Isaiah 18

Jerusalem was at the crossroads of the ancient world. After prophesying about countries to the north (Babylon) and east (Moab) in Chapters 13-17, Isaiah turns south in Chapter 18.

Assyria was sending its armies towards Judah to counter the growing power of Egypt, which had been taken over by an Ethiopian king in 715 BC. Those two countries began looking north and making trouble among smaller kingdoms like Judah that Assyria saw as being within its sphere of influence.

As someone who advised King Ahaz, Isaiah had connections in the royal court of Jerusalem who would have told him about the messengers from Ethiopia, which was then called Cush:

Woe to the land of whirring wings along the rivers of Cush, which send envoys by sea in papyrus boats over the water.  

— Isaiah 18:1-2 

He tells those messengers to keep Judah out of their schemes. What was happening to God’s people was part of His plan, and no interference from a foreign power would change things. They would not be able to defend Judah. Only God could save it. And it would happen on His schedule:

All you people of the world, you who live on the earth, when a banner is raised on the mountains, you will see it, and when a trumpet sounds, you will hear it.  

This is what the Lord says to me: “I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place, like simmering heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the harvest.”  

— Isaiah 18:3-4 

But Isaiah also had good news for the Ethiopians, although they would not have seen it like that:

At that time gifts will be brought to the Lord Almighty from a people tall and smooth-skinned, from a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers — the gifts will be brought to Mount Zion, the place of the Name of the Lord Almighty.  

— Isaiah 18:7 

The Ethiopians had no reason to care about the God of the Jews. Like most people in those days, they viewed the power of gods as being reflected in the strength of their people. God's people were descendants of escaped slaves who ruled a couple of no account kingdoms that were nothing but pawns on the geo-political chessboard. The odds were that either would survive the coming conflict between Egypt and Assyria were slim.

Yet, like so many other prophecies that Isaiah made, this one was fulfilled. The Book of Acts, which follows the Gospels in the New Testament, tells the story of how Christianity came to Ethiopia. A court eunuch was reading from the Book of Isaiah in Jerusalem when he ran into a disciple who explained how Jesus fulfilled those prophecies. (Acts 8:26-40)

That’s the power this book can have. Isaiah called something 700 years in advance and then his own words were used to make it happen. Imagine something you said in 2020 having that type of impact in 2720.

The north African church went on to play a huge role in early Christian history. It was the Bible Belt of the Roman Empire. St. Augustine, the most influential Christian thinker for 1,000 years, was from modern-day Tunisia. But all that was swept away by the Muslim conquests of the 600s, which created an empire that stretched from Persia to Spain:

Ethiopia was the one exception. It's a land of high mountains and rivers that has always been impossible to conquer. It was the only Christian country in North Africa that didn't become Islamic, and the only African country not colonized by Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The result is a land which doubles as a religious time capsule.

The Ethiopian church was cut off from the rest of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The people of Western Europe had only the vaguest idea of what was on the other side of the Muslim world, so garbled tales of an unknown Christian kingdom who had defeated the Islamic armies grew into a myth of a fabulously wealthy land who would ally with them in a war of civilizations. The king of that land became known as Prester John. Explorers searched for an African El Dorado for hundreds of years until the Portuguese made contact with the Ethiopians in the 1500s and were convinced they had found him.

It wasn’t just Christians. In the late 20th century, a tiny community of Ethiopian Jews called Beta Israel, which had been cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for millennia, was discovered. After a long rabbinical debate, they were officially welcomed back and evacuated to Israel in airlifts as part of Operations Moses and Joshua in the 1980s.

The existence of these types of isolated communities is proof of how artificial so many of our religious differences are. Imagine telling an Ethiopian Christian that the Catholic Church in Rome was the one holy church of Christendom that possessed the keys to salvation and that their church, despite stretching all the way back to the original apostles and surviving hundreds of years of Islamic persecution, was a fraud. It's absurd on its face. Obviously Jesus can save people who know about him and have access to his words and deeds through the Bible. The Holy Spirit doesn't need an intermediary in a funny hat.

The Ethiopian Church was neither Protestant nor Catholic. They wouldn’t have even known the difference. All that really mattered is that they were following Jesus. The fact that they were Christians at all was a miracle.

The fact that anyone becomes a Christian in this crazy modern world that we live in is a miracle. I hadn't heard about Barry Zito, the former Cy Young winner, in years when he appeared on The Masked Singer. So I went to his Wikipedia page to see what he had been up to since retiring from baseball. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Zito was a born-again Christian with a memoir about how all the fame and money that came with being a pro athlete hadn't actually made him happy and had taken him on a journey that ended with finding Jesus. Needless to say, this isn't a story being told in the media.

Does it matter what type of church that he goes to? Or what type of Christian that he would say that he is? Theology is important, but it shouldn't be a weapon to divide people. The whole point of the gospel is that it's a message that anyone can understand. You don't need a PhD. All you have to do is accept the gift of salvation that Jesus gave on the cross. That's it. There's no need to divide up people into smaller groups than that.

I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.  

My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas"; still another, "I follow Christ." 

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?

- 1 Corinthians 1:10-13

The test of whether anyone is a Christian is simple. This is what the Apostle John says:

We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did. 

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.  

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother or sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them. 

- 1 John 2:3-11

God had our salvation planned out before we were born. He told the Ethiopians what would happen 700 years before He did it. What happened in their country is a miracle. What happens to any Christian is a miracle. We all became part of God's family thanks to His miraculous grace. So if you are arguing theology, make sure you are doing it out of love or don't do it at all.