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

Isaiah 20

Isaiah didn’t just give messages. He also became them.

In Chapters 7 and 8 of the Book of Isaiah, God names the prophet’s sons for him. Names weren’t just names in ancient Hebrew. They had bigger meanings. God sent a prophetic message through Isaiah’s two kids:

-- Shear-Jashub: A remnant shall return
-- Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz: Quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil (Because the Assyrians would sack Judah)

In Chapter 20, He tells Isaiah not to wear a robe (sackcloth) or shoes for three years:

In the year that the supreme commander, sent by Sargon king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and attacked and captured it — at that time the Lord spoke through Isaiah son of Amoz.  

He said to him, “Take off the sackcloth from your body and the sandals from your feet.” And he did so, going around stripped and barefoot.  

Then the Lord said, “Just as my servant Isaiah has gone stripped and barefoot for three years, as a sign and portent against Egypt and Cush, so the king of Assyria will lead away stripped and barefoot the Egyptian captives and Cushite exiles, young and old, with buttocks bared — to Egypt’s shame.” 

— Isaiah 20:1-4 

The context for this prophecy was the cold war between Egypt and Assyria. The two heavyweights were on a collision course. Smaller countries like Judah were stuck in the middle.

The Egyptians were putting together a military alliance against Assyria. The Philistines, Judah’s neighbors to the east in modern-day Gaza, signed up. Ashdod was one of their major cities:

But the Egyptians could do nothing to prevent Ashdod from being sacked by King Sargon II of Assyria in 711 BC. It was ten years after the fall of Israel, and ten years before Judah narrowly survived its own destruction.

Hoping in Egypt was foolish. Assyria had the strongest military in human history at the time. Egypt was a fading power trading on past glory.

Isaiah was clear about what to do. There was a spiritual reality behind the geopolitical trends. God was using the Assyrians to punish the Jewish people for their rebellion. Trying to resist that punishment by siding with a different foreign power was foolish. The only real hope for Judah was to repent and pray for a miracle:

Those who trusted in Cush and boasted in Egypt will be afraid and put to shame. In that day the people who live on this coast will say, “See what has happened to those we relied on, those we fled to for help and deliverance from the king of Assyria! How then can we escape?”  

— Isaiah 20:5-6 

After the fall of Ashdod, Isaiah began walking around the streets of Jerusalem barefoot and in his undergarments. It would have been humiliating. As a prophet who advised the King of Judah, he was an important figure in their society. Imagine a Senator or Congressman walking along the street in Washington D.C. and begging for change.

The other prophets had similar experiences. Hosea married a prostitute and repeatedly took her back after she cheated on him. Jeremiah brought all of Jerusalem’s leaders out to a field to watch him break a pot on the ground. Ezekiel spent most of his ministry humiliating himself, from laying in the dirt to chopping off his hair, eating dung, and going mute.

They all had to swallow their pride and be foolish for God. It could not have been easy, especially for people who consulted with kings. But their pride wasn’t as important as getting His message out in the world. They were vessels for something bigger than themselves.

All Christians have the same calling. It’s not that any of us are Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. They were sent to their people at a specific point of time in history to give a specific message about the future. But we all have to be willing to be foolish for God in the eyes of man:

Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. 

- Galatians 1:10 

Just being a Christian is foolishness in the eyes of man. We were told that from the very beginning:

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. 

- 1 Corinthians 1:21-25 

You can’t preach the gospel without talking about God taking on flesh through a virgin birth, living a perfect life, dying for our sins, and rising from the dead. It sounds crazy to modern ears. Who could possibly believe this stuff anymore? This is 2020. We aren't living in the Middle Ages.

The supernatural parts of Christianity was the biggest stumbling block in my journey to faith. Could I not respect Jesus as a moral teacher and live by his principles without believing in obviously made up fairy tales?

But supernatural forces are actually the most logical explanation for everything that happened in his life. That's why most people who study it with an open mind become Christians. It just requires a dramatic perspective shift for "modern" people. You realize that the assumptions that are the building blocks of your modern belief system are just that -- assumptions. This is how the first Christians described the process:

Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord -- Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here -- has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit." Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, [emphasis added] and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

-- Acts 9:18-20 

Pretending the supernatural doesn't exist to make yourself look better to people who don't share your beliefs doesn't help anyone. It also makes Christianity less appealing.

If you apologize for what you believe and water down your principles to make them more appealing to a bigger audience, then why believe any of it? People respect confidence. People respect strength. You have to stand for something. It’s OK to look ridiculous to those who don’t know the truth.

There were a lot of people in Jerusalem who wrote off Isaiah as a crazy person when he walked around barefoot and shirtless for three years. Yet everything he predicted came to pass.

People walking in darkness aren’t supposed to understand those in the light. They live in the same world but see different things. As Drake said, we walk the same path, but got on different shoes; live in the same building, but got different views.

Following God starts with this simple truth. It doesn't matter what other people think of what He asks of us. Our identity doesn’t come from them. Our identity comes from what Jesus did on the cross.

Isaiah 19

Egypt was much more than a country in the Old Testament. It was a symbol of everything the Jews left behind when they followed God, a land of idols where people worshipped animals and Pharaohs became gods.

Being a slave in Egypt was like being a slave to sin. The Promised Land was communion with God. Turning to Egypt meant going backwards. And there were always people who wanted to go back.


via GIPHY

As soon as the Jews left Egypt, there were people complaining to Moses about the lack of food and shelter in the desert. The prophets had to fight the same temptation. Isaiah warned his people not to turn to Egypt for protection against Assyria. Jeremiah warned them against escaping to Egypt rather than accepting exile in Babylon.

This is how Isaiah frames the choice:

Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel, or seek help from the Lord.  

- Isaiah 31:1 

Relying on Egypt made sense. Assyria was expanding rapidly and rolling up every kingdom in their path. Being conquered meant death, destruction, and exile. The Egyptians were the only people with the size to fight back. They were even offering a military alliance.

But Isaiah wanted the people of Judah to look at the world through a spiritual lens. The Assyrians were God’s chosen instrument to punish them for rebelling against Him. It was their own fault that they were coming. An Egyptian alliance was a way to avoid reckoning with what they had done. It wasn’t going to work.

There was less to Egyptian society than met the eye. It was far removed from the height of its power under the Pharaohs. The Egyptians no longer even ruled themselves. An Ethiopian king was pulling the strings.

Their way of life was built on a river and not a rock. Dry up the Nile and it would die:

The waters of the river will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and dry. The canals will stink; the streams of Egypt will dwindle and dry up. The reeds and rushes will wither, also the plants along the Nile, at the mouth of the river.  

Every sown field along the Nile will become parched, will blow away and be no more. The fishermen will groan and lament, all who cast hooks into the Nile; those who throw nets on the water will pine away.  

Those who worth with combed flax will despair, the weavers of fine linen will lose hope. The workers in cloth will be dejected, and all the wage earners will be sick at heart. 

- Isaiah 19:5-10 

All their glory, all their power, all their tradition and history -- it was all a facade. Building the pyramids required a mind-boggling amount of engineering and logistical ability. It would have seemed God-like to shepherds like the Jews. There was certainly nothing in Judah to compare to them. But they were ultimately just giant tombs in the middle of the desert.

In The New Penguin History Of The World, historian J.M. Roberts sums up Egypt’s legacy to human history:

Yet the creative quality of Egyptian society, seems, in the end, strangely to miscarry. Colossal resources of labor are massed under the direction of men who, by the standards of any age, must have been outstanding civil servants, and the end is the creation of the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality is employed, and its masterpieces are grave-goods. A highly literate elite, utilizing a complex and subtle language and a material of unsurpassed convenience, uses them copiously, but has no philosophical or religious idea comparable to those of Greek and Jew to give to the world. It is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness, at the heart of this glittering tour de force. 

None of this would come as a surprise to Isaiah. He dismisses the Egyptians as idiots (19:11) who make plans by consulting mediums and carving up animals to look at their intestines (19:3).

To be sure, they would have said the same things about him. The Assyrians had just obliterated Israel, Judah’s bigger and more powerful neighbor to the north. Israel was where 10 of the 12 tribes had settled and it contained most of the wealth and resources of the Jewish people. The only explanation that Isaiah could give was that it was all part of God's plan. All he had were promises from a God no one could see. It wasn't exactly as tangible as an army.

Those are the kinds of moments when your faith is really tested. Believing in God when everything is going well doesn’t mean much. It's much harder to rely on Him when all the evidence is pointing the other way.

The first thing to do is look back at all the times in the past where God has come through for you. The second is to carefully examine the other options. The Apostle Paul extended Isaiah’s description of Egypt to all of mankind:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.  

- Romans 1:21-23 

It doesn’t matter how big or strong an army looks. It’s still made up of of human beings who have to put their faith in something. People who don’t believe in God don’t stop believing in unseen things. Americans believe in astrology and aliens a lot more than they used to.

So how do we test any of these belief systems? Jesus said to look at the fruit they produce. Isaiah's words are still bearing fruit in people's lives thousands of years later. Let's go back to J.M. Roberts to see about Egypt:

In reflecting on the nature of Egyptian history, there is always a temptation to revert in the end to the great natural images of the Nile always physically present to Egyptian eyes. It was so prominent, perhaps, that it could not be seen for the colossal and unique influence that it was, for no context broader than its valley needed consideration. While in the background the incomprehensible (but in the end world shaping) wars of the Fertile Crescent raged across the centuries, the history of Old Egypt goes on for thousands of years, virtually a function of the remorseless, beneficent flooding and subsidence of the Nile. On its banks a grateful and passive people gathers the richness it bestows. From it could be set aside what they thought necessary for the real business of living: the proper preparation for death. 

As a wise man once said, it all comes down to a choice. Get busy living or get busy dying.

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.

The Gospel Coalition Interview

At The Gospel Coalition, Eugene Park interviewed me about my journey to Christianity, faith in the workplace, and living in a secular society.