The world that Isaiah lived in wasn't that different from our own. His homeland of Judah was part of an integrated international economy that stretched across thousands of miles. There was a lot more going on in 700 BC than peasants herding sheep and exchanging metal trinkets.
Jerusalem was a hundred miles down the road from the financial capital of the ancient world. Tyre, a fabulously wealthy port city in modern-day Lebanon, was the New York City of its day:
Be silent, you people of the island and you merchants of Sidon, whom the seafarers have enriched.
On the great waters come the grain of the Shihor; the harvest of the Nile was the revenue of Tyre, and she became the marketplace of the nations.
- Isaiah 23:2-3Tyre was a Phoenician city. Their ancestors practically invented sailing, sending explorers to Britain and all the way around the coast of Africa on wooden boats. They planted colonies everywhere they went and maintained close connections with all of them. The result was a giant web of trading posts that generated huge sums of money:
The city even had its own version of Manhattan. The commercial center was located on an island off the coast while its less prosperous suburbs were on the mainland. That combination of money and geographic isolation made Tyre a safe harbor in a dangerous part of the world.
There would come a point in the rise of every powerful new king in the region when he would demand submission from Tyre. He would march his army to the coast and put the city under siege, but there was never a way to cross the strait. Eventually the Tyrians would write him a check to go away. This process repeated over and over for hundreds of years.
The Assyrians besieged Tyre four different times in 80 years without conquering it. It was the only city to hold out against King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, one of the most powerful kings in human history. Empires rose and fell around them while they just grew richer and richer. They had the same attitude about their neighbors that Jay-Z had about young rappers:
They come, they go, some real, some faux /Some friends, some hoes /But, no, I goes nowhere, this Hov.
The Tyrians thought that having more money than God made them invincible. Isaiah was there to tell them otherwise:
God works on a different time frame than man. The New Testament says that for Him a thousand years is like a day (2 Peter 3:8) and man is a mist that appears for a little while and vanishes (James 4:14). What happens in our lives is a small portion of a much bigger picture. We are trees that cannot grasp the size of the forest we are apart of.
Money is a perfect example. People spend their whole lives accumulating it for one purpose only for it to be used for the exact opposite after they die:
He created the Ford Foundation in 1936 as a place to park his money, get around the estate tax, and ensure that his family would retain control of his company. But it didn’t take long for the Foundation to be taken over by his ideological enemies and become one of the most influential left-wing political organizations in American life. Henry Ford II, his grandson, resigned from its board in 1976 because he disagreed with what it had been doing:
A new king at the head of a mighty army emerged in 336 BC. Alexander the Great had already conquered most of the known world when he came to Tyre in 332 BC and asked to make a sacrifice in their main temple on the island. They blew him off and told him he could use the one on the coast, feeling safe and secure in their ocean fortress.
He didn’t take no for an answer. Alexander tore down the coastal suburbs and used the stones to build a bridge out to the island and march his army across it. He turned their wealth against them and made it the engine of their destruction:
Alexander then stormed the walls, burned Tyre to the ground, and sold its citizens into slavery. It was a horrifying end for a people who thought they would rule the world forever. Isaiah’s prophecies had been fulfilled.
Who planned this against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, whose merchants are princes, whose traders are renowned in the earth?
The Lord Almighty planned it, to bring low the pride of all glory and to humble all who are renowned on the earth.
- Isaiah 23:8-9The section in the Book of Isaiah with prophecies against other countries begins with Babylon in Chapter 13 and ends with Tyre in Chapter 23. The former represented the military strength of the world. The latter the commercial. Both stood in opposition to God. So both would fall.
God works on a different time frame than man. The New Testament says that for Him a thousand years is like a day (2 Peter 3:8) and man is a mist that appears for a little while and vanishes (James 4:14). What happens in our lives is a small portion of a much bigger picture. We are trees that cannot grasp the size of the forest we are apart of.
Money is a perfect example. People spend their whole lives accumulating it for one purpose only for it to be used for the exact opposite after they die:
I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.
So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.
-- Ecclesiastes 2:18-21Henry Ford made about $200 billion (when adjusted for inflation) as the founder of Ford Motor Company, the inventor of the assembly line, and the man who popularized the car. His politics were way to the right of just about anyone in the U.S. today. Ford was so anti-Semitic that he got a shout-out in Mein Kampf and received a medal from the German government in 1938.
He created the Ford Foundation in 1936 as a place to park his money, get around the estate tax, and ensure that his family would retain control of his company. But it didn’t take long for the Foundation to be taken over by his ideological enemies and become one of the most influential left-wing political organizations in American life. Henry Ford II, his grandson, resigned from its board in 1976 because he disagreed with what it had been doing:
Henry Ford 2d resigned as a trustee of the Ford Foundation yesterday, complaining that the philanthropic agency was spreading itself too thin, was cultivating a “fortress mentality” and had staff that often failed to appreciate the capitalist system that provided the money the foundation gave away. [emphasis added]
There's no way for any of us to know how "our" money will be used in the future. It has a mind of its own. As a great thinker once said, money doesn’t have owners, only spenders.
Our society worships money and thinks that accumulating large sums of it will give us security. We spend our lives trying to create a nest egg to make sure that our kids and grandkids will be OK after we are gone. But having money doesn't actually solve your problems. It usually just creates more. If you want your kids to have the same view of the world as you do, the last thing you want to do is give them large sums of money. Someone who grew up with money is guaranteed to have a much different perspective on life than someone who didn't.
Being given money is no substitute for love, affection, and the knowledge of God. If you don't believe me, go meet some rich kids. A lot of them were given money by parents too busy working to spend much time with them. That dynamic rarely works out well.
Money isn't even real. It's a symbolic object that we have all collectively decided is important. A bar of gold has little intrinsic value beyond being a paperweight. A series of 1s and 0s on a computer screen has even less. It's created out of thin air by a keystroke at the Federal Reserve. We can all wake up tomorrow and decide that we don't care about it. This is called "the breakdown of society." It happens far more often than we care to admit.
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."-- Matthew 6:19-21
The people of Tyre found that out the hard way. They spent hundreds of years thinking that life was all good, that their money would buy them out of any tough situation they found themselves in. Then, one day, it didn't.
He didn’t take no for an answer. Alexander tore down the coastal suburbs and used the stones to build a bridge out to the island and march his army across it. He turned their wealth against them and made it the engine of their destruction:
Alexander then stormed the walls, burned Tyre to the ground, and sold its citizens into slavery. It was a horrifying end for a people who thought they would rule the world forever. Isaiah’s prophecies had been fulfilled.
It was essentially the scene from The Dark Knight Rises when the money man behind Bane's revolution realizes that Bane has been using him. He got used to yelling at people worth less money than him. But Bane didn't care about money. It had no power over him.
The same thing that happened to Tyre will happen to New York City one day. Having a bunch of money only makes you secure until it doesn't. Nothing lasts forever in this world. No kingdom of iron or gold. The only one that does it the kingdom of God.
Yet her profit and her earnings will be set apart for the Lord; they will not be stored up or hoarded. Her profits will go to those who live before the Lord, for abundant food and fine clothes.
- Isaiah 23:17
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