Isaiah 22

Isaiah spent his life prophesying to people who didn’t listen to him. It didn’t matter how many correct predictions that he made. He was telling the people of Jerusalem too many things they didn’t want to hear.

He warned them for years that Assyria was coming, and that Egypt couldn't protect them. Their only hope was God. But none of it got through.

Chapter 22 is a vision of what would happen in Jerusalem during the climactic Assyrian siege in 701 BC. Their army had conquered the rest of Judah. The city walls of the capital were the only thing preventing the complete destruction of the Jewish people:

What troubles you now, that you have all gone up on the roofs, you town so full of commotion, you city of tumult and revelry?  

Your slain were not killed by the sword, nor did they die in battle. All your leaders have fled together; they have been captured without using the bow. All you who were caught were taken prisoner together, having fled while the enemy was still far away.  

Therefore I said, “Turn away from me; let me weep bitterly. Do not try to console me over the destruction of my people.”  

The Lord, the Lord Almighty, has a day of tumult and trampling and terror in the Valley of Vision, a day of battering down walls and of crying out to mountains.  

- Isaiah 22:2-5 

God had raised up the Assyrian Empire to punish His people for their unjust and immoral society. The army camped outside their walls was part of the most fearsome military the world had ever seen. The invasion of Judah was the latest in a string of victories that stretched back generations. The Assyrians had already conquered the surrounding kingdoms in the region, sacking cities that were far more fortified than Jerusalem.

The people of Jerusalem had no chance of winning on their own. Yet they insisted on preparing for a long siege — emptying the armories (22:8), strengthening the walls (22:9), and building a reservoir to store water (22:11) — that could only end one way. In essence, they were choosing death rather than repenting and asking God for help:

The Lord, the Lord Almighty, called you on that day to weep and to wail, to tear out your hair and put on sackcloth. But see, there is joy and revelry, slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine! “Let us eat and drink,” you say, “for tomorrow we die!”  

- Isaiah 22:12-13 

That should have been it. Judah should have been conquered and written out of the pages of history like Moab and the rest of its neighbors.

But then God intervened in a way that still baffles historians 2,700 years later. The Assyrian army was slaughtered in a single night. Isaiah claims an angel killed them. Historians think it might have been a sudden plague. Either way, the city was saved.

You can come to your own conclusion about what happened. There's no doubt what the people at the time, who had a much different understanding of the supernatural than modern Americans, would have thought.

The result should have been a religious revival. But it didn’t take long for Judah to continue its long slide the other way. Less than 15 years after the miraculous salvation of Jerusalem, Manasseh ascended to the throne after the death of his father and had Isaiah killed. The Assyrians had lost one army, but they were still the dominant power in the region. Manasseh began encouraging his people to worship their god.

A century later, Jeremiah summed up what happened:

“Why do you bring charges against me? You have all rebelled against me,” declares the Lord. “In vain I punished your people; they did not respond to correction. Your sword has devoured your prophets like a ravenous lion.”  

- Jeremiah 2:29-30 

The same pattern is repeated over and over again in the Bible. God reveals Himself to His people and they still turn their backs to Him.

Jesus didn't just relay information. He actually performed miracles -- healing the sick, raising the dead, turning water into wine, feeding five thousand people with a few pieces of bread and fish, and many, many more. None of that stopped him from being killed.

Miracles can't change minds of people who don't want to believe in God. That is one of the points of the parable that Jesus tells about a rich man who dies and goes to hell. He sees Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, in heaven and begs him to send a warning to his family members who are still alive so that they can avoid his fate:

He answered, "Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so hat they will not also come to this place of torment." 

Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them." 

"No, father Abraham," he said, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent." 

He said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." 

-- Luke 16:27-31

Imagine that Jesus came back to Earth tomorrow and began doing exactly what he did 2,000 years ago. Would people really care about his miracles once he started telling them how they should lead their lives?

Let's take one of a million possible examples. How would modern people respond to someone claiming to be God who said that sex should only occur within marriage?

I’ll never forget having lunch with a friend from church a few months after I became a believer. He told me that he was a virgin before he was married. And he didn’t get married until he was in his late 20s! I’m looking at him like — are you really telling me that I’m not supposed to have sex until I’m married? Do you realize how insane that sounds?

It took me a long time to get my head around Christian dating. What I eventually realized is that sex is as much about identity as anything else. Modern people want to have sex largely because they don't want to think of themselves as the kind of person who doesn't have it. The whole point of being a Christian is that you have to change the way you look at the world and see that your identity comes from your relationship to God and not how other people look at you.

There are plenty of good reasons to not have sex outside of marriage. But none of them really matter. The ultimate reason is that God says not too. If that's not enough, none of the other ones will be, either.

It's the same thing with so many of God's commands. If you are going to be a follower of Jesus, you have to actually follow him. You have to accept that you don't have all the answers to life. That you aren't the ultimate judge of morality in the universe.

Most people aren't ready for that. They want to do what they want, and they don't want anyone, not even the Creator of the universe, telling them different. They would rather not believe in God than admit that He has any right to tell them what to do.

It doesn't matter whether its Jerusalem in 700 BC or 30 AD or the United States in 2020. Human nature never changes.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 

- John 3:16-19