Isaiah 34

The war between Assyria and Judah wasn’t a battle of good vs. evil. It’s not that the Assyrians weren’t doing evil things. Burning Judah to the ground and selling its people into slavery obviously qualifies. It was what they had done to most of the ancient Middle East. 

But fighting them didn’t necessarily make the people of Judah good. They had done plenty of horrible things of their own. Conflicts between two nations are rarely binary. Just because one side is bad doesn’t make the other good. It’s more likely that both are bad. 

That’s why Isaiah condemned both sides during the war. There was no reason for God to help either. And that same principle could be extended to all mankind: 

Come near, you nations, and listen; pay attention, you peoples! Let the earth hear, and all that is in it, the world, and all that comes out of it! 

The Lord is angry with all nations; his wrath is on all their armies. He will totally destroy them, he will give them over to slaughter. 

 -- Isaiah 34:1-2 

God is an impartial judge. He treats everyone the same. That’s what is often missed in the Old Testament. Helping His people establish a nation in the Promised Land was as much about taking the land from other people as it was giving it to them. The Philistines, Canaanites, and other warring tribes of the region had committed grave crimes against their neighbors and their own people. Israel was a tool that God used to bring them to justice. 

But the same standard applied to them, as well. God warned them repeatedly about what would happen if they acted like the people they had replaced. The Promised Land was a privilege, not a right. It could be taken away as easily as it had been given. 

In 750 BC, about 400 years after the exodus from Egypt, God raised up a shepherd named Amos as a prophet to Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms. Amos was one of the first of the Old Testament prophets. The heart of his message would be repeated by Isaiah a few decades later, and by their successors again and again over the next few centuries: 

There are those who hate the one who upholds justice in court and detests the one who tells the truth. You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain. 

Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine.  

For I know how many are your offenses and how great are your sins. 

 -- Amos 5:10-12 

In 722 BC, Assyria conquered Israel and deported the survivors. God used Assyria to punish Israel just as He had used Israel to punish the Canaanites and Philistines. Then history repeated itself. The Assyrians, like the Israelites, oppressed their neighbors and created an unjust society. So He raised up the Babylonians, who did the same things as the Assyrians and were punished in turn by the Persians. That cycle has continued ever since, from the Persians to the Greeks and Romans all the way to the British and American empires. 

It’s easy to be depressed when you study history. Humans never change. We have been killing and oppressing each other for as long as we have been around. Nor do we show any signs of stopping. But God has promised that the cycle will not go on forever. There will come a time where He will stop using nations to judge each other, and will step into history and judge them Himself: 

All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree. 

-- Isaiah 34:4 

That promise is also a warning to Christians about how we should relate to the nations of this world, even our own. If God is angry with all nations, the obvious implication is that there are no righteous ones. Putting your faith in any of them is foolish. 

American Christians have long placed our faith in this country. We trace our roots to the Puritans, who founded an explicitly Christian government for Christian people. And even as we have moved beyond those roots, we still believe that we are a force for good in the world. Americans believe that all of history has been building to the moment where the US and its system of government dominate the globe. It’s a progressive view of history that says we will continue progressing to even greater heights as long as we stay true to our ideals. 

That’s why every presidential election becomes a titanic battle to determine the moral character of our nation. We have spent the last four years being told that everything will go back to normal once Trump is gone. But the sad reality is that normal is really bad. Most of the evil things that America does won’t stop regardless of who is in the White House. 

The War in Yemen is a perfect example. Saudi Arabia, with the full backing of the U.S. government, intervened in their civil war in 2015, and began a vicious military campaign that has lasted for five years and killed hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a human rights catastrophe that we are ultimately responsible for. The Saudis are using our weapons with a military that we built for them. This policy began under Obama, continued under Trump, and will likely keep going under Biden. Read about the history of American foreign policy and you will see this kind of thing happens all the time. 

In "The Jakarta Method", Vincent Bevins describes how the U.S. helped the Indonesian military engineer a coup of a Communist-led government in the 1950s, kill almost a million people, and then export that process all over the world during the Cold War. It really isn't that surprising when you think about it. A battle for worldwide domination tends to be a race to the bottom. Anything you do can be justified by the fact that the other side is doing it. 

That's why the U.S. spends so much time talking about how evil our enemies are, whether it was the Nazis in World War II, the Soviets in the Cold War, or Vladimir Putin in modern times. And it's not that any of them would have been better if they had our level of global influence. It’s that no nation can responsibly wield that kind of overwhelming power. That’s why God condemned superpowers so strongly in the Book of Isaiah. 

America is the Assyria of our day. We spend more money on our military than every other major nation combined. The military is the one institution in our society we still have faith in. There's no question that we have used it to defeat a lot of evil nations. But just because our enemies are bad doesn't make us good. 

So how should American Christians respond beyond not blindly putting our faith in America? The Bible gives us a fairly relevant historical model. The first Christians lived primarily in the Roman Empire, which like the U.S., ruled most of the known world, either directly or indirectly. And Rome was far more hostile to the faith than America ever has been.

One of the interesting things about the letters in the New Testament, which were written in the first century AD, is how little they have to say about politics. Paul wrote a letter to believers in Rome, while both he and Peter wrote numerous letters from Rome. Yet none ever talked about who was a good or bad Emperor, much less overthrowing a tyrannical system of government that forced people to worship the Emperor as a god. 

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God had established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do will bring judgment on themselves.

For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you.

-- Romans 13:1-3

These are some of the most challenging verses in the Bible for American Christians who were raised to believe that rebelling against the British was one of the most noble acts in human history. Paul had every reason to fight the Romans. They imprisoned and ultimately killed him for preaching the gospel. The same thing happened to Peter. Yet his advice was the same:

Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing god you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

-- 1 Peter 2:13-17

What both Peter and Paul understood was that justice wasn't in their hands. God would punish the Romans for their crimes, just as he would punish everyone else. They were less concerned about what other people did to them than what they did to other people. They knew that their sins had to be forgiven on the cross. And they were grateful that they were. So they spent the rest of their lives telling other people the good news instead of playing the game of thrones. 

The same lessons apply to us. America is a country with a lot of power, just like Rome and Assyria. And it will continue to misuse that power, just like every other empire before it. Christians aren't asked to wield power in this world. We are here to tell people that this world won't last forever, and that there will be justice for everything that happens in it.