Isaiah 24

The day of the Lord isn’t coming for one country. It’s coming for them all. Isaiah detailed the sins of both his people and their neighbors in Chapters 13-23 to set up what scholars call the "Isaiah Apocalypse" in Chapters 24-27.

Everyone in the ancient Middle East deserved judgment. But not because they were special and unique. They were doing the same things people in every corner of the world had been doing since the beginning of time. All mankind falls short of the glory of God:

The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. 

- Isaiah 24:5-6 

That is the doctrine of original sin in two sentences. It’s hard to argue the basic point. All you have to do is look around the world and see what we have done to it and to each other. 

No person is perfect. It's a theme runs throughout the Old Testament. Even its greatest heroes are still very flawed human beings.

Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was constantly doing wild things. When he traveled through foreign countries, he would claim that his wife was his sister and give her to the local king. God promised to give him a son through his wife, despite their advanced age, but Abraham lost hope and conceived one with her servant. Then he abandoned both her and their son.

David was the greatest king in Jewish history. He was even called a man after God’s own heart. And yet he still slept with the wife of one of his soldiers and then had the man killed in battle.

You never know what you will turn up when you start poking in someone’s life. The only thing you can know for sure is that you will find something.

Mount Rushmore was built as a monument to some of the greatest Presidents in U.S. history — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Now people are talking about blowing it up because of the crimes those men committed.

Forget where you stand on the monument itself. No one can argue that it honors men who did a lot of evil things. 

A toast to the dead, for criminals burning in hell.
I wonder how many Presidents are burning as well,
Emperors, popes, senators, generals. 

-- Immortal Technique

There's a reason the Bible stresses over and over again that no man should be idolized. None of the men on Rushmore had all the answers.

Most of the Founding Fathers weren't even Christians. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist who literally copied and pasted portions of the Gospels together into a book which collected Jesus' sayings but stripped his life of its supernatural elements. The Bible is pretty direct about people who change any of its words.

What happens to Rushmore is the least of Jefferson's concerns. He had to face God's judgment when he died. No amount of power or wealth or fame or pretty words can save you from that:

See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants -- It will be the same for priest as for people, for the master as for his servant, for the mistress as for her servant, for seller as for buyer, for borrower as for lender, for debtor as to her creditor.  

-- Isaiah 24:1-2

But not having power or wealth or fame isn't a free pass, either. Humans tend to view the world in binary terms. If one side in a conflict is evil than the other must be good. It's just as likely that both sides are evil.

Mount Rushmore is built on stolen land. The question is stolen from whom. The history of European colonization of North America is not as simple as "White people" vs. "Native Americans." The latter didn't see themselves as part of an undifferentiated group that ruled two continents. They identified as Mohawks or Cherokees or Navajos or one of hundreds of other tribes, and fought wars against each other constantly.

The Beaver Wars is an all-encompassing term for a series of conflicts in the 17th century for control of the trade in beaver furs as well as the Great Lakes region. The British aligned with the Iroquois while the French and Dutch aligned with the Algonquins.

The Iroquois were a confederation of five smaller tribes (Mohawk, Onondega, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca) who pursued an expansionist foreign policy that drove their neighbors off their land. They won the Beaver Wars and pushed their enemies out to the Great Plains.

It's a story as old as time. The Aztecs were ripping the hearts out of their enemies and eating them long before the Spanish came to Mexico. Human beings have been killing each other and stealing their land since the beginning of history. The Algonquins the Iroquois killed have just as much a right to justice as the Iroquois the Americans killed.

You can fight evil while still being evil yourself. The Soviet Union did the majority of the work when it came to defeating the Nazis in World War II. That doesn't make the things they did to their own people right.

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all the moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.

-- James 1:19-21

You think God gave Stalin a free pass for the gulags and the Great Purge because he fought a war against another dictator? He uses evil people for good all the time. But they still have to answer for the crimes they committed. 

Just look at what happens in the Book of Isaiah. God's people in Judah and Israel sinned against Him and their fellow man so He used the Assyrians to punish them. The Assyrians overstepped their bounds so He used the Babylonians to punish them. Then He used the Persians to punish the Babylonians.

The same pattern has continued through history. Sin will be punished. Blood will be avenged. That is a guarantee. It might be America's time now. It's hard to know in the moment. But we certainly have it coming.

This is why Jesus never got involved in politics. He had a much bigger mission in his time on Earth. The last thing he told his disciples was to preach the Gospel to every nation, not found one of their own.

Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of age." 

-- Matthew 28:18-20

A nation is ultimately just a big group of extremely flawed human beings. No nation is perfect because no human is perfect. Putting your faith in any of them will only send you down the wrong path.

Fighting for a righteous cause doesn't necessarily mean that you are righteous. You still have to answer for all the evil things you have done in your life. Which leads us to the most important question of them all. Do you really want to be judged for your actions? Or do you want someone else to stand in your place?

Isaiah 23

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 23:2-3

Tyre 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:

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 23:8-9 

The 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 2:18-21

Henry 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. 

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.

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

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