it is worth. To delight in it, to meditate in it, to be thrilled by its glory, to be encouraged with your promises, to be convicted with your warnings and your judgments, to fear you, and to place great weight on every one of the words that have come from your mouth. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.