Isaiah 17

Isaiah saw doom coming for everyone in the ancient Middle East. The Jewish people weren’t different from their neighbors who worshipped other gods. All had rebelled against God. All would suffer the same fate. He would use Assyria to clear out the whole region.

Syria was one of the first to fall. Israel was right behind them. The two had been linked ever since forming an alliance to invade Judah and install a puppet king in 727 BC.

It was a shocking betrayal of a fellow Jewish kingdom. The original kingdom of Israel had split in half after the death of King Solomon in 931 BC. The northern one kept the name and 10 of the 12 tribes, while the southern kingdom of Judah, where Isaiah lived, had only two.

The prophet didn't hold his tongue when their invasion failed. Israel stood with Syria so they would fall with them too:

“The fortified city will disappear from Ephraim [Israel], and royal power from Damascus; the remnant of Aram [Syria] will be like the glory of the Israelites,” declares the Lord Almighty.  

- Isaiah 17:3 

He was proven right when Israel was conquered by Assyria in 721 BC. The survivors went down in history as the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” after they were resettled across the Assyrian Empire and assimilated. All kinds of groups from all over the world have claimed to be their descendants. The Mormons even think they wound up in North America.

But Isaiah did offer them some consolation. God still had a plan for their people:

"In that day the glory of Jacob will fade; the fat of his body will waste away. It will be as when reapers harvest the standing grain, gathering the grain in their arms — as when someone gleans heads of grain in the Valley of Rephaim.  

Yet some gleanings will remain, as when an olive tree is beaten, leaving two or three olives on the topmost branches, four or five on the fruitful boughs,” declares the Lord, the God of Israel.  

- Isaiah 17:4-6 

There would be a few survivors from Israel who would make their way into Judah, just as there would be a few from Judah who would survive the Babylonian exile a century later. And from that tiny remnant, God would rebuild Jewish culture, send them a Messiah, and change the world.

It would be like when an olive tree was harvested. Olives were one of the pillars of the Jewish economy in those days. They were a symbol of God’s relationship with His people. It took a long time for an olive tree to bloom. The land had to be cultivated for years before they would yield a crop. Only a few olives would be left after the harvest was finished. The rest would be taken away.

In this analogy, God was not pleased with what the trees had produced. He had given His people a land to call their own and they had produced a society that was just as corrupt and unjust as everyone else around them.

The only thing left to do was start over:

So the Lord will cut off from Israel both head and tail, both palm branch and reed in a single day; the elders and dignitaries are the head, the prophets who teach lies are the tail. Those who guide this people mislead them, and those who are guided are led astray.  

— Isaiah 9:14-16 

Most Biblical scholars believe that Judaism as we know it began during the Babylonian Exile. They view the adoption of monotheism as a gradual process that took hundreds of years and only became complete when the Jews came into contact with those ideas in Babylon.

The Old Testament becomes revisionist history in their view, turning a far more complicated story of religious evolution into one of good and evil that the vast majority of Jews at the time it was written would not have recognized. But here's the key point: Just because they wouldn't have recognized it doesn't mean that it's not true.

It's all a matter of interpretation. The kings of Israel and Judah who worshipped gods besides God saw themselves as acknowledging spiritual realities and uniting nations that included many people of non-Jewish descent. They saw prophets like Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah as dangerous zealots who represented the beliefs of only a small minority of people.

And they were right. Eljiah even complains to God that he is the only prophet left in all of Israel at one point. In that sense, the modern scholars and the writers of the Old Testament are saying the exact same thing.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that most of the Jewish people between the exodus from Egypt (around 1300 BC) and the Babylonian exile (around 600 BC) didn't actually worship God. Who wants to bother with following all the laws in the Old Testament when you could pick and choose from the religious practices of your neighbors and find a belief system that flatters your ego and doesn’t ask you to make personal sacrifices? Why wander through the desert for 40 years when there were get rich quick schemes all around you?

It was only when they were stripped of their land and forced into poverty in Babylon that they took God’s demands seriously. This is how historian Paul Johnson describes the process in his landmark work A History of The Jews:

Thus scattered, leaderless, without a state or any of the normal supportive apparatus provided by their own government, the Jews were forced to find alternative means to preserve their special identity. 

Hence it was during the Exile that ordinary Jews were first disciplined into the regular practice of their religion. Circumcision, which distinguished them ineffaceably from the surrounding pagans, was insisted upon rigorously and the act became a ceremony and so part of the Jewish life-cycle and liturgy.  

It was in exile that the rules of faith began to seem all-important: rules of purity, of cleanliness, of diet. The laws were now studied, read aloud, and memorized.  

The Exile was short in the sense that it lasted only a half century after the final fall of Judah. Yet its creative force was overwhelming. 

Or, to put it another way:

At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel. 

- Isaiah 17:7 

The Book of Isaiah is essentially the DVD commentary from the director of the movie. God said what He would do and why He was doing it. Read it closely and you will see that not only were most of the criticisms of Biblical scholars anticipated, God was making them, too.

And long after modern scholarship is forgotten, people will still be reading Isaiah and learning those lessons from him.

Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, “Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.” The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.  

- Psalm 2:1-4

Isaiah 16

Pride comes in many forms. You don’t have to rule the world to have it.

It’s easy to see how great empires like Assyria and Babylon could become proud and arrogant. But the same thing can happen to smaller and seemingly less significant countries:

We have heard of Moab’s pride — how great is her arrogance! — of her conceit, her pride and her insolence; but her boasts are empty.  

- Isaiah 16:6 

Moab played almost no role on the world stage. It was conquered by the Assyrians as they expanded towards Egypt in the early 700s and eventually vanished from the pages of history. The only reason that anyone has heard of it these days is because of the Old Testament.

So what were they so proud of? Isaiah never says exactly. But he implies that it had something to do with their crops:

Lament and grieve for the raisin cakes of Kir Hareseth. The fields of Hesbon wither, the vines of Sibmah also. 

The rulers of the nations have trampled down the choicest vines, which once reached Jazer and spread toward the desert. Their shoots spread out and went as far as the sea.  

- Isaiah 16:7-8 

Pride is relative. The natural comparison for the Moabites wouldn’t have been the Assyrians. A people who grew the “choicest vines” would have had more money than some of the poorer farming and herding communities around them. Being more successful than someone else is all it takes to get a big ego.

Everyone struggles with pride to some extent. It’s part of the human condition.

My issues tend to come from work. The natural temptation for me is to take great pride in what I do. I cover the NBA for a living. It’s a job that a lot of people would love. People always ask about it when they meet me.

But here’s the problem. Pride makes you miserable because anxiety always follows right behind it. The two are linked at the hip.

It all comes back to identity and how I define myself as a person. If I think that I’m better than someone else because of something that I have done or some other characteristic about myself, then I am giving that thing (whatever it is) power over me. It’s a four-step process:

1. I take pride in X.
2. I need X to feel good about myself.
3. I worry about losing X.
4. I become anxious. 

In my case, if X is my job, then it doesn’t take much for me to start worrying about my job security. There have been a lot of times where I have worried about losing my job for no reason at all. It’s no way to live.

It's not that I couldn't get fired or laid off. Sportswriting isn't a very stable industry. But there's no point in worrying about something that I can't control.

That is what Jesus means when he says to build your house (read: identity) on a rock:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock."  

"And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”  

- Matthew 7:24-27 

You should be anxious if your identity comes from something you can lose. The only way to get real freedom is when you put it in something that you can’t.

Let’s go back to the Moabites. What happens to a people who define themselves by their crops and fields?

So I weep, as Jazer weeps, for the vines of Sibmah. Heshbon and Elealeh, I drench you with tears! The shouts of joy over your ripened fruit and over your harvests have been stilled. 

Joy and gladness are taken away from the orchards; no one sings or shouts in the vineyards; no one treads out wine at the presses, for I have put an end to the shouting.  

- Isaiah 16:9-10 

The Moabites didn’t have a great answer to that question. We know from archeological records that they worshipped a god called Chemosh. But they could not sustain their worship without a land to call their own. Without anything to define themselves by, they assimilated into the societies around them and lost their identity as a people.

The Jews survived because they had an answer. Their tribal identity wasn't based on something fleeting. Even in exile, they continued to worship their God as the Creator of the universe, and that worship sustained them and allowed them outlast their conquerors and their neighbors. No human being, or group of humans, is going to last forever. If pride is relative, then the comparison point for any of us shouldn't be each other.

The Assyrians and Babylonians might have had more reason to be proud than the Moabites, but it wasn't reason enough. Nothing than any man can do comes close to God:

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me." 

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone -- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?" 

"Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in its thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt?'"

- Job 38:1-11 

As Moab found out, pride comes before the fall. The only way to avoid the same fate is to take pride in God instead of yourself.

Isaiah 15

Isaiah had a message for everyone. None of his neighbors, no matter their size, escaped his notice.

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 15:1-3 

Moab 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 16:11-12

There 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.

After his famous experience at sea, Jonah went to Nineveh and ministered to the people there. God told him why he had to go:

“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 4:11 

Once 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 2:9-11 

As 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.