It’s easy to see why he prophesied about Assyria and Babylon. But why care about a relatively unimportant country like Moab? It was located in modern-day Jordan, across the Dead Sea from Judah:
The Moabites weren’t friendly neighbors. The Jews had to fight their way through them to get to the Promised Land after leaving Egypt, and their relationship had been chilly ever since. But there were also plenty of ties between the two peoples. Ruth, a Moabite, was David’s grandmother. His parents hid in Moab during his conflict with Saul.
Judah and Moab had bigger problems than each other in Isaiah’s lifetime. They were like Poland before World War II, trapped between two superpowers locked on a collision course.
Isaiah saw the danger coming:
Ar in Moab is ruined, destroyed in a night! Kir in Moab is ruined, destroyed in a night!
Dibon goes up to its temple, to its high places to weep; Moab wails over Nebo and Medeba.
Every head is shaved and every beard cut off. In the streets they wear sackcloth; on the roofs and in the public squares they all wail, prostrate and weeping.
- Isaiah 15:1-3Moab never had a great chance of long-term survival. It was a tiny fish in an ocean of sharks. The Middle East was the crossroads of the ancient world, a highway that massive armies marched up and down for thousands of years, destroying anyone in their path and scattering survivors in every direction. The Moabites were repeatedly conquered and absorbed within larger empires until their identity was erased and they forgot they were a people. The same thing happened to the overwhelming majority of smaller tribes like them. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Jews survived to modernity.
Isaiah could have gloated about what was to come. But he had the exact opposite reaction:
My heart cries out over Moab; her fugitives flee as far as Zoar, as far as Eglath Shelishiyah. They go up the hill to Luhith, weeping as they go; on the road to Hornonaim they lament their destruction.
- Isaiah 15:5
My heart laments for Moab like a harp, my inmost being for Kir Hasereth. When Moab appears at her high place, she only wears herself out; when she goes to her shrine to pray, it is to no avail.
- Isaiah 16:11-12There was no reason for him to care. When the Moabites went to their shrines and high places, they weren't worshipping his God. They wouldn't have recognized him as a prophet. He might as well have been some guy yelling on a street corner to them.
Isaiah cared because God cared. They were His people, too. Even if they didn't acknowledge Him. The God of the Old Testament is often seen as a bloodthirsty tyrant who cared nothing for non-Jews. But His concern for the Moabites wasn't an isolated incident.
Jonah was a prophet who lived a generation or two before Isaiah. God told him to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, and preach repentance. But he didn't want too. The Assyrians were hated and feared for their militaristic culture and bloodthirsty foreign policy. Jonah wanted them punished not saved. He booked passage on a ship to cross the Mediterranean and get as far away from Assyria as possible. That’s how he ended up in the belly of a whale.
“And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left — and also many animals?”
— Jonah 4:11Once again, there was no reason for God’s mercy. The Assyrians didn’t deserve it. He did it out of love anyway.
Just because the Jews were God’s people didn’t mean he didn’t care about anyone else. The whole point of Him blessing them was so that they could be a blessing to all mankind.
Like the rest of the Bible, it all points back to Jesus. It wouldn’t have made sense for the Messiah to be born into a random group of people with no context for his mission. Jesus grew up within a culture that stretched back thousands of years and was waiting for someone like him to emerge. The prophecies that Isaiah made about his life 700 years before he was born are some of the most powerful evidence for who he was. Everything that he did was spelled out beforehand. That’s why a universal God created a specific group of people.
The course of history changed once Jesus came to Earth, died for our sins, and was resurrected. His disciples expected him to raise the banner of a greater Israel and overthrow the Roman Empire. He told them to go to every nation on Earth in peace and make disciples instead. Jesus didn’t need a nation of his own. Politics no longer mattered in the kingdom of God.
There was a small window of time in history where God needed to interfere in politics to produce a certain outcome. That time is over. The Apostle Paul explicitly spelled out the new way of doing things:
There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good; first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism.
- Romans 2:9-11As a rule, people should be very careful about assuming that God is on their side in an international conflict. God has people on every side. It's always tempting to believe that He has enlisted you on a holy crusade. But wars are usually fought for less spiritual reasons.
People began wrongly claiming to be the new Israel almost as soon as the Romans destroyed the original one. Look up "British Israelism" on Wikipedia. This was a real movement that had a lot of power in the 1800s. The kids today would call it swagger jacking.
The funny thing is that it wasn't all that great to be Israel. God held them to the same standards as everyone else. He helped them clear out the original inhabitants of the Promised Land, but He used the Assyrians and Babylonians to do the same thing to them when they rebelled.
God has no favorites. We all come up short in His eyes. Jesus died for each and every one of us. There are people from every tribe, tongue, and nation in front of the worship seat of God in the Book of Revelation.
He has a message for every country. Even the ones no one cares about anymore.
Great theme you've identified for this chapter. My dad's an ex-member of the Mormon church. I don't know much about their doctrine, but I always suspected it was the same kind of "chosen people" doctrine as the "Isrealitish" idea posted above. I remember my aunt saying something like, "it must be important to be in the true church." Of course, I also celebrated Passover every year and read about how we Jews were the chosen people. To continue to rely on that always seemed a bit wrong-headed. Of course you explain perfectly why that is, here.
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