Isaiah 21

Knowing the future isn’t as cool as it might seem. The Book of Isaiah describes his prophecies about countries as “burdens against them.” But they are also burdens on him.

Imagine someone in 1900 receiving a vision of all the terrible things that would happen in the 20th century. They would probably react like Isaiah when he sees the coming fall of Babylon:

At this my body is racked with pain, pangs seize me, like those of a woman in labor; I am staggered by what I hear, I am bewildered by what I see. My heart falters, fear makes me tremble; the twilight I longed for has become a horror to me.  

- Isaiah 21:3-4 

Isaiah has the same reaction to the fall of Moab. Just because the Babylonians and Moabites were his enemies didn’t mean they weren’t people, too. Their deaths were still a tragedy.

His burden was that he knew the future but couldn’t change it. God had called him to be a watchman along the walls of history. His job was to report accurately what he saw:

This is what the Lord says to me: “Go, post a lookout and have him report what he sees. When he sees chariots with teams of horses, riders on donkeys or riders on camels, let him be alert, fully alert.”

And the lookout shouted, “Day after day, my lord, I stand on the watchtower; every night I stay at my post.”  

- Isaiah 21:6-8 

This is the closest glimpse that we are given to how the process worked. It’s still pretty vague. When Isaiah says he spent day after day on his watchtower, does that mean he was scrolling through images in his mind for years until he came across ones with armies?

The craziest thing about his visions is how accurate they were. The way he describes the fall of Babylon is remarkably similar to what ancient historians like Herodotus said ultimately happened:

They set the tables, they spread the rugs, they eat, they drink! Get up, you officers, oil the shields!   

- Isaiah 21:5 

Babylon was conquered by the Persians in 539 BC. The great city, despite being fortified on all sides, fell without much of a fight. It stood on both sides of the Euphrates River. Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, stationed part of his army where the river went under the walls and sent the rest upstream to divert its path. King Belshazzar of Babylon was so sure that his walls would hold that he threw a great feast while this was happening, which is described in the Book of Daniel. Lowering the river was a great feat of engineering that few saw coming. Cyrus was able to sneak in troops behind his defenses, turning what had been a party (setting the tables, spreading the rugs, eating and drinking) into a rout.

There are only two ways Isaiah could have predicated that. Either he had supernatural help or he cheated. That’s why the theory of multiple Isaiahs prophesying over hundreds of years is so popular among scholars. They don’t accept supernatural explanations for events. If there really was just one Isaiah, then he must have actually been speaking to God.

There was so much time between his prophecies and fulfillment that no one man could have made them on his own. Isaiah’s ministry began in 743 BC and ended in 688. Many of the things he saw didn’t happen until long after his death — Assyria conquering Egypt in 671, Babylon conquering Assyria in 609, Persia conquering Babylon in 539. It would be like someone during the Revolutionary War predicting Watergate.

It's an amazing feat in hindsight. But it would have been very difficult to live through. Isaiah never got to see if he was right. He spent his life making prophecies that he would never see fulfilled. He was a watchman who saw so far into the future that no one had to listen.

Jewish tradition has King Manasseh killing Isaiah when he took power in 688 BC. That is the incident the Book of Hebrews is referencing when it describes an Old Testament prophet being "sawed in half." (11:37)

Manasseh would have had good reason to resent Isaiah, who had advised both his grandfather (Ahaz) and father (Hezekiah). He broke with Hezekiah, one of the more devout kings in Jewish history, and re-introduced the worship of other gods to Judah to cozy up to Assyria. The last thing Manasseh needed was one of his father’s spiritual advisers breaking with him and warning about the dire consequences for his decisions.

It would have been easy to write off Isaiah as crazy. Maybe his warnings about what would happen were accurate. Or maybe they weren't.

One of the things that makes understanding the world so difficult is that the course of history plays out over a longer period of time than a human lifetime. Events are set into motion long before we are born and play out long after our death. Take this passage about the history of the Byzantine Empire in J.M. Roberts' New Penguin History of the World:

What was less secure in the long run was the social basis of the empire. It was always going to be difficult to maintain the smallholding peasantry and prevent powerful provincial landlords from encroaching on their properties. The courts would not always protect the small man. He was, too, under economic pressure by the steady expansion of church estates. Theses forces could not easily be offset by the imperial practice of making land grants to smallholders on condition they supplied military service. But this was a problem whose dimensions were only to be revealed with the passage of centuries [emphasis added]; the short-term prospects gave the emperors of the seventh and eighth centuries quite enough to think about. 

It's only in hindsight that we can see the link between cause and effect. Something set to happen 150 years in the future never seems like a big deal in the moment. The scientists warning us about global warming are experiencing that now. It's hard to make people in 2020 care about the consequences in 2170.

Christians have a similar problem. There has been a massive decline in faith in the United States over the last century. Just check out these startling statistics from a nationwide survey by the Pew Forum in 2019:

Furthermore, the data shows a wide gap between older Americans (Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation) and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation and attendance. More than eight-in-ten members of the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945) describe themselves as Christians (84%), as do three-quarters of Baby Boomers (76%). In stark contrast, only half of Millennials (49%) describe themselves as Christians; four-in-ten are religious “nones,” and one-in-ten Millennials identify with non-Christian faiths.

That trend has only increased with Generation Z. The ever-growing number of non-religious Americans would say that is a good thing and point to the decline as a sign that history is moving in the right direction.

Only time will tell if they are right. The question is just how much time we need to get the right answer. The U.S. is still a young country without much sense of the scale of history. It's entirely possible that the consequences for these decisions won't play out for centuries. Just because a decision in 1960 looks one way in 2020 doesn't mean that it will look the same in 2120.

American Christians can warn our neighbors, but they don't have to listen. We have to get used to the idea that our warnings about walking away from God will fall on deaf ears, and that we will not be proven right until long after our death. The whole point of having faith is that it doesn't matter. We know that it always ends the same way for countries that oppose God:

Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses. And he gives back the answer: ‘Babylon has fallen, has fallen! All the images of its gods lie shattered on the ground!’  

- Isaiah 21:9