Isaiah 2

The Book of Isaiah is set in the shadow of a looming apocalypse. The Assyrians had conquered Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms, in 721 B.C., and looked set to conquer Judah twenty years later. The impact of those defeats on the Jewish psyche was huge. If their God really was the Creator of the Universe, why were His people always losing to the followers of other gods?

The Assyrians worshiped Ashur, who started as the local god of their capital city of Assur and seemed to grow more powerful as his followers conquered all of their neighbors. The kings of Assyria traditionally wrote reports back to Ashur after their military campaigns ended. If Yahweh was more powerful than Ashur, why could He not defeat him?

Military conflicts in the ancient Middle East had spiritual undertones. Conquered people usually worshipped the gods of those who conquered them. After all, what was the point of worshiping their gods if they had fought for those gods and lost? The people of Judah could already see this happening to their relatives in Israel, who began worshiping Ashur after their defeat and were eventually assimilated into the greater Assyrian Empire. The same thing would have happened if Judah had been conquered.

With the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people around the corner, the prophecy that Isaiah makes in Chapter 2 must have seemed ridiculous:

In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

Isaiah 2:2-3

Just imagine what the Assyrians would have thought if they had heard that. Your God will be exalted above all the nations? People from every tribe will come to worship Him? Then how come we are about to conquer you and erase his name from history?

This is the message that Sennacherib, the King of Assyria, sent to Hezekiah, the king of Judah, when his armies were massed outside of Jerusalem:

“Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of Assyria.’ Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely.

And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them -- the gods of Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? Where is the king of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah?”

Isaiah 37:10-13

It would have been hard to argue Sennacherib in that moment. The Assyrians had conquered a lot of nations, and heard a lot of nonsense about how those gods would stop them. They had even conquered a Jewish kingdom! Surely, the people of Judah didn’t think things would end any differently. What made their god so different than any of the other gods that Sennacherib had already destroyed and sent back to the temples of Assur as tribute?

Here is one thing we can know for sure. If Sennacherib had conquered Jerusalem in 701 B.C., no one would be talking about the Book of Isaiah almost 3,000 years later.

In What If?, an anthology book where leading military historians speculate about the paths that human history could have taken, William H. McNeill imagines a world where Sennacherib conquered Jerusalem:

This may be an odd thing to say about an engagement that never took place; yet Jerusalem’s preservation from attack by Sennacherib’s army shaped the subsequent history of the world far more profoundly than any other military action I know of.

None of [modern history] could have come to pass if the kingdom of Judah had disappeared in 701 B.C. as the kingdom of Israel had done a mere twenty-one years earlier in 722 B.C. On that occasion, the exiles from Israel soon lost their separate identity. By accepting common sense views about the limits of divine power, they abandoned the worship of Yahweh, who had failed to protect them, and became the “Ten Lost Tribes” of biblical history. In all probability, the people of Judah would have met the same fate if the Assyrian army had attacked and captured Jerusalem in 701 B.C. and treated its inhabitants as they had treated those of Samaria and other conquered places before. If so, Judaism would have disappeared from the face of the earth and the two daughter religions of Christianity and Islam could not possibly have come into existence. In short, our world would be profoundly different in ways we cannot really imagine. 

The odds of Judah surviving the Assyrian invasion were minuscule. They were a tiny country down to its capital city facing the greatest military machine the world had ever known.

So how did they do it? No one really knows. Here's what Isaiah says:

Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning -- there were all dead bodies! So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew.

- Isaiah 37:36-37

We know that something happened to the Assyrian army. Archeologists have found a series of monuments that Sennacherib built near the end of his reign to commemorate his military victories. Jerusalem is on a list of all of the cities that he besieged, but it is the only one of those cities that isn't also on a list of the ones that he conquered. Many historians, including McNeill, believe that a plague devastated his army as they were camped out Jerusalem. That explanation is more satisfying to a secular audience, but wouldn't a plague be the perfect way for an angel of the Lord to kill people?

It would be an awfully big coincidence otherwise. Maybe Hezekiah, Isaiah, and the people of Judah just got lucky. Maybe the course of world history was completely changed for no reason other than blind chance.

Or maybe the plague was a miracle. And maybe there is something (or someone) guiding the course of world history.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Barack Obama loved to quote this saying when he was President. If it's true, the question isn't whether or not the moral arc of the universe bends, or what direction that bend might take. It’s why there is a moral arc in the first place. MLK was a preacher. His confidence didn't come out of belief in the goodness of man. It came from something else entirely.

Isaiah prophesied a lot more than just the Assyrian withdrawal from Jerusalem. He also talked about a coming Messiah who would reshape the Jewish religion and spread the worship of their God to the rest of mankind:

And now the Lord says -- he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength -- he says: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

- Isaiah 49:6

Now imagine if Sennacherib had heard that prophecy when his armies were outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Here's one more Biblical prophecy that would have sounded insane at the time it was made. This one is from Jesus in the days before of his crucifixion:

 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

- Luke 21:33

Jesus was killed by an empire (Rome) who made the Assyrians look like amateurs. The Romans lasted much longer than any of their imperial predecessors. Rome was sacked more than 400 years after the crucifixion, and New Rome (Byzantium) wasn't conquered for another 1,000 years after that. But even that prolonged lifespan wasn't enough to outlast the words of an obscure preacher who died in a backwater province with only a few followers to his name.

There are a million possible explanations as to why all these different prophecies came true. Here's the simplest. The reason that Isaiah could accurately predict what would happen thousands of years after his death is because he really was relaying the word of God.

The best way to know the future is to study the past. If two people in 2019 predict two vastly different futures in 2029, it would be hard for us to know who is right. The most helpful thing we could do is see what they said in 2009 about what would happen in 2019. If someone has been right before, there is reason to believe they will be right again.

"Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods."

- Isaiah 41:22

"This is what the Lord says -- Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.

Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people, and what is yet to come -- yes, let them foretell what will come.

Do not tremble, do not be afraid. Did I not proclaim this and foretell it long ago? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one."

- Isaiah 44:6-8

Believing in the God of the Bible isn’t just about blind faith. The proof is right there if you look for it.