Isaiah 5

In the first four chapters of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet lays out why the Assyrian army invading Judah was an instrument God was using to judge His people. There were spiritual undertones to the invasion. The Jewish people had walked away from their Creator and ignored His commands, and He was punishing them for their rebellion, just as He promised when He initially gave them the Promised Land.

It was a harsh punishment, which is why Isaiah made a point to remind his people about the goodness of God in spite of what was happening around them. To further illustrate that point, he introduces the parable of the vineyard. Like Jesus, he understood that people could see things more clearly when a new context was put around a familiar story:

I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.

- Isaiah 5:1-2 

As Isaiah goes on to explain, Judah is the vineyard, the Promised Land is the fertile hillside, and God is the one who planted it. The good grapes were righteousness, and the bad fruit was sin. God’s creation had gone bad so He was going to tear it up and start over:

Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall and it will be trampled.

- Isaiah 5:4 

The key to understanding this parable is to look it at from the point of view of the vines. Why should they have to produce good fruit? Don’t they have the right to do what they want? Who is God to tell them what is or is not bad fruit?

The answer to those questions is where Christianity conflicts with the way most Americans view the world. Our culture places a huge emphasis on independence. No one can tell us what to do or what to think. We determine the course of our own lives. Anthony Kennedy, the recently retired Supreme Court justice, summed it up in one of his most famous opinions:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

For the most part, God agrees with Kennedy. He doesn’t make us obey Him. He has given us the gift of free will. We are free to believe anything that we want about this world. The difference is that He doesn’t leave open the question of what the right answer is.

It comes back to first principles. If the universe is the product of random chance, and humans are nothing more than self-aware animals with the same value as any other creature on Earth, than there is no point to our brief existence other than what we make of it. Conversely, if the universe has a Creator, and human beings are created in His image, than the point of our lives is to know and experience Him. If you start with that belief, than good and evil are not things we can define for ourselves.

“Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands?’

This is what the Lord says -- the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Concerning the things to come, do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands?

It is I who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshalled their starry hosts.

- Isaiah 45:9-12 

I have lived both sides of this question. I didn’t grow up as a Christian. My parents raised me in the Unitarian Universalist church. The UU church is the combination of two radical branches of the Protestant Revolution -- The Unitarians believed in the unity of God (i.e. not the Trinity and that therefore Jesus was just a human being) while the Universalists believed that God would save all of mankind regardless of whether or not they believed in Jesus. They eventually merged into a religion whose primary tenet is that we are free to believe anything as long as our beliefs don’t harm anyone else. It is a church for people who want church without religion.

We took comparative religion classes in Sunday School. The New York Times was our Bible. This was our version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Love is the doctrine of our church.
The quest for truth is its sacrament. [Emphasis added]
And service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace.
To seek knowledge in freedom.
To serve humanity in fellowship.
Thus do we declare. 

The quest for truth is like the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. The implication of searching for something is that you haven’t already found it. Just like the Founding Fathers couldn’t promise happiness to the citizens of their new nation, the UU church fathers didn’t promise truth to their parishioners.

In my experience, what happens when people are left to search for meaning in the world is that they find it other people. Everyone needs answers about themselves and their purpose in life. We all need to identify as something. Either we get that answer from a supernatural belief system or we look for one in the natural world. Without God, the best way to know how to think about myself is to see what other people think of me.

Here's the problem. If you get your identity from what other people think of you, then impressing those people becomes the most important thing in your life. The result is that nothing you do matters unless other people see you doing it:

Most Americans are Unitarian Universalists. They just don't know it. The actual religion, with its buildings, doctrines, and ministers, is a vestigial structure. (The classic example is the appendix, an organ that still exists within our bodies even though it no longer serves its original purpose.) That's the reason why only 12.5% of kids raised in the UU church stay in as adults. The religion already exists all around them. It is the default option in American life. Going on Sundays isn't necessary to believe in it.

The only way to actually leave is to opt out and join a different religion, one that gives answers about the world and about your own identity that exist outside of what other people think about you. In my experience, the most powerful part of becoming a Christian is learning that my identity comes God. I don’t have to impress anyone. I have value beyond my place in society. God loves me and died for me on the cross.

The flip side is that He decides what is right and wrong, not me. I don’t have all the answers. No Christian does. Those answers have been handed down to us for thousands of years. The choice that everyone is given in this life is to either believe in an objective Truth or go searching for a subjective one.

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

- John 18:33-34 

Just because you don’t believe in Good and Evil doesn’t mean those things don’t exist. That’s what Isaiah was trying to tell his people all those years ago. There is objectively good and bad fruit in this world. Go to a supermarket if you don’t believe me. No one is going to plant a vineyard and live with bad fruit forever. It may seem cruel to the vines to tear them out of the ground. But they were created for a reason.

Isaiah 4

The Book of Isaiah is set during an apocalyptic invasion of Judah, the southern of the two Jewish kingdoms in the ancient Middle East. Israel, the northern kingdom, had already been conquered by Assyria and its seemingly invincible military. Now the Assyrian army was marching towards Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, and threatening to do the same thing. Isaiah and the people of Judah were left to grapple with the spiritual implications of their military defeats. Why had God abandoned them?

Isaiah had an ugly answer: God turned away from His people because they turned away from Him. He lead the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt hundreds of years before and gave them land in Canaan (modern-day Israel) for two interconnected reasons:

1. To create a godly kingdom that spread the love of God to the rest of the world. 

2. To punish the previous inhabitants of Canaan for their crimes against their neighbors and God.

But God’s people did not live up to their end of the bargain. By Isaiah’s time, they had split into two warring kingdoms that were just as evil as their neighbors. Now, as a punishment, the same things they had done to the Canaanites were being done to them by the Assyrians.

It could not have been an easy message to deliver. The Assyrians were known for the savage way they treated their enemies. The people of Israel had been massacred and their survivors resettled hundreds of miles across the desert. It would have been easy for the people of Judah to conclude that God was harsh and uncaring. They would have had many of the same questions that modern audiences have about a God who consigns people to Hell.

Isaiah had to make a key distinction. Just because God judges people doesn’t mean that He enjoys doing it. Judgment is not an end in and of itself. There is a greater purpose behind it. God wanted to bless the Jewish people, not punish them. Isaiah made that point over and over again.

The Book of Isaiah is still hopeful despite the tragedy surrounding it. Isaiah never lost his faith. He believed in the goodness of God, and always balanced the good with the bad in his writing. In the same breathe that he warned about the coming judgment of God, he also pointed past it to the day when his people would be restored to fellowship with their Creator:

In that day the branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors of Israel. Those who are left in Zion, who remain in Jerusalem, will be called holy, all who are recorded among the living in Jerusalem. The Lord will wash away the filth of the women of Zion; he will cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire.

Then the Lord will create over all of Mount Zion and over those who assemble there a cloud of smoke by day and a glow of flaming fire by night; over everything the glory will be a canopy. It will be a shelter and shade from the heat of the day, and a refuge and hiding place from the storm and the rain.

- Isaiah 4:2-6 

For Isaiah, any understanding of God started with what He had done in the past. After all, God had shown his goodness to the Jewish people many times before. When Isaiah talks about a cloud of smoke that will cover Israel like a canopy, he is referencing a story from their exodus from Egypt:

By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way any by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.

- Exodus 13:21-22 

The exodus was a migration of hundreds of thousands across an inhospitable desert. People of all ages made the journey. It wasn’t just military-aged men. It was the very old and the very young, along with pregnant and nursing mothers. The Jews should not have been able to make it to the Promised Land, much less have the strength to conquer when they did. The only reason they survived is because God literally guided them along the way.

This is where the Old Testament loses modern readers. A pillar of smoke and fire sounds more like science fiction than history.

But we believe far more insane things about the world than that. The latest research on string theory and the multiverse is wilder than anything you will read in the Bible. There are many scientists who believe that we are living in a computer-generated simulation, which begs the obvious questions of who is running the simulation and whether they left us any guidance for how they want us to live in the world they created.

Humans pretend that we understand the universe because we have invented a few gadgets when we really don’t have much of a grasp on the true nature of reality. Maybe that will change if scientists discover the elusive Theory of Everything. Or maybe that answer will just create a hundred more questions.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

- 1 Corinthians 13:12 

Here is one thing we do know. The survival of the Jewish people was not guaranteed when Isaiah was preaching. It was a miracle they survived the Assyrian invasion, much less that they are still around thousands of years later. But Isaiah never doubted they would, even when all the evidence pointed to their impending doom.

Isaiah didn't just believe in God. He believed that He was good. That is the biggest problem most people have with faith.

It can be hard to reconcile God's judgment with His mercy. There is so much evil and suffering in the world. It is hard enough to get through life in one piece without having to worry about being judged at the end by a God who created our cruel and seemingly arbitrary existence in the first place. 

That conflict is the underlying premise of the TV show The Good Place. In season 3, the characters realize that no human being has made it to “the good place” (aka heaven) in over 500 years because the interconnected nature of modern life makes it impossible for the good we do to outweigh the bad. None of the characters are Christians. If they were, they wouldn’t be shocked to learn that we are all sinners living in a fallen world:



There is a lot of truth to the point that Michael (played by Ten Danson) makes. It is impossible for any of us to earn our own salvation. That is why God made another way.

There are hints sprinkled throughout the Book of Isaiah, which was written 700 years before the birth of Jesus, about what was to come. God, not Man, would earn salvation for all:

The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him.

- Isaiah 59:18-19

God came down to the world that He created and assumed human form so that He could live the sinless life that none of us could. He then sacrificed His life so that He could pay the punishment for our sins.

That is the beauty of the gospel. We don’t have to be like the people on The Good Place, endlessly striving for a perfect life forever outside of our grasp. We don’t have to rack up a bunch of points to be saved. We just have to trust someone else to do it for us.

It's far easier for us to accept this message than for the people in Isaiah's time. They didn't know what was coming. All they had were hints. They just had to trust that God was ultimately working for their good even when they couldn't understand how. We, on the other hand, are living on the other side of the most important event in human history. Jesus already came. He already died, and already rose again. To paraphrase Jay-Z, he's already home.

God has reached out His hand to save us. We just have to take it. Mercy triumphed over judgment at the cross. That is the hope that we have to hold onto no matter what happens to us in this life.

Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people; praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

- Psalm 30:4-5

Isaiah 3

The Book of Isaiah tells the story of the beginning of the end of ancient Israel. It is set between 742-688 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the northern Jewish kingdom and came this close to destroying the Jewish people entirely. Things went from bad to worse over the next century. The Babylonians finished the job in 597 BC, conquering the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah, and deporting the survivors to their homeland in modern-day Iraq.

Those defeats represented an existential threat to the Jewish belief system. Warfare in the ancient Middle East was seen as a proxy for spiritual battle. Each tribe was fighting for its gods so a god who could not help his people win a war was one who could hardly be worthy of worship. If the Jewish people were fighting on behalf of the almighty Creator of the universe, why were they being defeated and killed by pagans?

Isaiah gave them an answer, one that went back to the founding texts of their religion. God was punishing them:

Jerusalem staggers, Judah is falling; their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves.

- Isaiah 3:8-9 

In Isaiah’s telling, Jewish society had not lived up to its principles. The issue wasn’t outward belief. Judah was still nominally religious. The massive temple in the heart of Jerusalem was at the heart of their cultural and political life. Jews living abroad still made pilgrimages home, and priests still made daily and annual sacrifices for the sins of the people.

The issue was that few actually believed any of it. Their customs were more about tradition than any real desire to follow and serve God. They followed the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.

The proof was in the way Jewish society functioned:

The Lord takes his place in court; he rises to judge the people. The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: “It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?”

- Isaiah 3:13-15 

Isaiah began preaching after the death of Uzziah, whose reign (782-743 BC) was a time of widespread and prosperity. A lot of money came into Jewish society, and that money corrupted the people at the top. The rich got richer and grew more powerful to the point where they were no longer accountable to everyone else. It probably didn’t look too different from modern-day America. When Isaiah curses those “who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left” (5:8) and declares that “the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants” (5:10), he sounds like Bernie Sanders.

Judah, instead of being different than its pagan neighbors, was as unjust and corrupt as everyone around them. Even worse, Jewish society was supposed to be a reflection of the character of God. They were using His name to justify the way they mistreated the less fortunate and crushed the poor under their feet. He could not allow that to continue. The answer for why their armies were being crushed despite fighting for God is that they weren't actually fighting for Him. They were fighting for themselves.

When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood!

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.

- Isaiah 1:15-17

Isaiah, like the other Old Testament prophets, warned his people about what would happen if they didn’t repent and change their ways. The relationship between God and His people wasn’t a one-way street. It was a covenant. God had promised them that He would help them defeat their enemies and establish their own kingdom -- but the price of that help was obedience. The same power that had lifted them up could just as easily bring them down.

Isaiah wasn’t saying anything that Moses hadn’t said hundreds of years before as the Jews were leaving Egypt:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.

-- Deuteronomy 30:15-18

For Isaiah, the Assyrian army marching towards Jerusalem was the representation of the warnings that Moses had given so many years ago. The Jewish people had stopped listening to God. Now they were getting a harsh lesson in the consequences.

These types of lessons are uncomfortable. The God of the Old Testament didn’t turn the other cheek. He was a God of blood and iron who marshaled armies and fought wars to the death. A lot of Christians over the years have tried to separate the actions of God in the Old Testament with the more peaceful teachings of Jesus. Marcion, an early heretic who lived between 85-160 AD, formalized the distinction, creating an edited Bible that wrote most of the Old Testament out of the picture.

The origin story of the Jewish people is fairly problematic. God had promised them a land of their own even though there were already a lot of people living there. The solution was simple, if not exactly appealing to modern sensibilities: God told the Jews to drive those inhabitants out of their land. Driving people out of their land is a harsh and ugly business. Another word for it is ethnic cleansing.

For many Americans, the founding of ancient Israel is an ugly reminder of the founding of our own country. You aren’t going to find many people these days who will defend the Trail of Tears. And they want nothing to do with a God who would tell people to kill their neighbors in His name.

The reality is more complicated. While Americans may be ashamed of what our ancestors did to the Indians, there is plenty of violence and bloodshed from our history that we can still get behind.

Look at William Sherman’s March to the Sea, which many historians believe was the beginning of the modern concept of “total warfare”. Sherman conquered and destroyed Atlanta, the economic center of the Confederacy, in 1864. From there, he marched his army almost 300 miles to the Atlantic Ocean port of Savannah, destroying everything in its path. The goal was to end the Civil War by teaching the South a harsh lesson in the consequences of rebellion. The days of the North treating them like gentlemen were over. The gloves were coming off.

“We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hand of war.”

- William Sherman 

Innocent people die all the time in war, even when the military is doing everything in its power to save lives. It can get really ugly really fast when those same troops believe they are punishing guilty people.

 
The problem is that collective punishment means punishing individual people who were completely innocent of the crimes of their countrymen. The South was fighting a war for slavery, but every person in the South wasn't a slave owner. Did some poor 10-year old boy in rural Georgia deserve to die because of the decisions of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee? War always comes with ugly consequences. Yet the vast majority of Americans would agree that the deaths of the people who stood in the way of Sherman’s March to the Sea were for the greater good.

The firebombing of Dresden in World War II is another example. Dresden was a major German city that the Allied armies burned to the ground in 1945. Over the course of a few days, more than 1,000 U.S. and British bombers dropped more than 2,000 tons of incendiaries on Dresden. The destruction was so total that there is no real way to estimate the dead. Historians have pegged the number at somewhere between 25,000-135,000.

The bombing was immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war in Dresden, wrote about what he saw in the aftermath:

Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire-storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. 

It's hard to believe that all of those people deserved to die for the crimes of Adolf Hitler. Yet few modern Americans would call World War II, and all that we had to do to win such a titanic conflict, unjust.

The same logic applies in the days of the Old Testament. The Canaanites whom the Jews drove out of the Promised Land didn’t have clean hands. Their most shocking crime was the worship of Molech, a bull-shaped idol with a massive furnace in its chest. They placed their own children in its hands and burned them alive in order to gain the favor of their god.

This was not just propaganda. Historians have found a lot of extra-Biblical evidence for the worship of Molech:

Oxford Professor John Day wrote that “We have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria-Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey.”

If they were willing to do that to their own kids to earn the favor of Molech, imagine what they were doing to people who weren’t related to them!

It wasn’t that God gave the Jews land of their own because he didn’t care about the people already living there. They were an instrument that He was using to punish the Canaanites for their crimes.

The same thing was happening again hundreds of years later, except the shoe was on the other foot. Now it was the Jews who had sinned against God, forcing him to raise up another people (the Assyrians) to strip them of their land. The God of the Old Testament was harsh, but He was also fair.

The most important thing for modern readers to remember is that there is a massive difference between the way God acted in BC and the way that He acts in AD. Something vitally important happened in between that split human history in half, changing not only the way that God related to His people, but all of mankind. Over the course of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet reveals how that process will occur.

Isaiah 2

The Book of Isaiah is set in the shadow of a looming apocalypse. The Assyrians had conquered Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms, in 721 B.C., and looked set to conquer Judah twenty years later. The impact of those defeats on the Jewish psyche was huge. If their God really was the Creator of the Universe, why were His people always losing to the followers of other gods?

The Assyrians worshiped Ashur, who started as the local god of their capital city of Assur and seemed to grow more powerful as his followers conquered all of their neighbors. The kings of Assyria traditionally wrote reports back to Ashur after their military campaigns ended. If Yahweh was more powerful than Ashur, why could He not defeat him?

Military conflicts in the ancient Middle East had spiritual undertones. Conquered people usually worshipped the gods of those who conquered them. After all, what was the point of worshiping their gods if they had fought for those gods and lost? The people of Judah could already see this happening to their relatives in Israel, who began worshiping Ashur after their defeat and were eventually assimilated into the greater Assyrian Empire. The same thing would have happened if Judah had been conquered.

With the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people around the corner, the prophecy that Isaiah makes in Chapter 2 must have seemed ridiculous:

In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

Isaiah 2:2-3

Just imagine what the Assyrians would have thought if they had heard that. Your God will be exalted above all the nations? People from every tribe will come to worship Him? Then how come we are about to conquer you and erase his name from history?

This is the message that Sennacherib, the King of Assyria, sent to Hezekiah, the king of Judah, when his armies were massed outside of Jerusalem:

“Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of Assyria.’ Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely.

And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them -- the gods of Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? Where is the king of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah?”

Isaiah 37:10-13

It would have been hard to argue Sennacherib in that moment. The Assyrians had conquered a lot of nations, and heard a lot of nonsense about how those gods would stop them. They had even conquered a Jewish kingdom! Surely, the people of Judah didn’t think things would end any differently. What made their god so different than any of the other gods that Sennacherib had already destroyed and sent back to the temples of Assur as tribute?

Here is one thing we can know for sure. If Sennacherib had conquered Jerusalem in 701 B.C., no one would be talking about the Book of Isaiah almost 3,000 years later.

In What If?, an anthology book where leading military historians speculate about the paths that human history could have taken, William H. McNeill imagines a world where Sennacherib conquered Jerusalem:

This may be an odd thing to say about an engagement that never took place; yet Jerusalem’s preservation from attack by Sennacherib’s army shaped the subsequent history of the world far more profoundly than any other military action I know of.

None of [modern history] could have come to pass if the kingdom of Judah had disappeared in 701 B.C. as the kingdom of Israel had done a mere twenty-one years earlier in 722 B.C. On that occasion, the exiles from Israel soon lost their separate identity. By accepting common sense views about the limits of divine power, they abandoned the worship of Yahweh, who had failed to protect them, and became the “Ten Lost Tribes” of biblical history. In all probability, the people of Judah would have met the same fate if the Assyrian army had attacked and captured Jerusalem in 701 B.C. and treated its inhabitants as they had treated those of Samaria and other conquered places before. If so, Judaism would have disappeared from the face of the earth and the two daughter religions of Christianity and Islam could not possibly have come into existence. In short, our world would be profoundly different in ways we cannot really imagine. 

The odds of Judah surviving the Assyrian invasion were minuscule. They were a tiny country down to its capital city facing the greatest military machine the world had ever known.

So how did they do it? No one really knows. Here's what Isaiah says:

Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning -- there were all dead bodies! So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew.

- Isaiah 37:36-37

We know that something happened to the Assyrian army. Archeologists have found a series of monuments that Sennacherib built near the end of his reign to commemorate his military victories. Jerusalem is on a list of all of the cities that he besieged, but it is the only one of those cities that isn't also on a list of the ones that he conquered. Many historians, including McNeill, believe that a plague devastated his army as they were camped out Jerusalem. That explanation is more satisfying to a secular audience, but wouldn't a plague be the perfect way for an angel of the Lord to kill people?

It would be an awfully big coincidence otherwise. Maybe Hezekiah, Isaiah, and the people of Judah just got lucky. Maybe the course of world history was completely changed for no reason other than blind chance.

Or maybe the plague was a miracle. And maybe there is something (or someone) guiding the course of world history.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Barack Obama loved to quote this saying when he was President. If it's true, the question isn't whether or not the moral arc of the universe bends, or what direction that bend might take. It’s why there is a moral arc in the first place. MLK was a preacher. His confidence didn't come out of belief in the goodness of man. It came from something else entirely.

Isaiah prophesied a lot more than just the Assyrian withdrawal from Jerusalem. He also talked about a coming Messiah who would reshape the Jewish religion and spread the worship of their God to the rest of mankind:

And now the Lord says -- he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength -- he says: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

- Isaiah 49:6

Now imagine if Sennacherib had heard that prophecy when his armies were outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Here's one more Biblical prophecy that would have sounded insane at the time it was made. This one is from Jesus in the days before of his crucifixion:

 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

- Luke 21:33

Jesus was killed by an empire (Rome) who made the Assyrians look like amateurs. The Romans lasted much longer than any of their imperial predecessors. Rome was sacked more than 400 years after the crucifixion, and New Rome (Byzantium) wasn't conquered for another 1,000 years after that. But even that prolonged lifespan wasn't enough to outlast the words of an obscure preacher who died in a backwater province with only a few followers to his name.

There are a million possible explanations as to why all these different prophecies came true. Here's the simplest. The reason that Isaiah could accurately predict what would happen thousands of years after his death is because he really was relaying the word of God.

The best way to know the future is to study the past. If two people in 2019 predict two vastly different futures in 2029, it would be hard for us to know who is right. The most helpful thing we could do is see what they said in 2009 about what would happen in 2019. If someone has been right before, there is reason to believe they will be right again.

"Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods."

- Isaiah 41:22

"This is what the Lord says -- Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.

Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people, and what is yet to come -- yes, let them foretell what will come.

Do not tremble, do not be afraid. Did I not proclaim this and foretell it long ago? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one."

- Isaiah 44:6-8

Believing in the God of the Bible isn’t just about blind faith. The proof is right there if you look for it.

Isaiah 1

The Book of Isaiah opens with a dateline:

The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.  

- Isaiah 1:1 

Isaiah received his initial call from God (Isaiah 6:1-13) in 742 B.C., the year Uzziah died. He spent the rest of his life prophesying and preaching in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, the southern of the two Jewish kingdoms. His ministry ended soon after the death of Hezekiah, Uzziah’s great-grandson, in 688 B.C. The New Testament mentions an Old Testament prophet who was sawed in half (Hebrews 11:37), which many scholars believe is a reference to Isaiah’s death at the hands of Hezekiah’s son Manasseh.

Of course, saying that Isaiah’s ministry went from 742-688 B.C. would have meant nothing to him or his contemporaries. They were not keeping time by the life of someone born almost seven hundred years after their death. The people of Judah, like most people in the ancient Middle East, used the reign of their own kings as historical milestones.

The reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were a difficult period in their history. Judah had known peace and prosperity under Uzziah, but was slowly suffocated by the armies of Assyria in the years after his death. The Assyrians, whose homeland was located in the north of modern-day Iraq, were a fiercely militaristic people who carved out the largest empire in human history at that point in time. They were Alexander the Great and the Romans rolled into one, long before either.

Assyria’s rise was fueled by military and technological innovation. They had one of the first professional standing armies -- it wasn't a bunch of farmers going to war in between growing crops. The Assyrians had tens of thousands troops who drilled year-round and were divided into highly specialized units. They had cavalry and armed chariots in numbers that no one ever had before, as well as teams of engineers who built massive siege engines that could crack even the most fortified walls. They were also one of the first people to use iron instead of bronze in their weapons. When you imagine what these professional killers would do to smaller groups of amateurs with inferior weapons and tactics, it's easy to see how they could have swept through the ancient Middle East.

They were also masters of psychological warfare. The Assyrian armies used fear to win battles before they even happened. This inscription gives a taste of the way they ruled:

I built a pillar at the city gate and I flayed all the chief men who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up inside the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes.  

- King Ashurbipinal (668-622 B.C.)

Assyria conquered Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms, in 721 B.C., and began applying pressure along the new frontiers of their empire. Their ultimate goal was to conquer Egypt, the original superpower in the region. Any smaller nation that had the misfortune to be in their way, like Judah, was in a lot of trouble. The Assyrians forced Hezekiah to strip his palaces of gold and pay a massive tribute to them (2 Kings 18:13-16) after their conquest of Israel, and responded with overwhelming force when he stopped.

The climax of the Book of Isaiah is the seemingly unstoppable march of the Assyrian army towards Jerusalem in 701 B.C. The distance between Jerusalem and Samaria, the former capital of Israel, was only 42 miles. The Assyrians carved out a swath of death and destruction in their wake, sacking 46 Jewish cities in the process:

Why should you be beaten anymore? Why do you persist in rebellion? Your whole head is injured, your whole heart afflicted.  

From the sole of your foot to the top of your head there is no soundness -- only wounds and welts and open sores, not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with olive oil.  

Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers.  

Daughter Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city under siege.  

- Isaiah 1:5-8 

Isaiah is one of the most apocalyptic books in the Bible. It is set in a specific time and place, but uses that setting to tell a far broader story -- the evil of man, the redemption of God, and the ultimate climax of history. The Book of Revelations only fills in the blanks of the rough outline given by Isaiah.

People have always been obsessed with the apocalypse. Every generation of human history has thought the world would come to an end within their lifetime. But it was more than a theoretical exercise for Isaiah and the people of Judah. They were watching the apocalypse move ever closer toward them, as they sat uneasily behind the walls of Jerusalem.

The stakes of the war with the Assyrians could not have been higher: They burned Israel to the ground in an orgy of violence and marched the survivors hundreds of miles through the desert to resettle near the capital of Tigris.

Those survivors are known to history as the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. The Jewish people were originally organized into 12 tribes, each descended from one of the 12 sons of Jacob, one of legendary patriarchs in the Book of Genesis. When they were divided after the death of King Solomon hundreds of years before the events of the Book of Isaiah, 10 of the 12 settled in the northern kingdom of Israel, leaving only two (Judah and Benjamin) in the southern kingdom of Judah. Those 10 tribes were assimilated into the Assyrian Empire and ceased to exist in the years following their conquest. Modern-day Jews are descended from the remaining two tribes.

The Assyrian Empire was the original melting pot. They didn’t have to kill all of the Jews they conquered. The survivors forget who they were and slowly lost their identity. They worshiped Assyrian gods and inter-married over the course of enough generations that it no longer became possible to tell them apart from the average Assyrian. The 10 tribes were erased from history as if they had never existed at all.

Unless the Lord Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have become like Gomorrah.

- Isaiah 1:9

The Jewish people should not have survived the Assyrian invasion. They couldn’t field an army that would defeat the Assyrians outside the walls of Jerusalem, and even their walls offered only so much protection against a military machine that practically invented siege warfare. The Jews were to the Assyrians what the Dutch were to the Nazis in World War II.

Americans are still obsessed with the Nazis almost a century after we defeated them. Imagine how afraid of them we would be if they had gone into WWII with an almost unbroken string of military victories that stretched back hundreds of years, conquered Europe, massacred the British people and resettled the survivors into German cities, and then landed armies in North America and marched them to the outskirts of Washington D.C.

We have never had to fear military conquest. But there may be a different kind of Judgment Day in our future. When Al Gore talks about the threat of global warming and how we need to fundamentally change the structure of our society to survive, he is putting a modern spin on what Isaiah was saying 28 centuries earlier. (He even started growing an Old Testament beard at one point).

This is the key parallel. It’s not just that Isaiah was telling his people that their world was coming to an end. They could see that for themselves. He was also telling them that it was their fault:

Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”  

Woe to the sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the Lord; they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him.  

- Isaiah 1:2-4 

Isaiah claimed to speak for God himself, and traced his authority back to the very beginning of Jewish society, when God spoke through Moses after the exodus from Egypt. Over the next 700 years, the Jewish people had stopped listening. Now they had no choice but to pay attention.

The threat of the apocalypse has a way of focusing the mind.

Advent E-Book

I wrote one of the entries in this Advent E-book on the Song of Mary from the Book of Luke. This was put together by the good people at the Alabaster Company, and all proceeds go to Homeboy Industries, a group which re-habilitates ex-gang members.

1 Peter 3:3-4

In the first two sections of Peter’s first letter in the New Testament, he tells his readers not to get caught up in politics. Even though Christians were a persecuted minority living on the fringes of an unjust society, Peter didn’t want them to revolt. He wanted them to trust God with the big picture and focus on living like Jesus. He transitions into what that looks like in the third section of the letter:

Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. 

- 1 Peter 3:3-4 

Peter is talking to wives in this passage, but the underlying point applies to all Christians, regardless of gender. We all know we shouldn’t judge people by their appearance, yet we all do it. There’s no privilege like beauty privilege. Beautiful people get the benefit of the doubt in every aspect of life. People are just more willing to cut them slack.

The stories of Saul and David in the Old Testament illustrate the difference between external and internal beauty. The Jewish people ask God for a king, and He gives them someone who looks the part:

Kish had a son named Saul, as handsome a young man as could be found anywhere in Israel, and he was a head taller than anyone else.  

- 1 Samuel 9:2 

Tall, dark, and handsome is what we want in leaders. In a widely replicated study, people picked the winner in a political race almost 70 percent of the time just by looking at a picture of each candidate. They didn’t need to know anything else: not their names, beliefs, or even the countries they were from. More often that not, voters just go with the person who looks the best.

David would never have won a political campaign against Saul. He was the youngest of eight sons, and he spent most of his time herding sheep. He was barely part of the family. When the prophet Samuel visits his father Jessie to anoint one of his sons as the future king of Israel, no one even bothers to tell David. Samuel goes through all seven of his older brothers, all of whom are bigger and stronger than David. God doesn’t choose any of them. Samuel, who had previously anointed Saul, sees one brother and thinks he must be the one:

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”  

- 1 Samuel 16:7 

Saul, not David, should have fought Goliath. Saul was “a head taller than anyone else in Israel.” He was at least in the same weight class as the Philistine giant. But while David wasn’t nearly as big, his faith was much stronger. He knew Goliath’s size didn’t actually matter. All he needed was a slingshot and faith. It was like the ending of A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker turns off the targeting machine and trusts The Force to aim the missiles that destroy the Death Star. That is the type of faith that God wants in a king.



The Jewish people couldn’t see any of that. They couldn’t look inside David’s soul. All they could see was a scrawny teenager who looked ridiculous in Saul’s armor. Humans can only see with our eyes. There is no one like Professor X from the X-Men in real life. We can’t read each other’s minds. None of us can know anyone, not even our closest friends and family members, as well as God does. Humans judge appearance. God judges the heart.

That’s what Peter is getting at in this passage. Human judgment isn’t as important as divine judgment. So instead of focusing on your outward appearances and how you appear to other people, worry more about your heart and how you appear to God. The former is all for nothing, anyways. It doesn’t last. No one stays young forever, and no one is beautiful in their old age.

Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.

- Proverbs 31:30 

Building your identity on how you appear to other people is throwing away good money after bad. It’s a never ending pit that has no bottom. That’s especially true in the era of social media, where a persona that takes years to build can be thrown away in a moment. It’s all just a front. None of it means anything. Saul seemed like the baddest dude in Israel, but he was really a coward at heart. 

American society is built entirely on image and superficial qualities. We look to actors for wisdom when their job is pretending to be something they are not. John Wayne was a war hero in movies and a draft dodger in real life. It’s the same with the news. We are informed about the world by people whose only job requirement is projecting a good image of themselves on a TV screen. Most don’t know anything beyond what is on their cue cards. These are not people we should admire or listen too.

Photo: Andrew Dallos

We can fool each other, but we can’t fool God. Humans see what we do. God sees why we do it. There are a lot of people who put on a big show of helping others because they want to seem like a good person. They aren’t doing it of the kindness of their heart. They just do it for themselves. Jesus warned us about them:

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 

- Matthew 6:1-6 

God doesn’t need us to do anything. Saul was the biggest person in Israel, but God didn’t need him to battle Goliath. If Saul wouldn’t do it, God would find someone who would. It didn’t matter who it was, or how big they were, or whether anyone else thought they had a chance. David had God on his side. And he trusted God to win the battle for him. That's what faith is.

Young writers ask me sometimes for career advice. It’s not complicated. Pray, listen to God, and trust in Him. That’s the only reason I’ve done anything with my life.