Where is the wall now?-Isaiah 56:1-8

1. I still remember when I first started my studies at the seminary in Toronto back in 2011. At the time, I had a hard time fully getting my thoughts and opinions across in English. Since I wasn't Canadian, I often felt like I didn't quite fit in with the other students — and honestly, they probably saw me as an outsider too.

1.2 I don't blame them at all. It's such a natural human thing to feel a bit guarded when you meet someone from a different background. But living in that kind of atmosphere really made me stop and take a hard look at my own life — and what my ministry might actually look like once I'm done with seminary. So today, I want to kick things off with a simple question:

When was the last time you felt like you didn't quite fit in — whether it's here at church, with your family, or even in the story you tell about yourself?

1.3 This year, as we’ve been working through the book of Isaiah, we keep coming back to the themes of God’s justice and mercy. Isaiah talks about how God’s righteousness gets restored — and that righteousness shows up through the lives and witness of His people as they follow His ways.

1.4 It’s easy for us to think that being righteous just means following God’s rules or bringing more offerings. But Isaiah’s message goes way deeper than that — honestly, it’s a lot more radical. For Isaiah, living out God’s righteousness is about something much bigger.

1.5 So today, as we look at this passage, I want us to really sit with what God’s righteousness actually looks like. Let’s open our ears to God’s word from Isaiah 56:1–8.

Isaiah 56:1–8 ESV

Thus says the Lord: “Keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come, and my righteousness be revealed. Blessed is the man who does this, and the son of man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil.”
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.
“And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” The Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares, “I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.”

2.1 Notice what comes immediately after this command to "keep justice, and do righteousness" in verse 1. Isaiah doesn't move on to a new law or a new sacrifice. Instead, he goes straight to two people — the foreigner and the eunuch. This is how God chooses to define what righteousness actually looks like — not first in ritual, but in who is welcomed and who isn't.

2.2 Let's begin with the foreigner. The dictionary defines a foreigner as 'a person born in or coming from a country other than one's own.' But in Israel, the term carried more weight than geography — it meant someone outside the covenant community, outside the lineage, outside Israel's narrative. If anyone was bound to hear 'you don't belong here,' it was him. And in verse 3, that's precisely the fear he expresses: 'The Lord will surely separate me from his people.' He's already assuming the verdict before he even poses the question.

2.3 Then Isaiah turns to someone we don't expect — the eunuch. By definition, a eunuch is simply a man who has been castrated. That's it — a physical condition, nothing more. But the Hebrew word used here, sārîs, tells a different story. In the royal courts of the ancient Near East, this term could refer to a high-ranking official — someone with access, someone with influence, someone with real standing in the corridors of power.

So this may not be just a story about a man excluded because he had nothing. It may be a story about a man excluded even though he had everything he thought he needed — status, position, access — except one thing: belonging.

And that should give us pause. Because we tend to assume that if someone has status, they must also have a place. If someone has influence, they must also feel at home. Isaiah 56 says: not necessarily. You can stand inside every structure of power this world has to offer, and still hear the words no one wants to hear — you don't fully belong here.

2.4 Check out how the eunuch describes himself in verse 3: 'I am a dry tree.' Not 'I'm poor.' Not 'I'm weak.' A dry tree—no fruit, no future, no kids to carry his name, no one to remember him once he's gone. Back then, your legacy was your children, so this guy is basically saying: I'll be forgotten. I'll vanish. Everything I have dies with me. Let that sink in. This isn't griping about his lot in life—it's mourning the fact that he'll be wiped from memory.

2.5 And here is where God answers — not the way we'd expect, not with a small concession, not with "you may stand a little closer." Read verses 4 and 5:

Isaiah 56:4–5 ESV

For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

Do you see what God is doing here? The eunuch's deepest fear was being cut off — no name, no future, no legacy. And God's answer goes straight at that fear and flips it: an everlasting name. Better than sons and daughters. Not cut off. The very thing status and power could never give him — permanence, belonging, a place inside the walls of God's own house — God gives freely.

3.1 So what does all this mean? If covenant belonging isn’t about status, and it isn’t about bloodline—then what is it about? Isaiah doesn’t leave us guessing. A few chapters later, in Isaiah 58, God gets specific about what He really means by justice and righteousness. The people there are fasting, going through the motions of religious devotion, and wondering why God isn’t answering. And God’s reply is blunt: “This isn’t the fast I’ve chosen.” Here’s what He says instead—

Isaiah 58:6 NLT

“No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people.

Notice — for Isaiah, righteousness was never really about getting the rituals right. It was about what you do with the ties, the burdens, and the barriers that shut people out. Isaiah 56 made that clear through the foreigner and the eunuch. Isaiah 58 just spells it out: God's justice isn't about fasting harder; it's about freeing people from whatever keeps them excluded.

3.2 And this is precisely the language Jesus adopts — not as an abstract theological concept developed centuries later, but as his very first declaration of ministry. As Jesus rises in the Nazareth synagogue, unrolls the scroll, and reads, here’s what he says:

Luke 4:18–19 NIV

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

3.3 This isn't a random passage Jesus just happened to pick. He's pulling together Isaiah 61 with the very language of Isaiah 58 — "let the oppressed go free." And then He drops something remarkable: "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). In other words — the eunuch's wall, the foreigner's fear of being shut out, everything Isaiah named centuries earlier — Jesus stands up and says: this is exactly what I've come to do. Today.

4.1 You already know we had that summer outreach with the Calgary Korean Church team to the First Nations community last week. Here's why I kept going back to them. First Nations people aren't strangers here—they're not immigrants from somewhere else. They're woven into the fabric of this country; this land is, in every real way, theirs first. Still, they've been pushed aside in some genuine ways—not because they don't fit in, but because of how Canada's history and institutions have handled things.

4.2 When I first reached out to them, standing where I did — as someone who once struggled just to be understood in Toronto — they seemed wealthier than me. They had this land, this history, this identity. In my eyes, they weren't the outsider in this story. They were the eunuch. They possessed something — a place, a past, a rootedness in this land that even I didn't have. Yet, like the eunuch calling himself 'a dry tree,' many of them carried a deeper weight: they appeared to have no hope in God.

4.3 Status and history were there. But the very thing the eunuch in Isaiah 56 feared losing most — a name, a future, a place in God's house — that's what seemed absent. That's why I couldn't stop reaching toward them. Because Isaiah 56 doesn't let me assume that someone who 'has' it all still isn't standing outside the wall.

5.1  Isaiah named the wall. Jesus moved toward it. And here's what the apostle Paul tells us happened to it. Listen to Ephesians 2:14–16.

Ephesians 2:14–16 NKJV

For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.

5.2 Notice — Paul doesn't say Christ made the wall a little lower, or opened a small gate in it. He says Christ broke it down. In his own flesh. On the cross, the very place where he himself was rejected, cast out, cut off — that is exactly where the wall came down for everyone else.

5.3 That's the truth Paul is pointing to — objectively, once and for all, the wall is gone. But truth like that doesn't stay in the past tense for long. It has a way of turning into a question about right now.

6.1 So here's where I want to leave us this morning. Not with an answer, but with a question — one I think each of us has to sit with on our own.

If Christ himself has already torn down the wall... when you look again at the people around you — where is the wall now?