The Case Nobody SolvedThe Case Nobody Solved

Introduction

There is a kind of tired that sleeping doesn’t fix.

You know the ordinary kind. You put in a long week. Your body aches in the places it always aches. You sleep late on Saturday, you have a proper lunch, you doze in the chair on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning you are more or less back. That is honest tired. It comes from work, and it goes away with rest.

But there is another kind.

You slept eight hours and you woke up tired. You took a week’s leave and came back tired. Nothing on your schedule explains it. You look at your life on paper and it does not add up to how heavy you feel. And when somebody asks how you are doing, you say "Ag, just tired" — because there isn’t a shorter answer, and there isn’t time for the long one.

I want to say something this morning that might sound strange at first.

Some of you are not tired because of your work. Some of you are tired because you are carrying a case.

Something was done to you. And it was never dealt with. Nobody answered for it. Nobody put it right. Maybe nobody even admitted that it happened. And from that day to this one, you have been carrying the file.

You didn’t ask for the job. You got handed it. And you have carried it — through jobs, through houses, through years — because as far as you can tell, if you put it down, then nobody in the world is holding it any more. And that feels like letting them win.

So here is the question I want in front of us for the next twenty minutes. Not "have you got a case?" Most of us have. The question is: who is supposed to be carrying it?

Sub-introduction

Isaiah forty. Isaiah 40:27–31 — NLT

The people these words were written for were a long way from home. Not on holiday — taken. Their city was rubble. The temple was gone. They were living in somebody else’s country, working somebody else’s land, and they had been at it long enough that there were grown men among them who had never seen Jerusalem.

Now notice what they were not asking. They were not asking whether God was strong enough to help them. They would have told you He was. They knew the stories. They had heard about the sea splitting.

They were asking something colder than that. Quieter than that. The kind of question you only get to after years.

They were asking whether He was ever going to do anything about it.

And watch how Isaiah begins. He does not begin with an answer. He begins by quoting their complaint back to them, word for word, so the whole nation can hear them say it out loud.

Section 1 — your case slipped past, and nobody reached for it

Isaiah 40:27 — NLT

Listen to what they are actually saying. Two complaints — and they are both the same complaint.

The first: my road is hidden from the Lord. Not "God cannot help me on my road." God cannot see my road. I am walking it, and He is not watching.

And the second one — this is the one I want to stay with. Our Bible has it as God ignores your rights. The word underneath that is a courtroom word. It means a case. A claim. A matter that ought to be heard, and decided.

And the picture in the Hebrew is not a judge who picks up your file, reads it, and pushes it to one side. It is worse than that, and quieter than that. It is a case that goes past the bench and out the door — and nobody reaches for it.

That is what they are saying. My case came up. And it just… went past.

Now. Some of you have known exactly what I am talking about since about the second sentence.

Most of us have stood at a counter somewhere and reported something. You gave your statement. Somebody wrote it down, slowly, in a book. And at the end of it you were handed a case number on a piece of paper.

And that case number is the last thing that ever happened.

You kept the paper. It might still be in a drawer at home. Because as long as you have got the paper, it means it was real. It means you did not imagine it. But nobody ever phoned. Nothing was ever decided. The case exists, and it went nowhere.

Some of us are carrying a case number for something a great deal heavier than whatever went in that book.

A father who never once said he was sorry. And now he is dead, so he never will.

A man who put his hands on you when you were small — and the family decided it would be better for everyone if it was never spoken about again.

A brother who took money that was meant for all of you.

Someone at work who said something about you in a meeting you were not in. You did not get the job. Nobody ever told you why.

Someone in a church who was trusted, and should not have been.

Church — I am going to name what we are talking about now, because I think some of you got there ahead of me.

We are talking about forgiveness.

And I know what happens in a room when that word gets said out loud. Some of you have just folded your arms. Because you have heard that word used as a way of telling you to be quiet. You have heard it used to hurry you past something that was never dealt with. Somebody said "you need to forgive," and what they actually meant was "I am uncomfortable, and I would like you to stop talking about this."

If that is what you are braced for this morning — you can unfold your arms. That is not what this text does.

Look again at what Isaiah does with their complaint. He does not tell them they are being dramatic. He does not tell them to move on. He quotes it. He puts their words up where everybody can hear them.

The wrong done to you is real. Your case is real. God does not begin by telling you it was not.

He begins somewhere else.

Section 2 — it never left the hands of the one who saw what nobody else saw

Isaiah 40:28 — NLT

Isaiah’s answer comes as a question. Two of them. Have you never heard? Have you never understood?

That is not sarcasm. That is a man saying: you know this. You have always known this. You just have not been standing on it lately.

And then he tells them two things about God. Two. Not one. And most of us only ever hear the first.

The first is this: He never grows weak or weary.

The everlasting God. The Creator of all the earth. He does not run down. He does not get to the end of a long week. He has not got less of Himself now than He had when He started.

That matters — because when a wrong gets old enough, you start to assume it has expired. Twenty years. Thirty. And somewhere in there you quietly decided that even God has probably filed it away by now, because surely at some point a thing stops mattering.

It has not stopped mattering. He has not run down. What was done to you is exactly as much of an outrage to Him this morning as it was on the day it happened.

But now the second thing. And this is the one I do not want us to walk past.

No one can measure the depths of His understanding.

The Hebrew is blunter than that. There is no searching out of His understanding. You cannot get to the bottom of what God knows.

Now think about why that sentence sits in a passage about a case nobody handled.

Here is the thing about the worst wrongs. They almost never happen in front of witnesses.

The public ones you can prove. Somebody dents your car in the parking lot — there are cameras. Somebody swears at you on the floor — there were twenty people standing there.

But the one that actually broke something in you happened with nobody else in the room. In a house. In a car. Late at night. Between two people. And that is exactly why it was never dealt with — because when you finally tried to tell it, you were asking somebody to take your word for it.

And you could hear it while you were saying it, couldn’t you. You could hear how thin it sounded out loud. Everything that made it unbearable — the way he looked at you, the tone of it, the thing that was said just before, what that house had already been like for years — none of that fits into the telling. So the person listening got maybe ten percent of it. And they judged it on the ten percent.

That is why most of us stopped telling it.

Now hear verse twenty-eight again. There is no searching out of His understanding.

There is One who was in the room.

He did not get the ten percent version. He did not need you to be a good witness. He was not relying on your memory, or on how well you told it, or on whether anybody believed you. He was there. He saw the whole thing. And He understands it better than you understand it yourself — because He also saw everything that came before it, and everything it has done to you since that you have never once connected back to it.

Your case did not slip past Him. It has never been out of His hands.

Now I have to be honest with you, because this text is honest with them.

Isaiah does not promise these people that their case gets settled this year. He does not tell them when. He does not tell them how. Some of them died in that country.

So I am not going to stand here and promise you a verdict you can see. If somebody has promised you that, they promised you something God did not.

What Isaiah promises is that the One holding it never loses sight of it, and never runs down.

And that turns out to change everything. Because it means the question is no longer whether your case will be dealt with.

The question is who has to carry it until it is.

Section 3 — carrying it is costing you strength you were never given to spend

Isaiah 40:29–30 — NLT

He gives power to the weak, and strength to the powerless. Even youths will become weak and tired, and young men will fall in exhaustion.

Look at who falls over in that sentence.

Not the old. Not the sick. The young men. In that world that is the strongest thing available — the ones at the peak of it, the ones you would pick for the hard work.

And the word Isaiah uses for what happens to them is not "they get a bit tired." It is a word for being brought down. Knocked off your feet. They do not fade. They go down.

Anybody here ever had to hold something heavy out at arm’s length? Not against your chest — out, away from your body. A full tin of paint. A car battery. A bag of cement while somebody fetches the barrow.

It does not matter how strong you are. Everybody’s arm goes. The weight never changed. Nothing got heavier. It is the holding that does it. And the strongest man on the site goes down the same way the rest of us do — he just goes down about ninety seconds later.

That is verse thirty. Being strong does not exempt you. It only buys you time.

And here is what I want you to sit with. Some of you have been holding something out at arm’s length for eleven years.

You call it being strong. Your family calls it being strong. And it is costing you more than you have any idea.

It is in how you are with your wife on an evening when nothing has happened. It is why you cannot stand a certain tone of voice from anybody. It is why you are exhausted on a Monday that has nothing in it. It is why a small thing at work can put you in a mood for three days — and afterwards even you do not understand why.

You are running an engine, all day, every day, to hold a case that God never asked you to hold.

Isaiah 40:31 — NLT

But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.

That phrase — "find new strength" — in the Hebrew it is not topping up your tank. It is not God adding a bit more to what you have already got so that you can hold the thing a while longer.

The word means exchange. Swap. You put down what you are holding, and you are given something else.

That is the promise. Not more strength for the same load. A trade.

And look at what the trade produces. They will soar like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.

We love the eagle. We put the eagle up on the wall. But watch the order — it goes down, not up. Soaring, then running, then walking. Isaiah finishes on the least impressive one on purpose. Because he is not promising you a spectacular Sunday. He is promising you a Tuesday. And a Wednesday. And a year from now.

And the very last word of the passage is that word faint — the same word he used about God back in verse twenty-eight. He does not faint. And you will not faint.

You get to live off His strength instead of your own.

So here is what I have been walking us toward for twenty minutes.

Hand the case nobody solved to the God who never lost sight of it.

Not because it did not matter. It mattered. Not because it is settled — it may not be, not yet.

Hand it over because it was never yours to carry, and because carrying it is costing you the strength you need for the people who are actually in your life this week.

Conclusion

But I have not told you the most important part yet. Because on its own, everything I have said so far is just good advice. Put it down, you will feel better. You can hear that anywhere. You do not need a church for that.

Here is why a Christian does it.

There is a second case. And in that one, you are not the one who was wronged.

Every one of us in this room has a file with our own name on it. Things we did. Things we said. Things nobody ever found out about. Things that would cost us this church, or this marriage, or this job, if they were read out loud this morning.

And that case did not slip past Him either.

He saw all of it. There is no searching out of His understanding — and that cuts both ways, doesn’t it. He was in the room for the worst thing that was ever done to you. And He was in the room for the worst thing you ever did.

And He settled it. Not by deciding it did not matter. By paying for it Himself. Everything owed on your account came out of His own pocket, on a cross, in the dark.

That is the order the New Testament always puts it in. Never "forgive people, it is healthier for you." Forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

You are not being asked to do anything for somebody else that has not already been done for you.

Now — some of you have had something tugging at you for the last fifteen minutes. A name came up. Maybe a face. You have been arguing with me in your head about it.

Two things.

The first is this morning, at this table. In a moment we are going to take communion together, and what is on that table is exactly what I have been talking about — a body broken and blood poured out, for the forgiveness of sins. Yours. Come to it this morning and put the file down in front of Him. Not "it did not matter." Just: You saw it. You have got it. I am not carrying it any more.

The second is Saturday.

Because putting it down once, here, is a start — and for some of you, what you are carrying is going to need a great deal more than a start. It is going to need time, and people who will sit with you while you do the work. That is what Saturday is for. If something tugged this morning, that tug is your invitation. Come.

Let us come to the table.

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