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.

Isaiah 14

Isaiah saw far beyond the immediate danger to his people. He also saw the much bigger threat coming down the road.

The Assyrians were Public Enemy no. 1 in his time. But they were never able to conquer his homeland of Judah. That task fell to the Babylonians a century later. They sacked Jerusalem, destroyed The Temple, and exiled the survivors for another 70 years.

Babylon has been the ultimate boogeyman in the Jewish imagination ever since. The city became the symbol for everything evil in the world, a representation of the Kingdom of Man that stands in opposition to the Kingdom of God. There’s a reason the Book of Revelations features a character called “The Whore of Babylon”.

Isaiah doesn’t hold back when talking about the King of Babylon in Chapter 14:

The realm of the dead below is all astir to meet you at your coming; it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you — all those who were leaders in the world; it makes them rise from their thrones — all those who were kings over nations.  

They will all respond, they will say to you, “You also have become weak, as we are; you have become like us.”

All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noises of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you.  

- Isaiah 14:9-11 

Nebuchadnezzar II was one of the most powerful kings of all-time. Judah was barely a bump in the road for someone who ruled almost the entire known world. This is a man who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in the middle of a desert in 600 BC:

In his time, Nebuchadnezzar was as famous and accomplished a man as had ever lived. He created a legacy that should have lasted forever.

Yet who has heard of him now? His bones are rotting in some long forgotten tomb, just as Isaiah said. He might as well have never existed for as little as people these days care about him.

Not much lasts after 2,600+ years. The sheer scale of human history is hard for Americans, whose country has been around for less than 250, to fully appreciate.

Take our Presidents. We spend so much time worrying about their legacy and what the judgment of history will be on their time in office. Will they one day be on Mount Rushmore?

The reality is that it won’t take that long for people to forget every face on that mountain. Our Presidents will mean about as much to future generations as the faces on Easter Island statues mean to us.

Most of human history has already disappeared in the sands of time. The Jews were in Egypt for longer than the U.S. has been a country. The Pharaohs were in power for longer (3,100 years) than the entire span of Western Civilization. All that is left of them is a bunch of giant tombs in the desert. Who were the greatest Pharaohs in Egyptian history? Who cares?

The same thing will happen to the U.S. There might be something we recognize as America in 2500. By 3000? No chance. We will be lucky if people have even heard of this country when we are as far into the future (4800) as Nebuchadnezzar is from us.

Most people reading this would probably say there won't even be a world we will recognize at that point. Either because of global warming or a nuclear winter or The Singularity or the second coming or some other apocalypse.

That might be right. But people have always believed the world was coming to an end. Europeans in the 9th century AD thought the coming of the new millennium meant the end times were here. The Apostle Paul thought it was right around the corner a thousand years before.

Jesus constantly talked about the coming apocalypse, although he admitted that was the one thing that he didn't actually know about:

But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  

- Mark 13:32

The key distinction for all of them is that just because their world was ending didn’t mean the world was. The world that Jesus grew up and lived in around Galilee and Jerusalem ended when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD. The ancient Jewish world that Isaiah knew ended when Babylon destroyed the original in 587 BC. The same thing will happen to the one that you and I know.

The good news is that the fate of mankind doesn’t hinge on the fate of the U.S. The days of nations mattering in the kingdom of God ended with Jesus. There was a plan in the Old Testament for a Jewish society to last long enough for the Messiah to be born into it. The Gospels told his story and the Book of Acts showed how his disciples founded the Christian church. Everything after is just an intermission until Revelations. Then end is already written.

The impact that even Pharaohs and Presidents have on the course of human history is miniscule. All the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. We have our exits and our entrances. The music cuts, the lights come down, and you get ushered off so that someone else can take your spot.

Your entire career becomes a one-minute TV ad. That’s how quickly it all goes by:



Jay-Z has a song called “Forever Young” about how he wants his music to live forever. It won’t. People won’t remember Beethoven or Mozart. They won’t remember him.

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.  

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.  

Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! There is something new?" It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. 

No one remembers the former generations, even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. 

- Ecclesiastes 1:3-4, 9-11

Every human being wants to leave a mark on this world that lasts beyond our death. But none of us will be able to do. Even the greatest kings end up being eaten by maggots and worms in their own tombs.

There’s only one man whose name will live forever. And that’s because he didn't stay in his.

This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?  

- Isaiah 14:26-27

Isaiah 13

Isaiah got so many things right about the future that most scholars think he was cheating. It's not just his prophecies about Jesus. He was three steps ahead of everyone else when it came to politics, too. The Book of Isaiah contains unbelievably accurate information about things that happened hundreds of years after it was written.

That, at least, is what the Bible tells you. Modern scholarship has a different answer. Read about "Isaiah" in a history book and you will find that he was actually a composite character created by multiple authors over a huge span of time.

It all comes down to belief. Isaiah makes Nostradamus look like a blind man reading a Ouija board. There only two possible explanations for how:

1. He was a genuine prophet who heard the voice of God.
2. He was cheating.

Believing Christians, Muslims, and Jews have no trouble with #1. But people who don't believe in God aren't going to believe in prophets, either.

The most popular theory about the Book of Isaiah is that it has three authors: the Original Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 1-39 around 700 BC), Deutero-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 40-55 during the Exile) and Trito-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 56-66 during the restoration of Judah after the Exile). So instead of Original Isaiah eerily predicting the future, Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just describing what they saw around them.

Those predictions or descriptions, depending on how you want to look at it, begin in Chapter 13. That's when the Book of Isaiah moves from talking about the Messiah and the fate of all mankind to focusing on its corner of the world. The first clue that something is off is the way that it describes Babylon:

Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.

 - Isaiah 13:19

Babylon was not the "jewel of kingdoms" during Isaiah's lifetime. Like the rest of the ancient Middle East, it existed in the shadow of Assyria. The Babylonians didn't gain their independence until well after his death.

Then, after breaking free in 626 BC, they created an even more dominant empire of their own. They eventually finished what the Assyrians started, sacking Jerusalem in 597 BC and deporting the survivors as part of what became known as the Babylonian Exile.

Not only did Isaiah predict their rise, he also predicted their fall:

See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold. 

- Isaiah 13:17

The Medes were an obscure group of tribes in modern-day Iran on the very fringes of the Assyrian Empire in his lifetime:

You can already guess what happened next. The people in that area coalesced into a group whom we now know as the Persians, who then conquered Babylon in 539 BC.

Predicting all that 200 years in advance is insane enough. But where the Book of Isaiah really loses scholars comes in Chapter 45, when it specifically gives the name of the Persian king who frees the Jews and lets them return to Jerusalem:

"I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight. He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the Lord Almighty." 

- Isaiah 45:13

The general scholarly consensus with this prediction can be summed up in six words: "Get the f*** out of here". Non-religious scholars who study the Bible for a living tend to be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. But this is too much. There had to be someone giving messages from the future to the past to get a name right.

No one actually knows. The beauty of that type of theory is that it's impossible to prove a negative. How can you prove in 2020 that someone didn't add chapters in 500 BC to something that was written in 700 BC?

The only proof that could exist is a copy of the complete version of the Book of Isaiah that can be dated to a specific point of time. The closes thing we have to that is the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient manuscripts that were preserved in the Israeli desert around 200 BC and then discovered in the 1940s. That's the point where we know the Book was "finished". Everything before that is just speculation.

You can raise doubt about the available evidence in either direction.

People who believe in a unitary Isaiah will point to phrases that exist throughout every section of the Book (most notably "the Holy One of Israel") and appear nowhere else in the Bible, as well as descriptions of things like plants and animals native to ancient Israel and the lack of the same descriptions of things from ancient Babylon, where Deutero-Isaiah was supposed to exist. But the proponents of the multiple Isaiah theory respond by saying that Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just covering their tracks.

Beyond the eerily precise predictions, they also point out that the subject matter changes between the three sections, as does the style of writing. But that doesn't prove anything, either. Writers change topics and write in different styles all the time. Just because I normally write about basketball doesn't mean this blog was written by someone else.

There's a thin line between historical speculation and conspiracy theory. You can use computer analysis to "prove" that multiple people wrote the Book of Isaiah, but you can also use it to "prove" that Barack Obama didn't actually write his memoir.

Nor is there an obvious place to stop once you start dividing a book into sections. There are some scholars who believe there were at least seven different authors -- 1-12, 13-23, 24-35, 36-39, 40-48, 49-57, and 58-66. There are others who think there are dozens, if not hundreds. Maybe the Book of Isaiah was just the first Wikipedia page?

The lack of concrete proof means that both sides are building their arguments on faith. It's obvious enough to see that with the unitary Isaiah people. But the same thing holds true for their counterparts.

The book "A History of The Bible" by John Barton, a liberal Christian theologian, is a perfect example. His section on Isaiah is a well-written review of what everyone "knows" that seems convincing at first glance.

You will notice something interesting if you read through his book as closely as he reads through the Bible. In eight pages about Isaiah, Barton uses the word "probably" six times and "may" (as in "we may assume" or "whom we may guess") four. That doesn't even count phrases like "we must assume" and "seems likely".

He's guessing, just like everyone else.

It all comes back to first principles. If your worldview doesn't allow for supernatural explanations, than cheating is the only possible explanation for Isaiah's predictions and "you must assume" certain things about how it was written. If you do believe in God, than believing that Isaiah could see into the future is nothing. The seraphim that he describes seeing in the throne room of God are way crazier than his predictions.

There are two sets of prophecies in the Book of Isaiah that we can all agree are real, regardless of worldview. The first are the ones about the Messiah. Even if there was an eighth or ninth or tenth or thirteenth Isaiah sneaking in prophecies in 210 BC, right before the Dead Sea Scrolls were frozen in time, it's still incredible to see how much he anticipated about Jesus.

The second are the ones about things that are still happening:

[Babylon] will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there no nomads will pitch their tents, there no shepherds will rest their flocks.

But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about.

Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious places. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.

- Isaiah 13:20-23 

Human civilization began in Babylon. It was New York City, London, and Beijing all rolled up into one. Historians believe that it had two stretches separated by over 1,000 years (1770-1670 BC and 600-300 BC) where it was the most populated city in the world. Jerusalem, where Isaiah lived, was a shabby collection of huts in comparison.

Here's what Babylon looks like now:

It has not been inhabited in thousands of years. Some people in the region believe there was a curse put on Babylon, and that anyone who tries to rebuild it will be destroyed. Just ask Saddam Hussein.

So how did Isaiah know that would happen?

Isaiah 12

Isaiah knew hard times. He's famous for his prophecies about Jesus, but what often gets missed is the context that he made them in.

He lived in a war zone. Assyria came this close to exterminating the Jewish people in his lifetime. Their armies were camped outside Jerusalem before being miraculously destroyed in a way that still baffles historians.

It would have been easy for Isaiah to despair and give up hope. Yet he never did, no matter how bad things got.

After prophesying about the Messiah in Chapters 9-11, he moves into a song of praise in Chapter 12:

In that day you will say:

“I will praise you, Lord. Although you were angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me. 

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation.” 

- Isaiah 12:1-2 

Being a Christian is like walking over a bridge. You know in your head that God will catch you if it collapses. But you would still rather not find out.

Then one day you look down and the bridge is gone. Then you have to decide if you are really going to believe any of this stuff.

That point has come for a lot of people in the last few months.

As a Christian, the best thing you can do in these moments is remember the times that God has come through in the past.

I always go back to when I first became a believer. I was 26. I was an editor and a writer at SB Nation while making money on the side writing about basketball for a few other websites.

My job was more than a paycheck. It was my life. I had spent the four years since college scratching and clawing to establish myself in the industry. I didn't have much else going for me. I didn't have any money. I lived in a run down one bedroom apartment. I hadn't dated anyone in years. The only thing I had to hang my hat on was that I had a cool job.

Then, all of a sudden, I didn't.

It was my own fault. The college basketball editor job at SBN came open, and I assumed that I would get it. After all, I was the best.

When I didn't, I began calling around to see what other jobs were out there for me. I even told my bosses what I was doing because obviously they would realize their mistake in passing over me.

You can already guess what happened. They fired me like it was nothing. No severance. Nothing. And all those other jobs that I had been talking too? None of them came through.

I ended up getting a part-time job stocking shelves on weekends. We would drive around to grocery stores in the morning, count the beer that had been sold the day before, and then go to the back of the store and replace it.

The funny part is that working in online media paid so little that I could make more money doing that in 20-25 hours a week than I could blogging and editing for 40.

The hard part was swallowing my pride. I went to a private high school with the sons of CEOs and politicians. They used to always tell us about how we were the future leaders of society. Do you remember in The Facebook Movie when Mark Zuckerberg is mad about not getting into one of the Finals clubs at Harvard? I knew kids in those. And here I was punching a clock with people who never went to college.

I prayed and prayed about what to do next. I felt like He told me to start a blog. It was an odd thing to do in 2014. Blogs had already died. Everyone was on social media. He might as well have told me to start a newspaper. Or a beeper company.

Nothing happened for a long, long time. My days were spent writing, stocking shelves, and going to church. I guess you could say it was my own version of Paul's time in Arabia after his encounter on the road to Damascus. There aren't many stories about those years in the Bible.

About nine months after I was fired, I was praying for a friend who had just broken up with the girl he thought he would marry. I could tell what was wrong. He was mourning not just the loss of the relationship but the pieces of his identity that he had put into it.

So I just kept telling him that she didn't define who he was. That his identity came from his relationship with God and not this girl.

And then I realized that I was really praying for myself. I had spent my whole life thinking that I had to be "successful". I had worked so hard to be somebody. But none of that stuff actually mattered. None of it would make me happy. I could be happy because God loved me. That was enough.

I was free.

Fast forward two years. I got an email from an editor about working for a start-up. The first thing he said was that he read my blog every day.


via GIPHY

I wish I could say that was the end of my story. That I learned an important lesson about identity and never putting too much of myself into my job. But that's not how life works. I've had to learn that lesson again and again over the last four years.

God has always been good to me, even as I kept making the same mistakes. He has always answered my prayers.

I was praying about getting into online dating right about the same time that I joined The Ringer. I felt like God told me not to do anything until a church-wide community service project that happened a few weeks later.

The project came and went without much happening. After it was over, a couple of us went to an outdoor patio. There was a pretty girl there who wanted to play sand volleyball with us.

Fast forward four years. Now we have a son.

Jackson Dean Tjarks was born on Friday. He’s in the 98th percentile for height and he’s incredibly cute! pic.twitter.com/GEflnApYAZ

— Jonathan Tjarks (@JonathanTjarks) March 23, 2020

In that day you will say: 

“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim that his name is exalted. 

Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world.” 

- Isaiah 12:4-5

Isaiah 11

The Book of Isaiah talks a lot about political power. The prophet was on the wrong end of it for most of his life. 

The Assyrian Empire was the dominant power in his region of the world. They conquered every country in their path, and came this close to destroying his homeland of Judah.

The Assyrians viewed their power as a sign of their own greatness. It's the way every empire throughout human history, including the U.S., has viewed themselves.

Isaiah saw things differently. He rejected the idea that any country could be great. They were all just trees in a forest to him. Assyria towered over its neighbors at the time. But God would chop them down to size:

See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will lop off the boughs with great power. The lofty trees will be felled, the tall ones will be brought low. He will cut down the forest thickets with an axe.  

- Isaiah 10:33-34 

In Chapter 11, he contrasts them with the coming Messiah:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  

- Isaiah 11:1 

The Messiah, rather than a mighty tree, would be a humble branch of one that had already been cut down. The kings of Judah had all been descended from David, the most legendary king in Jewish history, and his father Jesse. They would eventually be removed from the throne a century after Isaiah's prophecy when the kingdom was conquered by Babylon.

For the next 600 years, the Jewish people waited for one of their descendants to emerge and claim the mantle of Isaiah. His prophecies gave them hope for their future as they were passed from one empire to the next, going from Babylon to Persia, Greece, and then Rome:

In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.  

- Isaiah 11:10 

Jesus claimed that mantle when he began his public ministry, reading a passage from Isaiah 61 and claiming that it was fulfilled. (Luke 4:16-21)

His people were ready for a savior. The Romans had conquered them 60 years before he was born. It was hard to have much hope of overthrowing them without divine intervention. They ruled the known world with an iron fist. Their evil was obvious. They wanted their emperor worshipped as a god, an incredible sacrilege for a people famous for refusing to worship their neighbor's gods, much less their actual neighbors.

So when Jesus performed his most public miracle, feeding 5,000 people with a basket of bread and fish, the people knew what to do:

After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.  

- John 6:14-15 

One of the most interesting things about Jesus' time on Earth is that he never got involved in politics. It's very counterintuitive.

The Jesus of the Gospels was essentially a superhero come to life. He walked on water, healed the sick, and even raised the dead. There was no limit to his power.

Yet he didn't fight the Evil Empire when he had the chance. Imagine if Luke Skywalker had heard about the Death Star and said "Render unto Vader" instead of joining the Rebellion.

Jesus isn't mentioned in any of the contemporary histories of the period, which has caused many modern observers to wonder if he ever actually existed. But, then again, why would he be? He didn't actually do much to make historians notice him. What would someone in Rome care about an itinerant preacher from a backwater province who was killed before his movement got off the ground?

It was his followers that changed the world, not him. We know that Jesus was real because we know that people like Peter and Paul were. They had to have come from somewhere.

That was the key to what Jesus did with his time on Earth. He spent his life investing in the people around him.

The only way to change the world is to change it one person at a time. The multiplier effect does the rest. If you change the lives of two people, and they change the lives of 2 people, and each of those people changes the lives of 2 more, the numbers add up fast.

Jesus never needed to rule a country. That was hustling backwards.

A century after his crucifixion, another Jewish preacher emerged to claim the mantle of Isaiah. His name was Simon bar Kokhba. Every historian of the time period knew his name. The Jewish people gathered around his banner and rose up against Rome for 3 years, creating an independent Jewish state.

But what was the result of the heroism of Simon and his followers? Rome crushed their rebellion, just as they had crushed a different one 40 years before. There would not be another. The Romans burned Israel to the ground and ethnically cleansed the whole area. There would not be a significant Jewish presence in the region again for almost 2,000 years.

And for what? An independent Jewish state had already been tried before. It hadn’t worked. The people had rebelled against God and been just as evil as any of their neighbors. They couldn’t handle the power that had been given to them. There was no reason to think it would be any different this time around.

The political class of Israel, just like it has been in most places and times in human history, was broken and filled with people who pretended to love God but were really just in it for themselves. Jesus criticized the Pharisees more than he ever did the Romans. The last thing he was going to do was launch a rebellion to help them gain power.

It was as Isaiah said. Why spend your life trying to grow a tree when it was going to get cut down anyway? All nations have a life span. Judea. Assyria. Babylon. Rome. Israel. The United States. Political power always has an expiration date.

Jesus had all the power in the world and he gave it away. It doesn’t mean anything. There are better ways to change the world.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death -- even death on a cross!  

- Philippians 2:5-8

Isaiah 10

God always had a plan for the Jewish people -- He would reveal himself to them and they would spread that knowledge to the rest of the world. But he didn’t reveal how that plan would actually work until he spoke through Isaiah.

Isaiah made prophecies that were fulfilled by Jesus more than 700 years later. The reason that it took so long is that a lot had to happen in between. The nations of Judah and Israel were no different than their neighbors in Isaiah’s time, worshipping other gods and ignoring God’s commands as if they had never heard them at all. They had to be punished and reshaped into something that God could actually use.

One of the most important parts of the Old Testament is the way that it shows God working through history. It wasn’t just Israel. Every country had a role to play. He raised up a tool that he would use against His own people — Assyria. The Assyrians were the most powerful military force the world had seen at the time. They conquered Israel and brought Judah to the brink of destruction, leaving the Jewish people no choice but to depend on God:

Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath. I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets.  

 - Isaiah 10:5-6 

But the Assyrians had no concept of the Jewish God. They certainly didn’t believe in His power. So they looked at their military and political dominance and assumed that they were the ones responsible for it. They became proud and arrogant, believing their own myths because they were blind to the way the world actually worked. The same thing happens to any successful person or group of people who don't believe in God.

Faith in a higher power is the only thing that can keep people humble. The king of Assyria had nearly unlimited power. No country could stand in his way. No army could defeat him. Anything that he wanted, he could have. Why wouldn’t he think that he was a god?

When the Lord finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.”  

For he says: “By the strength of my hand I have done this, and by my wisdom, because I have understanding. I removed the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings.”  

 - Isaiah 10:12-13 

Modern people who lack faith fall into the same trap. They take credit for their own success and develop an inflated opinion of themselves. There’s only one possible outcome once you start down that path. Their pride blinds them and they bite off more than you can chew.

Assyria was one of the first great empires in world history. But it certainly wasn’t the last. The same pattern repeats itself over and over — The more powerful they become, the more they lose any sense that there are limits to their power.

I’ve seen that first hand as an American citizen. Most US elections are portrayed as a battle of good and evil. The only question is which side is which. What gets lost are the underlying assumptions that both sides agree on. Every presidential candidate, whether Republican or Democrat, says that the US is the greatest and most powerful country in human history.

photo: charles roderick

Maybe we are. But having that type of power should worry everyone. It’s not something to be proud of.

This is how Ezekiel, another Old Testament prophet who lived about 120 years after Isaiah, described Assyria:

Consider Assyria, once a cedar in Lebanon, with beautiful branches overshadowing the forest; it towered on high, its tops above the thick foliage. So it towered higher above all the trees of the field; its boughs increased and its branches grew long, spreading because of abundant waters. All the birds of the sky nested in its boughs; all the animals of the wild gave birth to its branches; all the great nations lived in its shade.  

- Ezekiel 29:3-7 

Does this not sound like America? The US has the biggest economy and military in the world. The amount of money the US spends on its military compared to every other country is staggering:

There are a couple of temptations when you have this much power. The obvious one is that there is no one who can prevent you from imposing your will on the world stage. The only restraints you have are the ones you put on yourself.

The more subtle temptation is believing that your power is a sign of your superior virtue and wisdom. After all, if you are that successful, you must be doing something right.

Americans know the second temptation well. All you have to do is look back at the invasion of Iraq. The US didn’t credit God as the source of our prosperity. We looked at our economic and military power and figured that it came because we had a superior form of government. The natural conclusion is that we needed to spread that government to the rest of the world. So we invaded another country to free them, which hasn’t exactly turned out well over the last 15 years.

There aren’t many situations where a country operating on Biblical principles should be invading anyone. There’s nothing in the Bible about how Christian countries need to rule the world. If anything, it’s the opposite. The only mandate that Jesus gave his disciples was to go make more disciples. But they were supposed to do that on a personal level, not a political one. The idea was that they would create ministries like Jesus - traveling the world, investing in a few people at a time, and planting local churches wherever they went.

Both Peter (1 Peter 2:13-17) and Paul (Romans 13:1-7) urged their followers to stay out of politics. They didn’t want to destabilize governments. Their goal was to add more people to the church, not gain political power.

Nor was Israel ever supposed to be an empire in the Old Testament. Their political boundaries were firmly established. They were supposed to be a model for the world, not conquer it.

That was the lesson that Ezekiel drew from the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, which happened between Isaiah’s time and his own:

Therefore no other trees by the waters are ever to tower proudly on high, lifting their tops above the thick foliage. No other trees so well-watered are ever to reach such a height; they are all destined for death, for the earth below, among mortals who go down to the realm of the dead.

- Ezekiel 29:14 

There are a lot of warnings about the dangers of empires and nations who think too highly of themselves in the Old Testament. It always ends the same way.

It all comes back to first principles and how you view your place in the world. There are two ways to look at it. You can believe you are responsible for your own success. Or you can accept that God is ultimately in charge of your life.

One way leads to pride. The other leads to humility. Every person and country has to decide for themselves which path to follow.

Does the ax raise itself above the person who swings it, or the saw boast against the one who uses it? As if a rod were to wield the person who lifts it up, or a club brandish one who is not wood!  

 - Isaiah 10:14