Isaiah 27

God will change the world. Not you or me. That is the hope that believers have to hold onto. 

In Chapter 27, the final section of the “Isaiah Apocalypse”, where the prophet outlines his vision of the end times, we see what the world looks like after the judgment of God. 

Isaiah returns to the analogy of the vineyard. In Chapter 5, God creates a vineyard (Israel in the Old Testament) that is corrupted by the world around it so he decides to tear it down and start over. His new vineyard (the Christian church in the New Testament) will be different. It will change the world instead to the world changing it: 

“I, the Lord, watch over the vineyard; I water it continually. I guard it day and night so that no one may harm it. I am not angry. If only there were briers and thorns confronting me! 

I would march agains them in battle; I would set them all on fire. Or else let them come to me for refuge; let them make peace with me, yes, let them make peace with me."

In days to come Jacob will take root, Israel will bud and blossom and fill all the world with fruit. 

— Isaiah 27:2-6 

The new vineyard will fill the world with fruit. Not because of anything that it will do. But because of what God will do for it. 

That is where Isaiah's confidence in the future comes from. There was no reason for him to have any. His people and his religion seemed doomed. 

Jesus had the same confidence. He was a no-account peasant from the middle of nowhere who was abandoned by even his closest friends at his death. The Roman Empire should have lasted a lot longer than the religion he founded. But Jesus knew something they didn’t: 

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

— Matthew 24:25 

The Romans did everything they could to stamp out Christianity. They made it illegal and killed anyone they found practicing it. They murdered Jesus and they murdered Peter and Paul, too. 

Killing Jesus should have been enough. There was no one who could fill his shoes. His inner circle wasn't made up of wealthy and important people. The 12 disciples were mostly fishermen without any formal education. They were essentially guys with associates degrees who worked blue-collar jobs. It was the first thing the Jewish religious leaders picked up on. They couldn't believe people like that could speak so well:

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. 

— Acts 4:13  

That’s the difference between Man and God. Man changes the world from the top-down. God does it from the bottom-up. He doesn’t need people from Harvard and Yale. God can empower a community college graduate just as easily.

Peter was the first leader of the Christian church after Jesus. There was nothing particularly impressive about him. He’s a rash and impulsive character throughout the Gospels, constantly second-guessing Jesus and rarely grasping the meaning of his lessons. 

After spending three years together, Jesus gives Peter a series of tests on the eve of the crucifixion. He asks Peter to pray for him, and Peter falls asleep instead. When the Roman soldiers arrest Jesus, Peter chops off one of their ears, going against every single thing that Jesus had taught him about non-violence. He even tells Peter beforehand that he will deny him three times. Peter scoffs at the warning and then does it anyway.

He's not someone who should have been able to lead and grow a religion. Yet Jesus still trusted him with that authority. 

The whole point of being a Christian is that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done or even what kind of abilities that you have. God can still use you in miraculous ways beyond what you could do on your own. He actually enjoys doing it that way. 

God doesn’t want people who don't need Him to succeed because then He wouldn't get the credit for their accomplishments. No Christian does anything without God. That is the first lesson you learn when you start walking with Him. That's what this classic hymn is getting at:

I will not boast in anything; no gifts, no power, no wisdom /

But I will boast in Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection.

-- How Deep The Father's Love

No early Christian leader understood this more than Paul. He was the opposite of Peter and the disciples in every way. Paul wasn't a nobody in Jewish society. He was born into the 1% and advanced even further up the ranks on the strength of his intellectual brilliance and religious zealousness, the two things their culture valued the most:

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.

-- Philippians 3:4-7

Paul turned his back on everything his society said was important to follow God. He was in line to become the ancient Jewish version of a Supreme Court justice. That's what he's getting at when he talks about all the reasons that he has for "confidence in the flesh" [i.e himself]. He had checked every box and was climbing all the most important ladders. Think of him like a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law who had clerked in the Supreme Court and was now a federal judge. Then he threw it all away to become a Christian. 

He went from persecuting the early Christians to being persecuted. He went from a religious scholar to a tentmaker, traveling from town to town and selling his goods in the market like his fellow believers, none of whom had his education.

History proved him right. Paul became one of the most influential thinkers in human history. His words have lived forever. But here's the important part. Peter is one of the most influential thinkers, too. He has his own letters in the Bible that people still pour over thousands of years later. And he didn't have 1% of Paul's natural ability or education. 

The world tells you need to check all these boxes to accomplish anything in your life. You need to go to this college. You need to know these people. You need to have this kind of career. God says you don’t need to do anything other than love Him. You don't have to be "special" in any way. He will do all the work. The pressure isn't on any Christian to do anything. Ask for help and help will be given. 

That certainly applies in my life. I had nothing going on before I was a Christian. I was broke, alone, and marginally employed. The only thing that separates me from a lot of folks on Basketball Twitter is that I asked God for help in my career. It really is that simple.

That's why the best thing that can happen to you in your life is to bottom out. Because that's when you realize that you can't get out of that hole without help from God. There are a lot of people in this world who don't ever need God. They were born on third base. They have everything figured out. That's what Jesus means when he says it's hard for a rich man to make it to heaven. They are doing just fine on their own. 

But that wasn't my story. It's probably not yours, either. The world wrote me off. I am where I am today because I wrote the world off and turned to God. It's the best decision you can make with your life. The only thing that it will cost you is your pride. 

Becoming a Christian is the opposite of selling your soul to the devil. You don't get to name your price. God isn't a genie. But He can do things for you far beyond your wildest dreams. You never know what will happen when you ask.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!"

-- Matthew 7:7-11

Here are two facts that even non-believers can agree. Christianity changed the world even though Christians aren't the most impressive people in the world. It's what Isaiah promised all those years ago. And there are even more promises still ahead of us.

Isaiah 26

God will save us. That is the message that Isaiah returns to over and over again. It could not have been easy to believe.

Even though the Book of Isaiah is one of the longest (66 chapters) in the Bible, we don’t know that much about his life. It doesn’t say what he was doing before he became a prophet, or what he wanted to be. He mentions that he has a wife and two kids, but doesn’t talk about them much.

Here’s what we can assume. Isaiah probably didn’t want to spend almost 60 years telling people things they didn’t want to hear, and publicly humiliating himself to get his message across only to be ignored.

With me, it’s not just bars and music /
I walk with God. I got the scars to prove it.  

-- Mase 

But Isaiah never lost his faith, no matter how bad things got. He waited for God to move and trusted Him with the outcome:

You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.  

— Isaiah 26:3-4 

Isaiah wasn’t speaking from a place of privilege. Things never really got better for him. He didn’t retire in comfort. He was executed at the very end of his life by a new king (Manasseh) who feared what he would say.

So how could he remain peaceful in spite of all his pain and suffering? How could he still trust in God when his faith was not rewarded?

The key was that he kept his focus on the big picture. He knew what was happening in the world was bigger than him. And that it was not the whole story:

But your dead will live, Lord; their bodies will rise — let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy — your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead. 

— Isaiah 26:19 

You don’t have to be religious to see that nothing we do on this world will last. The sun will go supernova one day and wipe away any trace of the Earth. And we will all be forgotten long before that happens.

The question is what you will do with that knowledge. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animals are sentient beings who are ruled unjustly by human farmers and begin to conspire to overthrow their masters. One key step for the conspirators is getting rid of Moses, a raven who works for the humans to keep the animals in chains:

“He claimed to know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges.  

The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place.” 

This is a fairly obvious reference to the role of religion in society, which Karl Marx called “the opiate of the masses”. The idea being that it's only when people are freed from the comforting lies of what happens to them after death that they fight to improve their lives on Earth.

But the point of the book is that the conspirators, a group of pigs who represent the Communists in Soviet Russia, are pushing their own set of lies. There will be no freedom or equality after the revolution. The animals would just be exchanging one set of masters for another.

At the end of The Communist Manifesto, Marx promises that a class-less society where the state withers away will spontaneously emerge after the worldwide communist revolution. Does that seem any less plausible than Sugarcandy Mountain?

Maybe the causality is reversed. Maybe all the pain and suffering in this world is only a brief interval before before our glorious future where we are restored to a relationship with God. Maybe weeping stays for the night but joy comes in the morning. Maybe the people who are trying to sell the idea of heaven on earth are the ones pushing the lie, distracting you from your real purpose in this world and raising your hopes on a dream that will never come.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe the only hope we have is that man can be perfected and that we can all do our small part to create a more perfect society on Earth. What do you think becomes of a person who believes that, and puts their hope in other people? Is that faith ever rewarded?

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, an existential philosopher, tried to make sense of a world without God or any hope in the afterlife. He saw man as Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology who was doomed to push a boulder all they way to the top of the mountain, only to see it roll back down. And this same process happens over and over again for all of time.

This is what he concludes:

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up.  

The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days.  

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.  

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

For Camus, life is an absurd struggle with no happy ending. But one must find joy and hope in the struggle, in working to make the world a better place, even if it's for nothing. Essentially, happiness is found in the journey, not the destination.

I thought this was pretty dope when I was in college. But I can see how insane it is now. This is the best the world has to offer you. You are going to be a miserable wretch toiling for no reason with no chance to meaningfully change your fate ... and they expect you to be happy about it! 

Has that line of thought worked for anyone? Has walking away from God and embracing that philosophy made people happy and content? 

Isaiah knew where his hope came from. That’s why he never let the political turmoil in his lifetime bring him down. That’s why he was able to maintain perfect peace inspire of persecution. The world couldn’t touch him because he didn’t belong to it. He knew where he was going and that this was all going away one day.

Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed by. 

-- Isaiah 26:20

Isaiah 25

The day of the Lord isn’t all bad news. God will judge the world. But He will also redeem it.

Isaiah describes the great banquet that will come after Judgment Day, a scene repeated at the end of the Book of Revelations (19:7-10):

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine — the best of meats and the finest of wines.  

On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; He will swallow up death forever.  

The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will removes his people’s disgrace from all the earth.  

— Isaiah 25:6-8 

An important distinction has been removed. The banquet is not just for “his people”. It is for “all people”.

All of mankind would one day worship the God of the Jews. It would have seemed like an outrageous claim at the time. Isaiah’s ministry occurred during one of the darkest times in Jewish history. There was one point when all that was left was a small remnant trapped in Jerusalem by one of the most powerful militaries in human history. It was over. The Assyrians would wipe them from the face of the Earth as if they had never existed, like they did too so many of their neighbors. How would their God be worshipped by everyone on Earth when there would soon be no one left who had even heard of Him?

Then a miracle happened. God saved His people and religion by destroying the Assyrian army in one night. Isaiah claims it was an “angel of the Lord” while historians say it must have been a plague. Either way, the result was the same.

But the people of Jerusalem didn't do anything to make that happen. God did. It would be the same on Judgment Day:

In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”  

— Isaiah 25:9 

It makes more sense in hindsight. Isaiah anticipated Christian theology in ways no one in his time saw. Just as God saved His people outside the walls of Jerusalem in 701 BC, Jesus would save all of mankind on the cross.

None of us did anything to deserve his mercy. It was the opposite. We deserved the punishment that he received:

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.  

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.  

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed by our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. [emphasis added]  

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us had turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.  

— Isaiah 53:3-6 

This passage (which describes someone called the “Suffering Servant”) was written 700 years before Jesus. And yet it reads like it could have been written 700 years after. The way that so many of his actions were predicted ahead of time is one of the most powerful arguments for why he is who he says he was.

Christianity starts with the sacrifice that he made. That is the foundation of our identity. We remember that we were saved by Jesus not because of what we did but because of who he is. Our value as human beings comes from the price that he paid for us. And we know where we are going after we die because of it.

The goal of Christian practice is to fully internalize this idea and live by its implications. Here are 7 principles of Christian life that we can take from our knowledge about the banquet in heaven:

1. Our distinctions in this world do not matter. It doesn’t matter how much (or how little) money you have made. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living. It doesn’t matter who your people are: "There is neither new Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is their male and female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28-29) The only distinction that matters is whether or not you will be at this banquet. 

2. Our actions do not get us there. No one gets there because they are a good person. The only way to get there is if Jesus pays for you to be there. It’s his party. We are just guests. 

3. We have to be thankful for getting in. Jesus paid the ultimate price to get us a spot at the table. So no matter what happens to you in this world, there is still plenty to be thankful for. What happens in this world ultimately does not matter: "For everything in this world — the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life — comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever." (1 John 2:17-18)  

4. We do not need to serve ourselves in our time on Earth. There is no need to strive after personal goals. We have already been given the ultimate prize. So we can turn our focus to other people. We can help them and bless them. And that has more value than trying to bless ourselves. 

5. The most important thing we can do other people is to help them get in. What good is it to gain the world but lose your soul? (Mark 8:36) If you are helping someone without telling them about the banquet, then you aren’t really helping them.

6. The people who aren’t invited will be mad. No one likes not being on the VIP list. Even if it’s their own fault for not being on it. Jesus warned his disciples about that: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.’” (John 15:18-20) 

7. The way you live your life will attract people. If your identity is built on a rock, then nothing the world can do will chip it away. The world is a dark place. Life is hard. We all need hope. We all need faith. Most people don't have either. They know everything they are doing is for nothing. Their best case scenario is that life is meaningless and that they won't exist after they die. We can offer them something better. We can live our lives secure in the knowledge of where we are going. They might test us to see if we really believe it. But eventually they will want that hope for themselves.  

Christians are like people making a long drive to a five-star banquet. The snacks we get along the way do not matter. Nor does it matter if someone else is eating better ones. There is a whole different level of food where we are going. We just have to tell people that they are invited, too. What they do with that information is up to them. 

Isaiah 24

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

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

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

- Isaiah 24:5-6 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Immortal Technique

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

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

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

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

-- Isaiah 24:1-2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- James 1:19-21

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

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

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

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

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

-- Matthew 28:18-20

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

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

Isaiah 23

The world that Isaiah lived in wasn't that different from our own. His homeland of Judah was part of an integrated international economy that stretched across thousands of miles. There was a lot more going on in 700 BC than peasants herding sheep and exchanging metal trinkets. 

Jerusalem was a hundred miles down the road from the financial capital of the ancient world. Tyre, a fabulously wealthy port city in modern-day Lebanon, was the New York City of its day:

Be silent, you people of the island and you merchants of Sidon, whom the seafarers have enriched. 

On the great waters come the grain of the Shihor; the harvest of the Nile was the revenue of Tyre, and she became the marketplace of the nations.  

 - Isaiah 23:2-3

Tyre was a Phoenician city. Their ancestors practically invented sailing, sending explorers to Britain and all the way around the coast of Africa on wooden boats. They planted colonies everywhere they went and maintained close connections with all of them. The result was a giant web of trading posts that generated huge sums of money: 

The city even had its own version of Manhattan. The commercial center was located on an island off the coast while its less prosperous suburbs were on the mainland. That combination of money and geographic isolation made Tyre a safe harbor in a dangerous part of the world. 

There would come a point in the rise of every powerful new king in the region when he would demand submission from Tyre. He would march his army to the coast and put the city under siege, but there was never a way to cross the strait. Eventually the Tyrians would write him a check to go away. This process repeated over and over for hundreds of years.

The Assyrians besieged Tyre four different times in 80 years without conquering it. It was the only city to hold out against King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, one of the most powerful kings in human history. Empires rose and fell around them while they just grew richer and richer. They had the same attitude about their neighbors that Jay-Z had about young rappers:

They come, they go, some real, some faux /

Some friends, some hoes /

But, no, I goes nowhere, this Hov.

The Tyrians thought that having more money than God made them invincible. Isaiah was there to tell them otherwise:

Who planned this against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, whose merchants are princes, whose traders are renowned in the earth? 

The Lord Almighty planned it, to bring low the pride of all glory and to humble all who are renowned on the earth.  

- Isaiah 23:8-9 

The section in the Book of Isaiah with prophecies against other countries begins with Babylon in Chapter 13 and ends with Tyre in Chapter 23. The former represented the military strength of the world. The latter the commercial. Both stood in opposition to God. So both would fall.

God works on a different time frame than man. The New Testament says that for Him a thousand years is like a day (2 Peter 3:8) and man is a mist that appears for a little while and vanishes (James 4:14). What happens in our lives is a small portion of a much bigger picture. We are trees that cannot grasp the size of the forest we are apart of.

Money is a perfect example. People spend their whole lives accumulating it for one purpose only for it to be used for the exact opposite after they die:

I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.  

So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.  

-- Ecclesiastes 2:18-21

Henry Ford made about $200 billion (when adjusted for inflation) as the founder of Ford Motor Company, the inventor of the assembly line, and the man who popularized the car. His politics were way to the right of just about anyone in the U.S. today. Ford was so anti-Semitic that he got a shout-out in Mein Kampf and received a medal from the German government in 1938.

He created the Ford Foundation in 1936 as a place to park his money, get around the estate tax, and ensure that his family would retain control of his company. But it didn’t take long for the Foundation to be taken over by his ideological enemies and become one of the most influential left-wing political organizations in American life. Henry Ford II, his grandson, resigned from its board in 1976 because he disagreed with what it had been doing:

Henry Ford 2d resigned as a trustee of the Ford Foundation yesterday, complaining that the philanthropic agency was spreading itself too thin, was cultivating a “fortress mentality” and had staff that often failed to appreciate the capitalist system that provided the money the foundation gave away. [emphasis added] 

There's no way for any of us to know how "our" money will be used in the future. It has a mind of its own. As a great thinker once said, money doesn’t have owners, only spenders. 

Our society worships money and thinks that accumulating large sums of it will give us security. We spend our lives trying to create a nest egg to make sure that our kids and grandkids will be OK after we are gone. But having money doesn't actually solve your problems. It usually just creates more. If you want your kids to have the same view of the world as you do, the last thing you want to do is give them large sums of money. Someone who grew up with money is guaranteed to have a much different perspective on life than someone who didn't. 

Being given money is no substitute for love, affection, and the knowledge of God. If you don't believe me, go meet some rich kids. A lot of them were given money by parents too busy working to spend much time with them. That dynamic rarely works out well. 

Money isn't even real. It's a symbolic object that we have all collectively decided is important. A bar of gold has little intrinsic value beyond being a paperweight. A series of 1s and 0s on a computer screen has even less. It's created out of thin air by a keystroke at the Federal Reserve. We can all wake up tomorrow and decide that we don't care about it. This is called "the breakdown of society." It happens far more often than we care to admit. 

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

-- Matthew 6:19-21

The people of Tyre found that out the hard way. They spent hundreds of years thinking that life was all good, that their money would buy them out of any tough situation they found themselves in. Then, one day, it didn't. 

A new king at the head of a mighty army emerged in 336 BC. Alexander the Great had already conquered most of the known world when he came to Tyre in 332 BC and asked to make a sacrifice in their main temple on the island. They blew him off and told him he could use the one on the coast, feeling safe and secure in their ocean fortress.

He didn’t take no for an answer. Alexander tore down the coastal suburbs and used the stones to build a bridge out to the island and march his army across it. He turned their wealth against them and made it the engine of their destruction:

Alexander then stormed the walls, burned Tyre to the ground, and sold its citizens into slavery. It was a horrifying end for a people who thought they would rule the world forever. Isaiah’s prophecies had been fulfilled.

It was essentially the scene from The Dark Knight Rises when the money man behind Bane's revolution realizes that Bane has been using him. He got used to yelling at people worth less money than him. But Bane didn't care about money. It had no power over him. 

The same thing that happened to Tyre will happen to New York City one day. Having a bunch of money only makes you secure until it doesn't. Nothing lasts forever in this world. No kingdom of iron or gold. The only one that does it the kingdom of God. 

Yet her profit and her earnings will be set apart for the Lord; they will not be stored up or hoarded. Her profits will go to those who live before the Lord, for abundant food and fine clothes.  

- Isaiah 23:17

Isaiah 22

Isaiah spent his life prophesying to people who didn’t listen to him. It didn’t matter how many correct predictions that he made. He was telling the people of Jerusalem too many things they didn’t want to hear.

He warned them for years that Assyria was coming, and that Egypt couldn't protect them. Their only hope was God. But none of it got through.

Chapter 22 is a vision of what would happen in Jerusalem during the climactic Assyrian siege in 701 BC. Their army had conquered the rest of Judah. The city walls of the capital were the only thing preventing the complete destruction of the Jewish people:

What troubles you now, that you have all gone up on the roofs, you town so full of commotion, you city of tumult and revelry?  

Your slain were not killed by the sword, nor did they die in battle. All your leaders have fled together; they have been captured without using the bow. All you who were caught were taken prisoner together, having fled while the enemy was still far away.  

Therefore I said, “Turn away from me; let me weep bitterly. Do not try to console me over the destruction of my people.”  

The Lord, the Lord Almighty, has a day of tumult and trampling and terror in the Valley of Vision, a day of battering down walls and of crying out to mountains.  

- Isaiah 22:2-5 

God had raised up the Assyrian Empire to punish His people for their unjust and immoral society. The army camped outside their walls was part of the most fearsome military the world had ever seen. The invasion of Judah was the latest in a string of victories that stretched back generations. The Assyrians had already conquered the surrounding kingdoms in the region, sacking cities that were far more fortified than Jerusalem.

The people of Jerusalem had no chance of winning on their own. Yet they insisted on preparing for a long siege — emptying the armories (22:8), strengthening the walls (22:9), and building a reservoir to store water (22:11) — that could only end one way. In essence, they were choosing death rather than repenting and asking God for help:

The Lord, the Lord Almighty, called you on that day to weep and to wail, to tear out your hair and put on sackcloth. But see, there is joy and revelry, slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine! “Let us eat and drink,” you say, “for tomorrow we die!”  

- Isaiah 22:12-13 

That should have been it. Judah should have been conquered and written out of the pages of history like Moab and the rest of its neighbors.

But then God intervened in a way that still baffles historians 2,700 years later. The Assyrian army was slaughtered in a single night. Isaiah claims an angel killed them. Historians think it might have been a sudden plague. Either way, the city was saved.

You can come to your own conclusion about what happened. There's no doubt what the people at the time, who had a much different understanding of the supernatural than modern Americans, would have thought.

The result should have been a religious revival. But it didn’t take long for Judah to continue its long slide the other way. Less than 15 years after the miraculous salvation of Jerusalem, Manasseh ascended to the throne after the death of his father and had Isaiah killed. The Assyrians had lost one army, but they were still the dominant power in the region. Manasseh began encouraging his people to worship their god.

A century later, Jeremiah summed up what happened:

“Why do you bring charges against me? You have all rebelled against me,” declares the Lord. “In vain I punished your people; they did not respond to correction. Your sword has devoured your prophets like a ravenous lion.”  

- Jeremiah 2:29-30 

The same pattern is repeated over and over again in the Bible. God reveals Himself to His people and they still turn their backs to Him.

Jesus didn't just relay information. He actually performed miracles -- healing the sick, raising the dead, turning water into wine, feeding five thousand people with a few pieces of bread and fish, and many, many more. None of that stopped him from being killed.

Miracles can't change minds of people who don't want to believe in God. That is one of the points of the parable that Jesus tells about a rich man who dies and goes to hell. He sees Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, in heaven and begs him to send a warning to his family members who are still alive so that they can avoid his fate:

He answered, "Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so hat they will not also come to this place of torment." 

Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them." 

"No, father Abraham," he said, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent." 

He said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." 

-- Luke 16:27-31

Imagine that Jesus came back to Earth tomorrow and began doing exactly what he did 2,000 years ago. Would people really care about his miracles once he started telling them how they should lead their lives?

Let's take one of a million possible examples. How would modern people respond to someone claiming to be God who said that sex should only occur within marriage?

I’ll never forget having lunch with a friend from church a few months after I became a believer. He told me that he was a virgin before he was married. And he didn’t get married until he was in his late 20s! I’m looking at him like — are you really telling me that I’m not supposed to have sex until I’m married? Do you realize how insane that sounds?

It took me a long time to get my head around Christian dating. What I eventually realized is that sex is as much about identity as anything else. Modern people want to have sex largely because they don't want to think of themselves as the kind of person who doesn't have it. The whole point of being a Christian is that you have to change the way you look at the world and see that your identity comes from your relationship to God and not how other people look at you.

There are plenty of good reasons to not have sex outside of marriage. But none of them really matter. The ultimate reason is that God says not too. If that's not enough, none of the other ones will be, either.

It's the same thing with so many of God's commands. If you are going to be a follower of Jesus, you have to actually follow him. You have to accept that you don't have all the answers to life. That you aren't the ultimate judge of morality in the universe.

Most people aren't ready for that. They want to do what they want, and they don't want anyone, not even the Creator of the universe, telling them different. They would rather not believe in God than admit that He has any right to tell them what to do.

It doesn't matter whether its Jerusalem in 700 BC or 30 AD or the United States in 2020. Human nature never changes.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 

- John 3:16-19

Isaiah 21

Knowing the future isn’t as cool as it might seem. The Book of Isaiah describes his prophecies about countries as “burdens against them.” But they are also burdens on him.

Imagine someone in 1900 receiving a vision of all the terrible things that would happen in the 20th century. They would probably react like Isaiah when he sees the coming fall of Babylon:

At this my body is racked with pain, pangs seize me, like those of a woman in labor; I am staggered by what I hear, I am bewildered by what I see. My heart falters, fear makes me tremble; the twilight I longed for has become a horror to me.  

- Isaiah 21:3-4 

Isaiah has the same reaction to the fall of Moab. Just because the Babylonians and Moabites were his enemies didn’t mean they weren’t people, too. Their deaths were still a tragedy.

His burden was that he knew the future but couldn’t change it. God had called him to be a watchman along the walls of history. His job was to report accurately what he saw:

This is what the Lord says to me: “Go, post a lookout and have him report what he sees. When he sees chariots with teams of horses, riders on donkeys or riders on camels, let him be alert, fully alert.”

And the lookout shouted, “Day after day, my lord, I stand on the watchtower; every night I stay at my post.”  

- Isaiah 21:6-8 

This is the closest glimpse that we are given to how the process worked. It’s still pretty vague. When Isaiah says he spent day after day on his watchtower, does that mean he was scrolling through images in his mind for years until he came across ones with armies?

The craziest thing about his visions is how accurate they were. The way he describes the fall of Babylon is remarkably similar to what ancient historians like Herodotus said ultimately happened:

They set the tables, they spread the rugs, they eat, they drink! Get up, you officers, oil the shields!   

- Isaiah 21:5 

Babylon was conquered by the Persians in 539 BC. The great city, despite being fortified on all sides, fell without much of a fight. It stood on both sides of the Euphrates River. Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, stationed part of his army where the river went under the walls and sent the rest upstream to divert its path. King Belshazzar of Babylon was so sure that his walls would hold that he threw a great feast while this was happening, which is described in the Book of Daniel. Lowering the river was a great feat of engineering that few saw coming. Cyrus was able to sneak in troops behind his defenses, turning what had been a party (setting the tables, spreading the rugs, eating and drinking) into a rout.

There are only two ways Isaiah could have predicated that. Either he had supernatural help or he cheated. That’s why the theory of multiple Isaiahs prophesying over hundreds of years is so popular among scholars. They don’t accept supernatural explanations for events. If there really was just one Isaiah, then he must have actually been speaking to God.

There was so much time between his prophecies and fulfillment that no one man could have made them on his own. Isaiah’s ministry began in 743 BC and ended in 688. Many of the things he saw didn’t happen until long after his death — Assyria conquering Egypt in 671, Babylon conquering Assyria in 609, Persia conquering Babylon in 539. It would be like someone during the Revolutionary War predicting Watergate.

It's an amazing feat in hindsight. But it would have been very difficult to live through. Isaiah never got to see if he was right. He spent his life making prophecies that he would never see fulfilled. He was a watchman who saw so far into the future that no one had to listen.

Jewish tradition has King Manasseh killing Isaiah when he took power in 688 BC. That is the incident the Book of Hebrews is referencing when it describes an Old Testament prophet being "sawed in half." (11:37)

Manasseh would have had good reason to resent Isaiah, who had advised both his grandfather (Ahaz) and father (Hezekiah). He broke with Hezekiah, one of the more devout kings in Jewish history, and re-introduced the worship of other gods to Judah to cozy up to Assyria. The last thing Manasseh needed was one of his father’s spiritual advisers breaking with him and warning about the dire consequences for his decisions.

It would have been easy to write off Isaiah as crazy. Maybe his warnings about what would happen were accurate. Or maybe they weren't.

One of the things that makes understanding the world so difficult is that the course of history plays out over a longer period of time than a human lifetime. Events are set into motion long before we are born and play out long after our death. Take this passage about the history of the Byzantine Empire in J.M. Roberts' New Penguin History of the World:

What was less secure in the long run was the social basis of the empire. It was always going to be difficult to maintain the smallholding peasantry and prevent powerful provincial landlords from encroaching on their properties. The courts would not always protect the small man. He was, too, under economic pressure by the steady expansion of church estates. Theses forces could not easily be offset by the imperial practice of making land grants to smallholders on condition they supplied military service. But this was a problem whose dimensions were only to be revealed with the passage of centuries [emphasis added]; the short-term prospects gave the emperors of the seventh and eighth centuries quite enough to think about. 

It's only in hindsight that we can see the link between cause and effect. Something set to happen 150 years in the future never seems like a big deal in the moment. The scientists warning us about global warming are experiencing that now. It's hard to make people in 2020 care about the consequences in 2170.

Christians have a similar problem. There has been a massive decline in faith in the United States over the last century. Just check out these startling statistics from a nationwide survey by the Pew Forum in 2019:

Furthermore, the data shows a wide gap between older Americans (Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation) and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation and attendance. More than eight-in-ten members of the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945) describe themselves as Christians (84%), as do three-quarters of Baby Boomers (76%). In stark contrast, only half of Millennials (49%) describe themselves as Christians; four-in-ten are religious “nones,” and one-in-ten Millennials identify with non-Christian faiths.

That trend has only increased with Generation Z. The ever-growing number of non-religious Americans would say that is a good thing and point to the decline as a sign that history is moving in the right direction.

Only time will tell if they are right. The question is just how much time we need to get the right answer. The U.S. is still a young country without much sense of the scale of history. It's entirely possible that the consequences for these decisions won't play out for centuries. Just because a decision in 1960 looks one way in 2020 doesn't mean that it will look the same in 2120.

American Christians can warn our neighbors, but they don't have to listen. We have to get used to the idea that our warnings about walking away from God will fall on deaf ears, and that we will not be proven right until long after our death. The whole point of having faith is that it doesn't matter. We know that it always ends the same way for countries that oppose God:

Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses. And he gives back the answer: ‘Babylon has fallen, has fallen! All the images of its gods lie shattered on the ground!’  

- Isaiah 21:9