Two Journeys

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 58:10-11. The main subject of the sermon is the need for God's people to care for the needy as God does.

I constantly marvel at the providence of God as He lines out the things that I get to preach on. It’s not an accident. Today I am preaching to you from the Book of Isaiah on ministry to the poor and needy, just having returned from Haiti, the neediest country in the western hemisphere. This will be my last sermon in the Book of Isaiah until further notice. When I preach to you next, it will be from the Gospel of Matthew, God willing. What I want to do today is just preach a topical sermon from texts in the Book of Isaiah on visions of mercy ministry and ministry to the poor and needy. I want to preach it as a challenge to each one of us to give generously and to live a life of sacrificial love to others. I can’t think of a better book in the Bible to do that from than the Book of Isaiah.

For me personally, I can’t think of a better time than today, this morning, having just come back from Haiti. The scenes of poverty in that country are overwhelming and devastating. Unforgettable. It’s my third trip there, and it just keeps deepening and expanding as I have visions in my mind. There’s a portion of the capital city of Port-au-Prince called the Cité Soleil. What a strange name, the city of the sun, because it’s a dark, poor place. There are all these temporary shelters built out of cardboard or wood with rusty corrugated metal roofs. There are children barely clad that are playing in puddles of muddy water or scooping some up in plastic pitchers and bringing it back into the city to do I have no idea what with. You see piles of garbage with people walking over them and picking out things that they find of some value and bringing them back into the city.

The whole country isn’t that poor. But the sights are unforgettable; the smells, the picture of poverty sitting on that community like a 900-pound gorilla and there’s nothing that they can do. I know the political history, the instability, the corruption, the wickedness of human government and of human sinfulness. You can’t put it all on the government because there’s just sin across the board that you see there, that’s brought that country to that level. The demonic element, voodoo, satanism, and darkness are pervasive. As I come back today to preach here at First Baptist Durham, my heart is moved and stirred with hope of the sense of the power of God. I have hope that God would anoint me, that He would sear my lips with a coal taken from the altar, that He’ll forgive me of my sins of selfishness, materialism, greed, loveless-ness, a lack of faith and fear, and all kinds of other sins that have hindered me from being fully useful to God and mercy ministry.

You remember how Isaiah had a vision of Christ seated on His throne, high and exalted, and he felt immediately his own sinfulness. He said, “Woe is me. I am ruined.” I feel that way as I look at the holiness of God, as I look at the love of Jesus Christ, the way He left that glorious throne and came to minister to us. I look inside my own heart of darkness, my own limitations as a Christian, showing what I’m used to, what I’m accustomed to. I just ask the Lord to forgive me and to free me so that I can minister to others better the rest of my life. And I know He will. He came to save me from sin. I know He’s going to save this church from the same thing. I don’t know what the future holds for our country. We may need to band together, economically, as never before. This is a good time for us to discover what it means to reach out to somebody who’s needy, to help them, and to not be selfish. So I’m trusting in God for that.

There’s one particular verse that moved me. You heard Fred powerfully read Isaiah 58:10. It says, “If you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” That’s the verse that’s going to be the focal point of our meditations together today. I believe that if we do this, God will bless this church as never before. We will be a light shining in a dark place. We will be a city built up on a hill for all the people around to see. No one lights a lamp and hides it under a bowl. God has lit a lamp in this church. He intends to put it up high in this community and to the ends of the earth that we might shine for His glory and for the alleviation of suffering. We could be a blessing in this world as Christ was. You’ve already heard the verse that Eric read, 2 Corinthians 8:9. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” That’s what moves me today.

So we turn to the Book of Isaiah. I’m not going to urge that you follow along. I’m going to be moving through the book and picking out verses in which Isaiah reveals his heart for the poor and needy. You can look these verses up later. For me, this message, as I said, is like a burning coal from the altar, a coal of conviction and also of atonement, that we might be transformed by the word of God. Isaiah called on Judah and Jerusalem to deal honestly with their sinfulness, to face it head on, and so he told the truth. They were saturated in religiosity, the machinery of religion. The wheels and the gears were turning all the time in Isaiah’s day.

This is what the Lord said through the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 1:13, “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New moons, sabbaths, and convocations – I cannot bear your evil assemblies.” They did all of these religious things, but God was displeased because their hearts were far from God. He was displeased with their hypocrisy. He was displeased with their lack of compassion for the poor and needy. Through Isaiah the prophet, God called to Israel to repent. In Isaiah 1:16-17, He said, “Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” These staccato commands come from God. Seek justice, it says. That is, be certain that the weakest members of society are being fairly and justly treated.

Oh, there was a lightning bolt of conviction for me this past week! I didn’t go to Haiti to be convicted of sin. I went to Haiti to minister. I went to Haiti to give them something good, that I might be a blessing. God intended, perhaps, that, but also that I might be convicted. We were in this church in Sainte-Marie. The church was filled with people that were there for the medical clinic, consultations that the doctors were doing, and for eye glasses. We divided the people up. David Eugene, the Haitian pastor that I work with, it’s just a blessing to work with him for those that needed eyeglasses and those that wanted the medical consultation. We gave them tickets with numbers on them. Everything was just engineered and perfect. It was so orderly and I loved it.

That’s how it began, clean and orderly and neat. It didn’t stay that way. Pretty soon, there was a lot of chaos. There was a lot of moving. We had two men that we thought were trustworthy guarding the stairs up to the pulpit. Behind the pulpit was where the clinic was and the eyeglasses. There were the right stairs and the left stairs. One went up one side for the eyeglasses, and one went up the other side for the consultation. We had these guards that were guarding like the fox guards the hen house. It wasn’t long before corruption started coming in the system. They were allowing their friends and attractive young ladies and other people to get in ahead of these elderly women that were sitting and waiting patiently and could do nothing about it. It started to anger me.

I saw this man give a ticket to one of his friends and he just put it in his pocket. And I said, “You gave him a ticket.” Now, I think the only word he understood was “ticket.” He knew that and he said, “Yeah, ticket. Ticket. Yeah, tickets. I’m taking tickets.” “No, no, you gave a ticket.” He was smiling and very, “Yeah.” Like I was born yesterday and knew nothing. But I do know some things. I studied French for six years and it served some benefit there in that Creole-speaking country. I said, “Ce n’est pas juste.” It’s not just, what you’re doing. And his countenance changed. He knew what I was saying. And we were not friendly after that. I wouldn’t mind reaching out to him, but he knew that I had caught him. Actually, I was the one that was caught. Is it just that I can walk into a Walmart and buy reading glasses in about ten minutes with a credit card, when they have to wait two or three hours to get them? Is that just? These are brothers and sisters in Christ, a lot of them. Is it just that we Americans, 5% of the world population, use 23% of the world’s energy? Is that just? It’s not just, I said. It’s not just, said the Lord to me. I’ll be wrestling with it the rest of my life. I don’t have an answer to the injustices of the world. I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know this: it is unchristian not to face the question. It’s unchristian to hide from it. It’s unchristian to remember one encounter you have with a beggar, and because of what they did with the money you gave (used it on drugs or alcohol), you are now free forever from thinking about ministering to the poor and needy. He means for us, based on Isaiah, to spend ourselves on behalf of the poor and needy. That’s what He means.

It’s relentless. He means for it to overwhelm us. He means for us to go back again and again and say, “God, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s wise. I don’t know what’s best. I don’t know how to minister here in Durham. I don’t know how to minister in Haiti. I don’t know what to do, but God, please show me.” That’s what He intends. But we hide from it. We come up with clever answers that will be worthless on the day of accounting. They will not help us. The tissue-paper thin reasons we make for why we don’t have to obey the scripture on ministering to the poor and needy will not help us when we face Christ and give Him an account. They won’t help.

So, seeking justice means being certain that the weakest members of society are being fairly and justly treated. “Encourage the oppressed,” says Isaiah. Find people that are crushed as if by a yoke of slavery. Encourage them by releasing them from the crushing burden that oppresses them. Defending the cause of the fatherless means being certain that the weakest, most defenseless members of society, the orphans, have their needs met. Pleading the case of the widow means standing in the courtrooms and the halls of power and acting as an advocate for their causes, as if they were your own. That’s what He’s telling us to do.

Isaiah was fighting against the sinfulness of the human heart. He was also fighting against the corruption of wicked rulers. It’s everywhere in Haiti, and it’s all over the world. The wickedness of people who use their positions of influence for their own selfish purposes! Isaiah fought against it. In Isaiah 1:23, he says, “Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless, the widow’s case does not come before them.” Consistently, Isaiah preached against these men. They were the ones corrupting society. For example, widows, orphans, and the otherwise weak and needy were being defrauded. There were multiple blasts from Isaiah’s clear trumpet against these wicked rulers. Isaiah 3:14-15 says, “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?’ declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.”

This included unjust judges who used their positions to rob the poor and needy, to plunder the houses of widows and steal their property, to favor the rich. It included kings and princes who did the same, using their influence to do that. I’m thinking, of course, about King Ahab, who in the time of Elijah set his heart on Naboth’s vineyard and through the suggestions of his wicked wife, Queen Jezebel, orchestrated some trumped up charge against Naboth. He had him killed and then illegally confiscated his inheritance, which should have gone to his family. But he’s not the only one. This kind of thing happens again and again, and not just in Haiti. It happens in America. It happens all over the world. People use their positions of influence for themselves. Isaiah raises his trumpet to his lips and he blasts out warnings, like that in Isaiah 10:1-3. “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?”

Yet, Isaiah saw that even the financially poor and needy were themselves sinners in need of salvation. He had no romantic view of the poor and needy. They were every bit as sinful as the rich oppressors. If they could have, they would have been the rich oppressors. I’m telling you from my own heart, one of the greatest obstacles to sustaining ministry to the poor and needy are the poor and needy themselves, how they live, what they do. We expect to be thanked, to be recognized for the love that we show them, okay? We expect that they might take the money and use it wisely to build themselves up. We’re not going to see that. You know why? Because they’re as sinful as we are. That’s why. Isaiah never denied this. He never denied that the poor and needy were sinners. He addressed it fully. Isaiah 9:17 says, “Therefore the Lord will take no pleasure in the young men, nor will he pity the fatherless and the widows, for everyone is ungodly and wicked, every mouth speaks vileness. Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised.”

He knew the hearts of the poor. It’s not, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” I know that’s what Luke says. But that has to do with poverty of spirit towards God, where you become a spiritual beggar and know you need a Savior. There are plenty of poor people that are going to go to hell. And there are some rich people that will go to heaven. That’s not the issue. We need to look past the sinfulness of the people we seek to reach and say, “Yes, they’re sinful. That’s why they need a physician. That’s why they need Jesus.” Yeah, it makes it complicated, very complicated, to know how to minister to them wisely.

Even the most wretched and oppressed people still need a Savior. Amen. That’s why we want to minister to them. Because they need Jesus. Isaiah knew very plainly that the only answer to poverty is Christ, the coming King. Amen! He’s it. The coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ is the only answer. I mean the eschatological, second coming of Christ’s kingdom. I’m not saying this in the sense of the liberal theologian that saw the kingdom of Christ here in this world and had the soup kitchens and the social gospel and all that. I see it when Jesus comes back and separates the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the bad fish, deals with wickedness, and sets up His eternal kingdom. That’s when it will finally be solved, and not until then. But Christ is a Savior now. He’s a Savior today, from selfishness and sin and wickedness and all that. The vision of Christ, the coming king, is in Isaiah 11:4. “With righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.” Christ is coming to establish an eternal kingdom of righteousness, justice, and holiness. He comes to judge the oppressors, the wicked. He comes to be a refuge for the poor and needy against their oppressors, a refuge, a shelter.

It says in Isaiah 25:4-5, “You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm driving against a wall and like the heat of the desert.” Christ comes to save sinners. That’s the good news of the gospel. He comes to be a refuge for the poor and needy who know they need a refuge.

Later chapters in Isaiah speak of the vindication of the poor and needy and the humbling of the arrogant, unbelieving rich. Isaiah 26:5-6 says, “He humbles those who dwell on high, he lays the lofty city low; he levels it to the ground and casts it down to the dust. Feet trample it down – the feet of the oppressed, the footsteps of the poor.” What a vision! The wicked city of the rich is cast down by the hand of God, and then the poor trample it. Isaiah 29:19 says, “Once more the humble will rejoice in the Lord; the needy will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.” That’s the future, friends. That’s a glorious future. That’s what the Lord is going to do.

Now, Christ began His ministry, His preaching ministry, in His hometown, in Nazareth. What a moment that was. They’d heard some strange reports about Jesus, this boy they’d seen growing up in their streets. His father was Joseph and his mother was Mary. He was always a bit different. Well, never more than on that Sabbath when He got up and the scroll of Isaiah the Prophet was given to Him. He unrolled it and found the place in Isaiah 61, where these words are written: “The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those grieve in Zion.” The scroll is rolled up and Jesus sat down, saying, “Today, in your hearing, this scripture is fulfilled.”

Oh, how powerful is that! Wouldn’t you love to have been there? To feel the electricity in the place? Fulfilled. Fulfilled. Yes, fulfilled in the voice of the Messiah, the one who comes ministering by the power of the Spirit of God to lift the poor and needy out of the ash heap of history and save them eternally. That’s what He came to do. He went to the weakest and the neediest, the hungry, the dying, and the dead. He ministered to them. And the poor were the ones who received it most readily, most eagerly.

Now, you should not imagine that Jesus had no heart or compassion for the rich. There was the rich young ruler. It says very plainly that Jesus loved him. His heart went out to him. He wanted to free him from his materialism, his selfishness, and his idolatry. That’s what He wanted. He wanted to free him. Or Zacchaeus, who made a living out of defrauding people, taking way too much tax money and becoming wealthy. Zacchaeus was saved. He was transformed by the power of the word of God. He said, “Lord, here and now I give some of my possessions to minister to the poor and needy. And if, per chance, I have defrauded anyone, I give back four-fold.” I think he probably had. Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to admit it to everyone. I don’t know. But Jesus celebrated. He said, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” Then there’s Nicodemus, who certainly was wealthy. And Joseph of Arimathea, who brought seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloe to wrap up Jesus’ dead body and give Him a burial fit for a king.

Finally, they have the courage to come out and be counted when Jesus is dead. They didn’t have the courage when he was alive. But the Spirit of God, I think, moved on them and said, “You have a prophecy to fulfill.” Isaiah 53 said He was with the rich in His death. They provided the physical evidence for the resurrection by wrapping up Jesus’ body with that sticky, expensive, aromatic resin. He’s only going to be using it for three days, you know. There it would be, as physical testimony. Only the wealthy could afford that. So He has a heart of compassion for rich people. But just like with the poor, He calls on them to repent, to turn away from idolatry, to turn away from wickedness and to be used by God for the kingdom of God. That’s what He’s calling on them to do. He said it’s hard for them to listen. Very hard. In fact, without God, it’s impossible.

So this is the call of the Lord from Isaiah: spend yourself on behalf of the needy. Turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 58. This will take the rest of our time in Isaiah, this one passage. There, the Lord calls on Israel to repent of their selfishness and spend themselves on behalf of the needy.

This is the context. He’s addressing Israel’s faulty religiosity. I’ve already mentioned that. He captures their attitude powerfully. Look at Isaiah 58:1-5. “Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins. For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?’ Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” No one had the power to strip you bare like Isaiah. Powerful words.

The people seem to think that their fasting has put God in some kind of debtor’s position, that God somehow owes them something now that they’ve deprived themselves of some food for a day. “Why have we fasted,” they say, “and you have not noticed? Why are we humbling ourselves and you’re not giving us what we asked for?” As though a single day of fasting obligates God to answer from on high and do whatever they want. In the midst of their fasting, they display their wickedness, their rebellion, and their sin. Their eagerness to know God’s ways was merely a façade. They claimed to know God, but by their lives they denied Him. “They seemed eager to know my ways,” said Isaiah, “as if they were a nation that does what is right. But they’re not. They seemed eager for God to draw near. But they really don’t want me because I’m a consuming fire.”

Even the fasting itself was polluted by their sinfulness. Look at verses 3-4. “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists.” I’ve done that. No, I haven’t had the brawling, fighting thing. But I’ve fasted and gotten irritable as the day went on. Has that ever happened to you? I don’t know if you want to admit it. But it’s like, “Rawr,” snarling like a junkyard dog. Somebody just throw me a bone; I’d gnaw on it. I’m not behaving very much like Jesus. It’s hard to be with me on days like that. Oh, what a holy day to the Lord! He said, “Put oil on your head and wash your face with it. No one will know that you’re fasting.” My family has known when I’m fasting. It’s been obvious later in the day. Beating each other up, that I’ve never done.

But you notice that he zeros in on the social issue. “On the day of your fasting, you do as you please and deprive your workers of their just wages.” He zeros in on the social issue of their treatment of the poor and needy, and so God rejects this fast entirely. Verse 4 says, “You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.”

Instead, he gives them a true, fast ministry to the poor. Look at verses 6-10. “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away form your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: ‘Here am I.’ If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and the malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”

God is saying what truly moves Him. “When I see these things,” says the Lord, “it moves me. This is the fast I’ve chosen. This is what I’m looking for.” Look what he talks about: to loose the chains of injustice, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free, to break every yoke. Each of these refers to unjust laws and legal circumstances that are binding the poor so they can’t escape from oppressive circumstances. Then he says, “to share your food with the hungry and provide the poor wanderer with shelter and to clothe the naked.” These refer to basic physical ministries: food, clothing, and shelter. I was hungry; I was a stranger; you invited me in. I was hungry, and you fed me. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. These basic physical ministries, that’s the fast that the Lord is seeking.

He also says “And not to turn away from your own flesh.” Now, God intended this ministry to go on, not just to native Jews, but to all human beings. The NIV adds, I think wrongly, “own flesh and blood.” Blood tends to connect with your race, the Jews. It doesn’t say that in the Hebrew. Do not turn away from your own flesh means these are other human beings. You’re just like them. There’s no difference. They are human beings. We’re all descended from one father. From one man, He made every nation of men. We’re of the same kindred. “To not turn away from your own flesh,” He says. The whole human race has basic physical needs in common. When you see someone hungry, naked, or homeless, something should move inside you to want to alleviate their suffering.

We come to this key phrase in verse 10. “If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry.” “Spend yourself” is the NIV translation. It’s a beautiful translation. I love it. It makes you uncomfortable. It causes you to live differently than you were living before. It changes you. It affects you. It’s not a life given out of surplus and out of the extra. It’s not “if you spend some of your money”, it’s “if you spend yourselves.”

There are different ways that preachers can belabor a point. I’m going to do it this way. I’m going to do it by reading different translations of this verse. King James says, “And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, so draw out thy soul to the hungry.” NAU gives us Isaiah 58:10 as, “If you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted.” The ESV has, “If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted.” The New King James has, “If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul.” All of these speak to the issue of self-sacrifice on behalf of the poor and needy. Now, I think spending yourself is the next step after a previous one, which is to deny yourself. Right? Jesus called on us as His disciples to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. I fit “spend yourself on behalf of the needy” right into the following Jesus part. Deny yourself. Say no to yourself. Pick up your cross and follow Jesus. You will spend yourself on behalf of the poor and needy the rest of your life, because that’s what He does. To me, that’s the Christian lifestyle. I find myself wanting in it. I lack it. I’m not doing it the way I should. I mean, there are glimmers here and there, like sparks before the fire. But I want the fire. I want the bonfire. I would like to be on fire for this. We need our hearts to go out to the poor and needy. We won’t do it otherwise.

Jesus, in Luke 7, saw a widow from Nain. She was in the process of burying her only son. She was weeping with a lamentation we can hardly imagine. In that society, that was a desperate situation. It says in Luke 7:13, “When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, ‘Don’t cry.’” We will not obey the Lord until our heart goes out to people and knits with them in their suffering. I think it starts with sight. You have to see them. Look at what it says in Isaiah 58:7. “When you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh.” You have to see them. If you don’t want to do this, never go where they are. Then you never have to see them. And if you don’t see them, then you don’t have to help them. Beggars, if you have ever noticed, they try to catch your eye. When they have your eye, they’ve got a better chance. What do you do if you don’t want to help them? You don’t look them in the face.

So I think the text is saying, “See them. Look at them. Look at their eyes. Look at their faces. Then, care for them.” And what is the result of this true fast? What is the result of this ministry? Glory. Glory for God. Glory for us. “The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” Matthew 13:43. In Isaiah 58:10-11, it says, “If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” Do you have any idea what kind of economic times are coming to us? I don’t. I don’t know. We may need to be this for each other. We may need to be an incredible community of sacrificial love, like we have never been before, to help the poor and needy even in our own congregation.

God is making this promise. If we live like this, we will have everything we need. He will take care of us. We will know the righteousness of God. We will know the happiness of God’s pure light shining in our souls. We will have a clarity and a purpose in our lives that we have never had before. We will know God. We will see His hand, His activity and sacrificial service. We will see Him. We will get to know Him better. The Lord will guide us always. He will meet our needs. He will strengthen our bodies. We will be fruitful like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

I think it was Tuesday morning of this past week. I was about to go out. I was standing at this pavilion where there was a group of Haitian people. Every morning, David Eugene and I went out and preached the gospel to them before they got ready to come into the clinic. And I just had nothing. I had nothing to give. I was weary. I was empty. I stood off to the side and they hadn’t seen us yet, David and I. I prayed. I said, “God, fill me up. I have nothing to give. I don’t want to be here. I want to be home. Please help me say something to them about the Gospel of Christ.” And He did for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next day. He continued to fill me, continued to strengthen me, to give me the power to minister. It wasn’t just me. Other brothers and sisters that were there, I saw Him do that for them, too. He has promised that if we will spend ourselves, He will replenish us and give us everything we need.

So who are we? Where do we live? We are an urban church. We worship every week adjacent to the poorest part of Durham, northeast central Durham. Here, the standard of living is the lowest in the Triangle Region. Here, the crime rate is the highest. Right near us, gang activity is pronounced. Here are single parent homes, drug deals, and prostitution. Now, I can tell you that there is no poverty here in Durham that even remotely compares with that in the Cité Soleil. It’s not even close. There’s no poverty in America that compares with that. But it is poverty nonetheless. There is suffering here, nonetheless. And we are called to minister to the poor and needy here, even though they are not at the level of those in Haiti. We are an urban church.

Secondly, we are a commuter church. Most of us, I would not say all of us, but most of us, drive a distance to get here. We live in more comfortable and more affluent communities than the people surrounding this church building. We drive to get here. Hardly any of us live in this community. Hardly any of us would choose to live in this community. Hardly any of us have ever lived in anything like this community. We are affluent, well-educated, and unfamiliar with the kinds of struggles that characterize daily life in northeast central Durham. The real issue is that we don’t necessarily want that to change. We may want to keep the sufferings of these neighbors of ours at arm’s length.

Thirdly, we are a blessed church. We have been lavishly blessed by God. He has given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. Through faith in Jesus Christ, the one who shed His blood on the cross, all of our sins are forgiven. If you came here today and your sins are not forgiven through faith in Christ, you don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to go anywhere. All you need to do is look to Jesus. He will forgive all of your sins and you will be adopted into the family of God as we have been. We are children of the living God. We have a glorious future. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. And the earth we’re going to inherit is better than this one. It’s going to be greatly fixed up, okay? It’s really going to be beautiful, a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. We are completely set for eternity. All of our needs are met, indwelt by the Spirit of God. We are materially blessed as well. That’s what we are.

An urban church, a commuter church, and a blessed church. What then shall we do? How shall we live? Well, I’m calling on us to pray and act. I want you to start with this. I love what Michael Card said in that concert that you folks so beautifully arranged for me and for all of you guys that came. It was such a blessing. I remember one thing Michael Card said. “It makes no sense to try to hide something from an omniscient God.” Amen! So if you say, “Boy, that was a disturbing sermon today,” go tell God. He already knows how you think about ministry to the poor and needy. Don’t hide it from Him. Just go and pray. Say, “God, I don’t care like I should for the poor and needy. I just don’t. I don’t want to walk down that road. I don’t want to go there. There are too many unanswered questions. There are too many hard things. You already said, Jesus, that the poor will always be with us. So what can we do? But I know that You want us to change. I know You want me to change. Please change me. Make me willing to travel with You on that road.” Just start there. There is no sense in hiding something from an omniscient God. I’m going to remember that one. Tell Him the truth.

Secondly, let’s start to see the needy. Let’s see them. Let’s go where they are. You had an invitation to go out in the streets of Durham and invite people to the Health Fair. That’s a wonderful way to begin. People will understand why you’re there. They won’t think it’s weird. They may or may not come to the Health Fair, but they’ll know why you’re there. You have an entré. It’s an easy thing to do. Invite them to the Health Fair. I don’t mean to be in any way disrespectful to the actual medical care that goes on in the Health Fair, but the invitation could cut out the middle man of them coming to the Health Fair by them coming to faith in Christ right there on the streets. You can witness to them. Talk to them. See how they live. Look past their shoulder into their living room to see where they live. Talk to them. See the needy.

If I can urge you, start with your own family. I don’t just mean your own children. Well, I do mean that. It says in 1 Timothy 5:8, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than a nonbeliever.” There’s much poverty in the world because fathers especially have neglected their ministry  to their children and their wives. So we have to start there. But then you could extend it out to extended family members: to your parents, to siblings that may be poor and needy. Care for them. I’m talking about concentric circles.

Then let’s talk about FBC. There are needy people here in this church already. It’s already happening. It says in Galatians 6:10, “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers." Acts 4:34-35 says, ”There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and so it was distributed to anyone as he had need.” Actually, the more that our urban ministry is fruitful, the more people from the community are going to become members of this church. And they’re going to need our help. So we need to minister. At the end of every Lord’s Supper, we have a Deacon Benevolence Fund offering. Plan now to give more generously to that than you’ve ever given before. We give that money out to help the needy of this church first and the community second. Already there are more and more needs of church members. There just are. So plan ahead to be very generous the next time we have the Lord’s Supper. Then extend from there to the community. Let’s reach out here in northeast central Durham.

I asked Matthew Hodges, the director of Urban Ministry, “I’m working on a sermon on ministry to the poor and needy. Can you give me some points of application for the church?” And he wrote out a list of them. I was reading over them this morning, and I said, “Why would I read them? Let’s have Matthew read them.” So we’re going to end our sermon. I told him he’s under strict orders just to read them. Now, he could easily preach on each of these points but he’s not permitted to do so. Right, brother? He can elaborate, and if you want to hear him elaborate, come and talk to him afterwards and he will. But he’s going to tell you some specific ways to minister here in the community. Then he’s going to close in prayer.

These are applications on ministering.

FBC may not be able to meet every physical need of the poor and needy, but we can be the heartbeat to meeting the spiritual needs in this community. Talk to me about serving on the Urban Ministry Team. Invite men and women from the community to come and worship here at First Baptist. Let the men and women you invite from the community make the decision of whether or not they are going to come. We cannot make the choice for anybody, whether or not they want to come and worship here. Pray as we move forward ministering to the community.

Proverbs 29:25 says, “Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.” We need to look at the poor and needy in our community from a Biblical worldview first, not from a we-do-not-connect worldview. If the latter is what we use, we will never minister to the community. Ask yourself, “Do I look at ministering to the poor and needy in our community from a Biblical worldview?” Let’s pray.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 21:1-17. The main subject of the sermon is how God's people require refuge and how He plans to provide it.

So, we come to Isaiah 21. It’s been a fascinating week for us as we’ve looked at the ongoing struggle that our nation is having economically, which I mentioned last week. It’s fascinating to me to see people asking questions about refuge and shelter. They’re speaking financially, of course. They’re looking for a shelter for their money and for their worldly possessions, something that will last, something utterly secure, something bullet-proof. We already know, we can tell them on the authority of Jesus Christ, there is no such place. That’s why Jesus said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in to steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Mt 6:19-21)

We know that, don’t we? As Christians, we know that. Don’t put your trust, said the apostle Paul, in wealth, which is so uncertain. The Book of Proverbs says “Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle.” (Prov 23:5) We’ve known that. Our treasure is in heaven, amen? It’s in Jesus Christ and the imputed righteousness of Christ. There’s no thief, there’s no natural disaster that can take that away. People have been using words like “refuge” and “shelter” recently. And I think it’s a fascinating thing. They look in the future and they see a storm coming. They’re looking for a place of refuge. I think about living in the Midwest, in the Plains region, where there are tornados that come and you have tornado watches. There will be a siren that will go off and you go to your safe haven, maybe a basement, or, like in the Wizard of Oz, it’s out across the farmyard. Remember how Dorothy had to make her way across and she barely made it down in the root cellar? Then she forgot Toto and had to go out and get him, and that was it. She was then whisked away by the tornado. But she was looking for shelter.

Or I think about in history, in World War II during the Blitz in London, when the Germans were bombing London night after night after night after night, an onslaught. At dusk, the siren would sound, warning of the coming of the bombers. The natives of London would flee. They would run down into the subterranean areas of the tube, as they called it, or down in the subway is what we would call it. They would spend the night there with total strangers, sometimes standing up all night, or sleeping side by side with somebody they had never met. They might drink tea together or sing songs. In this way, they had shelter from the bombing that was going on up above their heads. It’s a biblical concept as well. Think about the world as it was in the days of Noah, when there was a storm coming, a flood. For one hundred and twenty years, while the ark was being built, Noah preached that there was going to be a flood, that there was going to be a coming judgment, and that there would be a refuge, a safe place. If you entered that refuge, that ark that was growing ever larger, ever stronger, and ever clearer, right in front of their eyes, then he was preaching that they would flee from the wrath to come. But I can tell you from the scripture, from the gospel, there is no safe shelter from the true storm that is coming.

The true storm that is coming is not economic, my friends. It’s not financial. It’s not military through terrorism or any other way. It’s not natural disasters. “These things may come,” said Jesus, “but the end is still to come.” They’re just birth pains. The real judgment is before Almighty God, the one who has pure eyes, holy eyes, and can tolerate no evil at all. I had a witnessing opportunity with a man on a plane. Woe to the person who sits next to me on a plane. All right? Well, I hope it’s a blessing. I’m really hoping that it would be a blessing and not a woe. I don’t force anything on anybody, especially if they’re wearing headphones. You know, you see the big, thick Bose headphones, and it’s over. All right? The witnessing opportunity is done. But this was actually a great conversation, and I felt my primary responsibility was to make judgment day vivid to this man, to give him a vivid sense of the fact that someday he will stand before God and give an account. Is he ready? Does he have a shelter for that?

It was a discussion of economics that led us into that. You can get to the gospel from anywhere. What is the shelter where you can put your money and it’s going to be safe? The answer is nowhere. But where can you put your soul and it will be safe? The answer is Jesus Christ, amen? He is the refuge. He is the shelter. The problem is that human beings are always casting about for some other place. It says in the Book of Proverbs, “The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.” (Prov 18:10) There’s your refuge. Jesus Christ. Call on the name of the Lord. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. You’ll stand under the refuge of the shed blood of Christ and you will be free from sin. The real danger is the wrath of God, the judgment of God. He has, by His grace, crafted a safe haven, a refuge called Jesus Christ, Amen?

We’re always casting about, looking for some other thing, making some other plan. The Jewish people back in Isaiah’s day were no different. So we’re in the middle of the oracles of the nations. This will be my last sermon on the oracles of the nations. When I get back from Haiti, I’ll preach one sermon on ministry to the poor, and then we’ll be going to the Gospel of Matthew. Some time in the future, if God wills, we’ll come back to the Book of Isaiah. But as we’ve looked at these oracles, one after the other, we have seen how God gives these words of judgment to the nations. He’s got a lot of things going on. One thing is He’s warning those nations of the coming judgment so they will flee to Him and be saved. But He’s also speaking these oracles to the Jewish people. Why? So that they will not trust in these nations instead of God. So that they’ll not flee to Babylon as though the Babylonians are going to save them. So it’s a message of warning and of comfort to God’s people, really.

Look at Isaiah 21:10. You can see the message to the Jews right in this warning, this oracle of woe against Babylon. Look at what he says in verse 10. “O my people, crushed on the threshing floor, I tell you what I have heard from the Lord Almighty, from the God of Israel.” He’s speaking to His people, His Chosen people. He’s giving them a word of warning and of comfort. God’s people are the point of history, from God’s perspective. However, God’s people are crushed by history from the human perspective. So today, Christians are like dust on the scales. Among the movers and shakers of human history, we don’t make much of an impact. But God has a message to His people, crushed by the wheels of the nations. That crushing, I think, refers to the twofold exile. The exile that’s about to take place in Isaiah’s day is by the Assyrians. They’re going to take the northern ten tribes, and they’re gone in 722 BC. But then one hundred and thirty-six years later, the southern kingdom of Judah would be exiled to Babylon. The Babylonians would come and take them in 586 BC. God’s people were going to be crushed by the overwhelming wheels of the rise and fall of Gentile empires. They’re going to come and crush the people of God.

Now, this crushing was no accident. It wasn’t that God didn’t notice what was happening. It wasn’t that God was limited in His power, that His arm was too short to save them. It was none of that. God was bringing it. He was bringing judgment on His own people for violating the covenant. And He uses here this agricultural analogy of being crushed on the threshing floor. What would happen is, at harvest, the wheat would be gathered together and they would drag a threshing sledge or cart over the grain. It would pulverize the grain. Then they would take something like a pitchfork and they’d throw it up in the air. The wind would blow the chaff away. The light weight would just blow away, but the heavier kernels would fall back down to the threshing floor. When you do this enough, all you have left, for the most part, is wheat. The wheat has been separated from the chaff. And that’s what God is doing. He’s separating the wheat from the chaff. The wheat refers to the true believers among God’s people, those that genuinely, like Abraham, are trusting in God. God is credited to them as righteousness. The chaff is those that are Jews in name only. They really have never believed in God. They are idolaters. They worship other gods and they will be blown away.

So Isaiah is giving God’s people a message of encouragement and also a warning about their time under the domination of the Gentiles, under the boot of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The encouragement is that God is sovereign over the nations. Things are not spinning out of control. Even when you go off into exile, God is still reigning. He’s still ruling and He’s going to bring back a remnant to the promised land and re-establish them. God is still sovereign. That’s the message of encouragement. What’s the message of warning? Don’t trust in Babylon for salvation. Don’t trust in the Babylonians, militarily.

Now what’s going on? Well, again, when Isaiah the prophet was doing his work, Assyria was the big threat. The Assyrians were evil, and King Hezekiah was against the Assyrians. Evil Assyria continued to flex its muscles in the region and to dominate those little nations. But in the east, a new power is starting to rise. There’s a city on the Euphrates called Babylon. It has an ancient history already. Through the code of Hammurabi and other things, it’s got a history. Right now, it’s a subject people, under the domination of the Assyrians. But it’s starting to become a little more powerful. There’s a young Chaldean prince under the Assyrian domination named Merodach-Baladan, son of Baladan. In Isaiah 39, the story is told of how this man, this Babylonian prince, sends envoys to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah, by this time, has seen the miraculous deliverance by an angel of the Lord, when 185,000 Assyrian troops are killed in one night. Also, because of his pride, Hezekiah was struck with a fatal illness. Isaiah told him to put his things in order; he’s gong to die. Hezekiah doesn’t accept that. He cries and prays and God graciously extends his life by fifteen years.

Babylon hears about all these things. They send envoys to congratulate Hezekiah on his military victory and his healing. He was equally responsible for both, don’t you know? By faith, by the power of God, when I’m weak, then I’m strong. What did he do? He got sick and he was surrounded by almost 200,000 Assyrian troops. That’s what he did. He prayed in both cases, and God delivered. That’s how He saves sinners, friends. Call on the name of the Lord. He’ll save you. So the envoys come from Babylon, from Merodach-Baladan, and Hezekiah takes them on a tour. He shows them everything, all the gold and the silver and all the stuff accumulated there, and the military strength little Judah had. The Babylonians were impressed, very impressed. Note to self, lots of wealth in a little town called Jerusalem. Will be back later. Isaiah said they’re coming back. He gave a prophecy. He saw beyond. He saw to the day when the Babylonians would come and take Judah away into exile.

This is what he said in Isaiah 39:5-7, “Hear the word of the Lord Almighty: The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your fathers have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” It’s a dire warning of the coming exile by the Babylonians. But Isaiah sees beyond even that. Oh, he sees far beyond that! He sees the day when Babylon itself will be crushed, when Babylon itself will fall. That’s this oracle here in Isaiah 21. Babylon is going to fall.

This is a message of encouragement that Babylon will not reign forever. So Isaiah’s mission here is to persuade his people, Hezekiah and the others, not to trust in Babylon. Don’t put your trust in the Babylonian uprising from the east. Babylon is going to judgment, just as he had said already concerning Egypt, in Isaiah 19 and 20, not to trust in Egypt. Don’t put your trust in these nations. Trust in the Lord because those nations, they’re all under judgment. Trust in the Lord and fear the Lord. The Lord is the one you should fear. Isaiah 8:13-14 says, “The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread and he will be a sanctuary.” What is a sanctuary but a place of refuge? That’s where you go to hide. You don’t hide in Babylon. You don’t hide in Egypt. You don’t trust in some Gentile army that you can make an alliance with. Trust in the Lord. He will be for you a sanctuary and a refuge.

The Lord is the one I must trust. Again and again, Isaiah says this. In Isaiah 8:17, he says, “I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in him.” I will invest in God. That’s what I’m going to trust in. I’ll put my trust in God. Or again, Isaiah 25:9 says, “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.’” By the way, the word “His” will become very, very clear on Judgment Day, in eternity-future. Amen? It was His salvation. He saved us. We trusted, but He did the saving. So He gets the glory. We get eternal joy. Isn’t that enough? I think that’s sweet. It is the future. We trust in Him. The nations, then, are nothing in God’s sight. Isaiah 40:15 says, “Surely the nations are like a drop in the bucket; they’re regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.” The nations are as nothing to God. More than that, frankly. The nations are all under God’s judgment. They’re not nothing in that sense. They’re all under God’s judgment, every one of them. Isaiah 34:2 says, “The Lord is angry with all nations; his wrath is upon all their armies. He will totally destroy them, he will give them over to slaughter.” That will be very clear when the Lord returns at the end of the world and all the nations’ armies are together against Christ to fight against Him. He will destroy them completely. Therefore, the message is: stop trusting in man. Isaiah 2:22 says, “Stop trusting in man, who has but a breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he?” That’s the message here.

Now, we’re talking about Babylon. Look at verse 1. “An oracle concerning the Desert by the Sea.” This is a bit of a tricky word game here. Isaiah was brilliant. He was a brilliant guy. He would have been in Mensa, I think. So he’s doing a little bit of a word puzzle here. You have to kind of unravel it. I wouldn’t be smart enough. I don’t know Hebrew well enough. But the commentators tell us that you unravel it and you end up with Babylon. We’re talking about Babylon here, the Desert by the Sea.

Now, the people are tempted to trust in Babylon as an ally. But Isaiah says it’s actually a desert by the sea. This is a bit strange because Babylon isn’t by the sea. It’s actually a number of miles inland. But it’s called the Desert by the Sea. What is he doing? He’s saying, “there’s nothing there for you, oh people.” The desert is a place where there’s nothing. There’s no life. You can’t live there. You have to bring your water with you. You can’t survive in the desert. And the sea is very much like the desert. It’s a different kind of desert. “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” If you’re out in a row boat, your first problem, within twelve hours, is where you’re going to get enough water. There’s no place you can survive. It’s a deserted place. Babylon is not your future. That’s what he’s saying here.

Furthermore, Babylon is about to face the whirlwind of God’s judgment. Look what it says in verse 1, “Like a whirlwind sweeping through the southland, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror.” The impending destruction of Babylon, it mentions here. The language speaks of a windstorm coming from the desert. I think that’s called a sirocco, a dry sandstorm, a big one. It’s going to erase Babylon. He’s speaking about an invader coming to destroy the Babylonian empire.

This is the way of the world. Babylon will be betrayed by its allies, its partners in crime, as it were. Look at verse 2. “A dire vision has been shown to me: the traitor betrays, the looter takes loot. Elam, attack! Media, lay siege! I will bring to an end all the groaning she caused.” Isaiah calls it a dire vision. The rise and fall of the world is repulsive to watch. It’s disgusting. It’s violent. It’s selfish. It’s materialistic. It’s ugly. Therefore, Daniel sees these empires like beasts, ravenous beasts coming up out of a turbulent sea. It’s a dire vision.

The particularly cold way that the spirit of Babylon works is this: we see Babylon rise up, make allies of Elam and Media, and together they overthrow Assyria. That’s how it works. So they’re partners together like that. But then Babylon, more powerful than the others, dominates them and subjugates them like the Assyrians did. Now Babylon is in charge. Babylon sweeps down, takes over Palestine. They are the top dog, king of the hill. But they won’t last. They won’t last because now the traitor is going to turn and betray them. The looter that’s been looting with the Babylonians is going to loot Babylon. Who are we talking about? We’re talking about the Elamites and the Media, the Medes. They’re coming. They’re going to judge. Basically the history of the world is, “what goes around, comes around.” The way you treat your neighbor, that’s the way your neighbor’s going to treat you. That’s how it works. Habakkuk 2:16 says it this way, “Now it is your turn! Drink and be exposed! The cup from the Lord’s right hand is coming around to you, and disgrace will cover your glory.” That cup you gave to your neighbors, now it’s your turn.

What goes around, comes around. Jesus put it this way in Mark 4:24: “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you – and even more.” So the groaning that Babylon caused will come to an end. He’s going to use their subjugated allies to rise up. These peoples are going to rise up. The Medes are coming with the Persians. They’re going to destroy Babylon. This is what Isaiah’s saying.

In the midst of this oracle comes an incredible response. This is Isaiah’s response as he’s looking at this oracle. Isaiah was a visionary prophet and I think his mind is filled with visions of what the fall of Babylon is going to look like. It was overwhelming. Almost, he couldn’t stand it. It was so terrifying. Look at verses 3-4. “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.” He is overwhelmed, get this, at the destruction of the people who exiled the Jews. How do you figure that? He knows that the Babylonians are going to come and exile the Jews. Now he sees a vision of them getting crushed and destroyed, and he’s overwhelmed. It’s like he can’t even look at it. He sees with clarity, in visionary form, the night that Babylon fell, what it would be like. Men, women, children, and sleeping infants, are slaughtered in their beds. He sees it. It’s the very thing he already told us, in Isaiah 13, would happen.

Speaking of the Medes, he says, “Their bows will strike down the young men; they will have no mercy on infants nor will they look with compassion on children. Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonians’ pride, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.” So he’s looking at this vision inwardly in his mind and he can’t handle it. It’s so overwhelming to him. He has a visceral reaction. His body is racked with pain. Pangs like those of a woman in labor rack his body, because of the vision that he’s seeing.

This is amazing, isn’t it? This is compassion for the lost, compassion for those who are going to suffer this coming judgment. Now, God’s work of judgment is not His delight. He doesn’t delight in it, any more than He literally delighted in the suffering of His son on the cross. Jesus suffering on the cross is not God’s delight. What is God’s delight, is the effect of Jesus’ suffering on the cross.

For the joy that was set before God the Father, He poured out wrath on His son. He doesn’t enjoy the wrath pouring out part. Neither does He enjoy the clearing of the threshing floor so that the kingdom can be built. There’s nothing delightful in the mind of God in the crushing and judgment of sinners. Instead, He beckons again and again, calling on them to repent. So it says in Ezekiel 33:11, “Say to them, ‘As surely as I live,’ declares the sovereign Lord, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.’ Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die?” So He’s calling out to sinners. God yearns to be gracious. Isaiah 30:18 says, “The Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion.” That’s the God of the Bible. In the midst of all this judgment, God is rising to show you compassion, and His name is Jesus. That’s the compassion He wants to show you. Jesus, moved by compassion, reaches out and saves.

Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul mourns, in Romans 9, over the Jews who were persecuting him. Isaiah is racked with pain at this image of the destruction of Babylon. Well, this destruction comes in, and, amazingly, the judgment interrupts a party. The party’s over. The party is over. Look at verse 5. “They set the tables, they spread the rugs, they eat, they drink! Get up, you officers, oil the shields!” I love that. That’s Isaiah giving Babylon military advice. What are you doing partying? How does that fit? You’re about to be destroyed and you’re having a party! How did it work? Well, I think they’re within the walls of Babylon. Remember, I began the sermon talking about refuge, secure places, and shelter. They thought they had it. Babylon was pretty imposing. Herodotus tells us the walls were 150 feet high. You could drive a chariot with four horses at the top of the wall. It was huge. The city had plenty of food. They could outlast you if you’re besieging them. It was a secure place. I get the image that the soldiers of Babylon were up on the walls toasting the Medes and the Persians. Do your best, but we’re going to party. See if you can get in here. They were absolutely cocky and confident.

So they’re having a feast; they’re enjoying it. There’s something innate, something inside us that yearns for pleasure. We want to be happy. You know where I think that comes from? I think it comes from God, because He is happy. “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.” Psalm 115:3. He’s a happy being. Our problem is that we pursue it like idolaters: materialistically and sensually. We pursue it wickedly. There’s nothing wrong with a yearning for pleasure. But these folks, they pursue it like pagans, rubbing God’s nose in their idolatry. This is the night in Daniel 5 of Belshazzar’s feast, when Belshazzar orders that the gold goblets from the temple be brought in to the feast. They used these goblets, God’s cups, to toast the gods of bronze, iron, wood, and stone. They cannot see or hear or understand. That’s what they’re doing while the Medes and the Persians are besieging Babylon, proving that their refuge is nothing of the kind.

Oh, it’s a wicked drive we have inside us! Even with the Jews, in the very next chapter, Isaiah 22, when they are under judgment, when wrath is coming on them, when they are besieged, this is what happens. Just look one chapter over in Isaiah 22:12-14. “The Lord Almighty called you on that day to weep and to wail, to tear out your hair and put on sackcloth. But behold, there’s 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!’ The Lord Almighty has revealed this in my hearing: ‘Till your dying day this sin will not be atoned for.’”

He said that to the Jews, God’s chosen people. “You should have mourned. You should have fasted. You should have prayed. You should have taken it seriously. But instead you pursued life as it has always gone on.” Just like it’s always going on. Jesus said it would be like this. It was like in the days before the flood. People were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage right up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They had no idea what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. So it was also with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the days of Lot. Right up until the fire and brimstone starts coming down, they’re pursuing lustful pleasures. They’re pursuing the old way.

And so, we have Belshazzar’s sinful feast. And you remember the end of Daniel 5. That very night, Belshazzar, King of the Babylonians, was slain. Darius the Mede took over the kingdom at the age of 62. Oh, what a final verse that is! The writing on the wall has been fulfilled. Babylon has fallen. How does the city fall? Well, I’ve mentioned it a number of times in my sermons. They diverted the Euphrates River. They crawled under the wall. With the city drunk or asleep, they opened up the gates. It’s just like the story of the Trojan horse. They came in. They opened it up. Then they went running through the sleeping, drunken city and kill everybody. That’s how it happened.

All that Babylon needed to do was to be alert and take Isaiah’s ancient advice, from 150 years, 200 years before that. Just take his advice. Get up officers, oil the shields, get ready for battle, and you win. But they wouldn’t because God had given them over to judgment and used their own pleasures to do it. That’s how it worked. So Babylon has fallen.

Jeremiah gave a clear prophecy on how it would happen in Jeremiah 51:37-39. This, again, was seventy years in advance. “Babylon will be a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and scorn, a place where no one lives. Her people all roar like young lions, they growl like lion cubs. But while they are aroused, I will set out a feast for them and make them drunk, so that they shout with laughter – then sleep forever and not awake.” I don’t know if it could be any plainer than that, friends. In Jeremiah 51:39, He said how He would do it. He was going to set out a feast and they would get drunk and they would die that night. Judgment has come.

In Isaiah 21, the scene shifts from Babylon to a watchman, perhaps in Jerusalem, waiting on the walls for news. The watchman is up on the walls and he’s waiting for news. Why? Well, I think this is what’s going on: by the time that the city of Babylon has fallen, the Medes and Persians have conquered the whole empire. It’s just the city that’s left. I think all of the outpost cities that were under the Babylonian Empire are waiting for news. “What’s happening? What’s happening? Has Babylon fallen? What’s going on?” So they’ve got watchmen up on the walls. They’re waiting for news, trying to find out what’s happened. Look at verses 6-9. “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 at my watch tower; every night I stay at my post. Behold, 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!’”

People received the news. The watchmen on the wall were waiting for news. Nowadays, you don’t have to have a watchman on the wall. You know, the guy who walks around saying, “Two o’clock and all is well! Three o’clock and all is well!” That’s over. Now you’ve got your Blackberry. If something major happens in some part of the world, you get a little red light and you turn it on. “What is it? Oh, it’s an email from CNN.” Because you set that up, when anything big happens, they’ll tell you. They’ll let you know because you are so important and you need to know. I think that’s fascinating. How important can we be? “Twenty-four/seven, I need to be in touch with the events of the world, okay?” “Giving you the news you need.” I always wonder about that. Why do I need that news? But at any rate, there it is. We can find out immediately when a city like Babylon falls.

But back then, they were waiting on the walls, looking for some messenger coming, looking for a chariot or something, coming with the news. “What’s going on over there in Babylon?” The watchman is told to be fully alert. It could come at any moment. And at last, he sees the chariot coming.

The chariot comes and the answer comes back, almost breathless. “Babylon has fallen, has fallen! It’s done! Babylon is gone.” Then there is a focus on the religion, all the images, of Bel, Marduk, and all those false gods. They were so alluring. All those images are crushed on the ground.

So this is a warning. Don’t trust in Babylon’s gods. Don’t put your trust in Bel and Marduk. If the modern gods are called the almighty buck, or your career, or whatever the Babylonian idols are today, don’t trust in them because all of those things are getting crushed on the ground when judgment comes. So God gives this message: don’t share in Babylon’s fate. Look at verse 10. “O my people, crushed on the threshing floor, I tell you what I have heard from the Lord Almighty, from the God of Israel.” “I told you, I tell you what God Almighty told me to tell you. That’s prophecy. God spoke into my head these words. I’m telling you what God, who created heaven and earth, has told me to tell you. Babylon is going to fall. It’s coming down. Therefore, a warning: come out from Babylon and be separate, so that you will not share in her judgment.”

Now, the rest of the chapter really just enhances the same point that’s already been made. There are two other kingdoms, Edom and Arabia. Neither one of them are a refuge either. Both of them could be a refuge. You run out of Babylon and you go to Edom. Maybe that’ll be a safe place. They had a really high, lofty mountain fortress. Maybe that will be a safe place. Then Arabia, you can go out in the desert and hide in the desert. But there is no safe refuge.

Look at verse 11-12. “An oracle concerning Dumah (that’s Edom): Someone calls to me from Seir, ‘Watchman, what is left of the night?’ The watchman replies, ‘Morning is coming, but also the night. If you would ask, then ask; and come back yet again.’” These are the kind of verses that make Isaiah a mystery. You read it, and it’s like, “Why is that in the Bible? I don’t get it. What does it mean?” Well, it’s an oracle against Edom. Edom felt secure. Read about it in Obadiah. They felt like they were safe. They were up in a lofty mountain perch, safe and sound, all right? But they’ve got watchmen on the walls, waiting to hear about Babylon. They’re waiting to hear, has Babylon fallen? “What’s left of the night? Night is tough. It’s dark. Are we going to die tonight like the Babylonians did?” They’re waiting and the minutes are like hours. It’s the longest night of your life if you think it’s the last night that you’ll be alive. The watchman comes back, and it’s almost dawn. Morning is coming. But there’s another night, too. Come back again tomorrow and we’ll do this whole thing all over again. Waiting for judgment is all it is. The message here concerning Edom is: don’t flee to Edom. Edom is going to be judged as well.

“What about Arabia? Can we go to Arabia? It seems good. Go hide in the desert. Who is going to want the desert?” Well, look at verses 13-17. “An oracle concerning Arabia: You caravans of Dedanites, who camp in the thickets of Arabia, bring water for the thirsty; you who live in Tema, bring food for the fugitives. (Who are these fugitives? We’ll get to that in a minute) They flee from the sword, from the drawn sword, from the bent bow and from the heat of battle. (That’s who the fugitives are) This is what the Lord says to me: ‘Within one year, as a servant bound by contract would count it (that means very accurately, counting day-by-day), all the pomp of Kedar will come to an end. The survivors of the bowmen, the warriors of Kedar, will be few.’ The Lord, the God of Israel, has spoken.” So the Babylonians run for their lives, whatever is left of them. They go out in the desert to their allies, the Arabians. Who are these people? Well, the Dedanites were descendants of Keturah, from Genesis 25:3, Abraham’s concubine. They were desert dwellers, Arabians. Tema and Kedar are names of the tribes of Ishmael. They are also descendants of Abraham. Their trade caravans have fled from the swords of the Medes and Persians. Now they’re camping, hiding in the desert.

Babylonians come running from the Medes and Persians, looking for a shelter. The refugees flee out to the desert where the Arabians are. What’s the word? Don’t go there, because judgment is coming there as well. I’m telling you that within one year, the Arabians will be wiped out as well. What is God doing? What is He saying? He’s saying, there is no other refuge. It’s like, to which dry hill during Noah’s rainstorm should I go? Which one will do? What would you recommend? Well, that one’s pretty high. Let’s go to that one. But there is no other refuge. Not Edom, not Arabia, not Babylon, not Egypt, not Assyria, none of them. Nothing earthly can save us. You know why? Because God is our problem. Our sins are our problem. The only refuge there has ever been, the only refuge there will ever be, is Jesus Christ on the cross, His blood shed, and the empty tomb of Christ. There is your refuge. Flee there. Flee there, oh friends! Flee there.

Maybe you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Maybe you’ve never trusted in Him. Flee to Christ. Call on the name of the Lord. “The name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous run to it and are kept safe.” That’s where you go.

Are we living in Babylon? Is this Babylon? Yes. Yes, it is. Does that mean everyone involved in the government is wicked? No. Daniel was second in charge, or third in charge, in Babylon. There are Godly people involved in government. But what are the marks of Babylon? Arrogance, defiance, idolatry, wickedness and pursuit of sensual pleasure. The two aspects of Babylon, military strength and trading with the nations, both of them are in Revelations 18. That’s Babylon. Are we living in Babylon? Well, if so, then don’t you think the Bile ought to let us know how to do it? How shall we live in Babylon?

Well, first and foremost, find what your true refuge is. It is Christ. Listen to Galatians 1:3-4. “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age.” Jesus gave Himself to rescue us. He is our refuge. Trust in Him. And I don’t just say that if you’ve never trusted in Christ and you came here today to be saved. (Praise God for that! Trust in Him.) I say that to Christians as well. Keep fleeing to Christ. In your mind, every time you’re getting anxious, you read something in the news and your heart is getting anxious, flee to Christ. Flee to Christ. He’s not telling you He won’t bring you any difficulties. He’s telling you that when you pass through the waters, He will be with you. When you go through the fire, you’ll not be consumed. That’s what He’s telling you. He’s actually going to bring you through those things. You’re going to make it through. You’re going to be saved. That’s what He’s telling you.

Learn how to live in Babylon. First of all, understand that it’s going to be destroyed. It’s coming down. Everything visible is temporary. Everything. Now, Jeremiah told the exiles of Babylon to seek the peace of the city. Jeremiah 29:7 says, “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Fine, seek the peace of the city. But can I urge you that you would focus on this kind of peace: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith in Christ, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Seek that peace for the city, not material prosperity. Furthermore, wasn’t it Jeremiah who later in this same prophecy told us that Babylon was going to be destroyed?

There are people that go out and plant gardens and do different things in urban renewal projects based on Jeremiah 29:7. Look, if it’s a ministry and it gives you a chance to share the gospel to interested onlookers, do it. But if you think those gardens you plant are eternal, they’re not. Judgment is coming on Babylon. Understand that.

Finally, a message of holiness and purity. Live a holy life. Isaiah 52:11 says, “Depart, depart, go out from there. Touch no unclean thing! Come out from it and be pure, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” And this from Jeremiah 51:44-45, “I will punish Bel (that’s a false god) in Babylon and make him spew out what he has swallowed. The nations will not longer stream to him. And the wall of Babylon will fall. Come out of her, my people! Run for you lives! Run from the fierce anger of the Lord.” And then there’s this in Revelation 18:1-4, “After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice, he shouted: ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.’ Then I heard another voice from heaven say: ‘Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues.’” And then in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? … Therefore, come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you. I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

Since everything is going to be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? Peter said, “You ought to live holy and Godly lives in Babylon.” Can you not live in Babylon? No, you cannot live in Babylon. But you do. What are you going to do about it? Seek refuge in Christ. Allow Him to be a wall of protection spiritually around you. Like Isaiah, grieve for the perishing around you. Reach out with the only message that can save, the gospel. Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 19:1-6. The main subject of the sermon is that all who fail to rely on God will be put to shame and all who rely on Him will never be put to shame.

Have you been following current events? Do you have your favorite news outlet? Do you like to watch the news? Maybe it’s CNN, or MSNBC, or maybe you’re reading that, perhaps, soon-to-be-obsolete form of the news known as the newspaper. I don’t know what the future of the newspaper is. Are you tracking current events? If so, then you are susceptible to anxiety. Of course, that’s been true in every generation and every era. As we track current events, we are susceptible to anxiety. As it says in Psalm 11, “When foundations are being shaken, what can the righteous do?”

Now, you can read Psalm 11, and say there’s an implication that there’s nothing the righteous can do if the foundations are being shaken. But I tell you, we have a God that delights in shaking unstable foundations. He delights in it because He loves us too much to enable us or to allow us to build on sand. We have a habit of building our houses on the rock that cannot be shaken when the rains come down, and the streams rise, and the winds blow and beat against that house, but then building extensions out on the sand and then living out there because we feel a little more comfortable in that part of the house. The Lord delights in sending the storm and crashing those things down. It’s an uncomfortable process, isn’t it? As we look at what’s happening economically in our country, as we look around and we look ahead to an uncertain future, it’s an uncomfortable thing to try to anticipate where we’re heading as a nation, where the world is heading.

We’re not the only ones asking this question. In some places it’s a matter of food shortage, places like Haiti where they don’t have enough to eat because the food distribution systems have broken down. So we believe in a God who delights in shaking foundations and giving instead a solid foundation that can never be shaken, founded on the word of God, on the work of Jesus Christ. When I come to Isaiah 19 and 20, I really think that’s what these two chapters are about. They are an oracle of woe to the nation of Egypt in a certain specific time and place, over twenty-six centuries ago. There are certain things that were going on at that time. We might struggle to find relevance in what was happening at that point. But God had a word to say to the Egyptians, to strip them of their arrogant self-importance and their love for their own wisdom, and to enable them to turn to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and build on Him. That Egypt would become God’s people through repentance and faith in Christ. Isaiah also, I think, has a message to the Jewish nation. He was a Jewish prophet. He was ministering there in Jerusalem. And he was speaking a word of warning to the Jews, lest they should turn to Egypt for help in times of trouble.

Let’s remember what was going on in the geopolitical scene back then, a scene that’s alien to us. So long ago. But elements are still with us today. You had two major super powers vying for control of Palestine, of the ancient near east. You had Assyria, the Nazis of the ancient world, they were in the north. They were powerful and strong. You had Egypt in the south, perennially wealthy, powerful, and strong. In between them, you had all these tiny little nations like Israel and Judah, the two Jewish nations. You had Moab, Edom, the Ammonites, the Philistines, and all these smaller powers that were there in Palestine. Between the two super powers there was always some vying for control and power. The little states were making alliances with one another and were tempted to turn to one of the super powers against the other, etcetera.

At one point, King Ahaz was tempted to turn to Assyria for help. You remember when Ephraim, the northern kingdom of Israel, and the Arameans allied together. Ahaz wanted to make an alliance with the Assyrians, of all things. But then, Hezekiah was being tempted to make an alliance with the Egyptians against the Assyrians. So there is a message of warning here spoken to the Jews. Don’t trust in Egypt because Egypt’s going to be destroyed. Its captives are going to be led away in utter disgrace. Why trust in a nation whose future is like that? Trust rather in God. There was a message to ancient Egypt. There was a message to the Jews of that time. But there’s a timeless message to all of us. Let me ask you this question: What is the foundation of your life? What are you trusting in today? When you look ahead to an uncertain future, how do you comfort yourself when feeling of anxiety rise? That’s your hope right there. If it’s financial, if it’s economic, if it’s your job, if it’s your education, if it’s clever things you’re doing to beat the economic indicators, whatever, that’s what you’re trusting in. If you’re trusting in this: that the Lord has never forsaken His children, then that’s what you’re trusting in. You’re trusting in the Lord. It seems to me that the Lord wants to wean us off of self-trust and trust in things that cannot last, things that will disappoint us. He is in the business of shaking those foundations so that we can trust in Him. We can have a solid foundation from which we can minister hope and trust to others who don’t know that foundation, who is Jesus Christ.

That’s what God wants us to do. And I believe that’s why He sends trouble and affliction in every generation. The things we’re facing economically, I’m talking about a $700 billion bailout, the President meeting with members of Congress. Some people say it’s nowhere near enough. It’s an interesting situation. What’ll it look like if the dollar is close to worthless in ten years or ten months? What will our life look like? People are asking those questions. Those are unsettling questions. They are the kind of questions that make you say, “Oh gee, what’s it going to be like if you go to the supermarket and there’s no food at all and gas is ten dollars a gallon?” You learn to ride a bike for the first time in years and you start to wonder, “What is my lifestyle going to look like?”

We’ve gotten accustomed to a certain way of living here, haven’t we? Is the Lord shaking those foundations? And a deeper question, is the Lord calling on us to repent? Is the Lord calling on us to turn and face sin, and to deal honestly with Him and His law? To be broken hearted before Him and not arrogant? Those are the questions that come to me from Isaiah 19 and 20.

This prophecy is a prediction of future judgment on Egypt. The future at that time, it’s happened now. God fulfills His promises. He predicted through Isaiah that He would judge Egypt in every way imaginable. He would judge their politics. He would judge their religion. He would judge their economy. He would judge the wisdom of their counselors. He would judge them militarily. It was a comprehensive judgment right from the beginning. Look at verse one of Isaiah 19. It says, “An oracle concerning Egypt: Behold, the Lord rides on a swift cloud and is coming to Egypt. The idols of Egypt tremble before him, and the hearts of the Egyptians melt within them.” This is a terrifying picture of the coming wrath of God, of God coming on a cloud to destroy Egypt.

It’s a wrath they should still well remember from the days of Moses, when He laid Egypt to waste by ten plagues and by the destruction of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea. I’m sure they did remember that, years later. Now He’s coming on a swift cloud to bring judgment again on Egypt. He begins, in verse 2, with civil strife and conflict. “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian – brother will fight against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city, kingdom against kingdom.” This is civil strife and conflict, perhaps even civil war. And notice it says, “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian.” This is the sovereignty of God over the hearts of Gentile people. It says in Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.” The sovereignty of God is over this. This is judgment from God. This isn’t an accident. It’s judgment from God.

Their idolatry is exposed in verse 3. “The Egyptians will lose heart, and I will bring their plans to nothing; they will consult the idols and the spirits of the dead, the mediums and the spiritists.” Egypt was well known for their religion that embraced the occult. The dark mystery religion of Egypt, of Osiris and Isis, had shaved priests, muttering and whispering, like mediums and spiritists trying to contact the dead. The pyramids are a testimony to how they believed in life after death and how they prepared for it. It was a dark and evil religion. Their idolatry was going to be exposed as worthless.

In verse 4, we see the power of oppression, of government that would come and would oppress. Verse 4, “I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them.” Well, I don’t know which fierce king this would be. It could be one king after another. All of these conquerors wanted Egypt, the bread basket of the ancient world. And so they would come. Egypt would lose its autonomy, and fierce and powerful masters will rule over them.

God would judge Egypt’s economy. It’s not just we in the 21st century, looking at CNNmoney.com (or anything like that), who have been interested in the economy. The Egyptians were interested in their economy, too. God was going to bring a judgment on their economy. Does God do that? Does He actually judge the economies of the nations? The answer is yes, He does. All He has to do with Egypt is hit the Nile. If He can strike the Nile, then the economy withers. It shrivels. Egypt was totally dependent on the Nile for life. I was looking, a few weeks ago, at a NASA satellite photo of Egypt. There is this thin green, slender thread winding its way through the Sahara Desert. It’s the Nile River, the irrigation canals, and the fertility on either side of the Nile River. It goes out to this emerald kind of fan in the Alexandria region where it spills into the Mediterranean Sea. Basically, without the Nile River, there is no Egypt. There’s just more Sahara Desert.

So they totally relied on the Nile. And what does God say? He’s going to dry up the Nile River. Look at verses 5-6: “The waters of the river will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and dry. The canals will stink; the streams of Egypt will dwindle and dry up.” Note the death of all plant life. Verses 6-7, “The reeds and rushes will wither, also the plants along the Nile, at the mouth of the river. Every sown field along the Nile will become parched.” That, my friends, is famine right there. That’s famine. “Will blow away and be no more.” Those plants mean life to Egypt. They mean economic power too, because they exported food. Note the economic disaster in verses 8-10. “The fishermen will groan and lament, all who cast hooks into the Nile; those who throw nets on the water will pine away. Those who work with combed flax will despair, the weavers of fine linen will lose hope. The workers in cloth will be dejected, and all wage earners will be sick at heart.”

This is all the economy here. These are people who make their living by the Nile and by the things that grow up from the fields that are irrigated by water from the Nile. And it’s all withering up. It’s all going to blow away, like dust in the wind. The question behind all of this is, if the nation of Egypt is so fragile that a judgment on the river causes it to wither and die and blow away like dust, then, oh Israel, why trust in them? Why put your hope in Egypt? Hope in the Lord, not in the Egyptians. Don’t trust in them. They’re fragile, and more than that, they’re under the judgment of God. He actually says, “This will happen.” Not just might happen, He says it’s going to happen.

God judges Egypt and He judges their wisdom. Look at verses 11-15, “The officials of Zoan are nothing but fools; the wise counselors of Pharaoh give senseless advice… The Lord has poured into them a spirit of dizziness; they make Egypt stagger in all that she does, as a drunkard staggers around in his vomit. There’s nothing Egypt can do – head or tail, palm branches or reed.” Consistently throughout the book of Isaiah, God reserves, through the prophet, His bitterest attacks on human pride and arrogance. He hates it. We see this again and again. Among the aspects of human pride that most offends God is considering yourself wise in your own eyes, clever in your own sight.

It says in Isaiah 5:21, “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.” Like any prosperous nation, the Egyptians didn’t have to worry about food. The Nile ran just like clockwork, rose and fell at the same time every year. And it had done so for centuries. So they didn’t need to worry about it. They had plenty of food. Everything gave them leisure time to develop other kinds of industries and all kinds of other pursuits, such as philosophy, religion, music, culture, and all of those things. There were ancient systems of wisdom, philosophy, and religion that concocted together to give Pharaoh his wise counsel, so to speak. They were very proud of it, weren’t they? Very arrogant and prideful about their wisdom and the council that they could give to Pharaoh. I was on the Washington Post website. They edit and publish columns every day submitted by thirteen prominent think tanks on a rotating basis, every other weekday. It’s called Think Tank Town. Now, what is a think tank? It’s a bunch of experts that come together around a certain issue. They talk about it, discuss it, and bring forth all of their wisdom and pour it out onto the table. With everybody pouring out their wisdom, they concoct a brew of collective wisdom at the think tank. It bubbles in a cauldron and out comes the aromas of human wisdom from the think tanks. That’s quite an image, isn’t it?

There it is, Think Tank Town. Of all the towns in our country, which would you say is the best city for that? Couldn’t it be Washington, DC? Isn’t that where all the experts are? All the pundits who talk about the future, have a bright plan, and who basically say, “If only the President would listen to me! I have an insight. I know what to do, but I just can’t seem to get his ear.” We can’t seem to do it the right way. Everybody’s got an angle. We can listen to them on the talk shows and all that kind of stuff. The Egyptians had it too, a long time ago. I don’t think they called it a think tank back think, but they had their wise counselors. And the Lord says, “I’m going to frustrate the wisdom of the wise. They want to play chess with Me, they will lose.” It’s quite plain why. Because they don’t know what the Lord is going to do. Look at verse 12. This is really important, friends. “Where are your wise men now? Let them show you and make known what the Lord Almighty has planned against Egypt.”

 Go ahead, wise man, tell me what the Lord is going to do. By the way, why does it matter? Because that’s actually what’s going to happen. Other predictions may or may not happen. The things that the Lord plans to do, they actually happen. The Lord delights to hide His plans from arrogant, boastful counselors like this. They guess wrong. Is that relevant to us? What’s the Lord going to do? What’s He going to do? Is this like Y2K, when nothing comes of it, or is it like September of 1929, when something comes of it? Well, which is it? Can you tell? And if it’s this bad, but no worse, you should do this. But if it’s going to be this bad, then you should do that. But we don’t know, do we, what’s going to happen? Where are you going to turn for your wise counsel? Let me ask you a simple question. What are you relying on for the future? I would urge you to get on your knees and ask the Lord what to do. I’m speaking about as plainly as I can.

If you’re the head of a house, and you have economic concerns for the future, get on your knees in the spirit of Isaiah 19:12, or actually the opposite. Say, “Lord, I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I do know I’m your child. I don’t think You have to tell me everything You’re going to do. But tell me what I have to do today.” Then go do it, and God will give you wisdom and council. So yes, we should rely on the Lord for salvation on judgment day. You should get ready for judgment day through faith in Christ, absolutely. But what about today? It’s not more important than judgment day, but it is important. How are you going to provide for your family? How are you going to make wise choices? What are you going to do for yourself in the future? You don’t know what the Lord is planning to do. Do you? Neither do I. But you do have this, you have free access to the throne of grace, and you can obtain mercy and find grace to help you in times of need. Ask Him what to do. Have I spoken it plainly enough?

I can’t give you any better economic advice than that, because I don’t know what the Lord’s going to do. Neither did these counselors of Pharaoh. As a matter of fact, the Lord was planning on orchestrating their foolish council to make it foolishness. I think about 1 Corinthians 1:20, where it says, “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” He delights in doing that. Christ is God’s wisdom. Christ crucified is the wisdom of God, not some economic plan. It’s Christ crucified that is the wisdom of God. For it says in 1 Corinthians 1:23-25, “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”

Go to the cross. Go to the cross. If you don’t know whether your sins are forgiven, if you came in here because you were invited, or used to come to church, or you’ve maybe been coming here for years, but you don’t know whether your sins are forgiven, go to the cross. Jesus is the power of God, Christ crucified. Are you ready for judgment day? All the judgments that we face, all the judgments of military or economic or medical emergencies, they’re all just pictures of that final judgment that’s coming. Judgment day, in which we will stand before God and give an account for our souls. He will tell us, “Welcome into my kingdom” or “depart from me, you were cursed.” Now that’s the judgment day. Are you ready for it?

Well, Egypt was wise. They trusted in their own wisdom, trusted in their own military and their own strength. That strength was turned into weakness. Look at verse 16, “In that day the Egyptians will be like women. They will shudder with fear at the uplifted hand that the Lord Almighty raises against them.” No mighty superpower will Egypt be then. Her military strength will be as nothing. Egypt’s mightiest soldiers will be trembling and hiding. They don’t want to pick up the shield, the sword, the spear and ride out  in the chariot. They’re terrified at the judgment God is bringing. Now, we have seen, therefore, the coming judgment on Egypt. Judgment on Egypt, politically, religiously, economically, socially, militarily, in every way. Doesn’t that leave an interesting question if you’re living in Isaiah’s day and you know that they’re actually sending emissaries down to Egypt to conduct an alliance with the Egyptians against the Assyrians? Why in the world would you want to do that? Egypt’s going to get judged. They’re under the judgment of God. Why would you ally yourself with them? Why trust in Egypt? Trust in the Lord.

Put your finger here in Isaiah 19 and turn over to Isaiah 30. Isaiah 30:1-7 has an incredibly relevant cross-passage, or cross-reference, on this. Judah was constantly tempted to run back to Egypt for help, to turn to Egypt when in trouble. This, my friends, is a great insult to Almighty God. In the time of King Ahaziah, Ahab’s wicked son, in the time of Elijah the Prophet, Ahaziah fell through the latticework and was severely wounded. As he lay there, he immediately sent messengers to the pagan city of Eckron to consult Beelzebub and see whether he would live or not. Do you remember that? Remember how Elijah intercepted the messengers. He stopped them in their tracks and said, “Go back and tell the man who sent you, ‘Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending to Beelzebub in Eckron to find out what’s going to happen?’ Therefore, thus says the Lord, ‘You will certainly die. You will not recover.’ There, you have your answer. Go back and tell him.” Is it because there is no God in Israel that you’re making an alliance with Egypt? This is a great insult to God.

So, Isaiah 30 talks about emissaries, or envoys, that are sent down across the blazing desert with gold and silver on the backs of donkeys and camels to give to Egypt, to hire an army if the Assyrians should come. That’s what they’re doing. And this is what the Lord says, “ ‘Woe to the obstinate children’ declares the Lord, ‘to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my spirit, heaping sin upon sin; who go down to Egypt without consulting me;’” You can just circle that in your Bible: “without consulting me.” “Who look for help to Pharaoh’s protection, to Egypt’s shade for refuge. But pharaoh’s protection will be to your shame; Egypt’s shade will bring you disgrace.” (Is 30:1-3) Look at verses 6-7, “The envoys carry their riches on donkeys’ backs, their treasures on the humps of camels, to that unprofitable nation, to Egypt, whose help is utterly useless. Therefore I call her Rahab the Do-Nothing.”

Go back to Isaiah 19. For me personally, spiritually, it occurs to me that God is offended with me if I ever trust anything but him. I mean about anything. I don’t just mean my soul on judgment day. I mean about the future, my economic future, about anything that I should trust in something and comfort and console myself as I think anxious thoughts, perhaps about the future and say, “yes, but I always have such and such. I’ve always got this laid by.” That’s the trust, my friends. If it isn’t the Lord, it is an idol and the Lord is offended by it. Now, you may say, “I have no idols in my life.” We’ll see. I think, as I said, that the Lord delights in shaking faulty foundations. If you have built your house on the rock, but a back extension out on the sand, it may be that the Lord sends a storm, and it will come crashing down.

Then we’ll see what you’re really trusting in for your joy, and for your security. But for me, I just want to build my house on the rock. I am as tempted as anyone to build back extensions on the sand. But it occurs to me from Isaiah 19 and 20 and Isaiah 30 that God is offended when we do that. He’s not pleased with it. Therefore, we should repent. It is, therefore, a shameful thing to rely on anything but God. In Isaiah 20:5-6, the prophet says, “Those who trusted in Cush and who boasted in Egypt will be afraid and put to shame. In that day the people who lived on this coast will say, ‘Behold, what has happened to those we relied on, to those we fled to for help and deliverance from the king of Assyria! How then can we escape?’” They’re gone. Now, what’s going to happen to us? You’ll see.

When the foundations are shaken, what can the righteous do? Well, don’t build your house on Egypt. They’re going down. That’s what the message is. It’s a shameful thing to rely on them. The message, again and again, is that God judges that kind of pride and that kind of arrogance. But you know what? All of that judgment and all of that warning and all of that shame, my friends, that’s not the center of this passage. You know what the center of the passage is? God’s mercy and grace to Egypt in saving them. Hallelujah! The center of this is that God actually has a saving purpose, even toward Egypt and Assyria. He wants to save people out of that. Therefore, He’s giving Egypt this warning. He’s calling on them to turn away from their own wisdom and their own military power and their economic strength, to turn away from that and to trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And do you know why? Because (Jesus said it to the Samaritan woman) salvation is from the Jews. It would be good for Egypt to learn that. He sends affliction so that they would learn that lesson.

We see the glorious future of Egypt and of the world. Look at Isaiah 19:17-25, which Paul already read for us. God has always had His eye on the whole world, from the beginning of calling Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans. He says, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed because of you.” (Gen 12:3) God intends to save an elect people, a chosen people, from every tribe and language and people and nation, including the Egyptians. He’s going to begin by transforming their hearts, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of that wisdom. Look at verse 17, “And the land of Judah will bring terror to the Egyptians; everyone to whom Judah is mentioned will be terrified, because of what the Lord Almighty is planning against them.” Perhaps it is God’s past reputation for destruction. I mean, the Egyptians had reason to remember. Rahab, the prostitute living in Jericho, had heard what the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had done to Egypt. She was afraid. All the Canaanites were afraid. They said, “Okay, it’s over now because he’s a Jew, and we’ve seen this before.”

If you start messing with the Jewish people, these kinds of judgments come on you. It’s right there in the book of Esther. God has a reputation for bringing judgment. So, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom for the Egyptians. They start to fear the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Jews. It begins there.

Secondly, we see some cities being transformed. They’re actually swearing allegiance to the Lord Almighty. Look at verse 18, “In that day five cities in Egypt will speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord Almighty. One of them will be called the City of Destruction.” Under the extreme distresses mentioned in this chapter, the Egyptians will turn to the Lord Almighty. They will seek deliverance. This is what the purpose of affliction is, so that we can learn to trust in the Lord.

The Egyptians looked down on the Semites as contemptible sand dwellers. Some of their writings speak that way. Shepherds and herdsmen were contemptible to them. But all of a sudden, these Egyptians are turning and swearing allegiance to the Lord Almighty, the God of the sand dwellers. How they have been humbled! Now, look at what it says: “five cities in Egypt will speak the language of Canaan.” There were perhaps as many as 30,000 cities and towns in Egypt. Five isn’t very many, is it? It is five cities, friends, and they are turning to the Lord and swearing allegiance, right there in the heart of Egypt. “And even though the gate is narrow and the road is difficult to find, and only a few find it,” Jesus said, “still, there’s going to be a multitude greater than anyone can count from every tribe and language and people and nation.” So, five cities are going to escape the destruction. Let’s put it that way. One of them was called the City of Destruction. Remember “The Pilgrim’s Progress?” That’s where Christian is escaping from. He’s running from the City of Destruction.

These five cities are going to be transformed. They’re going to build an altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt. Look at verse 19, “In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt, and a monument to the Lord at its border.” Now, any time I see an altar and I think of animal sacrifice, it always points ahead to the cross of Christ. It points ahead to Jesus’ shed blood. He who is led like a lamb to the slaughter, pointing ahead to Christ. Only by His shed blood can Egyptians, or Israelites, or Assyrians, or any of us, have our sins forgiven before Almighty God.

But there’s a picture of salvation, the monument at the border, an altar in the heart of Egypt, and then God sends a savior. Amen? Look at verses 20-21, “It will be a sign and witness to the Lord Almighty in the land of Egypt. When they cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, he will send them a savior and defender, and he will rescue them.” Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord, my friends, will be saved. So, they are going to cry out and call in the name of the Lord and they will be saved. Verse 21 says, “So the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians, and in that day they will acknowledge the Lord.” The afflictions had a purpose. Verse 22, “The Lord will strike Egypt with a plague; he will strike them and heal them. They will turn to the Lord, and he will respond to their pleas and heal them.” He’s going to reveal Himself. He’s going to open Himself up to the Egyptians. How? There is no better way than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news! Amen.

Some people cross those sands and they’re not bringing money from the King of Judah trying to make a political alliance. No, no, no. they’re bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They’re coming as emissaries from heaven, not from Jerusalem. They’re coming to say, “If you turn to the Lord and repent of your sins, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (He is the Lord Almighty, the God of all the earth), He will forgive you. He will restore you. You will be His children.” Oh, how sweet is that! They will hear and believe, these five cities. They will cry out to the Lord for deliverance and He will send them a savior and a defender in His name, Jesus Christ. He’s the only savior of the world. Then their hearts will be transformed. They’ll have a new life in Christ. Look at verse 21, “So the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians, and in that day they will acknowledge the Lord. They will worship with sacrifices and grain offerings; they will make vows to the Lord and keep them.” They’re going to love Him from a pure heart. They’re going to worship Him in spirit and truth, the Egyptians are. They’re going to worship the Jewish God and turn to Him and believe in Him.

And that’s going to change their alliances, let me tell you. At that point, they’re going to look at the Assyrians differently, aren’t they? All of a sudden, they’re going to hope that they can actually be an instrument in converting the Assyrians. Look at what it says in verses 23-24, “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the whole earth.” The old way was that they were bitter rivals, competing for control over Palestine, fighting with each other, battling with each other. Chapter 20 begins with the Assyrian king coming down the coastland to destroy Egypt. That’s the old way. In the New Covenant, through faith in Jesus Christ, the former enemies have become brothers in Christ. They’re worshipping together. First the millennial kingdom of Christ when Jesus will reign in Jerusalem, then the eternal kingdom, the new heaven and new earth, the new Jerusalem where they will be together forever and worship the Lord face to face.

Look at the final transformation status: outsiders who had actually become the people of God. Verse 25 says, “The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying: ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’” Can you even fathom that? How would a Jew hear those words? “Blessed be Egypt my people?!? We are the people of the Living God. We are the Jews, not the Egyptians!” But God says right here through the mouth of His prophet, “Blessed be Egypt my people.” This is the very thing that Paul says in Romans 9:23 and following, “’I will call them my people who are not my people; and I will call her my loved one who is not my loved one.’ And it will happen that in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’” Oh, how sweet is that! The electing love of God, the sovereign love of God to transform rebels, to make them actually children of the Living God. The elected Egyptians who turn to God in faith through Christ will become sons of the living God. So will the elected Assyrians who do the same. So will the elect Israelites who do the same. They will all be together in the new Jerusalem.

It says in Revelation 21:3, “I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’” So He will say, “Blessed by Egypt, my people and blessed be Assyria my handiwork.” Yes, He crafted the Assyrians together in their mothers’ wombs, that’s true. But that’s not what it’s talking about here. Now, He’s going to do a new work in their hearts. For it says in 2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance. That’s our future, friends.

So yes, we may have some difficult times to go through. We may have some foundations shaken under our feet. We may have some suffering yet to come. But what are you trusting in through all of that? Are you ready for the final shaking of the heavens and the earth when everything that can be removed will be removed? When you stand before God and give Him an account of your life, are you ready? If your soul is ready, are you ready then to trust Him with your wallet, with your checkbook, with your investments, with your real estate, with how you’re going to buy groceries in ten years? Are you able to trust Him to with that too? God may change some things in our lifestyle. Are you able to trust Him with that? Are you able to look to Him and say, “Lord, what you do is good. What I want out of this world, is that I want to be holy like Jesus. I want to be useful to You in Your kingdom building. That’s what I want out of this world. The material stuff doesn’t matter.” Do you want that change in your attitude if you don’t have that attitude now? Are you willing to go through suffering to get there so that you really just trust in the Lord? Please close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 18:1-7. The main subject of the sermon is God's delight in people all across the world including the Ethiopians.

We are looking this morning at Isaiah Chapter 18. One commentator called it one of the most obscure chapters in Isaiah. But I think the more you study and the more you understand the circumstances, not only is it not obscure, but it actually is very applicable to our present day. We are in the middle of a series of oracles that the prophet Isaiah has given to the surrounding Gentile nations. The nations of the world make up an astonishing, brilliant, beautiful mosaic to the glory of God. God has created different races, tribes, languages, and peoples all over the world. Together they make up the human race. They bring great glory to God. Some peoples are characterized by their physical strength, some by their military prowess, some by their intellectual achievements, philosophy or science, some by their exquisite artistry, and some by their skill in trade or travel. All of these proclivities, these tendencies, bring glory to God. The differences between the tribes and the peoples and the nations were built into the original genetic code of one man, Adam. The apostle Paul told us in Acts 17:26, “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth.”

Actually, God did that twice because you know that He destroyed the entire world in a flood. And so again, through one man, Noah, the entire human race was developed. Now, the differences between the races have come about by the magnificent variety that God built into the genetic code of that one man, Adam, or that one man, Noah. Differences between the races therefore come from God and bring Him glory. Pride between the races comes from sin, and dishonors God. Race is from God, racism is from sin. Racism may be defined as the belief that one race is inherently superior to another, and that race is the primary determining factor of human traits. Closely linked to racism, of course, are all sorts of bad behaviors, prejudices, oppressions, violence, and discrimination that one group foists on another because of racial differences. The 20th century, I think, saw the purest form of this evil of racism in the Nazi movement and their Aryan convictions that they were the purest and best race on the face of the earth, and that everyone else was inferior to them, if not actually subhuman.

They believed themselves to be genetically superior and everyone else to be genetically inferior. They took that ideology on the road through military conquest until they were finally defeated by the providence of God. But that doesn’t end the issue of racism itself. This country struggles with it. The end of slavery in the United States did not end the suffering of the African people who were stolen from their homelands. They’ve had to face racism ever since. Christian faith is diametrically opposed to racism, because racism is inherently based on pride. If we haven’t learned anything from the book of Isaiah, we can learn this: God hates pride. He hates it. Pride is the root of all sin, that me-ism. One thing I’ve noticed about racism is that people tend to celebrate the race they’re from. Have you ever noticed that? I’ve never found anyone that was racist on behalf of another race. It was always their own race that they felt was superior. Therefore, I think racism is really a form of self worship. It’s really a form of idolatry, and it is evil.

Now, we Christians, we know that. We know that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. Amen? Every single one of us depends on the shed blood of Christ to have any standing at all before our creator. It is because Jesus shed His blood that we can have access to the throne of grace. Amen? In that way, all of us are together. We all need a redeemer. And praise God, that Redeemer is available! Jesus Christ is the redeemer of the whole world, of people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. It says in Revelation 5:9-10, “They sang a new song” up in heaven, speaking of Jesus, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on earth.” Notice it’s a kingdom, not a multiplicity or a mosaic of kingdoms. We will be one in Jesus. Amen? We will serve the Lord forever. That’s where we’re heading, and that’s a beautiful thing. Now, Isaiah 18 is an oracle about one tribe, one nation, the Cushites. The political events with Assyria have led that distant nation from Africa to send envoys to Jerusalem to seek an alliance with, I believe, King Hezekiah and the Jews. The Cushite envoys come with a purpose, but God speaks through the prophet Isaiah concerning God’s larger purposes. God’s doing something much bigger than defeating the Assyrians.

He has a bigger purpose for the Cushites, and He has a bigger purpose for the whole world. That’s what this seven verse oracle is speaking about. In this brief oracle, God reveals His delight in the Cushites. He has pleasure in them. He enjoys their uniqueness and their distinctiveness. He speaks a word as a pleased, or as a delighted Creator about them, not just concerning their little political mission, their military mission, but about, I believe, their future, bringing gifts to almighty God in Jerusalem. I think that speaks of a spiritual purpose, of God’s desire to bring them to faith in Christ through the spread of the Gospel. Ultimately, the cure for racism is to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re not going to have any of that in the new heaven and new earth. I’m looking forward to that, to being free forever from racism and frankly from every vestige of pride, to being so completely humble and immersed in a sea of worship that Jesus deserves for what He’s done at the cross.

In this brief oracle, we see the delight, the pleasure of God in Cush and His plans for them. It begins with these envoys coming from Ethiopia. Now, I know that Isaiah 18 is not primarily about racism, and this sermon’s not going to be about it. I’m going to give careful exegesis to it and I’m going to describe the political situation. But I tell you this, I think we ought to take every opportunity we can to find out the evils that surround us that may still be in our own hearts, and to preach clearly the truth so that God can be glorified. Sin always brings misery. It brings misery to those who have that locked within their hearts and also to those who receive the bitter fruits of it. So, we’re going to focus on Isaiah 18 and understand the glory of God in the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

The envoys are coming from Cush, Ethiopia. In modern history, we think of Ethiopia as a land of starvation and weakness. But in Isaiah’s day, the Cushites were a nation to be reckoned with. They were a rising power in Africa. After the flood, as I mentioned, Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Through them God would repopulate the entire earth. Cush was the eldest son of Ham in the table of nations in Genesis 10:7. His brother Mizraim was the Hebrew name for Egypt, probably the ancestor of the Egyptians. Cush seems to have settled farther south along the Nile River. From him came Seba, Havila, Sabta, Raamah, and Sabteca. All of them seem to have settled in Arabia. But some of his descendants seem to have crossed the Red Sea and settled in what we now know as Ethiopia. One of Cush’s descendants was Nimrod, who was a mighty warrior and who founded what became Babylon and Nineveh, two centers of godless empire-building. The Babylonian Empire and the Assyrian Empire eventually came from these cities that Nimrod, Cush’s descendant, planted.

According to Ezekiel 29:10, the southern border of Egypt was its common boundary with Cush. This was the land of the Nile River, stretching almost 2,500 miles by air. But because of its twisting and meandering course, the Nile River is over 4,000 miles long, the longest river on the face of the earth. The Nile Valley was formed as water cut its way through the sandstone and limestone. It made cataracts, or waterfalls, which interfere with navigation and section off portions of the river. In those various valleys and basins, peoples formed. The Cushites were among them. Cushites settled the region of the fourth cataract, or waterfall, and there they flourished.

Some commentators believe that the Queen of Sheba, or the Queen of the South in the NIV, was actually a Cushite who came from this very region. She heard of Solomon’s fame and came to see all that Solomon had done. There formed a link, then, between the Cushites and what God was doing in Jerusalem, the glory He was spreading through the Davidic kingships of David and Solomon. She was overwhelmed. As the Old Testament era ended, there is a tradition, perhaps a myth, that it was the Cushites that rescued the Ark of the Covenant. No matter what Indiana Jones thinks, there are some Ethiopians that say they’ve got it. It’s in an Orthodox temple. You can’t see it, but they take care of it. I don’t know what good it would do to see it. God is not in the business of leaving us physical artifacts for us to focus our worship on. He actually tends to destroy those things, like the bronze serpent that was destroyed because it had become an idol. At any rate, there is that tradition. You can follow it on the internet or however would be interesting to you. They say they rescued the lost Ark of the Covenant and that they still have it.

Around the time of Isaiah, somewhere around 720 to 715 BC, the Cushites got so strong that they were able to basically conquer Egypt and take it over. They set up the 25th dynasty and they ruled until around 633 BC. So they were in charge of Egypt at this time. And now, these Ethiopian rulers were sending emissaries to Judah to organize an anti-Assyrian coalition.

Let’s set the stage in terms of the geopolitics of the region. Palestine, the ancient near east, that area of Judah and Israel and all those tiny little kingdoms, was between two mighty empires at the time: the Assyrian Empire to the north, and the Egyptian Empire to the south.

The Assyrian Empire to the north was between two rivers. The Mesopotamian region literally means “between two rivers.” It was a fertile area, and because of the fertility of the soil, they were strong and powerful militarily and culturally. They sought to take that dominance on the road and build, as they did, the Assyrian Empire. In the south it was Egypt. Again, because of the fertility of the soil through the Nile River, they were strong and powerful and able to project their power as well. Between these two empires was this little region called Palestine. It was their playground, the battlefields, the chessboard between these two empires. There was always stuff going on, always intrigues, emissaries and alliances being formed. This was an opportunity for such an alliance.

During this time, the Cushites, having gained control of Egypt, wanted to link up with this Judean king. I believe it was King Hezekiah. So they sent emissaries to try to make an arrangement and an alliance against Assyria. They show up in Jerusalem, but there’s a prophet there named Isaiah, and he’s got something to say about this mission and these emissaries. He’s got a prophetic word to speak about the future. And he speaks it. Look at verses 1-2, “Woe to the land of the whirring wings along the rivers of Cush, which sends envoys by sea in papyrus boats over the water. Go, swift messengers, to a people tall and smooth-skinned, to a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers.” This is the land of whirring wings.

You can almost hear them, the tsetse flies or perhaps other types of flies. There are lots of flies in Egypt along the marshes where the reeds grow. These folks come from the rivers of Cush, a land, it says, divided by rivers. So Isaiah’s oracle reaches to a land over 1,500 miles away, a land populated by people very different from the Jews, a land that God intended to conquer someday with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They send envoys. As mentioned, Cush takes control of Egypt and sends envoys to curry favor with King Hezekiah. They come in these little papyrus boats. They’re lightweight boats. If you’re going to travel through the cataracts, through the waterfalls, it’s good to have a boat that you can carry. So these are lightweight boats made of reeds, or grass, and that’s how they come. They’re designed to travel lightly and quickly. They had traveled an enormous distance to make their case to King Hezekiah, to check the power of the Assyrians, perhaps even to defeat the Assyrian Empire.

But Isaiah sends the envoys back home with a message. He sends them back. “Go, swift messengers, to a people tall and smooth-skinned, to a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers.” The Lord, through Isaiah, describes the Cushites with a pleasure, the pleasure of the Creator. He delights in the Cushites. He enjoys them. He enjoys their uniqueness, their attributes. I have the sense almost of the way God, in the Book of Job, describes the different physical aspects of His creation; of the sun and the moon and the stars, the stability of the earth and different animals He’s created and their attributes.

First of all, they are swift. They’re good runners. In the time of the rebellion against King David by Absalom, there was a Cushite man that wanted to run and bring the news that Absalom was dead, and the rebellion had been destroyed. Do you remember that? They’re long-distance runners. They do very well in the Olympics. Have you noticed? It’s the Ethiopians that win the 5,000 and the 10,000 and the marathon if they can. They’re great runners and have been for a long time. They’re swift, and they’re tall, and they’re smooth-skinned, and they’re a people feared far and wide. These envoys represented an unusually tall people. As a matter of fact, some research that I did listed some tribes in Ethiopia and the Sudan as the tallest people on the face of the earth, statistically. In the case of one of these tribes from that area, males can have an average height of six feet four inches tall, women six feet tall. They’re a tall people, and they’re powerful militarily.

Herodotus, the first Greek historian, called the Father of History, visited Egypt around 460 to 450 BC. He wrote this about the Ethiopians, he said, “The Ethiopians to whom this embassy was sent are said to be the tallest and handsomest men in the whole world. In their customs they differ greatly from the rest of mankind, and particularly in the way they choose their kings; for they find out the man who is the tallest of all the citizens, and of strength equal to his height, and they appoint him to be ruler over them.” That’s a unique way to choose a leader. It’s the very same thing they noted about Saul, though, that he was a head taller than any of the other people. So it’s not unheard of that the tallest man, the most powerful man, is going to be the king.

It says of them that they are smooth-skinned. Now, the Egyptian priests shaved themselves head to toe once every three days. But these people didn’t need to do that. They were smooth-skinned already and had no need to shave themselves. They were, as we said, a people feared far and wide. They were aggressive militarily and strong. They had already taken control of Egypt, and that was no small accomplishment.

Ancient historians tell the story of some Persian messengers who went to the Cushite king to discuss a possible alliance with him. This was in the era of the Persian Empire. The Cushite king brought out a standard bow that their archers used, but the bow was unstrung. He challenged the Persian messengers to string the bow, and none of them could do it. And he said, basically, “When you’re able to send men who can string one of our bows, then we’ll talk about an alliance.” They’re powerful and strong, and, you can see, also a little prideful.

A modern website speaks of the Ethiopians as the only Black nation in history never to have succumbed to slavery or colonial rule. The Italians, British, Dutch, Portuguese, Turks, Spanish, Arabs, and French tried twenty-seven times to conquer Ethiopia but failed every single time. Yet they easily defeated all other African tribes and empires to carve out a niche for themselves in the Horn of Africa. This speaks of military prowess and the power of this small nation. Because of this, and because of God’s plans for Assyria, God is issuing them a warning. “Military aggression ends in destruction. If you take what you have and you start spreading out, you start conquering other people, you’re going to come under my judgment.” That’s what the woe is at the beginning of the chapter. He’s giving them a warning. He’s going to warn them more than anything though what He’s going to do to the Assyrians. So if you have plans to conquer the world, put them aside, because God has His own plans to conquer the world. You’re just going to be running head to head with Him.

So that’s the warning that He gives to these amazing people. And what is this message? Look at verses 3-6, the message to the peoples of the world. “All you people of the world, you who live on the earth, when a banner is raised on the mountains, you will see it, and when a trumpet sounds, you will hear it. This is what the Lord says to me: ‘I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place, like shimmering heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.’ For, before the harvest, when the blossom is gone and the flower becomes a ripening grape, he will cut off the shoots with pruning knives, and cut down and take away the spreading branches. They will all be left to the mountain birds of prey and to the wild animals; the birds will feed on them all summer, and the wild animals all winter.” Something magnificent, something noteworthy is about to happen, says Isaiah. The message is given to all the nations of the earth. Why? Because they all have the same ambition. They’d like to conquer the world if they could. Now, some nations find themselves in a position to try, but he’s addressing all the peoples of the earth concerning this ambition. God is going to do something dramatic. It’s as if He’s saying, “Drum roll, please. Now, pay attention to what I’m doing.”

 The nations of the world are going to sit up and take notice of what God is about to do. When a banner is raised on a bare hilltop, people from miles around can see it. When a trumpet sounds clearly and loudly, people from miles around, they can hear it. The Lord is going to communicate something to every tribe and language and people and nations about His great power. At this point, the seemingly silent God speaks at last. It seems like God isn’t even there sometimes. Is He even there in the natural disasters and with the rise and fall of the empires? People have asked that again and again when suffering and tragedy come. Is there even a God? It seems like He’s not even there. People cry out to Him and there’s no answer. It just seems like He doesn’t exist to some. But He is there. Oh, He’s there! Right from the very beginning of the book, we have these words, that God is there, and He is not silent.

Isaiah 1:2 says, “Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the Lord has spoken.” Here in this oracle, verse 4 says, “This is what the Lord says to me: ‘I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place, like shimmering heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.” Oh, He’s there! He is powerful, and He’s watching, it seems, very quietly. He’s like the rising heat. You wonder if He’s there, but you can perhaps occasionally see the shimmering. You think, “All right, maybe He really is there.” Now, there’s a legal maxim that says, “Silence means consent.” Well, that doesn’t work when it comes to God, let me tell you right now. Just because God is silent doesn’t mean He agrees. Not at all.

It says in Psalms 50:21, “These things you have done and I kept silent; you thought I was altogether like you.” Oh, but He’s not altogether like us. And just because He’s silent doesn’t mean He agrees. Not at all. God’s silence actually is time to lead us to repentance. His patience means repentance and salvation. That’s what He’s waiting for. 2 Peter 3:15 says, “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation.” Romans 2:4, “Do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you towards repentance?” Here, God is silent like shimmering heat and like a cloud of dew, silent, but ready to act.

How unlike the tumultuous kings of the earth that we talked about last week in Isaiah 17:12, “Oh, the raging of many nations – they are like the raging sea! Oh, the uproar of the peoples – they roar like the roaring of great waters!” That’s what we’re like. We’re noisy, but it’s signifying nothing. God is silent and signifying everything, sitting on His throne. He sits serenely up there on His throne. He sits enthroned above the circle of the Earth. The people before Him, they are like grasshoppers.

God has a magnificent plan, and that is judgment on the aggressor. Look at verses 5-6. “For, before the harvest, when the blossom is gone and the flower becomes a ripening grape, he will cut off the shoots with pruning knives, and cut down and take away the spreading branches. They will all be left to the mountain birds of prey and to the wild animals; the birds will feed on them all summer, the wild animals all winter.” This is a bit of an agricultural analogy, perhaps like a parable. There’s a spreading vine, and it’s moving out. It’s advancing itself. Its branches are moving. We might know it as kudzu. Okay, have you ever seen that? It just grows and grows. It seems like it can’t be stopped. But here, there’s even some fruit. It’s a flowering and then a fruitful vine that seeks to move out. Notice that He doesn’t mention Assyria here directly, because it’s a message for all the nations.

Right now, it’s Assyria, at the time of the oracle. But it could be the Cushites too. Maybe they have ambitions for the world. It’s anybody who wants to move out with military prowess and take over the face of the earth. God will stand and He will say, “No.” He will cut off with a pruning knife those spreading branches. And what’s going to happen to all of the fruit? The birds are going to come and eat it. It’s a picture of desolation and judgment. It’s God fighting against you. Now, the Cushite envoys have come and they’re trying to play the geopolitical game. They’re trying to make an alliance. They’re going to stop Assyria. Assyria will be thwarted. They’re so clever, they’re so wise, and they come to talk to King Hezekiah about making this kind of an alliance. God says, “I have my own plans for Assyria. I’ve already made them plain through my prophet Isaiah.”

We have already read it. Isaiah 10:12 says, “When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, ‘I will punish the King of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.’” This is Isaiah 10:16-17, “Therefore the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors; under his pomp a fire will be kindled like a blazing flame. The Light of Israel will become a fire, their Holy One a flame; in a single day it will burn and consume his thorns and his briers.’” One day. Just one day. He’ll take care of Assyria. Now we know what that is. That’s when Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem, came right up against it. God sent out the Angel of the Lord, and in one night, one hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian troops were dead. “Cushite envoys, I don’t need you.”

There doesn’t need to be any alliance between Judah and Egypt. It’s not necessary. As a matter of fact, it’s sin. We’ll talk about that next week. “Judah doesn’t need you, but you need Judah. A little more specifically, you need a savior coming from Judah.” That’s the message here. God knows His sovereign plan. He knows His own perfect timing. Though He is quiet, though He is silent like shimmering heat in the sunshine and like a cloud of dew, He will act when the time comes, quite boldly. It says in Isaiah 14:25-27, “’I will crush the Assyrian in my land; on my mountains I will trample him down. His yoke will be taken from my people, and his burden removed from their shoulders.’ This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” God is enough, Amen? His power is enough. What matters is what God thinks. What matters is what God is doing, not all these plans, trying something on our own, on the side. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, what is God’s will? What is He doing? That’s what matters.

God gives a prophecy through Isaiah. The envoys are looking for some kind of a political arrangement. Actually, let me tell you what’s going to happen with Cush. There’s going to come a time when they’re going to send gifts from the ends of the earth. They’re going to send it to Zion and they’re going to worship the Lord, the Lord Almighty. Look at verse 7, “At that time gifts will be brought to the Lord Almighty from a people tall and smooth-skinned, from a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by the rivers – the gifts will be brought to Mount Zion, the place of the name of the Lord Almighty.”

The gifts will be sent by envoys. They’re going to come back and they’re going to worship. The Cushite envoys first came to recruit for military alliance. These powerful people are described for a second time. God just can’t seem to get enough of saying these words. He enjoys the Cushites. He likes talking about them. But at that time, those Cushites are going to send gifts and they’re going to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They’re going to worship at Mount Zion.

Now, there is a physical fulfillment of this. In 2 Chronicles 32, 21-22, this is what it says: “The Lord sent an angel, who annihilated all the fighting men and the leaders in the camp of the Assyrian king. So he withdrew to his own land in disgrace.” That’s the defeat of Assyria. One angel, the Angel of the Lord, gets sent out and Assyria gets defeated. He withdraws to his own land in disgrace. “And when he went into the temple of his god, some of his sons cut him down with the sword. So the Lord saved Hezekiah and the people of Jerusalem from the hand of Sennacherib king of Assyria and from the hand of all others.” That’s the banner raised up on the bare hilltop. That’s the trumpet blast that all nations will hear. And they did hear. That was Assyria. That was Sennacherib. That was almost 200,000 troops killed in one night, while the nations sat up and took notice. He took care of them on every side. 2 Chronicles 32:23, “Many brought offerings to Jerusalem for the Lord and valuable gifts for Hezekiah king of Judah. From then on he was highly regarded by all nations.”

So they’re going to physically come, after Assyria gets crushed, and the Cushites are going to bring gifts. They’re going to link up. Perhaps it’s enlightened self-interest. “It’s good to be on the good side of the Jewish God, we’ve noted.” They want to worship, so they bring gifts. That’s what Isaiah’s predicting. But I think he’s predicting far more than that. By the way, just a note about Hezekiah: at that time, when he was receiving ambassadors and people coming from all over, and they’re bringing gifts, his heart gets puffed up with pride. Can you believe it? Oh, how pestilent is human pride! And Hezekiah’s like, “Ain’t I something?” What did Hezekiah do? When he heard of an overwhelming Assyrian force, he got down on his face and pleaded with God to save the remnant that still survived. He had the good sense to know that he had no chance if God didn’t intervene. That’s all.

Hezekiah receives these emissaries, and 2 Chronicles 32:25 says, “Hezekiah’s heart was proud and he did not respond to the kindness shown him; therefore the Lord’s wrath was on him and on Judah and Jerusalem.” Can I just urge you by way of application to search out pride in your life and destroy it? Wherever you find it, wherever you find it. Start looking in certain places, like when good friends give you some advice on how you can do better. For example, your spouse might have some input on how you could improve some area of your life. That’s a chance for you to find out if there’s any pride in your heart. Oh, there are many such opportunities. Look at your ambitions, look at your hopes and desires. What are you driving for? How many of them are traced back to your own pride? Search it out and destroy it, friends. I need to do the same.

But what is God’s ultimate end for the earth? Why does He put up the banner on the bare hilltop? Why the trumpet beckoning? Because He wants to be worshipped, friends. He wants you to forget yourself. He wants you to turn away from your own petty little interest, your own empire building. He wants you to get down on your face and worship Him, and delight in Him in spirit and in truth. That’s what He’s doing. So those little gifts that are brought by the Cushite emissaries after the Assyrians die, that’s just a symbol, friends. That’s yet another prophecy, that’s all it is. It’s a prophecy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When the Gospel goes out to the ends of the earth and the true gifts come from the nations, that’s the people themselves bringing their own hearts, their own bodies prostrate before God and saying, “Here I am.” Presenting to God a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing, themselves, that’s the gift.

They’re going to come from all over the earth. Regarding God’s original purpose in calling Abraham the father of the Jews, He said this in Genesis 12:3, “I bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” Now just wait till next week. Wait till next week, when in Isaiah 19 we talk about how God says this, “The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’” Wow, that brings goosebumps, that God would actually call Egypt “His people.” Yes, He will in the new covenant, through the blood of Jesus Christ. So God has some specific purposes for the Cushites. They’re going to come and they’re going to bring gifts. They’re going to come and worship the true God. Psalm 68:29-32 says, “Because of your temple at Jerusalem kings will bring you gifts… Envoys will come from Egypt; Cush will submit herself to God. Sing to God, O kingdoms of the earth, sing praise to the Lord.”

Zephaniah 3:9-10 says, “Then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and may serve Him shoulder to shoulder.” Listen, “From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshippers, my scattered people, will bring me offerings.” Isn’t that sweet? Zephaniah 3:9-10, where God is predicting that some from the Cushites will come and worship Him forever. God’s ultimate aim, then, is worship from all nations. Isaiah 52:10 says “The Lord will lay bare his holy arm in the sight of all nations, and all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.” Isaiah 60:11-13 says, “Your gates will always stand open, they will never be shut, day or night, so that men may bring you the wealth of the nations – their kings led in triumphal procession. For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined. ‘The glory of Lebanon will come to you, the pine, the fir, and the cypress together, to adorn the place of my sanctuary; and I will glorify the place of my feet.’” And it says in Isaiah 56, “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” That’s God’s purpose in Isaiah. That’s God’s purpose to the ends of the earth.

There is a brief New Testament fulfillment to all this. Ain’t it sweet? In Acts 8, an Ethiopian eunuch has gone up to worship. He’s gone to the temple to worship. Why has he gone there? He’s heard of the fame of the Jewish God, and he wants to worship. He is an important official in charge of the treasury of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians. He’s an important man. He’s gone there for the Old Covenant worship. He’s taken part in the animal sacrifice system. He’s on his way back, riding in his chariot, and he’s reading the book of Isaiah the prophet.

Oh, Isaiah has converting power, my friends! So there he is, reading Isaiah the prophet, and this is what it says in Isaiah 53:5-6, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” That’s what he was reading. You can’t choose a better portion of Isaiah to be reading, especially if you’re unconverted. So, he was reading Isaiah, and he was reading about Jesus Christ, the substitute, the Son of God who came to shed His blood. But it didn’t make any sense to him. Who is this man who died? Who is this suffering servant?

Well, the Holy Spirit leads an emissary, an envoy, a messenger, a missionary named Phillip, one of the original seven. God laid on him, by an angel and by the indwelling spirit, “Go down to that desert road. I’ve got work for you to do.” And he sees the chariot, he runs up alongside it and jumps in. I think actually the Ethiopian invited him in first, all right? You need to be invited in. You need to build that connection relationally. He said, “What are you doing?” “I’m reading.” “Do you understand what you’re reading?” “How can I,” he says, “unless someone explains it to me? Please evangelize me.” Friends, don’t miss one like that.

You actually ought to pray for them. If you’re not really being that fruitful in evangelism, pray for an easy one. You know what I mean? A big, slow pitch right down the center of the plate that you can knock over the fence. Ask for something. Say, “God, give me an evangelistic opportunity equal to my immaturity and lack of courage and boldness.” He’ll answer that prayer. But he’s saying, “I need someone to explain Isaiah 53 to me. Can you do it?” Oh, you need to be ready for that moment. “I can do it. God sent His son. His name is Jesus. He entered the world. He lived a sinless life. He did great miracles to prove his deity. He taught great things to prove His wisdom. But the greatest thing He did of all was He took our sins on Himself. He was our substitute. He died in our place. All we like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. He’s talking about Jesus.” The Ethiopian man was drawn in. “What do I do? What do I have to do to be saved?” “Repent and believe.” Friend, you may have come here today by the provident hand of God and you’re not saved. You don’t know the forgiveness that this Ethiopian eunuch found. Find it in Christ.

It’s the same message. Then gifts will be brought by you. Not just by the Cushites, but by you, to Almighty God. Simply repent and believe in Him. Trust in Him. The Ethiopian man, he did it. He said, “Look, here’s some water, why couldn’t I be baptized?” No reason. So they stopped the chariot, and right there and then Philip baptized. When he came up out of the water, immediately the Lord took Philip away, disappeared, poof! Now that’s an exciting moment in redemptive history. “Whoa, where did he go? He’s gone!”

The Lord dropped Philip at Azatus and he continued his preaching ministry there. But the Ethiopian eunuch went on his way rejoicing. He went down to Ethiopia where Irenaeus tells us that he continued in evangelistic ministry himself. We don’t anything more about this man. He drops from the pages of history. I can’t imagine, however, that he didn’t go back and lead many to Christ. See, God has plans for Ethiopia. In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, after the Gospel had already started to spread around the world, a shipwreck brought two men to the Cushite kingdom. Those two eventually led that king to faith in Christ. Athanasius sent one of them back as the first bishop, orthodox bishop. He set up the church there in Ethiopia, so the Gospel was planted in Ethiopia. But friends, that’s in the past. That’s in the past.

What’s in the future? I’ll tell you what’s in the future, the new Jerusalem, the new heaven, and the new earth. Its gates are going to stand open night and day. It says in Revelation 21, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and the honor of the nations will be brought into it.” Those are the gifts that are going to be brought from a people tall and smooth-skinned, a people feared far and wide, whose land is divided by the rivers, an aggressive nation of strange speech. They’re going to bring gifts eternally into the new Jerusalem. Amen?

So what application can we take from this? Well, let’s start with this: believe in the gospel as the Ethiopian eunuch did. Believe in it the first time today for the forgiveness of your sins, and continue to believe in Christ. He is the focus of Isaiah. He’s the focus of all scripture.

Secondly, be ready to preach the gospel as Philip did. Are you prepared? Suppose you were reading something a little more obscure than Isaiah 53, would you be ready? Are you ready to share the gospel? Get yourself ready. Pray that prayer. You can laugh, but pray it. Say, “Lord, make me a witness today. Give me a chance. I’m weak.” He knows you’re weak. “Lord, I’ve been fruitless.” He knows that. “Oh God, give me a chance today to witness. Help me to be ready.” And pray for the advance of the gospel, not just in Cush, in Ethiopia, but to the ends of the earth. God has plans for people from all over the world. Pray for it, and get involved in it.

Delight in the races as God does. I have a theory. I was talking to Matthew Hodges about it this week. I have a theory that we will have our racial distinctions up in Heaven, in the new Jerusalem. I think we’ll retain them. I think God loves variety. I think He created them for His own glory. That’s why there’s people from every tribe and language and people and nation. It says in Revelation 7:9-10, “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’” Oh, that’s the end of racism there, friends; it’s gone. We will delight in the variety of what God has done. People will be coming from many different roads, many different places to believe in Christ.

Finally, despise racism as God does. Be open to what God is doing through this church in the urban ministry. Get involved in it. Ask Matthew how you can get involved in the urban ministry. We have a health fair coming up, get involved. Wouldn’t it be delightful to see, as much as possible, here in this local church, the variety that we’re going to see in heaven? Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 17:1-14. The main subject of the sermon is that the nations of the world rage against God's righteous rule.

I believe it still ranks as one of the stupidest things that I’ve ever done (what a way to begin a sermon). I was on a summer evangelism project with a parachurch group in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. A tropical storm had sat off the coast for a day or so, and it whipped the waves into a frenzy. The next day, right in the middle of the summer, there was no one on the beach. The beach wasn’t closed, but it didn’t need to be. Nobody in their right minds would swim in the ocean that day, except for me and a friend of mine. I had never seen the waves so high. I enjoyed body surfing, and it looked like Oahu. It was the closest I was ever going to get to those kinds of waves. So, the two of us went out and we started swimming and body surfing. What a time we had! We had a great time until we started to notice that we were getting further and further away from the shore. We were caught in a riptide, and we started getting scared. I said, kind of lightly, to my friend (his name was Chaz), “Don’t you think we oughta start heading in?” He said, “Good idea.” It took us 45 minutes just to get in. I’ll never forget that. We’d ride a wave about halfway in, and then swim as hard as we could just to maintain our position more or less in that place. Then we’d ride another wave halfway in. In this way, we dropped exhausted on the sand, glad to be alive. And I resolved never to swim again after a tropical storm or hurricane in the ocean, no matter how dramatic the waves.

There are times when we look at current event, and I think we as Christians can feel very much like that. We’re caught in a riptide. We have little or no control over where we’re going. Even death could face us, depending on the magnitude of the trial. We can feel very insecure in those situations. We like to have control and the fact is, that’s an illusion. We have very little control. And frankly, for the most part, since the church is made up of not many who are wise, not many who are influential, not many of noble birth, we have even less control than average people. We are not the king-makers of the world. I’m talking about the church as a whole, around the world. We are more passive when it comes to current events than even those great people of the world who think that they are in charge but really aren’t. But we know we’re not in charge. So we have to look, more than ever before, to the sovereign God who rules over history.

Look at this CNN age that we live in. That’s something that’s really just come on in the last few decades, where something negative, something significant, can happen anywhere in the world and we can know about it almost while it’s happening. I still remember during the first Gulf War, seeing Peter Arnett and some other CNN correspondents standing on the roof of the Al-Rashid Hotel in downtown Baghdad, while the bombing started, starting the war. This kind of gave you a ‘you are there’ feel, like we had never experienced before. CNN has continued since then, whether it’s a typhoon, a hurricane, an earthquake, a war, or something like that, you can be there and you can see it. I think it gives you a sense of the verses in Isaiah 17 that we’re going to look at today. Look at verses 12-13. It says, “Oh, the raging of many nations – they rage like the raging sea! Oh, the uproar of the peoples – they roar like the roaring of great waters! Although the people roar like the roar of surging waters, when he rebukes them they flee far away, driven before the wind like chaff on the hills, like tumbleweed before a gale.”

Those verses speak of the churning of the nations, the great power and convulsive effect of one nation after another, crashing into each other. Each of them is vying for supremacy in the world, for oil drilling rights, or for gold, or for control over a piece of property, something like that. It’s the surging, the raging of the nations. The church, the believers in Christ, are really like flotsam and jetsam, something floating on the surface that can do very little about it. Therefore, it’s good to know what this verse, this passage, and what we’ve seen in Isaiah teaches: God is sovereign over the nations, He sits on His throne and rules over all of these things. We can believe that there is nothing random happening on the face of the earth, that everything is for a purpose and that God is ruling over all things, though we don’t understand it, though we can’t know it. So we have the ragings of the nations described here, and I think the root cause, really, comes down to the heart of man. Because we are not at peace with God within our own hearts, we are not at peace with each other. Because of man’s original fall into sin, the world, the climate, the earth is at war with us and we with the earth. And so we’re in trouble because of sin.

It says in Isaiah 57:20-21, “The wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. ‘There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked.’” Since the year 2000, one website tells us that there have been one hundred and forty-two riots in the world. One hundred and forty-two riots. Many of us don’t know that in April of this year, there were riots in Haiti and Bangladesh and Mozambique over the spiraling cost of food. And what is just kind of an annoyance for us was desperate for them in terms of even getting enough to eat and survive, probably all of it tied to the rising cost of oil. There have been many other causes of riots over the years. There’s political unrest. Many of us can remember the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and what happened there as hundreds of thousands of Chinese crowded in, clamoring for political change. Race and racial tensions can be the cause of riots. In 1998, there were race riots in Jakarta, Indonesia between native Indonesians and ethnic Chinese. Religion can be a cause of riots. I think since 1979, when the hostages were taken by Iranian students, we’ve seen images of Muslim demonstrations almost every week, fists in the air and anger. So, religion can be a cause of it.

In 2007, in the town where the Taj Mahal is, there were angry mobs stirred up because there was an accidental death of an Islamic youth. There were riots between Hindus and Muslims. Anti-war demonstrations, food shortages, unemployment, housing shortages, grievances among prison inmates, gang violence, natural disasters leading to other physical problems and shortages, excessive pollution, and even sports can cause riots. There are soccer riots in Europe all of the time. It’s very nationalistic, but it goes on. Lots of violence, lots of anger, the seething rage of the nations. They rage like the roiling turbulent sea after a hurricane or tropical storm. It comes from the fact that we’re not at peace with God, and, therefore, we’re not at peace with each other. More potently, you see the rise and fall of the world, the rise and fall of one controlling regime after another, one empire after another, the invasion by one seething power of another country’s territory. “The raging of many nations – they rage like the raging sea; … they roar like the roaring of great waters.” (Is 17:12) They are like the relentless ocean, undulating and frothy, whipped by the eternal drives of sinful human nature, by what they want.

James 4:1-3 says, “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you do ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” This is what’s whipping the nations into a frenzy. Behind it all is the rage of Satan. We’ve already learned this from Isaiah 14, of Satan’s fall and how Satan was ambitious, not content, not satisfied with what God has assigned to him. However great his personal beauty, and his personal wisdom, and his powerful position, it wasn’t enough for him. He was ambitious and covetous, and wanted to rise up. He gave us those five “I wills,” the ambitions of Satan. Satan rebelled against God and therefore God cast him down to the earth. He put him on a timetable for his ultimate destruction, as we saw. Revelation 12:12 says, “Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”

When Adam, our federal head, our representative, ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, he, in effect, joined Satan in his rebellion against God. Therefore, he also, man, put a timetable on his ultimate destruction. We, as a race, are like Satan, filled with rage because we know our time is short. Hence, the uproar of the nations.

The ultimate rage is directed toward God and toward His Christ. That’s where the real raging comes. Psalms 2:1 makes this plain, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain?” The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One, His Christ, His Messiah. “Let us break their chains asunder,” they say. “Throw off their fetters.” The One enthroned in heaven laughs. He laughs at it, but that’s where it is. It’s a hatred against God and against His rule, against Christ, and against His authority. That’s the nature of this raging that goes on.

Now, the immediate context here in Isaiah 17 is the Assyrian invasion, as we’ve seen. In the oracle of the nations here from chapter 13 of Isaiah up through 23, in the oracles of the nations, this Jewish prophet is describing political situations that would be alien to us. We wouldn’t care that much about them, perhaps. They happened a long time ago. They were resolved a long time ago. But there are two things you need to know about the Bible that make it immediately relevant and applicable. First of all, God never changes. He never changes. He’s the same yesterday, and today, and forever. What we can learn about God back in Isaiah’s time, twenty-seven centuries ago, is still true today. Now, He didn’t have to act in any given way. He can do whatever He chooses. I’m just saying He never changes. And if we can learn something about God’s character and His nature, His attributes, from something in the Bible, it’s still true today. Second of all, we don’t change either. I know we may wear different clothing, we may have advanced technology, but we have the same passions. We have the same lusts. We have the same drives and desires, the same thinking patterns. We’re the same.

Therefore, when we see how God interacts with sinners twenty-seven centuries ago, it should matter to us today. We should take it as a warning to flee the wrath to come. The judgment on Syria here, Damascus and Ephraim, is a judgment on peoples that may seem obsolete to us, but these facts are still with us, the facts that God never changes and that man never changes. Assyria was to invade Damascus, the Arameans, and also Ephraim. In Isaiah 17:1-6, it’s described. Look at verse 1, “An oracle concerning Damascus: ‘See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins.’” Damascus was the capital of Syria, not to be confused with Assyria. They were also known as the Arameans. It was a small nation, along with all those others: the Moabites and Edomites, and the northern and southern kingdoms of the Jews. These were the Syrians, and Damascus was their capital city.

Now, Damascus has the distinction, from what I’ve found, of being the longest continuously inhabited city on the face of the earth. People have been living there for centuries, for millennia. Rome is called “the Eternal City,” but Damascus, Syria was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC. It was the capital of the Syrian nation in Isaiah’s day, also known as Aram. It was one of the most strategic cities in the ancient Near East. It stood at the mouth of a natural funnel through which ran the only convenient land route between Mesopotamia and Egypt. So everybody had to go down through Damascus. It positioned them very well for trade and for influence.

Remember back in Isaiah 7, when King Ahaz was terrified by an alliance between these two countries, Syria and Ephraim? Ephraim, the northern kingdom of the Jews, and Syria allied themselves against Judah. And you remember that Isaiah at that time predicted their destruction. Here is the second prediction. It says in verses 1-2, “See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins. The cities of Aroer will be deserted and left to flocks, which will lie down, with no one to make them afraid.”

But it wasn’t just the Arameans that were going to be judged. It was also the ten tribes of the Jews, Ephraim. Ephraim was the name of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. They were apostate right from the beginning of their history. Remember that Solomon was led into idolatry by his foreign wives, and God chose to judge him in the next generation through his son Rehoboam. And so the twelve tribes were split up. Ten tribes went to the Northern Kingdom under Jeroboam, son of Nebat. Right from the beginning, he led the Israelites, the Northern Kingdom, into sin because he did not want those ten tribes going three times a year back to Jerusalem, the City of David. He didn’t want them going there because he thought that he would lose his power and his influence. So he set up his own religion, with his own priests and his own idols, golden calves in Bethel and Dan. He immediately led those ten tribes into idolatrous worship. Pretty soon after that, they were worshipping in whatever way the nations worshipped around them. They became literally no different than any of the pagan peoples around them. A godless nation, those northern ten tribes.

They share in the destruction of the godless around them. Look at verse 3, “’The fortified city will disappear from Ephraim, and royal power from Damascus; the remnant of Aram will be like the glory of the Israelites,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” Verses 4-5 continue, “In that day the glory of Jacob will fade; the fat of his body will waste away. It will be as when a reaper gathers the standing grain and harvests the grain with his arms – as when a man gleans heads of grain in the Valley of Rephaim.” The picture here is of a formerly healthy man. Now he’s lost so much weight through illness, or perhaps like a prisoner of war. You come upon those that were in the Japanese concentration camps, or the Nazi concentration camps, with their skin barely hanging on their bones. They’re like living skeletons. That’s the image here, the fat of the body completely wasted away. That’s what the former health and prosperity of these two countries will be like.

And the end result in verse nine is desolation. “In that day their strong cities, which they left because of the Israelites, will be like places abandoned to thickets and undergrowth. And all will be desolation.”

How does this judgment come? It comes in the usual way. It comes through the invasion of the Assyrians. It’s what they do. The Assyrians coveted their land, and then they came.  But we know what’s going to happen to the Assyrians, too. They’re going to be destroyed as well. So the nations, they rise, they fall, they come, they go, they covet, they invade, they win, they lose, all of it for earthly glory and earthly pleasure and earthly conquest, and none of it means anything eternally. All of them stand under the judgment of God, the real story of history, the real story of human beings’ relationship to Almighty God. That’s what causes everything. It’s because of that that we’re in the situations that we’re in now. The rise and fall of the nations is orchestrated because of that, because of human beings and their idolatry.

And yet, in the midst of all of that idolatry, look at verse six. Some gleanings will remain of Israel. This is a remnant for Israel that God promises. “’Some gleanings [of Israel] will remain, as when an olive tree is beaten, leaving two or three olives on the topmost branches, four or five on the fruitful boughs,’ declares the Lord, the God of Israel.” It says in Romans 11:29, “God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable.” And no matter how godless those ten tribes were, they were still descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He’s going to leave a remnant by His sovereign grace, though they don’t deserve it. Who does? Judah doesn’t deserve it either, none of us does. But by His sovereignty, He’s going to leave this handful of sick-looking olives that nobody wants. Physically, what that looked like was, after the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, there were just some of the poorest in the land left to kind of farm it and be there. In Jeremiah 39:10, it says, “Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard left behind in the land of Judah some of the poor people, who owned nothing; and at that time he gave them vineyards and fields.” So God doesn’t totally give the Jews over to destruction, even though they are no better than their Gentile neighbors.

Now, as I’ve mentioned, the root cause of this judgment is clear. It’s idolatry. Verse 8 mentions their altars, the work of their hands, the Asherah poles, and the incense altars that their fingers have made. The essence of idolatry is worshipping and serving created things rather than the Creator, who is forever praised, Amen. To worship what you do, to worship what you make with your hands, now that’s idolatry, to worship and serve created things. It is the ultimate foolishness to exchange the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man, and birds, and animals, and reptiles, and to worship, ultimately, man in all his glory, in all of his creative power.

Later on in this very book, Isaiah is going to lampoon idolatry with some of the most poignant sarcasm that you’ll find in any prophetic writing. Isiah 44:12 – 17 talks about the foolishness of crafting an idol and then falling down and worshipping it. This is what he says, “The blacksmith takes a tool and works with it in the coals; he shapes an idol with hammers, he forges it with the might of his arm. He gets hungry and loses his strength; he drinks no water and grows faint. The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker; he roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses. He shapes it in the form of man, of man in all his glory, that it may dwell in a shrine. He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. It is man’s fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, ‘Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.’ From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, ‘Save me; you are my god.’”

In the end, there are just two religions: the worship of the true living God and idolatry. For the longest time, even in my own ministry as a preacher, I underestimated the significance of the sin of idolatry. You read the Old Testament, and you think of totem poles and these odd-looking golden things and wooden things that people bow down to. But the fact of the matter is, if you’re not a genuine believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the living God through faith in Christ, you are an idolater. It’s a fact. That’s your religion. If you don’t have the true religion, you have idolatry. You’re worshipping and serving some created thing, maybe yourself. You could even be an atheist and you’re an idolater, worshipping yourself. We Americans, we struggle with our idolatries. Materialism is idolatry. Careerism is idolatry. Being in love with your achievements, your academic achievements or professional achievements, is idolatry. All of these things come close to home and it’s because of idolatry that God moves out in judgment.

These people crafted a system of religion that was handed down from generation to generation around their idolatry. It’s religious idolatry and you see elaborate systems of it in the east, in Hinduism and Buddhism and other types of idolatry. These people had Asherah poles, which represented the feminine side of deity. Goddesses were frequently worshipped along with the gods, usually through sexual immorality. They also had altars that their hands had made. They offered sacrifices to demon gods. They’re not true gods, they’re demon gods who do God impersonations. And these people bow down to that.

The whole system, however, is empty. When the judgment comes, when the Assyrians come over the border, they forsake the idols and run for their lives. They say, “Save me, you are my god.” But their god can’t save them because he doesn’t exist. And in that day they will forsake it. They will run for their lives. They will turn away from the idols that they made and run away from them because they know that they cannot save.

But the deepest issue is rejecting God. Look at verse 10, “You have forgotten God your Savior; you have not remembered the Rock, your fortress.” Exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images, that’s exactly what they did. It’s especially tragic for those ten tribes, the northern tribes of Israel. Think of all that God had done through Moses and Aaron, how He rescued them from the land of slavery by the ten plagues that He demonstrated with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, and how He led them through the Red Sea when the water walled up to the right and to the left and they passed right through. Two million strong, right through by the power of God. They went through to the other side and there God provided water out of a rock, and manna came down. They just picked it up off the ground. God delivered them for forty years in the desert and carried them as a father carries his son on his shoulders. He brought them right across the Jordan River at flood stage when the water heaped up like a mountain, and they crossed on dry ground. They surrounded the walls of Jericho, that mighty walled city, and then they just cried out on the seventh day and the walls came falling down. They took over the whole promised land by miraculous power, taking over nations more powerful than they were.

In this way, they came into a land flowing with milk and honey, and they ate from vineyards they didn’t plant, and they lived in houses they didn’t build. All of this done by the hand of God.  And it wasn’t long after that, that they turned away, those ten tribes, from the God of their heritage, the God of their fathers, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and worshipped and served foreign gods. It says in Jeremiah 2:11 that this is the greatest tragedy of all time. “’Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror,’ declares the Lord. ‘My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken Me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.’”

The result of this idolatry, of this exchange, is a harvest of incurable pain. God puts a curse on everything they do. Everything they do, there’s a curse on the work of their hands. Look at verses 10-11, “You have forgotten God your Savior; you have not remembered the Rock, your fortress. Therefore, though you set out the finest plants and plant imported vines, though on the day you set them out, you make them grow, and on the morning when you plant them, you bring them to bud, yet the harvest will be as nothing in the day of disease and incurable pain.” What a dreadful, final end! What a terrifying thing it is to have Almighty God as your enemy, to have God fighting everything you do, to have Him not bless you when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, and when you rise and lie down, to have God not bless your kneading trough, and your calves, and all the agricultural images.

You say, “We’re not farmers. Or, what do these vines have to do with us?” Well, alright, translate it then into the 21st century. You invest in a small business and it goes belly-up. You leave one job and go to another thinking things are going to go better for you and they go much worse. You have problems with material possessions. You have a flood in your home, or you have repairs to your car that you can’t afford, one thing after another. How can you fight God? Could it be that God is using all of these adverse circumstances to say, “Look, this is happening to you?” You may not have thought Isaiah 17 was relevant to you, but you set out vines and you planted them thinking good things were going to come. And nothing comes of it. Could it be you’re out of fellowship with God? That God himself is fighting you?

Now, it mentions the day of disease and incurable pain. It is true that we can suffer in this world. We can have pain in this world. We can have incurable diseases. We think of AIDS as an incurable disease. You could bye laying there suffering from AIDS and wonder, “Is this a judgment of God on me?” Frankly, any disease that takes you out of the world was, in the end, incurable, wasn’t it? The doctor couldn’t cure it. He couldn’t save you from dying, and so you died. But I don’t think that’s the ultimate judgment of God, do you? “Do not be afraid,” said Jesus, “of those who kill the body and after that, there’s nothing more they can do. But be afraid of the one who has power to destroy both soul and body in hell.” Death isn’t the end. God has appointed for each one of us that we die and then face judgment day, in which we give an account for the things done in the body. So to me, the real day of disease and incurable pain is hell. It’s a day that will last forever. It is incurable because God will not cure it and any He casts to hell are cast there forever. There is no rescue. There is no refuge. That is the ultimate end of idolatry, it’s the ultimate end, the ultimate judgment of God that He will bring.

God in His mercy, God in His kindness gives us samples of that future judgment while there’s still time to repent. You may not think of it as mercy, but we should think of it that way. When judgment comes on other people, like the Tower of Siloam fell and some people died, Jesus said that unless we repent we will all likewise perish. Hurricane Ike didn’t come our way. Well, we’re fine then. We have our power, we have our electricity. You’re not thinking rightly. When you turn on CNN and you see some misery for other people in another part of the world, you should say, “Unless we repent, we will all likewise perish.” That’s one message. Another is, “There but by the grace of God, go I.” What can I do with the grace that God’s given me to help them and reach out to them and love them? If you come to Isaiah 7 and say, “This is the Syrians and the Ephraimites, what do they have to do with me? Oh, they lived twenty-seven centuries ago,” you’re missing the point. God is still holy and we’re still idolaters. He hasn’t changed. And unless we repent, we will all likewise perish.

The ray of hope in the middle of this is that God can bring about salvation for sinners like you and me. Isn’t that sweet? Isn’t that magnificent? Look what it says in verses 7-8, “In that day men will look to their Maker and turn their eyes to the Holy One of Israel.” At last they look to him! “They will not look to the altars, the work of their hands, and they will have no regard for the Asherah poles and the incense altars their fingers have made.” They finally turn to the Lord and look to Him.

It says in Isaiah 4:22, “Look unto me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth.” It’s the look of faith. CNN’s not going to cover the look of faith, friends. But it’s going on all over the world, praise God! People from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation are hearing the gospel and they’re looking, at last, away from the work of their hands. They’re looking up to their Maker and they’re finding salvation in Him through His Son, Jesus Christ.

I think it’s my primary job, as a preacher, to make Christ crucified almost visible to your eyes. I think about that hymn, “Before the Throne of God.” At the end, it says, “Behold him there, the risen lamb, the perfect spotless, the great I Am.” Behold Him there. How do you see Him? By faith. It says in Galatians 3:1, “Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was portrayed as crucified.” The Apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 2:2, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” So behold Him there, the bloody Son of God who shed His blood for idolaters, for sinners like you and me. And in that day, it says they will have no more regard for the work of their hands. They’re going to look to their Maker, their Creator, their sustainer, and to their Savior, and they will find in Him salvation. Look to Him. Look to Him.

This is an assembly of Christian worship. Most of you who come in here with a profession of faith in Christ, are you done looking to Jesus? Are you finished being saved? Look unto Him and be saved. Keep looking. Look unto Him the rest of your life. Realize that there are still idolatries inside our divided hearts. Romans 7 talks about it, ‘The very thing we hate, we do.” Why? Because there are idols still there and we still bow the knee and give them allegiance. Look unto Him and be saved, all the ends of the earth. In this alone will the raging of the nations be quieted at last. This is where the peace comes from. It’s not coming from the United Nations. It’s not coming from military actions. It’s not coming from economic sanctions. It’s not coming from a new invention. It’s not coming from better food distribution systems. It’s not coming from the best negotiator that ever lived. None of that is going to bring peace between the nations. Not at all.

You want to know what’s going to bring peace between the nations? The actions of our Sovereign God, actions in judgment and actions in salvation. We’ve talked about the judgment. He’s going to clean it all up. He’s going to come back in glorious power and He’s going to destroy the final regime, the final nation, that one world nation under the antichrist. And the dragon, the devil, stands by the sea, remember? And up out of the sea comes the beast. What does the sea represent? The raging sea, it’s right here in Isaiah 17. It’s the nations, the turbulent nations. Up out of the nations comes the antichrist. It’s the same image in Daniel 7. He has a dream and the winds are blowing over the turbulent sea and up out of it comes four beasts, one after the other. Up out of the sea comes the nations, the final form of that, the antichrist, doing the bidding of the dragon, of Satan. Up he comes.

The nations will still be raging, still be turbulent until the Lord Jesus comes back in all His glory, amen? He destroys the antichrist and destroys the devil, and gets rid of the sea. It says in Revelation 21:1, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” I really link that right back to Isaiah 17:12. The turbulent, crashing waves of rebellion against Almighty God is over and there’s going to be this quiet, peaceful, loving group of people from every tribe and language and people and nation who are all focused on the throne of Christ. He will reign forever and ever over a peaceful multitude. The time of rebellion will end and your heart will be at peace with God and with one another. Why? Because it says in Romans 5:1, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith,” What do we have? ”we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

As a result of that, we have peace with one another. Why? Because Jesus Christ paid our price for us. Isaiah 53:5 says, “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” The punishment that brought us what? Peace. That’s where it’s going to happen, friends. That’s where the raging turbulence of the nations will end at last, at the end of the world when Jesus comes and establishes His throne. Then it will be true, what it says in Zechariah 1:11, “we have gone throughout the earth and found the whole world at rest and in peace.” Oh, how sweet will that be!

So there are two looks. We’ll see Christ in two different ways. The first is the look of faith. That can happen right now. Close your physical eyes. If you look with your mind’s eye, then you can see Christ crucified. You can also see Christ resurrected. You can see Christ reigning on the throne. You can see Christ returning in glory. Alright, it’s the look of faith. You can see Him that way or you can wait and you can see Him with your eyes. “Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen.” Revelation 1:7. You’ll see Him either way. I urge you to see Him now, see Him today by faith so that all your sins can be forgiven. Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 15:1-16:14. The main subject of the sermon is how the nations will flee in the day of God's wrath.

As we come to Isaiah 15 and 16, I acknowledge here before you the challenge of expositional preaching. It is quite possible that there’s no congregation on the face of the earth that has had Isaiah 16:4 projected up on the walls as we did this morning, talking about fugitives from Moab and finding refuge in Christ. That’s the challenge of exposition and the joy as well. “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” (2 Tim 3:16) Amen.

Jesus said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4:4) Now, my brother and good friend, Andy Winn, had John 3:16 last Sunday. I get Isaiah 15 and 16. He did a wonderful job and I was greatly encouraged. But frankly, the more I studied these two chapters that we’re looking at today, the more relevancy I saw in my own personal life. I don’t know that this is something where you’re necessarily going to take a verse from it and memorize it, or something like that. Yet, it is the word of the Lord to us today. And I pray that God will enable me to preach it with power and with conviction so that our lives might be transformed.

I’ll never forget the summer of 1987, when I had the privilege of ministering to refugees who had fled from the invading Russians in Afghanistan. They were across the border in Pakistan, and we went to the city of Peshawar and we ministered to them. They were the most miserable and destitute people I’d ever seen in my life. And it’s still the case. I’ve seen some poverty in Asia, in India, in Haiti, but I’ve never seen the kind of misery and pain that I saw etched on the faces of these people that had run for their lives from Russian helicopter gunships. Many of them had seen relatives and friends killed before their very eyes. Their prospects were limited. They were not incredibly welcome in Pakistan. They were safe, at least for the time being, but their prospects economically were dim.

Very few people were ministering to them. They had a hard time eating and caring for themselves. And again, the future looked dim. What a joy and privilege it is to go into a situation like that and minister the gospel of Jesus Christ! Amen! To be able to bring hope where, other than the ministry of the Gospel, there would be no hope. But the 20th century really was a century of refugees. Look at World War I. Look at World War II. Look at grainy old black and white photos from World War I and footage of German dive bombers, strafing columns of refugees that are fleeing from Belgium, or fleeing from Poland, or fleeing from Russia or Ukraine. You can see a picture in your mind of what it is to be a refugee. It’s a terrifying situation to be in, to lose everything that you have except what you can carry with you.

I remember a picture of an elderly French woman. She’s got a mink stole on and she’s got an evening gown and a valuable painting. She’s got it in a baby buggy and she’s pushing it down a muddy road. It’s all she has left of a former way of life. Everything that she has, she’s carrying with her. You get the sense that it won’t be much longer and she won’t even be pushing that baby buggy. She’ll be stripped of everything. So it is to be a refugee. The more I meditated on Isaiah 15 and 16, the more I saw the relevance to our lives. I don’t know that any of us will ever be refugees. I do know that the United Nations High Commission on Refugees said there were sixty-five million displaced persons in 2007.

So there’s a lot of refugees around the world. There’s an opportunity for us as a church of Jesus Christ to minister. We had an opportunity to minister to some refugees who came to us from Vietnam. What a great privilege that was! We may well have a practical ministry to refugees. It could be that, if we are in fact the final generation, and some of the events that are recorded in the Book of Revelation take place, then we will actually know what it means to flee for our lives and to dwell in caves, and to look for a place of refuge from an encroaching terror that’s coming to hunt us down. We may know that. If the Lord tarries, we may never know that.

But there are people, even brothers and sisters in Christ, in the Sudan and other places in the world, that are actually going through this right now. So at the physical level, I think there’s a relevance to this text. But I also see a spiritual connection. I don’t think it’s hard to find because what happens in this text is a judgment on Moab. Some unnamed invader comes into their country and the people of Moab have to run for their lives. Their military strength is gone. They have nothing left. Their religious strength is gone and they run for their lives. They actually turn, at that point, to their former enemies in Judah, the Jews. They want to see if it’s possible that they might take them in. As a matter of fact, Isaiah the prophet says that it’s the only refuge they’re going to have.

I’m going to talk about who the invader could be. We don’t really know who it is. But if in fact the invader was Assyria, and if they came in during a certain time, it could be that, literally, physically, the only refuge there could be would be in Zion, in Jerusalem, with godly King Hezekiah. This, in the end, becomes a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Jesus, the descendant of David, the King, the Davidic King, mentioned in the middle of Isaiah 16, is in fact the only refuge there is from the coming judgment. So there is a beautiful spiritual picture of the gospel as well.

The Bible does this over and over. Oh, how the Lord wants us to flee to Christ! How many different ways does it give us incentive so that we would run for our lives, run to the only refuge there is, the refuge of Jesus Christ? There are pictures again and again in the Old Testament of a place of refuge. If you go there, you are going to be safe from the coming judgment and the coming wrath. But, if you go outside of it, you’re going to be killed. You’re going to perish.

Noah’s ark is a picture of that. If you’re on the ark, you’re safe. If you’re outside the ark, you are lost. Also, during the time of Passover when the Jews painted the blood of the sacrificial lamb over the door posts, the angel of death passed over. If he saw the blood on the house, everyone inside the house was safe. But if you were outside the house, your blood was on your own head. That meant you were going to die. So there’s a place of refuge, a place of security and safety, and outside there is none. Or again, we have Rahab’s house nestled in the walls of Jericho. The promise of a scarlet cord hanging down was that she and all of her relatives would be safe if they stayed in the house. But if they went outside the house, their blood would be on their own heads. They would die. It is also a picture of a place of refuge, which you have to be inside. That’s where the refuge is. Outside there is none. In the Law of Moses, there is a provision for cities of refuge where, if you accidentally kill somebody, you can run for your life. If you get there before the avenger of blood comes, you’ll be safe. They’ll protect you and keep you safe until the death of the high priest. It was a picture, again, of a place of refuge.

Don’t you see how all of these are pictures of Jesus Christ? Don’t you see Christ in all of this? Don’t you see the need to run for your life? Don’t you see that there is a judgment coming, worse than the flood of Noah? It’s an eternal judgment, an eternal fire. What we stand to lose is not just our mortal lives, but our souls. We are encouraged again and again and again to run for our lives to the place of refuge, and that is Jesus Christ. So there you have it. There’s the sermon in a nutshell. What we have is a current event that’s not so current.

We have, in this section of Isaiah, the oracles against the nations. Isaiah the prophet is giving an oracle, or a saying, a prophecy concerning Moab. From Isaiah 13 through 23, one nation after another is addressed through the prophetic voice. Isaiah the prophet is speaking here to the little country of Moab. We’ve had oracles against great nations like Assyria and Babylon. Last time, we looked at an oracle against the Philistines, a smaller nation. Here, the Moabites were even smaller. The Sovereign God who rules over all the earth is orchestrating the events of all the earth. He speaks an oracle through his prophet to the people of Moab, the Moabites.

Now, who were the Moabites? They were descended from Lot, Abraham’s nephew. When, in another picture of refuge, Lot fled from Sodom and Gomorrah to the little town of Zoar, he was able to survive the fire and brimstone. This is a picture, again, of refuge, fleeing for your life. But then, thinking that it was the end of the world, they took up refuge in a cave. Lot was there with his two daughters. And the daughters, thinking that they wouldn’t know any more people on the face of the earth, perhaps with the memory of the flood still very fresh in their minds, induced their father through wine to lay with them. Each of them had a son by their own father and from this came two peoples, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

The Moabites took up residence on a tiny piece of land east of the Dead Sea, stretching from the Arnon River, which dumps into the Dead Sea, to the Zered River, on the border with Edom. It’s a small piece of land, thirty miles by thirty miles. It’s really small. The Moabites were not a mighty and significant people. They were usually enemies of Israel, usually in opposition to the people of God. They would fight against them. For example, during the Exodus, they would not allow the Israelites to pass through their territory, they had to go around. They hired Balaam to curse Israel, and you remember what happened with that. The Moabite women seduced the Israelite men to worship Baal of Peor through sexual immorality. It was the Moabite women that did that. As a result of all of these things, the Law of Moses forbad any of them to enter the assembly of the Lord down to the tenth generation. They were forbidden to enter.

During the time of the Judges, God gave Israel over to a Moabite king, Eglon, the fat man. Eglon was murdered by one of the judges, Ehud, a left-handed man. These were the Moabites. They were the enemies of the people of God. It was Moabite wives that seduced King Solomon to worship foreign gods, to worship Chemosh, their detestable god. They occasionally organized armies to fight against the Jews, and they usually lost. They were the enemies of God’s people. By the end of Kings and Chronicles, Moabite raiders were still plundering Israel.

Yet, for all of that, it was a godly Moabite woman, Ruth, who said to Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God… May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” (Ru 1:16-17) From Ruth came David, and through David, ultimately, came our savior Jesus Christ. Therefore, we see the grace of God in dealing with pagan people. We also see God’s saving intentions to the Gentiles and to every tribe and language and people and nation, everyone on the face of the earth.

These are the people, the Moabites, who are running for their lives in these two chapters. It’s the Moabites who are running now. Why are they fleeing? Look at Isaiah 15:1, “Ar in Moab is ruined, destroyed in a night! Kir in Moab is ruined, destroyed in a night!” By the way, if you see Keith Pendergraff, thank him for that reading. There’s something like twenty proper nouns in that. He did a phenomenal job. I don’t know that I’m going to do as well. I was adjusting my pronunciation as I listened to him read the scripture. So thank you, Keith. We thought about that at our staff meeting, “Now, who’s going to do this reading? Please urge them to practice ahead of time.”

But what is going on in Isaiah 15:1? Well, these are two cities in Moab, Ar and Kir, and both of them are destroyed in a night. They’re gone. These are their strongholds, their high places, their walled fortresses. They are nothing to the unnamed invader. In a single night, they are gone, both of them have fallen. Furthermore, their religion has proven to be empty. They turn to their high places. Verse 2 says, “Dibon goes up to its temple, to its high places to weep.” If you look all the way over to Chapter 16:12, it says, “When Moab appears at her high place, she only wears herself out; when she goes to her shrine to pray, it is to no avail.” Chemosh cannot help them. You know why? Because Chemosh does not exist.

He’s an idol of their own imagination and Chemosh cannot save them. So they are running for their lives. They are fugitives. Look at Isaiah 15:5, “Her fugitives flee as far as Zoar, as far as Eglath Shelishiyah. They go up the way to Luhith, weeping as they go; on the road to Horonaim they lament their destruction.” You see a picture of a train of refugees, crying, running, leaving possessions behind, stuff strewn along the roads. That’s what’s going on. The Moabites are running for their lives. Like all refugees, they try to carry whatever they can of their possessions. Verse 7 says, “So the wealth they have acquired and stored up they carry away over the Ravine of the Poplars.”

They’re going to carry their gold and silver with them. Well, how long is that going to last? It’s heavy. There comes a point where they will leave it behind. The army that’s going to come after them will pick it up and plunder them. So that’s what is happening. These are refugees leaving behind their old way of life, and the slaughter is terrible. Look at Isaiah 15:9, “Dimon’s waters are full of blood, but I will bring still more upon Dimon – a lion upon the fugitives of Moab and upon those who remain in the land.” Whether it’s a literal lion or it’s just more military conquest coming on this straggling line of refugees, it doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is, it’s just a miserable, horrible time for these Moabites. The rivers are filled with blood. You see the image of their women in 16:2, “like fluttering birds, pushed from the nest, so are the women of Moab at the fords of Arnon.” As they’re trying to cross this river, they are panicking and weak and defenseless, a picture of the refugee.

At this point, they turn to Judah for help. This is the only place they can turn. Frankly, this is what Isaiah wants them to do. If you look at Isaiah 16:1, it says, “send lambs as tribute to the ruler of the land, from Sela, across the desert.” Where? “to the daughter of Zion.” Reach out to the Jews. Why? Because salvation is from the Jews, your ancient enemies. Reach out to the daughter of Zion. That’s the advice that Isaiah’s giving. It’s really that God is giving it. Reach out to the Jews in your moment of distress.

Now, I have no idea, historically, what this is referring to. Nobody really knows. I have a sense of what’s going on, but nobody really knows. Of course, the big bully of the time was Assyria. It could be that in 715 BC, the Assyrians were coming down and dealing with some Arabian raiders that were making commerce difficult. As they did, they passed through little Moab. And what do the Assyrians do when they pass through somebody’s land? They do this kind of thing, this kind of conquest, this kind of bloodshed, this kind of plundering and pillaging. It could be that’s exactly what was going. The end for Moab is quite near.

Look at the end of our reading for today. Isaiah 16:13-14 says, “This is the word the Lord has already spoken concerning Moab. But now the Lord says: ‘Within three years, as a servant bound by contract would count them, Moab’s splendor and all her many people will be despised, and her survivors will be very few and feeble.” It’s a time table, three years as for a servant bound by a contract, meaning counting the hours. It’s going to be very accurate. Within that time, three years, Moab will be finished. That’s what’s going on. Look at Isaiah’s reaction, weeping for the refugees.

I find it fascinating, the emotional response of Isaiah to these, who are supposedly his enemies. I tell you that God does not willingly afflict anyone. He doesn’t willingly bring suffering on anybody. So says Lamentations 3:32-33, “Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men.”

The consistent teaching of scripture is that it is, in fact, God that brings these disasters. There’s not a subset of disaster that didn’t come from God and had nothing to do with God. He does everything. He’s King of the Universe, but He doesn’t delight in bringing suffering. That’s not what He’s doing. It’s called in Isaiah 28:21, “His strange work” and “His alien task.”

It’s not his home base. He does it for a reason, for a purpose. I believe He afflicts the nations to get them up out of their self-satisfied, self-worshipping rut, and to cause them to seek a Savior, who they would never seek if God didn’t afflict them. As King Hezekiah says as he is recovering from his illness, “Surely it was good for me to have been afflicted.” It’s a good thing, then, to be afflicted if, in the end, it means salvation for your soul. And I think that’s what’s going on here. God brings these kinds of afflictions because there is no way the Moabites will seek a Savior from the descendants of David, unless they are desperate and running for their lives.

God brings this kind of affliction into lives, but you see the emotion, you see the compassion of God through His spokesman Isaiah. You see Him weeping for them, and it’s really quite surprising. Look at Isaiah 15:5. He says “My heart cries out over Moab; her fugitives flee as far as Zoar, as far as Eglath Shelishiyah. They go up the way to Luhith, weeping as they go; on the road to Horonaim they lament their destruction.” He’s weeping for them. He has compassion for them. In chapter 16:9-11, it says, “So I weep, as Jazer weeps… the shouts of joy… are stilled. Joy and gladness are taken away from the orchards; no one sings or shouts in the vineyards; no one treads out the wine at the presses, for I have put an end to the shouting. My heart laments for Moab like a harp, my inmost being for Kir Hareseth.”

This is Isaiah. Isaiah is speaking. He is a man. He is reacting to his own prophecies. He’s reacting emotionally to what he is writing. But in so doing, he is God’s mouthpiece, and it is really God’s own reaction to what the Moabites are going through. That’s quite remarkable. You have to look carefully, but look at verse 10, and then on into verse 11 of Chapter 16. It says, “Joy and gladness are taken away from the orchards; no one sings or shouts in the vineyards; no one treads out wine at the presses.” Why? “For I have put an end to the shouting.” Do you see that? The word “I?” Isaiah didn’t do that. It’s not Isaiah’s work that put an end to anything. He’s an announcer. He’s a messenger. This is God speaking. Therefore, the very next verse is God speaking as well. “My heart laments for Moab.”

This is the nature of our God. He brings the affliction, but He weeps at the effects. Surely, God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. They are so infinitely high above us, what God is doing in the world. But I believe He does it out of compassion. I believe He does it so that people will turn from their sins and cry out to a Jewish Savior, cry out to Christ and be saved. That’s why He does it. And unless some harsh treatment comes in most of our lives, if not all, we will never do it. We will never do it.

Christ wept for His enemies, didn’t He? Didn’t Christ stand over Jerusalem and weep for the coming judgment that would come on that city? Didn’t He say, concerning the men that were murdering Him, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Lk 23:34) Do you see His heart there?

Do you see the Apostle Paul, in Romans 9, testifying that he has a great sorrow and unceasing anguish over the Jews who are making his life utterly miserable and who would love to kill him as well? He testifies solemnly that he would trade his salvation for theirs, if he could. Amazing compassion!

What about us? What about me? Every time I come to the issue of my level of compassion for the lost, I’m brought up short and convicted. I realize that I have to cry out against the stoniness of my own heart and I realize that I just don’t care enough about fugitives, refugees. I don’t care enough about the lost, the idolaters around me.  I don’t care enough. And I have to fan a little ember into a flame, by a biblical meditation on what hell is actually going to be like. I have to do it.

The scholarly pastor Andrew Bonar, in Scotland, lay on his bed Saturday nights. Down in the street, below his window, he could hear revelers tramping back and forth, going to the bars and the shows, an empty searching for something. He used to get out of his bed and weep over their souls and cry out, “Oh, they perish, they perish!” He would weep for them. Oswald J Smith, who brought the Gospel to over 50 countries, this is what he said, “Can we travail for a drowning child, but not for a perishing soul? It is not hard to weep when we realize that our little one is sinking below the surface for the last time. Anguish is spontaneous then. Nor is it hard to agonize when we see the little casket containing all that we love on earth borne out of the home. Ah, no; tears are natural at such a time! But oh, to realize and to know that souls, precious, never-dying souls are perishing all around us, going out into the blackness of darkness and despair, eternally lost, and yet to feel no anguish, shed no tears, know no travail! How cold are our hearts! How little do we know of the compassion of Jesus!”

I take solace from the fact that you can even see that Oswald J Smith, who brought the gospel to over 50 countries, saw that weakness in his own heart. It’s not natural for us, but we ought to weep over the kind of judgments that come on the lost. We ought to travail for their souls. We see the sorrow of Isaiah and, really, the sorrow of God over the affliction necessary to save them.

We also see the great advantage for these refugees. Now, you might say what advantage can there be in being a refugee? Well, on an earthly basis, at a purely secular level, I can’t possibly see any advantage. As I said, these were the most miserable people I’d ever seen on the face of the earth. I don’t mean that in terms of their emotional state. I just mean in terms of their circumstances.

As I look at the hierarchy of suffering, the only think that I think is worse than running for your life before an invading army is being captured and held by a malicious tyrant who loves to torture you, with no escape or death. I think that’s probably the worst earthly circumstance you could be in. Of course, none of this compares to hell, because there is always some escape from any misery here on earth. But there is no escape from hell. Still, I think being a refugee is a horrible situation. Yet there is an advantage if, in the end, you come to your senses and come to faith in Christ, if you realize you’re really running for your life. And by that, I mean your eternal life. If you realize that your ordinary way of life was only going to lead you to hell, and something caused you to get out of that rut that was drawing you right down into hell, to get up out of that and say, “Where am I going?” If you then come to your senses and say, “I need a savior,” then it’s worthwhile.

There’s some advantage, then, in being a refugee. Foundations are removed. All the things you counted on and relied on are taken away. You have to think about everything anew and afresh. Everything’s been tossed up for grabs.

Pride has been removed. Oh, that’s important. Look at Isaiah 16:6. It’s mentioned right there, “We have heard of Moab’s pride – her overweening pride and conceit, her pride and her insolence – but her boasts are empty.” Oh, they’re empty now! Now whoever it is has come in, the Assyrians, let’s say. Oh, there’s nothing left to be proud of now! Now they’re beggars looking for some place of refuge. Actually, that’s good, because Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 5:3) It’s good to get to the point where you realize you have nothing in your hands to give to the king. You’re just begging for a place of refuge. That’s a good thing.

Pride has been destroyed. It’s amazing how proud we are, isn’t it? But what do we have to be proud of, really? We’re just created beings. Everything we have we receive from God. What do we have to boast about? Yet it’s in there, that worm of pride. It’s so ugly when you see it in someone else, isn’t it? It’s so ugly when you see it in another person, but it’s ugly if you can see it in yourself too. I was reading a quote by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I can scarcely read this without feeling a curdling effect in my stomach. He said openly what most people would never parade. Pride is just oozing from this paragraph. Listen to what he said:

“What could your miseries have in common with mine? My situation is unique, unheard of since the beginning of time. The person who can love me as I can love is still yet to be born. No one has ever had more talent for loving. I was born to be the best friend that ever existed. Show me a better man than me, a heart more loving, more tender, more sensitive. Posterity will honor me because it is my due. I rejoice in myself. My consolation lies in my self-esteem. If there were a single enlightened government in Europe, it would have erected statues to me.”

Wow! Listen, bro. Let’s sit down and have a conversation. Let’s get the scripture and find out what the truth really is. What’s so sad is that we’re like this, though we don’t admit it. We’re not going to bring it this far, but we think, “Has anybody ever suffered like me? Nobody loves like I love. If I really got what I deserved, they’d be erecting a statue.” I don’t know if we carry it that far, but the pride, it’s really laughable. It’s actually good to laugh at yourself. But, you know, to actually get cured from it, sometimes it takes this level of affliction. To run for your life strips you of pride. What do you have left? Where then is your resume? Where then are your possessions? Where then is your glorious future? You’re running for your life, and that’s what it’s done. So there’s a great advantage to being a refugee.

It’s good if you know the refuge. Amen? If you know where to run to, now that’s a benefit. And I say to you, the only safe refuge is Jesus Christ. He’s mentioned in the text, though indirectly. With their pride stripped, the Moabite refugees have nowhere to turn but to Judah. As we already mentioned in Chapter 16:1, they’re urged to “send lambs as tribute to the… mount of the Daughter of Zion.” That’s Jerusalem. They begged for help from the Jews. Verses 2-4 of Chapter 16 say, “Like fluttering birds pushed from the nest, so are the women of Moab at the fords of the Arnon. ‘Give us counsel, render a decision. Make your shadow like night – at high noon. Hide the fugitives, do not betray the refugees. Let the Moabite fugitives stay with you; be their shelter from the destroyer.’ The oppressor will come to an and, and destruction will cease; the aggressor will vanish from the land.”

Here we have a stunning and beautiful prophecy: a ruler from the house of David. Look at verse 16:5, “In love a throne will be established; in faithfulness a man will sit on it – one from the house of David – one who in judging seeks justice and speeds the cause of righteousness.” Oh, how sweet is that promise of Jesus Christ! This isn’t any one of the Davidic kings. Yes, Hezekiah was a godly man, but he was no final refuge. He’s a picture of A refuge, but he’s not The final refuge. Oh no. The final refuge is Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. He’s the refuge. Therefore, Isaiah predicts the establishment of a Davidic throne that will reign in righteousness. This Davidic king will bring justice to the nations. It is Jesus Christ then at last, who is every refugee’s place of safety. The name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run to it and find refuge.

Jesus is the name of the Lord. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. You run to Him and you find refuge. What refuge is there? The foot of the cross, where Jesus shed His blood for sin. The real danger is not the Assyrian army or any army. The real danger is the wrath of God. “’Do not fear those who kill the body and after that can do nothing to you. I’ll tell you the one to fear,’ said Jesus, ‘fear the one who has the power to destroy both soul and body in hell.’” We need a refuge from hell. We need a refuge from the judgment of an all-seeing God. We need a refuge from judgment and wrath. That’s what we need.

Jesus Christ is the place of refuge, amen? We can flee to Him and find safety. There is no other, there’s no other place. God didn’t ordain that Noah and five other people each build an ark. There was one ark, there was one place of refuge. And so it is with Christ. In the Old Covenant, the Moabites were excluded to the tenth generation. Oh, but praise God for the New covenant, Amen? In the New Covenant, anyone who repents and believes is welcome.

“All that the Father gives me will come to me,” said Jesus, “and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” (Jn 6:37) There is your welcome. There is your place of refuge. Jesus Christ is saying, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt 11:28) So He is the place of refuge mentioned right here in Isaiah 16:5.

What’s the connection to our lives? Are we ever going to be refugees? Well, I can’t say. I cannot say. I do know, though, there will come a time when every nation on earth will run for their lives. If you’re alive at that time, you’ll run too. You will run too. That’s all you can do. This is what the Lord says in Isaiah 13:13-14, “Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the Lord Almighty, in the day of his burning anger. Like a hunted gazelle, like sheep without a shepherd, each will return to his own people, each will flee to his native land.” Haggai 2:6-7 says, “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations.’” Isaiah 30:27-28 says, “See, the name of the Lord comes from afar, with burning anger and dense clouds of smoke; his lips are full of wrath, and his tongue is a consuming fire. His breath is like a rushing torrent, rising up to the neck. He shakes the nations in the sieve of destruction.” Hebrews 12:26-27 says, “At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, ‘Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.’ The words “once more” indicate the removal of what can be shaken – that is, created things – so that what cannot be shaken may remain.”

God himself is going to shake the nations in a sieve of destruction. All the nations that live at that time will run for their lives. So you will be a fugitive if you live in the final generation. It is your future and mine if the Lord tarries. It is a terrifying thing. The prediction is plain in Revelation 6:12-17,

“I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The sky receded like a scroll, rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?’”

Run for your lives! It’s going to be literal at that point. But the real danger is nothing on earth, friend. No, the real danger is Judgment Day. That’s the real danger. When you stand before Him who knows everything you ever said, everything you ever did, who knows the inclinations of your heart, who remembers everything perfectly, that’s the danger. As John the Baptist said to his Jewish enemies, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” Has anybody warned you to do that, to be a refugee from the coming wrath? Have you learned to do that? To flee from the wrath to come?

Jesus Christ is the only refuge from that wrath to come. It says in 1 Thessalonians 1:10, “Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.” Amen? He is a safe refuge from the coming wrath. It says in 1 Thessalonians 5:9, “God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” So run for your lives! In the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian realizes that he actually lived in a place called the City of Destruction. He started to be worried about the future. Wouldn’t you if you lived in a place called the City of Destruction? He’s reading about it in the book, in the Scriptures, and he has a terrible burden on his back, a sense of guilt for his own sins that are going to press him down to hell. He talks to his wife, but she doesn’t believe. She thinks he’s crazy. The children don’t believe, they think he’s crazy. His neighbors think he’s crazy. Then Evangelist tells him to go to a wicket gate and to a flashing light, and he begins to run there. He’s running, and he’s got his fingers in his ears so he doesn’t listen to the cries of his unbelieving family and his mocking neighbors. He runs and runs for the distant salvation, running for that gate, so that his soul can be saved. Run for your lives. Do you live in the City of Destruction? Yes, you do. So do I. So we’re called on to run this race with endurance, to keep running until we’re done, to run for our lives spiritually.

What application do we take from this? First, nothing you see around you is eternal. Don’t be deceived. Did you say, “What? We heard a strange sermon today on being a refugee for Christ. I don’t think that’s going to happen to me.” Well, be careful, friend. Be careful, because someday you’re going to lose it all anyway. You are. And it’s good to know it. I don’t know the specific political and military situations, or earthquake, or hurricane that will cause you to be a displaced person. I don’t know whether that will ever happen to you. But I do know this, you ought to live with that kind of mentality. Live as an alien and a stranger on earth, looking ahead to a city with foundations whose builder and maker is God. Run for that place, the celestial city. Nothing will ever remove that. It cannot be shaken. Run for that.

Hold on to your possessions loosely. Live a holy life worthy of that final day, since is says in 2 Peter 3:11-13,  “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.” So live a holy and godly life. 1 Peter 2:11  says, “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in this world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.”

Thirdly, I would urge you to cry out over your own hardness of heart, as I do over mine. Cry out that you don’t care about the plight of the lost. Be like God. Be like Paul. Be like Andrew Bonar and Oswald J Smith. Be like these men and women who learned to weep over the condition of lost friends and relatives and co-workers. If you don’t care much, know that God knows you don’t care. He knows, however, if you’re a believer, that you want to care. You want to be healed from your hardness of heart. You want to care about the poor and the needy. Go to Him and ask Him for it. Be a spiritual beggar for that, too. Say, “Lord, change my heart. Give me tears to cry over lost people.” And stay there until He does. Meditate in depth on passages about hell. That might help you.

Finally, consider in a practical way a ministry to refugees. We’ve already had some in this church that have sacrificially given to refugees from Vietnam. It’s been a sweet experience for them and for the church. You can give money to Persecution Project, which ministers to Christian refugees in the Sudan, especially in Darfur. You can minister to refugees that are non-Christians, as we did in Pakistan. Those were Muslim refugees. Perhaps God might call you to that kind of a practical ministry. In any case, whatever God calls you to do, live your life as a refugee here on Earth until God takes you to heaven. Close with me in prayer.

God is sovereign over all nations, He speaks oracles, dictates policy, decrees events for them, and brings about their rise and fall.

Of all the marvels of the physical universe, few are more amazing to me, as a former mechanical engineer, than the human hand. I’ve been thinking about the human hand. Now, I know I’m supposed to have grown out of hand-regard a long time ago. Infants just lay and stare at their hands. But I’ve been thinking about the human hand because the hand of the Lord is in this passage. I can’t see his invisible hand, but I can know what human hands do. The human hand is a marvel of design and of engineering and of beauty. Each hand contains twenty-nine major and minor bones, twenty-nine major joints, at least one hundred and twenty-three ligaments, thirty-five muscles (seventeen in the palm and eighteen in the forearm), and forty-eight named nerves. You won’t be asked to name them. I don’t know what they all are, but they’ve named them for us, these forty-eight nerves. There are thirty named arteries and nearly as many smaller named branches. The thumb is a marvel. It’s controlled by nine individual muscles, which are themselves controlled by three major nerve branches. It moves in such a complex fashion that there are six descriptive terms for just the particular directions of one joint, the basal joint at the bottom of the thumb.

Sir Isaac Newton said this, “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” Well, there’s a lot more proof than that, but I’ve been thinking about the power of the human hand. It’s an amazing instrument. Think about the strength. There are three different ways that the hand shows strength. The first is the crush grip, and there’s one among you who has the gift of a vigorous handshake. I’ve talked to you about it before. I am blessed by it every week. I’m grateful that he holds back. You know who you are. That’s the crush grip. For example, if you’ve been watching the Olympics, I watched the super heavyweight weight-lifting man from Germany, and he lifted 565 pounds over his head. I watched for thirty seconds as he got his grip right on the bar, adjusting and readjusting and gripping, just knowing what the hand was about to go through, 565 pounds.

Then there’s the pinch grip, which we use to carry heavy things like a piece of plywood or something like that. It’s the weakest of the three grips. We do it to pinch. Then there’s the support grip, in which the hand has to be strong over a long period of time, like for rock climbers that are dangling by three or four fingers. Have you seen it, where they reach back for equipment or take a break, just dangling like that? Or the ability to hold a bucket of water, a pail, over a long period of time. These are the three ways that the human hand shows its strength. Now, the human hand has shaped all of history. Alexander the Great grasps his sword and conquers an empire. Or maybe Michelangelo grasps a paintbrush and paints the Sistine Chapel for us. Or maybe it’s Bach who’s writing down the music to St Matthew’s Passion so that we can enjoy it centuries later. Or Thomas Jefferson taking hold of the quill pen and writing the Declaration of Independence, the birth sounds of an infant nation. These are the very powers of the human hand, and with it we also stroke the face of our little baby, or shake each other’s hand, pat each other on the back.

People can talk with the hand through sign language. They can use the expressiveness of the different motions of the human hand in order to communicate. If these are the various powers of the human hand, what then of God who created it? He who formed the eye, does He not see? He who made the ear, does He not hear? And He who formed the human hand, does He not have power to change events in history? We see in scripture the hand of God mentioned again and again. We know that God doesn’t have a physical body. He doesn’t have a hand. But this is human language so that we can know that this is the way that God exerts His effect on the world. We see it in creation, for example. It is meditated on so beautifully in Psalm 8:34, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” Just with the fingers of God, He sets the sun and moon and stars in position. We also see His hand in the flow of history, in providence, in God’s orchestration of history. And that’s the focus of our text today: we see the hand of God in history.

Look at Isaiah 14:26-27, “This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” The context of this great statement of the power of God over the nations is that it’s the beginning of a series of oracles that the Prophet Isaiah is going to utter concerning all of the minor nations in the ancient Near East, in Palestine. We’ve already had his contemplation of God’s great power over Assyria, and also over Babylon, the present empire and the future empire. He’s already talked about that. But from chapter 14 through chapter 23, he’s going to give a series of oracles about the smaller nations. Palestine of the ancient Near East is somewhat like the Balkans today, made up of a lot of small countries. The Balkans has Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and all of these small countries. In the ancient Near East you had Israel, the Northern Kingdom and Judah, and you had Ammon, Moab, the Edomites, and all of these smaller kingdoms.

Certainly Egypt and Assyria, and then eventually Babylon, would be the major powers of the day. The empires would be fighting over these smaller nations, trying to control them and to organize them. Each of these nations had tribal deities, national gods. For example, Moab had the detestable god Chemosh. Anything that concerned Moab concerned the god Chemosh. When the Moabites would go out to fight, Chemosh was right there with them. Today, Moab is gone, and so is Chemosh. The Philistines had Dagon, the half man, half fish god. Whenever the Philistines would go out to fight, Dagon was right there with them. The Philistines are gone today, where then is Dagon? He’s gone.

But the God of the Bible is not gone. He’s not a localized tribal deity. Yes, it is true that He chose the descendants of Abraham to be His very own chosen people, the Jews. That is true, they were His people. They were the smallest of all the nations when they were called because they were called from a barren couple. They weren’t even a nation, there was nothing there. So, a small nation. But God is a great God, a majestic God, the God over all the earth. And though He is incredibly concerned with the Jews and that one nation, yet He is sovereign over all nations. The picture of God is of a God who rules all the earth. Jeremiah 23:23-24 says this, “’Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord.” He’s not a localized tribal deity. It says in Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.” He is not a localized tribal deity.

He is Lord of Heaven and Earth, sovereign over all nations. He speaks oracles over them. He dictates policy to them and they must obey. He decrees events for them. He brings about their rise and their fall. But above all, God yearns for their salvation. He yearns that they would reach out for Him and seek Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him, we live and move and have our being. Yes, God decrees the time set for those nations and the exact places where they should live, but God does it all so that men will find Him and be saved. As it says in Isaiah 45:22, “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.” So we’re entering this section in Isaiah, the oracles to the nations. And here is Isaiah, a lone Jewish prophet, in some room somewhere, perhaps in Jerusalem, somewhere in Judah. He is speaking the word of the Lord. He’s writing out the word of the Lord. He speaks of the sovereign hand of the King of all the Earth, orchestrating events to achieve His final purposes. Oracle after oracle will come from Isaiah’s lips. They will stand over the events of foreign peoples.

If the foreign peoples knew that this Jewish prophet was speaking about their affairs, they might be indignant. They might laugh. They might wonder what this prophet had to say that in any way concerned them. But it wouldn’t matter, because he was speaking the words of Almighty God. He was speaking the oracles of the living God. Over the next nine chapters, Almighty God is going to speak to one Gentile nation after another; to the Philistines, to Moab, to Damascus, to Cush, to Egypt, to Babylon, to Edom, to Arabia, and to Tyre. Many of those nations have gotten absorbed into modern nations. Many of them do not exist as such anymore. But the lesson’s still the same. God is sovereign over all the earth. He’s sovereign over the affairs of the nations. He rules heaven and earth.

Two great lessons then, come from these chapters. First of all, God is sovereign over the nations and has the power to destroy them. And secondly, refuge from God’s wrath can only be found in the God of the Jews. These are the two great lessons of these oracles to the nations. God is sovereign and rules and has the power to judge nations for their sins. Secondly, refuge is available. It is found among the God of the Jews. As Jesus put it very beautifully to the Samaritan woman, “Salvation is from the Jews.” (Jn 4:22) In order for any of these Gentiles to be saved, they must humble themselves and go to the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and find salvation, find refuge there.

So let’s look, first and foremost, at the plan and power of God proclaimed in verses 24-27. Look again at these beautiful verses, “The Lord Almighty has sworn, ‘Surely as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand. I will crush the Assyrian in my land; on my mountains I will trample him down. His yoke will be taken from my people, and his burden removed from their shoulders.’ This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” The absolute sovereignty of God is declared to all the nations. God’s name here is Yahweh Sabaoth. “The Lord Almighty,” it’s translated in the NIV. First, the Hebrew word for God, Yahweh, His covenant name, the name by which He revealed Himself in the flames of the burning bush to Moses. It’s the name with which He made the covenant with Israel, and He’s declaring that name to the nations. Sabaoth is literally “of host.” He’s the Lord of Hosts. He’s the commander of the armies of Heaven. He rules over great power, indescribable power. The Lord Almighty. He takes somewhat of an oath stance here. He puts His feet together and puts His hand up in the air and He makes an oath. He swears something here. He’s in an oath stance.

Everything God says is true. God is incapable of lying. He cannot lie. It’s impossible for Him to lie. When He swears, we ought to pay careful attention. For example, when Abraham was willing to offer up his son Isaac, the angel of the Lord spoke from heaven and stopped him. He said, “I swear by myself, …that because you have done this, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed…” (Gen 22:16-18) Or even more seriously, when God the Father swore to His own son. Psalms 110:4 says, “The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind: you are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.” The book of Hebrew says, when the Lord swears something and takes an oath, it’s His way of underscoring that “by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us, may be greatly encouraged.” (Heb 6:18) It’s for the sake of us that God swears His oaths and makes His promises, that we might know that God is sovereign over the nations and that God’s wise plan means our salvation, that we can have forgiveness of sins so we can live with Him forever.

So the Lord swears an oath to the nations. He wants the ends of the earth to know two things. Number one, God has an infinitely wise plan for all nations. And number two, God has an infinitely powerful hand to make it happen. God’s absolute sovereignty is proclaimed here. This is a topic over which many people stumble and fall needlessly. Human sinners, I’ve found, including myself, are tempted. We want absolute freedom. We don’t mind a God who gives us advice and makes recommendations. We don’t mind a God who lets us make our own choices. And we certainly don’t mind a God who’s there to clean up any mess we might make when we make bad choices. That’s the kind of God we’re attracted to. We like that kind of God, but we want the final say. We want to make the final decision. We want the freedom to rule over our lives, and we like to control as much around us as we can. That’s what we do. We like to be as sovereign as we can be.

The doctrine of the power of absolute sovereignty of God is repugnant to the natural mind. But the grace of God has power to transform that view. It’s transformed for me. For me, the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God is my only hope over my constantly wandering heart. It’s my only hope that I’m going to end up in Heaven, free at last from the corruption of sin. I trust in the absolute sovereignty of God to save me and to save you too, and to save people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, who ordinarily wouldn’t listen to us at all. But because of God’s sovereign hand, He opens up their ears to hear the messengers of the Gospel. I trust in the sovereignty of God. Slowly, as we being to understand and embrace the Biblical doctrine that the Most High rules over the heaven and earth, our hearts are encouraged and are humbled. We don’t trust in ourselves any more. We have security to face the bitterest trials that we’re going to face in our lives.

A.W. Pink talked about how important this doctrine is in his book, “The Sovereignty of God.” He said this, “The sovereignty of the God of scripture is absolute, irresistible, infinite. When we say that God is sovereign we affirm His right to govern the universe, which He has made for His own glory just as He pleases, without conferring with us. We affirm that His right is the right of a potter over the clay, namely that He may mold that clay into whatsoever form He chooses, fashioning out of the same lump one vessel for honor and one for dishonor. We affirm that He is under no rule or law outside of His own will and nature, that God is a law unto Himself, and that He is under no obligation to give an account of His matters to anyone. Sovereignty characterizes the whole being of God. He is sovereign in all His attributes. He is sovereign in the exercise of His power, His power is exercised as He will, when He wills, where He wills. This fact is evidenced on every page of Scripture.”

In other words, to deny the absolute sovereignty of God is to worship an idol, a god who doesn’t really exist. It is to leave us, as Christians, preaching a false gospel, one that will save no one. It is to leave us vulnerable to deep doubts and unneeded suffering during the painful trials of our lives. It is to strip us of the greatest weapon we have for fighting sin, knowing that God’s power is available for us so that we can stand firm and resist the devil. What’s he going to do? He’s going to flee from us. Why? Because we’re so mighty and powerful? No, because God’s sovereignty ordains that if we stand firm, he will run away from us. And it is to deny the clear teaching of the passage we’re looking at today, Isaiah 14:24-27.

The first assertion is that God has a plan for all nations. Look at verse 26, “This is the plan determined for the whole world.” What is the plan? It is God’s wisdom, His foreknowledge woven together ahead of time to determine the best course of human history. It’s God’s wisdom in action woven into the events of history. That’s what the plan is. This plan is shown in scripture to be both massive and minute. It’s massive enough to cover the rise and fall of great empires; how long they will reign, how long they will last, and what will bring them down. It’s massive enough for that. It’s minute enough to extend even to the death of a sparrow. Even a sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground apart from the will of God, or the casting of lots into the lap of a child when he plays a game, the rolling of a die. It extends even to minor things like that.

How incredible is the range of the plan of God! Ephesians 1:11 says, “In him, we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.” It’s a comprehensive plan, and that plan, scripture reveals, was made before the foundation of the world. Ephesians 1:4 says, “He chose us in him before the creation of the world.” God does not merely react to human choices and shape His plans accordingly. We are not on plan B or plan C or plan Triple Z by now. We’re on schedule. We’re in God’s plan. And think of this, God has never learned a single thing. He never will. That’ll boggle your mind, won’t it? God has never learned anything, and He never will. Everything He knows, He has always known. He’s not increasing in knowledge or wisdom as He goes on, as He gains experience being God. That’s not the God of the Bible. No. This plan was wise from the very beginning. God took all of His attributes and wove them together in His plan. His plan is a display of His love, of His mercy, of His grace, of His wrath, of His justice, of all of His attributes. It’s all woven into His plan.

God’s plan here in Isaiah 14 is also revealed to be comprehensive and universal, for the whole earth. He’s looked out over all the earth and He’s claimed it as His own. He can rule over it as He chooses. God’s plan extends to every nation on earth. To every nation on earth, He has given evidence of His existence through physical creation. To every nation on earth, He has shown kindness by giving rain and crops and their seasons. To every nation on earth, He has given internally, through a conscience, a sense of His moral law. To every nation on earth, He threatens judgment for sin when we violate our conscience and go against that moral law He has revealed. To every nation on earth, He has sent one man, the savior of the world, Jesus Christ. This is the plan of God. And so, assertion number one is that God has a wise plan for all nations.

The second assertion is that God has a mighty hand to make that plan come true. God’s omnipotent hand will most certainly accomplish that plan. It’s not enough to say that God has a plan. We all have plans. Many are the plans of a man’s heart, but it’s the Lord’s purpose that overrules them all. Almighty God alone has the power to make certain that all of His plans will definitely be accomplished. Look at verse 24, “The Lord Almighty has sworn, ‘Surely, as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand.’” There’s no chance about it. It’s going to happen. And all others beings, Satan, all of his demons, all the kings and potentates and emperors, and even the most minor, insignificant people on the face of the earth, none of them can change God’s plan. Why? Because God has an omnipotent hand to make it so. All of God’s wisdom and love went into making that plan. Now all of God’s omnipotence is behind making sure it happens.

We have two phrases that I have kept in mind, right from the text. “This is the plan.”  ”This is the hand.” There it is, easy to remember. There is a plan and there is a hand behind it, and that’s Almighty God. Things are under control. Both the plan and the hand extend over the whole world. Not just a corner of it, but all the world is under this plan and all the world is under His mighty hand. The hand of the Lord Almighty cannot be resisted. Look at verse 27, “The Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart Him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” God’s hand represents, then, His power to act in history, to make a difference, to effect a change. His hand stretched out shows that He is moving. He’s not the god of the deists, standing back and watching to see what will happen. He is moving out. He’s making changes. He’s working in history. He says His hand is stretched out and no one can turn it back. We’re all created beings together. Satan and his demons and all human beings, all of their mass, their power together, sought to push God’s hand back. They couldn’t move it a slight bit, for God is omnipotent. No one can stop His hand from extending exactly where He has willed.

Up to this point, we’ve been speaking of the plan and power of God somewhat in abstraction. Here in this text, it’s applied directly to a certain circumstance, to a situation. Look what verse 24 says, “The Lord Almighty has sworn, ‘Surely as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand.’” Then, verse 25, “I will crush the Assyrian in my land; on my mountains I will trample him down. His yoke will be taken from my people, and his burden removed from their shoulders.” God’s plan doesn’t stand hovering up there like a theory. It comes down on the Assyrians here. Now, you might say, “I’m not too worried about the Assyrians.” There’s a reason you’re not worried about the Assyrians. This verse tells us why. They’re gone, but God’s still the same. We can transfer this principle to modern politics and nations. We know that God rules now, as He did then. God’s eternal plan, then, is made up of small acts in history. As a tapestry is made up of single threads, so history is made up of single events. They may seem small to us, but God understands their significance.

God is well aware of the effects of seemingly small things in the flow of history. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. He understands that better than anyone. And He’s just as aware of the big moments in history, Waterloo and Gettysburg, and D-Day, all the big events. The rise of Charlemagne, or the defeat of the Muslims in the 7th century by Charles Martel. He understands what’s happening, how significant these things are. He understands it all.

The destruction of Assyria was part of God’s plan. It’s the most significant moment in Isaiah’s lifetime. We’ve talked about it before, we’ll talk about it again. Assyria sweeps down from the north. They bring into exile the Northern Kingdom of Israel. They move down into Judah seeking to take it over as well. They conquer all of Judah, except the city of Jerusalem. They come right to the walls of Jerusalem. But they’re arrogant and boastful. They say, “The God of the Jews is just like all the other gods. Every nation has its gods, like Chemosh, and Molech, and Dagon. And Yahweh would be just another national deity.” Oh! That was a mistake, talking like that, because it motivated God to show His glory. And in the sovereignty of God, it just so happened there was a godly king who knew what to do, and that’s get out of the way. Get down on your face. Be humble and ask God to work and move.

So the Lord sent out the Angel of the Lord. One hundred eighty-five thousand Assyrian troops died in one night. They’re all dead. And the King of Assyria thought it best to leave, wisdom of man. Time to go home and be assassinated by your son, in the temple of your god. You can’t fight God. And that’s what God has ordained. He said, “I’m going to crush the Assyrian in my land. I’m going to take his burden off of my people.” This is the plan determined for the whole world. This is the hand stretched out over all nations. This is what the Lord can do to a mighty empire that boasts against Him. And notice how personally He takes it. Look at verse 25, “I will crush the Assyrian in my land; on my mountain I will trample him down. His yoke will be taken from my people, and his burden removed from their shoulders.” This is very personal for God. He is getting involved to crush the Assyrians. He is defending His people and His promised land.

The chapter ends with a warning to the Philistines. What does that have to do with it? Well, he goes right from this to talking to the Philistines. We’ve talked about the Assyrians. What about the Philistines? Look what it says in verses 28-31, “This oracle came in the year King Ahaz died: ‘Do not rejoice, all you Philistines, that the rod that struck you is broken; from the root of that snake will spring up a viper, its fruit will be a darting, venomous serpent. The poorest of the poor will find pasture, and the needy will lie down in safety. But your root I will destroy by famine; it will slay your survivors. Wail, O gate! Howl, O city! Melt away, all you Philistines! A cloud of smoke comes from the north, and there is not a straggler in its ranks.’” God is speaking to the Philistines here a message of warning. By the way, that alone is evidence of grace. God could just do it. As a matter of fact, sometimes He does just do it. People do just drop dead without warning. It does happen. Nations do topple without a prophet saying ahead of time what’s going to happen. But here, He gives them a warning, speaking to the Philistines through a Jewish prophet named Isaiah. The context, at this moment, was King Ahaz’s death, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it.

Who are the Philistines? They’re the ancient enemies of the Jews. You know them. They migrated from Crete, perhaps originally from the shores of the Aegean Sea around Greece. They came down and took a foothold along the shoreline near the land that God had promise to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, on oath. Their land was an alliance of five Philistine lords in the cities of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron. They were a thorn in the side of the Jews again and again. They were the bitter enemies that were fought during the period of Judges. Samson was after the Philistines all the time, right up to the time of Samuel. Then King Saul comes along and starts to fight them and has some successes and some defeats. It was a Philistine named Goliath that David defeated, showing his military strength. Then, when David becomes king, he pretty much reduced the Philistines to servitude, and they never really rose to ascendance again. However, they were still there, present on the coast lands, still a factor when Ahaz died.

Look at the warning he gives. Look again at verses 29-30, “Do not rejoice, all you Philistines, that the rod that struck you is broken; from the root of that snake will spring up a viper, and its fruit will be a darting, venomous serpent.” This is a false cause for joy, the death of the rod that struck them. Who is this? I don’t think it’s Ahaz. Though they weren’t necessarily friends, the Philistines and the kingdom of Judah, Ahaz didn’t do much, militarily. He wasn’t the rod that struck them. No, it was Tiglath-Pilesar, the King of Assyria. The Assyrian king. He died the same year Ahaz died.

There was partying in the streets. They’re celebrating and they’re rejoicing that the King of Assyria is dead. Well, meet the new King of Assyria, same as the old King of Assyria. There’s a warning here. Because what has happened is the Philistines, upon the death of the King of Assyria, are sending emissaries, messengers to Zion, to Jerusalem, to King Hezekiah, saying “Join us together in a rebellion, a revolution, against Assyrian power. Join us, and we’ll throw them off. It’s a time of weakness now. You come along with us and we’ll get rid of the Assyrians.” But what does it say here? Don’t rejoice that the rod that struck you is broken. Out of that will come a venomous viper, even more powerful than before, the next King of Assyria. With that revolution, with that revolt, the Assyrians were motivated. They swept down and they conquered the Philistines almost entirely, took over their land, and absorbed them into the Assyrian kingdom. That’s what happened there.

They should have listened to the warning, because the warning actually speaks of death. Look at verse 30, “But your root I will destroy by famine; it will slay your survivors.” The root is a hope for the future, something that can spring up. But it’s gone forever for the Philistines. Why? Because, as verse 31 says, “Wail, O gate! Howl, O city! Melt away, all you Philistines! A cloud of smoke comes from the north, and there’s not a straggler in its ranks.” It’s a mighty army sweeping down from the north, and they know what they’re doing. “Not a straggler in its ranks” means they are well-disciplined, and they’re coming to destroy you. The Assyrians came down in 711 BC and they reduced the Philistine territory completely and made it a permanent part of Assyria. Verse 30 says, “It will slay your survivors,” that’s what the NIV gives us. Another translation would be “remnant.” They’re all dead. The Philistines would be gone. “I will make the Philistines extinct.”

This is predicted in numerous places. In Jeremiah 47:4, the prophet says, “The day has come to destroy all the Philistines and to cut off all survivors… The Lord is about to destroy the Philistines, the remnant from the coasts of Caphtor.” In Amos 1:8, “’I will destroy the King of Ashdod and the one who holds the scepter in Ashkelon. I will turn my hand against Ekron, till the last of the Philistines is dead.’ says the Lord.” From this point in Isaiah’s prophecy, the Philistines were never mentioned again. They’re gone. You know very well that you don’t personally know any Philistines. They don’t exist anymore. I think they may have given their name to Palestine, but they themselves were extinct as a people. Why? Because God’s hand was against them.

What a contrast with the Jews. How powerful are the Jews? A weak remnant at this point. As a matter of fact, the Assyrians are coming after them next. That’s why it says in Isaiah 1:9, “Unless the Lord Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah.” That’s what the Jews say. “If the Lord hadn’t protected us, we would have been wiped out too.” Therefore, Hezekiah, when facing the same Assyrian army, said to Isaiah, “Pray for the remnant that still survives.” (Is 37:4) And so he did. God moved out with His sovereign hand and His sovereign plan and protected a small remnant of Jews. They’re with us to this day, the remnant of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You know what?  They’re going to be with us right through to the end of time. Why? Because this is the plan determined for the whole world. This is the hand stretched out over all nations, and no one can stop it. It doesn’t matter how powerful their enemies, it doesn’t matter about Nazi Germany or Stalin or any of them. They can organize their plans all they want to try to exterminate the Jews. It cannot happen, because God sovereignly will not allow it to happen. He is upholding the remnant until Jesus returns.

So what answer should be given to the nations? Verse 32 says, “What answer shall be given to the envoys of that nation?” Well here’s the answer. Here come the envoys. They’re saying, “Join us in rebellion.” Here’s the answer. “The Lord has established Zion, and in her his afflicted people will find refuge.” You’re not going to find refuge in a plan to revolt against Assyria. You find refuge in Zion. Zion represents not just the literal physical city of Jerusalem. It represents God’s saving plan through the Jews. In effect, what He’s saying is, “You want to be safe? Come to Zion.” I think for the Philistines, it literally meant come to Zion and get inside the walls with King Hezekiah; you’ll survive. If any Philistines had believed this message and had literally come into the walls of Jerusalem when the gate went up and they were there, just like Rahaab or Ruth, any of these Gentiles that come and say, “I want to get close to the God of the Jews. Your God will be my God and your people will be my people,” then they’d find refuge there, not in your plans of throwing off the Assyrians.

The bottom line is that the true danger isn’t the Assyrians. Never has been. The true danger is not another Islamic attack, terrorist attack, on American soil. That’s not the true danger. Nor is it the coming economic crisis, or inflation, or the strength or weakness of the dollar against the euro. It’s none of that. The true danger isn’t heart disease or cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. It’s never been any of those things. It’s not the ascendancy of China in the 21st century to a position of world dominance. It’s none of that. Those things may happen. That’s not the danger. No, Jesus said it this way, “…Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has the power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Lk 12:4-5) Is there a refuge from this God? Yes, there is. God Himself is a refuge from His own judgment and His own wrath. It says in 1 Thessalonians 1:10, “Jesus rescues us from the coming wrath.” And so God sent His Son, His only begotten Son, Jesus, into this world to carve out a safe place, a refuge. Anyone from any tribe or language or people or nation, including the Jews, can flee to that place of safety, and they can find refuge. They can have their sins forgiven. His blood was shed on the cross that there might be a safe place, a safe haven, for any who trust in Christ.

I don’t know what brought you here today. I think the sovereign hand of God must have brought you here today. If you don’t know Him as your Lord and Savior, you’re under great danger. It says in John 3:36, “The wrath of God remains on you.” This sovereign God who controls and orchestrates everything down to sparrows falling to the ground, you don’t want Him as an enemy. Oh, how sweet it is to have Him as a friend! Oh, how sweet it is to have Him as a savior! You can flee to Christ and trust in Him and know, because of the sovereign hand of God and His plan, that all of your sins will be forgiven. And if you do, if you become a child of God, His hand will take hold of you for good and will never let you go. It doesn’t matter what happens in your life. It doesn’t matter what you struggle with. It doesn’t matter what temptations. If God has taken hold of you for salvation, He will not let you go until you are fully saved.

What is “fully saved?” It means freedom from all sin, freedom from temptation, pure in your heart, in a resurrection body as glorious as Jesus’ resurrection body. It means being in a company of people so great that no one could count them, from every nation on the face of the earth, in the new heaven and new earth, living there forever in happiness and joy. That’s the plan that God has determined for His people. That’s the hand that’s stretched out over all nations, to save a people for Himself. Flee to Christ. Trust in Him.

By way of application, I would urge you to meditate frequently on this theme: God is sovereign. His hand is stretched out. His plan is worked out to the ends of the earth. Everything’s on schedule. Though you may not understand it, God has actually chosen this universe as the best possible universe to display His glory and His attributes. You may not understand the suffering, like that of a 19-year-old that dives into a lake, hits his head, and dies. You may not understand that. I don’t understand that. But I know this, God has never learned anything and God is loving and compassionate, and this world is not all there is. We can trust in Him to take us into heaven to live with Him forever. We don’t need to fear the rise and fall of the nations. That’s all under control. God knows what He’s doing. Therefore, stand in awe of what God is doing.

Finally, if I can say this one last thing, stand in awe over the fact that the Jews still exist. The Philistines are gone. The Moabites are gone. But the Jews are still with us. Why? Because God’s gift and His calling are irrevocable. God’s plan is to save the Jews at the end through faith in Christ. It’s an amazing thing. Even a staunch unbeliever like Mark Twain said, “I have no explanation for how it is the Jews are still with us.” Nations come and go, but the Jews are still with us. Well, I have an explanation for it. This is the plan determined for the whole world. This is the hand stretched out over all nations. Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on Isaiah 14:12-15. The main subject of the sermon is the victory God currently has and will have over Satan.

In December of 1923, one of the most dedicated Satanists and occultists in Germany lay dying. His name was Dietrich Eckhardt, and he was the head of the secret Thule Society, known to inner circle members as the Satanic Brotherhood of Death Society. Eckhardt had studied black magic and eastern mystic techniques. He felt that it was his calling from Satan to prepare an antichrist who would rule the world. As he lay there dying, he revealed plainly to those that were standing around him that his 34-year-old apprentice, Adolf Hitler, was that man. Eckhardt said this, “Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune! I have initiated him into the ‘Secret Doctrine,’ opened his centers of vision, and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: for I shall have influenced history more than any other German.” That’s eerie, isn’t it? But I think that Hitler had been prepared long before he met Eckhardt for that moment.

This testimony comes from a childhood friend of his when he was a fifteen-year-old youth. He was with a friend, August Kubizek, and suddenly he grabbed Kubizek’s hands with incredible force. A look came over his face that Kubizek had never seen before. His eyes turned feverish and he began to speak in a voice that was loud and hoarse and raucous. Kubizek felt that some strange being had seized control of his friend Adolf and was inhabiting his body. Hitler began to speak eloquently about a mandate to rule Germany and lead her back to her rightful glory. From that point until Eckhardt’s pronouncement, Hitler immersed himself in occultic studies, all kinds of black magic practices. The political party that he would eventually lead, The National Socialists, the Nazis, was to become more than merely a political party or government. It was to become a religion. Now, the Greek word “antichrist” doesn’t literally mean “against Christ,” although that is the effect. It means “in the place of Christ, taking his place.” Hitler would offer himself as a messiah to the German nation. The soaring oratory of his frenzied speech-making was the key to his demonic power. It would seize him and drive him to volcanic heights.

It was really scary to listen to him speak, eyewitnesses said. Hitler said privately to his closest followers, “I’m going to become a religious figure. Soon, I will be the great chief of the Tartars. Already, Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers.” The whole nation was sucked under his demonic spell. Hitler did become a god for millions. In one of the Nuremburg rallies, a giant photo of Hitler was captioned with the words “in the beginning was the Word.” One of his followers, Alfred Rosenberg, said, “Let it happen as it will and as it must. But I believe in Adolf Hitler. Above his head, hovers a star.” Hitler’s hold over people and over the German nation, I think, was supernatural and it was demonic. It is not easy to prove the central thesis of my message here, that the kings of Babylon, one generation after another, have been effectively influenced by Satan to accomplish his ends. How do you prove that from the pages of history? There’s all kinds of skepticism about that, but just think about the effect that this man had over people.

I think about his spellbinding effect.  William L Shirer, who was a CBS correspondent, went to those Nuremberg rallies. He said that the people looked on Hitler as if he were their Messiah. People would swoon under his influence. It was hypnotic. I think it was demonic. Historian George Bruce concluded that Hitler had mediumistic powers that linked him with satanic forces, which spoke through him and gave him specialized information. I believe that, however great was the influence of this man and however dark and evil his deeds in history, they were a mere dress rehearsal for the final act in this great drama, when the future antichrist comes and rules the world. It will be the culmination of every tyrannical throne there has ever been on earth. The final form of Babylon the Great, that has ruled the world in various forms and in every era for thousands of years. Behind each of those tyrannical thrones has been the power of Satan himself. But as we mentioned last week, and this is the glory of this passage, above those evil thrones, above Satan and his throne, is the King of all Kings.

Isaiah 14 speaks of the casting down of the king of Babylon, the throwing down of this powerful force. This is what verse 12 says, “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn!” This is the theme of Isaiah 14:12-15: the past, present, and future defeat of the King of Babylon, of Satan himself, the ruler of the kingdom of the air.

Two weeks ago, we looked at Isaiah 13, the fall of Babylon, and we saw that it referred not just to the destruction of that one city, the city of Babylon, by the Medes. It did refer to that, but also to the wicked form of government, the tyranny that is woven into Babylon itself, and into the wicked human governments that will rise up from the ashes of each tyranny until its time comes to be destroyed and the next tyranny rises. It’s Babylon and Babylon and Babylon to the end of time. That was Isaiah 13.

Last week, we looked at the human kings of all of these Babylons, the kings of Babylon, the rulers who are going to take up these thrones. We focused on the human side. We looked at Isaiah 14:1-23. We saw that it referred to human tyrants who use their thrones to crush and oppose the people of God. But this week we’re going to zero in on verses 12-15. We’re going to look at the spiritual force of evil in the heavenly realms at work in those who are disobedient. At work, specifically, in the kings of Babylon, to do the will of Satan. We’re going to talk about the fall of Satan. The key verse is verse 12, “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!” The King James Version famously gives this translation of verse 12, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” We hear that famous title “Lucifer” there. Because the language of these verses seems excessive to refer merely to the ambitions of a human king, I take a double meaning here. Isaiah 14, then, does speak of the human King of Babylon and how he is cast down, but it also speaks of the invisible force of evil behind the throne, which is also cast down by Almighty God.

Satan, I believe, is the original rebel whose pride and ambition is spoken of here in Isaiah 14. He introduced evil into a pristine, a holy universe. He sought to better his standing in heaven, his heavenly position, to raise his throne above that of all the others. He sought even to challenge God Himself, to receive worship as God. He was cast down to the earth. He decided to try to subvert God’s plan for the earth by recruiting man, the kings of the earth, to join him in his rebellion. He was successful in that recruitment. He recruited the human race to join him in rebellion, and that’s been the story of history since that time. I believe it is no coincidence that the clearest indications in the Old Testament, the clearest descriptions of the fall of Satan, of what led him to fall into rebellion are both given in prophetic passages that talk about human kings. I find that fascinating. Isaiah 14 talks about the King of Babylon. Put your finger here, on Isaiah 14, and go over to Ezekiel 28. We’re going to look at it later, but I’ve learned as a preacher, give people time to find the text. We’ll come to it later on, but it’s Ezekiel 28. There, we have the King of Tyre.

Tyre was an influential trading city in northern Palestine which used its widespread influence as a port city and a center of commerce to spread corruption, luxury, and pleasure throughout the world. In Isaiah 14, you have the King of Babylon. Babylon represents military power, conquest, and tyranny, crushing power. That’s Babylon. Then in Ezekiel 28, you have the King of Tyre. That represents commerce, trade, money, pleasure, and luxury. Those two together make up the world as the enemy of God. Military crushing power, the King of Babylon. Luxury, trade, and all the stuff, the commerce of the world, that’s the King of Tyre. Actually, there are many Christian commentators, conservative Christian commentators, who believe in the inspirational authority of the Bible, who will not touch this theme that I’m preaching on today. They wouldn’t preach this sermon. They say, “Satan isn’t in Isaiah 14. He’s not in Ezekiel 28.” Calvin was among them. He hated that kind of speculation. But I don’t find it speculative. I actually think it makes perfect sense.

Isn’t this what Satan does? Doesn’t he hide behind things? Isn’t he the ruler of the kingdom of the air? Isn’t it always hard to see what he’s doing? Do you find the word “Satan” in Genesis 3? Or when Even was tempted, and then Adam, to join the rebellion against God? Do you find the word “Satan” there, or “Devil?” No, you don’t. You find a talking snake. Is Satan there? Oh, he’s there. It’s not until Revelation 12 that you find that he’s called the ancient serpent who led the whole world astray. I think he’s hiding behind Isaiah 14. He’s hiding behind Ezekiel 28. But he is there. Therefore, I do believe that God is speaking of his fall in the fall of the King of Babylon. Satan, if he wants to rule the world, must do it through human beings. He must influence human authority figures, rulers, and government figures. He must influence them in order to achieve his ends. And I believe this is the story of the world, the story of Satan, his influence and his fall. May I say more joyously, his many falls? For the Lord did not ordain just one fall for Satan. He has ordained many.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. So let’s start with Satan’s past defeat as we see it in the words of Isaiah 14. Isaiah 14 speaks of a fall from heaven. In verse 12, it says, “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!” This passage speaks of glory and beauty like that of a morning star. The Hebrew here is “heylal, ben shachar,” literally “shining one, son of the dawn.” Indications show that it refers to Venus, seen to be a star by those that stand on the earth. It’s a planet, but it never reaches its zenith before the sun rises and the glory of the sun eclipses or covers that of Venus. So it’s a competing star that doesn’t seem to win against the glory of the sun. The Greek translation of the Hebrew expression was “heosphoros” which also means Venus. When Jerome, in the fifth century, translated this into Latin for the Western church, he chose the Latin name for the planet Venus, and that was Lucifer, or “light bearer.”

Thus, Isaiah 14 speaks of a glorious, beautiful being like a star. The angels were created before the world began. God created spiritual beings and they watched God create the universe. They celebrated what God was doing. They enjoyed it, and they were worshipping God for the glories of his creation. You get this in God’s speech to Job. In Job 38:4-7, you see how God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind, and sets him straight. Some of the most fascinating therapy you’ll ever find in counseling is how God set Job straight, by basically giving him a tongue-lashing for a couple of chapters until he is the happiest he’s ever been in his whole life, still in the middle of his misery. But God has spoken to him, of His own greatness, and he is satisfied. He gets the stuff back. He gets things back, but that just doesn’t matter. He has God, and that’s enough for him. God speaks this way right at the beginning, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely, you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone – while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

The angels are watching God as He lays the foundations of the earth and they’re celebrating. They’re worshipping God for what He’s done. He calls them morning stars, plural. Isaiah 14 speaks of the morning star that’s fallen. I believe he was an angel, then, a fallen angel. Isaiah 14 also speaks of power and influence. You see the word “throne” there. Look at it. Verse 13 says, “You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.”

He's got a position of authority, of power. He’s got a throne. We’re going to find out that it just wasn’t enough for him. He wasn’t content with what God had assigned to him. No more details are given in Isaiah about that, but I think Ezekiel 28 give us more background information. So again, keep your finger on Isaiah 14, because that’s our focal point today, but go over to Ezekiel 28 and look at verses 12-15. It says, “You were the model of perfection.” He’s speaking of the king of Tyre here. “You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you: ruby, topaz, and emerald, chrysolite, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and beryl. Your settings and mountings were made of gold; on the day you were created they were prepared. You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created.”

The phrases here are quite striking. “Model of perfection,” literally, the Hebrew gives us “sealed in perfect proportions.” “Full of wisdom,” that’s speaking of intellectual, mental ability, and moral judgment. “Perfect in beauty” uses the kind of language that we would understand in terms of precious stones, but just absolute radiance and beauty, a created being. This is very important: it says it three times there in Ezekiel 28: verse 13 “on the day you were created,” verse 14, “so I ordained you,” verse 15, “from the day you were created.” It very much emphasized that this cherub, this angel, was a created being.

Since Satan is a created being, created by God, God is infinitely more powerful than he is. We do not believe in dualism, in a dualistic universe, in which God and Satan battle it out, good and evil, light versus dark, yin versus yang, or whatever you want to do with that whole dualism thing. On roughly equal terms, that is absolutely untrue. I said it before, I can say it again: All power that Satan has is borrowed from God. It’s God’s power. He can take it back anytime He chooses. He can unplug Satan anytime He chooses. You’re all thinking, “Today would be good. It’d be good today.” But let’s let God be wise. God has ordained many falls for Satan. He’s got this worked out. His ways are better than ours. So we’ll let God do it in His own time, but we need to understand that they’re not equal, not at all. Satan is a created being.

Look at the location. In Ezekiel, he was in Eden, the garden of God. That places him there as God is crafting that beautiful garden where he would put Adam and Eve, making it a perfect place for man to live. The angels were watching God make it, celebrating its creation. It also speaks of the holy mountain of God, walking among the fiery stones. Satan seemed to have access to God Himself, and to walking among other glorious beings. He was given a position of authority. He was anointed, it says. He was a guardian cherub, standing watch to protect. It speaks of his purity, his holiness. He was blameless in his ways from the day he was created. That’s what Ezekiel 28 tells us of this being before the fall.

In summary, Satan is a created being, gloriously beautiful, powerful, established in a position of great authority, with access to God Himself on the holy mountain, blameless in holiness, walking in the truth. Jesus says in John 8:44 that he did not abide or remain in the truth. He started in the truth, and turned away from it.

Now we come to the great unsolvable mystery of the universe. The unsolvable mystery of theology. I do not have an answer to this question: what is the origin of evil? I have no answer. All I have are these verses. How could evil crop up in a perfectly good universe? I do not know. All I know is Ezekiel 28:15 says, “you were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you.” That’s it. It just comes up. Where, how, I cannot understand. I just know it’s happened, and it has covered the universe like a poxy plague ever since. It is a wicked, evil thing. It’s spreading. It continues to grow, and the Lord in His grace through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is dealing with this, the only force that CAN deal with it. That’s the grace of God through Christ. But there it is, it just crops up in the heart of Satan. Ezekiel describes more of Satan’s early thoughts in Ezekiel 28:17, “Your heart became proud on account of your beauty and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth; I made a spectacle of you before kings.”

He was apparently corrupted by pride. He was impressed with his own beauty, impressed with his own power. He liked himself in a bad way. It’s fine to be appreciative about what God has put in you. Give God the glory. I’m fearfully and wonderfully made. That’s fine, but don’t take it too far. He was corrupted by pride in his own beauty. Go back to Isaiah 14. We’ll spend the rest of our time there. We’re done with Ezekiel. From there, Isaiah takes up the account of Satan’s pride in five “I wills.” Isaiah 14:13-14 says, “You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned in the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’” So when he says, “I will ascend to heaven,” it is an upward mobility, an ambition, stemming from pride. Satan had been set perfectly where God wanted him. He was in the right place, but it wasn’t enough for Satan. He wanted more. He wanted to be higher than all the other angels. He wanted to rule over them. He wanted to sit enthroned in the mount of assembly.

Basically, he wanted to take God’s place and be worshipped as God. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to be God. And so he was thrown down. He was defeated. The fullest biblical account of this defeat, in my opinion, is in Revelation 12. Don’t take the time to turn there, but in Revelation 12:7-9, it says, “and there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down – that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”

So, it seems, reading from the Book of Revelation, that Satan was able to successfully recruit about a third of the angels up there, because it says that the tail of the Dragon swept a third of the stars and flung them to the earth. We don’t know how many angels there were. Daniel mentions 100 million. That’s a lot of angels. We have no idea how many he flung to the earth. But we believe these are fallen angels, what we call demons, spiritual beings that are part of his kingdom. They joined in his rebellion and he was thrown to the earth. Isaiah 14:15 says, “but you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.” Ezekiel 28:16-17 says, “Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, O guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth; I made you a spectacle before kings.” Jesus said in Luke 10:18, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

With this comes a warning to the earth. Heaven’s happy, but watch out Earth! Revelation 12:12, “Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.” So God clearly ordained that Satan’s upward mobility, his pride, his self-love, his self-worship, and his soaring ambition would be judged.

Satan was cast down from his heavenly position. But God has ordained not just one fall for Satan, but that Satan will keep falling, and keep falling, and keep falling, forever, in different ways. And that he would ultimately end up suffering eternally in a hell designed for him and for the angels who joined him in rebellion. For Jesus says, in the passage about the sheep and the goats, speaking to those who joined Satan in his rebellion, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Mt 25:41) That’s the ultimate end and the ultimate fall of Satan. When Satan was cast down to the earth, he began the present phase of his fall, the modern earthly phase of his fall, by recruiting the king and queen of the earth, Adam and Eve, to join him in his rebellion.

That recruitment is written about in Genesis 3. This is what is says, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’’ ‘You will not surely die’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like the very thing that led Satan astray, that ambition to be like God, to take God’s place?

Just like the King of Babylon passage. Just like the King of Tyre passage. Satan isn’t mentioned here at all. He’s hiding behind the snake, making it talk. But it’s Satan. He is luring the human race into rebellion on the very same theme. “You will be like God, you get to take God’s place.” Remember the five wills: “I will ascend to heaven, I will raise my throne above the stars of God, I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain, I will ascend above the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.” He wanted to be like God. Now, he sells it to the human race. This corrupting influence, through Adam, has ruled in the hearts of all people ever since. I think especially clearly in the hearts of those ambitious empire-builders, those kings of Babylon who sit on human thrones and extend their tyranny over the surface of the earth and expect to be worshipped, or you die.

They are very Satan-like, they’re very demon-like in this, the kings of Babylon. God begins His defeat of Satan, His earthly defeat of Satan, by severing the alliance between Satan and the human race. He severs it right there in what’s called the first gospel promise. In Genesis 3:15, God says to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

That is a clear prophecy of the coming of Christ, the seed of the woman. There will be a lineage of believing people, the elect, who will not suffer Satan’s torment, who will not be thrown to hell but actually will be redeemed by the seed of woman, by Christ. God predicts the coming dragon slayer, Jesus Christ.

That’s not the end of Satan, of course. Satan then begins his active, invisible, spiritual influence over human beings as history unfolds from there. He is the power behind every evil throne. Listen to what’s said about him in the New Testament. Remember when he’s tempting Jesus in the desert, and he brings him to a high place, a mountain? In Luke 4:5, it says, “The devil led him to a high place and showed him in an instant [Oh, what did he show him!] all the kingdoms of the world.” He’s an expert in kingdoms. He knows which ones are powerful, which ones are not so powerful, all of these different regimes. He shows them all to Christ. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you will worship me, it will all be yours.” (Luke 4:6-7). He hasn’t changed, has he? I’ve said before, this is the most arrogant statement ever made by a created being. Saying directly to the Son of God, “Get down and worship me, and I’ll give you the earth.”

It’s a debate who gave it to Satan. I think Adam gave it to him. I think the sons of Adam continue to give it to him by giving him influence. He has this influence over the kingdoms of the earth. How then does he rule? Well, he rules silently, quietly behind the scenes. Ephesians 2:1-2 says, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air.” Now, just ponder that phrase, “the ruler of the kingdom of the air,” the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. “All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” (Eph 2:3) He is the ruler of an invisible spiritual kingdom having influence over the disobedient. What does that mean? Well, I believe every single political leader on the face of the earth is either indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God or under the influence of Satan to accomplish Satan’s purposes. I do not say they’re all demon-possessed. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that he’s running the show. I’m just saying he’s influencing. I’m saying he’s whispering in ears. I’m saying he’s orchestrating. He is playing chess, and he is doing what he will do.

I am talking about presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, emperors, members of congress, and lower level officials. If they’re not filled with the Holy Spirit they are part of the problem, part of what Satan is doing in the world. He is the wicked king of kings, and that includes whatever nation is most powerful on the face of the earth at that given time. The King of Babylon, in Isaiah 14, was an actual man at one point who had a name: Nebuchadnezzar, or evil Merodach, or Belshazzar. Then it would be Cyrus the Great, Darius the Mede. Or it would be Alexander the Great, the Macedonian. Whoever it is that’s running it, but if he’s not filled with the Holy Spirit of God, he’s under the influence of Satan. In Revelation 18 it seems that Babylon represents all of these human kingdoms of the world that stand in opposition to God. Therefore, the true final king of Babylon will be the antichrist, and he will be in collusion with Satan.

Daniel gives us a glimpse into this whole invisible spiritual world. Daniel was the Prime Minister of the greatest empire on the face of the earth, Persia. At the time, in the Middle Persian Empire, he was the Prime Minister. He was a godly man, seeking the face of God every day in prayer. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to God and asking God, praying towards Jerusalem, that God would restore Jerusalem and restore the temple. He was praying in that way.

So God dispatches a glorious angel to answer him and tell him what’s going to happen. This glorious angel, when he finally arrives, is so incredible and powerful and glorious that the men that are with Daniel faint almost dead away from fear. They’re in terror. Daniel himself is in terror. This is a powerful being. I preached on this in Daniel 10. I said he is no sissy angel. Okay, he’s no weak angel. He’s a powerful angel, glorious and mighty. He’s a warrior. But he tells us this in Daniel 10:13, “The prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days.” For twenty-one days, this powerful warrior angel couldn’t get to Daniel because the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted him. “Then Michael, one of the chief princes [I believe an archangel] came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia.” This is not just hinting. This is directly saying that there is this being called the Prince of Persia.

Persia, the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, this Prince of Persia, resisted this angelic being and the angel couldn’t get past. I’m telling you, no flesh and blood could have stopped that angel. I don’t know that the Prince of Persia was Satan. It would be even more terrifying if it wasn’t, if he was just one of Satan’s lieutenants. We don’t know. I just know he’s a spiritual force of evil in the heavenly realms, and it took two mighty angels to get the one past. The archangel Michael came down. At the end of the encounter, he says, “I want you to know where I’m going. This is what I’m about to do.” Daniel 10:20, he said, “Soon I will return to fight against the Prince of Persia, and when I go, the Prince of Greece will come.” That’s the next world-conquering empire. The Prince of Greece is going to come with his satanic being as well. It’s just the rise and fall of empires. It’s the rise and fall of the world.

Behind the scenes, there are these pulsating satanic forces and there’s a fight, a warfare, going on in the spiritual realm all the time. I find it fascinating that God allows those angels to battle it out on more or less equal terms. Whenever He wants to influence things, He can win. But He lets this first angel and Michael fight it out until the message can get through after twenty-one days. Fascinating. Paul the apostle, in Ephesians 6, uses governmental language to refer to Satan’s organized kingdom. Ephesians 6:12 says, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Friends, this is going on all the time around us. Rulers, authorities, powers. It’s happening.

In this way, Satan destroys the earth. Isaiah 14:12 says, “You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations.” He lays low the nations by influencing rulers to do the wicked things they do.

And so God sent His Son, His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to destroy the work of Satan. He sent His Son into the world, the one who had been predicted back in Genesis 3:15. Christ came into the world to destroy the works of the devil. Satan fell because of his upward ambition. He wanted to go up, up, up. And all of the demons fell for the same reason, their upward ambition. They wanted to go up, up, up. Human beings joined in that. They wanted to be like God, the upward mobility. So it says in 1 John 3:8, “the Son of God appears to destroy the devil’s work.” How does He do it? Philippians 2, speaking of Christ, says that he, being in very nature God, did not think it robbery, didn’t try to steal something that wasn’t His. Who does that sound like? Satan. Did not think it robbery to be considered equal with God but made Himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

This is the downward descent of humility in Christ. It led to our salvation. As the hymn put it, “He left His Father’s throne above so free, so infinite, His grace. Emptied Himself of all but love and bled for Adam’s helpless race.” That’s what Jesus did. Christ, in dying on the cross, destroyed Satan and his kingdom, and freed those who, all their lives, were held in slavery by their fear of death. We, the helpless ones. We, the powerless ones. We, the evil ones, the wicked ones, who joined in Satan’s rebellion. He has freed us up by His blood. By His shed blood on the cross. You may still be in bondage. You may still be in Satan’s kingdom as you come here today. It says at one time we were living under the influence of Satan. The gospel has the power to rescue you. As though God Himself were making His appeal through me right now, be reconciled to God. Come to faith in Christ. The blood of Christ is shed, enough to destroy all the works of the devil. Flee to Christ.

Repent of your sins and of your rebellion. Throw down your weapons of rebellion. Throw down your lusts and your selfish ambitions and your anger and all. Throw it down and come to Christ. He will forgive you of all of your sins. For Christ has been plundering Satan’s kingdom for two thousand years. I told you, it wasn’t just one defeat He wanted. He wanted two thousand years of defeat. So He sends out seventy-two disciples and they have power to drive out demons and they come back celebrating. “Oh lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.” And remember what He said. I already quoted it. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” But don’t rejoice that the demons are subject in His name. Rejoice that your names are written in Heaven. Oh, what a joy that is!

Jesus has been plundering Satan’s kingdom, but there’s a future defeat left to come. The antichrist is coming and the final King of Babylon will come. He’s introduced in Revelation 13 with the dragon, Satan. He’s standing in front of the shore, and there’s this pulsating wave of turmoil. I think it represents the nations, and up out of the nations comes this beast, this dreadful beast. Revelations 13:1 says, “And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.”

The ultimate aim of both the dragon and the beast is to be worshipped. They want to be worshipped. It says in Revelations 13:4, “Men worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshipped the beast and asked, ‘who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?’” I find this a bit humorous. I don’t know why. There’s just something funny about the fact that even then, the dragon has to get his worship through a human being first.

So they’re going to worship the antichrist, and then they’re going to ultimately worship the power behind the throne. He yearns for your worship. He yearns for the worship of human beings and of other angels, and so the final act of human history is this final King of Babylon, this antichrist imbued, infused with the supernatural wonder-working power of the devil. He’ll be able to do miracles. He’s going to captivate all the non-elect people on the face of the earth. They will receive his mark, and they will fall down and worship this human being. And they’ll worship the satanic power behind it. If they don’t, they’re going to be executed. They’re going to be killed. That is the crushing power of Babylon to the final degree. And then the final blasphemy, in 2 Thessalonians 2:4, speaking of the antichrist, says “he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” He’s going to receive worship at the end.

Christ is going to return and destroy them both. He’s going to come back and destroy them both. No more King of Babylon, either human or satanic. They will be gone forever. It says in 2 Thessalonians 2:8, “the lawless one [the antichrist] will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.” Revelation 19 pictures this one riding on a horse. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords fights that final battle of Armageddon, and he destroys the army that’s arrayed against Him. The beast is captured, and he’s thrown into the fiery lake of burning sulfur, Revelation 19:20. Satan is chained up for a thousand years. At the end, he leads one final rebellion, and then he is also thrown into the lake of fire, along with the grave and death itself. The victory is complete. He’s thrown into the eternal fire that was prepared for him and for his angels from that original fall. Then come the final celebration. Brothers and sisters in Christ, we’re going to spend eternity celebrating this victory.

For eternity, we’re going to give thanks to God who liberated us from a force too great for us. We’re never going to have to deal with them again. Never again will we feel the influence of Satan’s temptations. Never again will we be pulled away from Christ by them. Never again will we have to suffer under the lash of worldly tyrants who are operating under his influence. Never again. Then at last, we will bow down and worship the true King of Kings in freedom forever.

Now, what application can we take from this? Well, I’ve already given you the central one: flee to Christ. If you’re still in rebellion against God, there is forgiveness. Today could be for you the day of salvation, freedom forever from that tyranny that Satan has set up. Flee to Christ. Trust in Him. If you don’t know Jesus as your personal savior, come and talk to me after the service. There’s going to be people in the parlor that can talk to you about your personal walk with Christ.  Don’t leave this place without trusting in Him.

But secondly, understand Satan’s influence over world governments, history, and politics. Understand it. I’m not saying we can always see what he’s doing. Just know he’s there. He is the ruler of the kingdom of the air. As I was driving to church this week, I saw a decal on someone’s rear windshield, and it had an artistic rendition of a candidate for President. Below it was the single word, “hope.” I thought, “Oh no, no.” How can we put our hope in some politician? How can we put our hope in government and government programs and all of that? How can we put our hope in man who fails in every generation? Don’t put your hope in man. Don’t put your hope in a political party or political process. Put your hope in Christ. Put your hope in God. That troubled me, as you can tell.

Also, understand this, and I mentioned this last week, but this is where the rubber hits the road with me. You know what led Satan to fall? Discontent with what God had given him. He just wasn’t satisfied with the boundary lines. God has put boundary lines around each of you, and around me too. Inside those boundary lines are some rich blessings, and outside those boundary lines, there’s stuff that isn’t ours. It belongs to somebody else, and you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, you shall not covet your neighbor’s goods, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. You shall not covet a position that isn’t even yours. Be happy and content with what God has given you.

Be content with it. It says in Psalm 16, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Surely I have a delightful inheritance.” Can you say that, brothers and sisters? Are you satisfied with what God has given you in this world? Are you satisfied with what He’s promised to give you in the next? Is it enough for you? If so, then you’re free to serve others. Therefore, thirdly, let your ambitions be holy ambitions. It’s good to be ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with ambition, but let me tell you what to be ambitious for. How about this? “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Mt 5:6) Be ambitious to be as righteous and holy as Jesus. Or this one, Romans 15:20, where Paul says, “It has always been my ambition to preach the Gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.” I am ambitious to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Be ambitious for that. Or here’s a simple daily ambition, 2 Corinthians 5:9, “Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.” I have my ambition to be perfectly pleasing to Jesus for the rest of today, in all my works. Those are good ambitions. Have those.

Finally, anticipate the day when you’ll be free from this beast, from this tyranny forever. Celebrate it ahead of time. This is a taunt song, it’s meant to celebrate our fallen foe. We will not lament him. We will not miss him. We’ll be glad when he is gone. Look forward to that day. Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 14:1-23. The main subject of the sermon is the casting down of the spiritual power behind Babylon.

“The last of the horsemen disappeared into the smoke and the thudding of their hooves receded into the grey distance. The smoke hung on the land. It drifted across the setting sun, which lay like an open wound across the western sky. In the ringing silence that followed the battle, very, very few, pitifully few cries could be heard from the bloody, mangled wreckage on the fields. Ghostlike figures, stunned with horror, emerged from the woods, stumbled and then ran forward crying – women searching for their husbands, their brothers, their fathers, first among the dying and then amongst the dead. The flickering light by which they searched was that of their burning village, which had that afternoon officially become part of the Mongol Empire. The Mongols. From out of the wastes of Central Asia they had swept, a savage force for which the world was utterly unprepared. They swept like a wildly wielded scythe, hacking, slashing, obliterating all that lay in their path, and calling it conquest. And throughout the lands that feared them now or would come to fear them, no name inspired more terror than that of their leader, Genghis Khan.”

That’s how one writer described the aftermath of an attack by Genghis Khan and his dreaded Mongol horsemen. There’s never been a leader like Genghis Khan since that time, but many arrogant, murderous tyrants have ridden with bloody hooves across the pages of history. As a matter of fact, that really is history, the rise and fall of the world, one empire after another, of bloody, arrogant tyrants who are not satisfied with where they started but have to have more. This is the spirit of Babylon the Great that we began studying last week in Isaiah 13. It’s mentioned right to the end of history in Revelations 17 and 18. Babylon the Great is finally thrown down by the second coming of Christ. The spirit of conquering kings whose lust for blood and power, money and pleasure spurred them to plunder and pillage little villages like the one described here. But it’s a spirit driven by a deep and more wicked power than any of us can imagine. A malevolent force, the power of Satan himself, which drives them on, attacks the people of God, and seeks to oppose the kingdom of God.

Last week, we spoke of the fall of Babylon, that great city, that great empire, which crushed the world and ruined the Promised Land. This week, as we come to Isaiah 14, we’re speaking more specifically of Babylon not just generally, but of the king of Babylon. This chapter speaks specifically of the fall of the tyrant king of Babylon. And while it may refer initially to a specific man in history, I believe it refers to all tyrants in history, all of them. Some theologians think it may speak of nothing more than a single king, perhaps Nebuchadnezzar himself. Others think it doesn’t refer to a human king at all but actually refers to Satan. They point to the soaring language of Isaiah 14. For example, verse 12 says, “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn!” The King James version gives us “Lucifer, Lucifer.” Many ancient scholars believed that these verses spoke of the fall of Satan before time began.

For myself, I think it speaks of both of these things. I think it speaks at the human level of human tyrants, of kings whose ambition soared above their present circumstances to the point where they actually wanted to be worshipped like gods. Their ambition drove them on, like Genghis Khan and others, to trample defenseless people. But I think it also speaks of the power behind the throne, of Satan as well. And that partnership with Satan, his demonic influence over kings, will continue to the end of time, right through to the time of the antichrist when Christ comes and destroys them both by the splendor of His coming and the establishment of His kingdom forever. That’s what I think is the story of Isaiah 14.

So for two weeks, we are going to look at this section of scripture. This week we’re going to focus on the human side. We’re going to talk about the human kings of Babylon, what they have done, and what God promises for them. Next week, we’re going to focus more specifically on Satan, his fall, his ambition, what motivates him, and to the final union between Satan and the antichrist. We’re going to look at the power of every evil throne. The tyrant king of Babylon, we’re going to look behind it. The power behind every evil throne is Satan. But the real story of this chapter is the power above every evil throne and that is God Himself. To God we look, to the sovereign King of the Universe. We can look the tyrant king in the face and be unafraid. We can testify to him of the saving love of Jesus Christ even though he kills us as he killed perhaps our brothers and sisters before us. We can be unafraid of his power because we know there’s a king who holds him in the palm of His hand.

Now, right at the beginning of Isaiah 14, we see God’s eternal purpose, which is the eternal joy, comfort and security of His chosen people. That’s what God is doing through all of this. Despite Israel’s sin, Israel is chosen still. It says in Romans 11:29, “God’s gift and his call are irrevocable.” Soon after Isaiah’s time, Israel would be sold to Gentile powers. During Isaiah’s time, the Northern Kingdom was sold to the Assyrians. Approximately one hundred and fifty years later, the Southern Kingdom of Judah was sold to the Babylonians. But Isaiah promises here that God will again have compassion on His people and He will choose them again. Look at verse 1, “Once again, he will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land.”

I believe more than mere restoration is promised here. When the Jews came back to the Promised Land, 42,000 of them, under Cyrus the Great of Persia, they were still under Gentile domination. They had to ask permission for everything. Ezra and Nehemiah had to stand in front of a Gentile king and ask permission. So it has continued throughout the centuries. Jesus calls this the Times of the Gentiles, when Gentile power and influence rules, at least in part, over the Promised Land. But here Isaiah is promising a complete reversal, in which the chosen people will dwell in a position of authority over their former captors. Look at verse 2, “The house of Israel will possess the nations as menservants and maidservants in the Lord’s land. They will make captives of their captors and rule over their oppressors.” This, I believe, does not receive its ultimate fulfillment until the end of time, when the righteous will rule over the judgment of the wicked.

As the Apostle Paul says, “Do you not know that the saints who will judge angels will also judge the world?” (1 Col 6) In the millennial kingdom and even more in the internal state, this concept will have its fulfillment. Verse 1, “Once again he will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land.” God promised to Abraham a land. He made him a promise. It says in Hebrews 11 that Abraham died without receiving the promise. God doesn’t break promises. However, the land they are going to get will be eternal. It will be the new heaven and the new earth, and they will inherit the earth as Jesus promised. That’s the future, ultimately, of all this. And it says that aliens are going to join Israel. Again, in verse 1, “Aliens will join them and unite with the house of Jacob.” That’s even better for us because we are Gentiles. We’re not biologically descended from Abraham. We are not children of Abraham. But this is in direct fulfillment of the promise that God made to Abraham when he was called out of Ur of the Chaldeans.

Back in Genesis 12:2-3, it says, “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” So we, Gentiles, have hope in being included in the promises that God makes to the Jews. This is repeatedly predicted in Isaiah. The fact is that representatives from the nations are actually going to be joining together with the Jews under the covenant promises, worshipping the one true God. I believe this is ultimately fulfilled in the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The apostle Paul says, in Romans 11, that we, like wild olive shoots, have been cut out of an olive tree that’s wild by nature and been grafted into a cultivated olive tree. We look to Abraham, our father in faith now, and we draw nourishing sap from that root system of the patriarchs, the Jews.

So God’s ultimate purpose, then, is to bring Jew and Gentile together under the head of Jesus Christ, blessed forever and joyful forever. We will be free forever from concern about the arrogant tyrant who would strike us down and make us miserable. Look at the joy, look at the peace, look at the relief that just flows through this passage. It’s really quite striking, isn’t it? Look at verse 3, “On the day the Lord gives you relief from suffering and turmoil and cruel bondage.” And in verse 7, “All the lands are at rest and at peace; they break into singing.” Celebration! God throws down the king of Babylon so that He can bring joy and relief and security to His chosen people all over the world.

We come to this taunt song. That’s what it’s called. It’s a taunt song where the oppressed people are free forever from the tyrant, and they break forth in singing. They just celebrate. They can’t hold back. When I was growing up, every year we watched the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” Do you remember that movie? Remember when Dorothy’s house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East? The Munchkins come out and discover that she’s dead. Do you remember what they do? They start singing, “Ding dong the witch is dead!” I can hardly even mention that here from the pulpit, but it just seems so perfect. That’s exactly what happens. The oppressor is dead and they’re chanting and singing. They’re celebrating, all the little Munchkins. I thought, “Do I really want images of Munchkins dancing in your minds?” But there it is. They’re celebrating. They’re happy that the tyrant is gone, until of course, the Wicked Witch of the West shows up. Meet the new tyrant, same as the old tyrant.

So it has been and so it will be until the antichrist is thrown down by the second coming of Christ. We can look forward to that. There are pockets of relief. There are pockets of celebration that happen. But it’s not until Babylon the Great itself is thrown down, and the final king of Babylon is thrown down, and the wicked malevolent force, Satan, is thrown into the lake of fire, that we will at last celebrate like this. It’s coming friends, and oh, what a shout of joy there will be! What singing we will do when we realize that the one who oppressed us, who tempted us, who attacked us every step of the way, who sought to pull us from Christ at every moment, is gone forever and we’ll never have to deal with him again! Oh, how sweet will that song be! So it’s a time of celebration. It’s a song. Verse 4 says, “You will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon.”

Let’s talk about this idea of the King of Babylon. I don’t believe any one specific human king is intended here. Some people think it’s referring to Nebuchadnezzar. I have to tell you, honestly, I hope that Nebuchadnezzar is a brother in Christ. I hope that we will have fellowship together in heaven. I have better hopes than this for Nebuchadnezzar. Let me tell you, I have my predispositions and I’m rooting against this being Nebuchadnezzar. I think God converted him. I really do. If you look at verse 5, I think there’s an indication right in the text that we’re not speaking of any one single ruler, because it speaks of the scepter, the rod of the wicked. Verse 5 says, “The Lord has broken the rod of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers.” Do you see the plural there? It’s not just one ruler He has in mind. It’s whoever takes up the fallen scepter and then runs with it for a while. One tyrant after another, it’s not just one. So I don’t think it’s Nebuchadnezzar, okay? Are you satisfied? If you think it’s Nebuchadnezzar, come and talk, and we’ll find out. But I think you should be hoping, like I am, that he actually was converted.

There’s also no indication that any of this stuff ever happened to Nebuchadnezzar. It seems like he died relatively peacefully and passed his kingdom on to his son, Amul-Marduk. His son passed it on to his son, Belshazzar. We know Belshazzar from Daniel chapter 5. He was there at the fall of Babylon, and he seems like a weak, soft partier to me. He liked the soft life, the comfortable life, the luxurious life. He liked to eat and drink and be merry. There’s no record of him doing any of the kind of crushing oppression that’s spoken of here, though he does die a painful death under the judgment of God. Yet I don’t think this is referring to him. Therefore, I think it’s best to see the human side of this prophecy as referring to the king of Babylon, a representative of the spirit of Babylon, who takes up that tyrannical rod and carries it for a while and smashes the earth with it until his time comes. The people are breaking out in a taunt song against the fallen tyrant. They’re celebrating the end of his tyranny. They’re celebrating his judgment under the wrath of God. They’re celebrating the freedom that the whole world experiences now that he’s dead. That’s what is going on here.

Victims of overpowering tyrants are noteworthy. There’s the sense of powerlessness and helplessness that they face. They can do one of two things. If you’re living Germany in 1939 or 1941, and you don’t like what Hitler is doing to the Jews, you have two choices. You can speak up, defy Hitler, and die. It’s suicide and you know it. Or you can quietly, almost in a cowardly sort of way, say nothing. You can pray, hide, hunker down, and wait. Those are your choices. I don’t know if there are any other choices when that kind of tyranny and that kind of power is opposing you. When the victims are alone, they cry out to God for deliverance. Psalm 94:2 says, “Rise up, O judge of the earth; pay back to the proud what they deserve.” Let vengeance come. They’re crying aloud for vengeance. It happens even after their deaths in Revelations 6:10, “[The martyrs] cried out in a loud voice, ‘How long, sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’“ They are told to wait a little while longer, until the full number of the martyrs comes in. They’re crying out for God to be their deliverer because there’s nothing else they can do. They’re powerless to stop the tyrant. 

In the flow of history, death or conquest by another nation is what ends tyranny. It’s not the weak and oppressed that rise up. The ruler dies or some other worse tyrant comes along and topples him from power. That’s how it goes. But there will come a time when tyranny itself will die. The spirit of Babylon will be gone forever and oh, how we long for that day! The vicious oppression will be over. Look at verses 4 through 6, “How the oppressor has come to an end! How his fury has ended! The Lord has broken the rod of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers, which in anger struck down peoples with unceasing blows, and in fury subdued the nations with relentless aggression.” We see the viciousness of the reign of tyranny described here. The rage of the tyrant has finally come to an end.

These self-worshipping tyrants are noteworthy for their rage and their anger. They generally fly into a rage when anyone won’t bow down to them and worship them in some way, or when anyone brings them some bad news that they don’t want to hear. We have Nebuchadnezzar himself, before God dealt with him in chapter 4 of Daniel. In chapter 3, he sets up a statue, 90 feet high and 9 feet wide, made out of gold from top to bottom. I’ve wondered before if he made it out of gold because he didn’t like the statue in chapter 2, which was only a head of gold. He’s like, “Alright, why don’t we have the whole statue out of gold? Maybe I can continue forever.” But he can’t.

He’s going to make Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and the whole nation bow down to him and his power. Well, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego won’t do it. They bring these three young Jewish men in, and Nebuchadnezzar deals with them very directly. He commands them to bow down or he’s going to throw them into the fiery furnace. They refuse to do it. Very courageously, they refuse. When they make their answer, Nebuchadnezzar flies into a rage. He just goes insane. Angry with them, he orders the furnace heated to seven times hotter than usual. It’s the wrong thing to do! If you really want to make them suffer, you need to cool it off so that it takes hours and hours for them to die. But he’s just not thinking clearly. He is so enraged that anyone would oppose him. That’s the spirt of tyranny. It’s not just him.

Hitler was known for his rage, his temper tantrums. Even the highest officials in his regime were afraid to come and bring him bad news. Hermann Goring, who was a vicious man, used to tremble before coming and bringing bad news to Hitler. He said that Hitler had a purple vein that came across his nose and up to his forehead and it would pulsate, almost like it was fit to burst. And he needed medications after these spells of rage would come over him. Then there was Joseph Stalin, who was making plans in 1953 to exterminate the Jews, much as Hitler had. When the plans started to run afoul, as they tend to do when it comes to the Jews (because God sovereignly ordains that they will not be exterminated), Stalin flies into a rage. In March of 1953, he goes into an apoplectic rage. His rage reaches a crescendo. He drops to the floor and he’s dead the next day. His own rage killed him! But in Isaiah 14, it says that, “The rage of the tyrant has finally come to an end.” We don’t need to face it any more. It’s gone forever because God’s not impressed. He’s not intimidated and He will deal with it in His own time.

The tyrant uses his overwhelming power to crush all opposition. Military power, I mean. Isaiah 14 says again in verses 5 and 6, “The Lord has broken the rod of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers, which in anger struck down peoples with unceasing blows, and in fury subdued nations with relentless aggression.” It’s what they do. It’s the tramp of the Roman legions, for centuries, through the towns and villages of Europe and Palestine. It’s the sound of Atilla the Hun’s thundering cavalry coming across and bringing waste and destruction, even to the growing church in western Europe. It’s the terrifying sound of Viking longboats coming through the morning mist, landing on the pebbled shores of Lindisfarne and other monastic islands. The Vikings come with bloodthirsty rage. They won’t spare anyone. Not defenseless monks, not women, not children. They’re going to plunder. They’re going to rape. They’re going to pillage. It’s what they do.

Of course, it’s the rhythmic, hob-nailed boot march of the Nazis, goose-stepping through the time of their ascendancy, 1939, 40,41, when it seemed they could never lose a battle and no one could ever oppose them. It’s the sound of the Gestapo coming up the stairs in the middle of the night and banging on the door, taking away defenseless people: Jews, Christians, and anyone that opposed them, hauling them off. They are never seen again. They die, gassed in concentration camps. It’s the mindless savagery of the Soviet Union’s anti-Christian crusade. Twenty million Christians were put in gulags and systematically tortured and executed under Stalin. It’s the sound of an enraged mob in China, during the Cultural Revolution, screaming insults at the house-church pastors as they’re marched down the streets with their crime written on placards around their necks. If anyone won’t join in and chant at them, they’re noted by the secret police and they’re arrested as well. It’s tyranny. It’s the rod of tyranny, smashing people with relentless blows. At the end of time, it’s going to reach a crescendo under the blood-thirsty reign of the antichrist, as he dominates the entire world and executes anyone who will not receive the mark of the beast and worship him as God.

The terror of the powerful tyrant will be broken. When Christ comes again, He will put an end to tyranny forever and He will reign as a glorious king. At that time, peace will reign all over the earth. Look at verse 7, “All the lands are at rest and at peace; they break into singing.” This peace brings indescribable joy. I believe that the joy of that peace is directly proportioned to the power of the tyrant and to his viciousness. The more powerful and vicious the tyrant, the greater the joy when he’s thrown off. You have, on the cover of your bulletin, a picture of VE Day. I think those are British people gathering together in Trafalgar Square on March 8, 1945. They’ve heard that Hitler is dead. He put a bullet through his brain in a Berlin bunker before the Russians could get him. They are celebrating. It’s a wild celebration. From what I heard, it was incredible. I wasn’t there, too young for that, but I heard it was just amazing. Total strangers were dancing, hugging, and kissing each other. They never see each other again. There is just amazing joy and celebration because the tyranny has finally come to an end.

I think in our lifetime, perhaps we saw it with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1987. That November, finally East and West Berlin came together as one city, and communism was exposed as the economic and social fraud that it is. Finally, it came to an end there. What joy there was and what celebration! Everybody wanted to get a hammer and go bang on that wall a little bit and pull it down.

The destruction of the earth will end. Look at verse 8, “Even the pine trees and the cedars of Lebanon exult over you and say, ‘Now that you have been laid low, no woodsman comes to cut us down.’” One of the things about tyrants is that they think the earth is theirs to plunder. They can do anything they want with the natural resources of the earth. Gold, silver, oil, iron, and anything coming out of the earth, they strip mine. They do whatever it takes to fuel the engines of industry, to keep it going.

It says in Deuteronomy 20:19, speaking to the Jews, “When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees of the field people, that you should besiege them?” It’s an interesting passage, Deuteronomy 20:19. Don’t do it. Don’t tear down all the trees. The earth was given to us as a stewardship. We are to care for it. Genesis 2:15 says, “The Lord God put Adam in the Garden to serve it and protect it.” That’s my translation of those two Hebrew words. I think it’s a fair one. To serve the Garden and enable it to be everything it could be, to come to full fruition and protect it from harm. Not to pillage it and rape it and plunder it. It says in Revelation 11:18, “The time has come… for destroying those who destroy the earth.” These tyrants, they do it better than anyone.

We’ve seen the wickedness of the tyrants. We’ve seen their great power. But one thing we’ve noted throughout history: there is no tyrant stronger than death. There is no tyrant stronger than death. Look at verses 9 through 11. We see here the powerful tyrant, weak at last in the face of death. Verses 9 through 11 say, “The grave below is all astir to meet you at your coming; it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you – all those who are leader in the world; it makes them rise from their thrones – all those who were kings over the nations. They will all respond, they will say to you, ‘You also have become weak, as we are; you have become like us.’ All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you.” This is a remarkable passage of prophecy here.

Here the dead kings, as if in some nether region, notice that this powerful tyrant king has come down and they’re almost acting surprised. But there’s a bit of mockery here. They are saying, “Oh look, I guess you weren’t any stronger than we were. Here we are dead and here you are dead.” Now this is just poetical. I don’t think we should take a theology of the afterlife from this passage, any more than we should imagine that trees will be able to speak from verse 8. Rather, this is poetical language saying that even the most powerful tyrant can’t stand firm in the face of death. It is God’s judgment on the human race. There’s nothing they can do to stop it. The grave is personified here and the mighty potentate has his power stripped forever. Death has stripped him of it.

Picture, then, a Babylonian king, drunk, lying in his bed. The Medes are running through the palace looking for him. They find him and they kill him that very night, Daniel chapter 5. Or picture a Roman Caesar coming out after a good time in the Coliseum, surrounded by his usually faithful Praetorian Guards. But there’s a plot afoot. He doesn’t know it. One of them plunges a dagger between his ribs and he dies. His cousin becomes the new Emperor of Rome. Or picture a Russian Tsar wheezing and gasping as he chokes out his last few breaths and dies of consumption. Or a Chinese communist dictator, whose legacy is still with us, lying helpless in his bed, stricken with a heart attack. He rises up a little, tries to speak, and can’t do it. He gurgles something and slumps back down on the bead. Then he’s dead. Where’s your power now? Where has it all gone to? They are the very picture of weakness now. That’s what’s going on here in Isaiah 14. His pompous luxury is stripped as well. Not that you’d want to, but go look at him in two or three weeks. There will be maggots and worms, just like everybody. You can’t take it with you. You can’t take the noise of the harps. You can’t take the luxurious, purple silk robes. It’s all gone. It’s all going down into the grave.

So the final fall of the king of Babylon is that he will molder, dead in the streets. Look at verses 18 through 21, “All the kings of the nations lie in state, each in his own tomb. But you are cast out of your tomb like a rejected branch; you are covered with the slain, with those pierced by the sword, those who descend to the stones of the pit. Like a corpse trampled underfoot, you will not join them in burial, for you have destroyed your land and killed your people. The offspring of the wicked will never be mentioned again. Prepare a place to slaughter his sons for the sins of their forefathers; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.” Ordinarily, kings are honored in death. Presidents lie in state in the rotunda. People pass by. It’s a solemn time, a time of reverence and honor. Ordinarily, that’s what happens. But this king doesn’t get that. He doesn’t get a state burial. He’s thrown out like refuse in the streets. Like a branch stripped from the tree and lying on the ground, his body is trampled underfoot.

I get the picture of Ahas, whose blood was licked up by dogs. And of course, Jezebel, you couldn’t even find a piece left of her. Something like that. Or like Hitler’s body, which I think was doused with gasoline and then burned, lest the Russians should desecrate it. But even worse than what happens to this king’s body, this king would have no legacy. His offspring, it says, would be cut off entirely. All memory of his name effaced forever. His kingdom is over. It’s ended forever. He’s got no legacy. He’s done. He’s thrown out. And why? Verse 20 says, “For you have destroyed your land and killed your people.” It’s interesting, that’s what he does to his own people. You have to wonder what the Germans thought of Hitler in June of 1945, when the whole country was a pile of rubble from one side to the other. Did they love him then? Did they honor him then? He was the one who did that to their country, ultimately, because of his policies and his leadership.

Some have said, I think somewhat wisely, that people get the leadership they deserve. That’s meant negatively. It’s not like a good people get a good king, something like that. But, if a nation will tolerate a leader, then that could be the outcome. Here, it is turned around because of what he did to his people, because the people were destroyed, the people he should have protected and cared for and served, like any good leader. Because of that, he’s judged.

And so we also have the final fall of Babylon in verses 22-23. Here again, as we saw in chapter 13, God is doing all of this. None of this is an accident. It’s not just happened. This is something God has done to judge this man. “’I will rise up against them,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ‘I will cut off from Babylon her name and survivors, her offspring and descendants,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will turn her into a place for owls and into swampland; I will sweep her with the broom of destruction,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” We’ve already seen in Isaiah 13 that Babylon will never be inhabited again.

What is God’s motivation in all of this? What’s the reason for the judgment? Well, it comes down to one word, pride. God hates human pride. He hates it with a passion. God opposes the proud. This is a chapter of God opposing the proud. This is how much He hates pride. The pride is right there in these famous verses right in the middle, verses 12-15. “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly; on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.” It’s all about ambition. It’s about soaring ambition.

The king of Babylon looks at himself and sees more there than he realized, up to this point. He’s got potential. God has put him in a bounded place. There are boundaries around him like there are around all of us. God sets those boundary lines up. David says, in Psalm 16:6, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” God sets those boundaries up. But this tyrant, he’s not satisfied with it, just like Satan wasn’t satisfied with his boundaries. So he starts to move out, to expand his boundaries, to jump across borders and boundaries, and to make an empire for himself. Ultimately, it’s going to include, in his own heart, raising his throne above the stars of God and sitting enthroned on the mount of the assembly where God sits. Yes, he’s going to want to be worshipped.

How many human kings has this been true of? In the book of Acts, King Herod stands before the people with shining, radiant robes, and he gives a little speech. The people say, “This is the voice of a god and not of a man.” And he actually likes it. He’s like, “Well, finally, you see it!” The voice of a god and not of a man. Immediately, he was stuck down by worms, just like here in Isaiah 14, and died. The Roman Caesars also saw themselves as deities. The root of it all is Satan’s soaring ambition, which we’ll see next week. It’s really Satan that’s feeding this pride, putting logs on the fire. He’s feeding it until both are destroyed together forever. Because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Next week, we’re going to talk more about Satan’s activities, Satan’s ambitions. As we come to the end of the human section in understanding this, what application can we take? Well, first, understand the future fate of all tyrants. Isaiah 14 stands over all tyrants, and we have some today. There actually is a website, parade.com, which lists the top 15 tyrants on earth today. It’s really amazing to read thumbnail sketches of each of these folks. For example, Omar al-Bashir, of the Sudan. He’s the worst dictator on earth, so this website says, because of his ongoing deadly human rights abuses in the Darfur region of the Sudan. Over the last four years, at least 200,000 people have been killed by his forces nationwide. 5.3 million have been driven from their homes, and more than 700,000 have fled from the country. There’s Kim Jong-il of North Korea, who has isolated his nation from the rest of the nations on earth. His record of human rights abuses is every bit as bad.

Recently, we have been following Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, an unbelievable tyrant. He’s not as powerful as some of the others, but he has ruined his country. The inflation rate there was 1,281% last month. 1,281% inflation rate. In 2002, he permitted an election. But in the middle of the election, the guy who was running against him was arrested for treason. So when there was an election earlier this year, the guy who was running against him decided to drop out of the race. You may think that’s probably a wise decision. That’s Robert Mugabe. He’s a tyrant. It goes on and on. It’s not just those three. There are many, many others. All of these dictators will suffer the same fate. They will all be judged, as in Isaiah 14, unless they repent and come to faith in Christ. And let me speak about that for just a moment.

Should we pray for a tyrant to be saved? Is it possible that the grace of God can reach into the megalomania of a tyrant like this and actually save him? That’s why I mentioned Nebuchadnezzar. I think He can. I think that Nebuchadnezzar and Saul of Tarsus stand as trophies of God’s grace, of what God can do to anyone, anytime, if He moves out with His grace. The Apostle Paul puts it very, very plainly in 1 Timothy 1:15-16. “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was show mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life.” You may have come in here today thinking you’re the worst of sinners. That’s what Saul of Tarsus thought about himself. “I’m the worst. Nobody could ever forgive me for what I’ve done to the Christians. God couldn’t forgive me.” But God did forgive him! Such is the grace of God. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. There is no human tyrant whose sin is so great that the grace of Christ cannot cover it.

Paul goes on in 1 Timothy 2:1-2 to advise us to pray for rulers and leaders. This is what he says, “I urge, then, first of all, that requests for prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone – for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God, our savior.” The first reason is so that the people of God can have peace and security in their lifetimes and do the work of the Kingdom. But there’s a second reason. “This is good and pleases God, our savior, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.” Can God save an Osama Bin Laden? Can He save an 82-year-old Robert Mugabe at the end of his life? Can He do that? We’re commanded to pray for it. I think there’s not going to be many of them saved. But that there’s one at all shows that they can be. We’re commanded here to pray.

For you individually, as you’ve come here today, perhaps you feel guilty. Perhaps you feel alienated from God. You don’t know what you can do about your guilt. The cross of Jesus Christ is an ocean of grace. It can cleanse any stain. Come to Christ. Trust in Him, look to Him who shed His blood for you. His grace is the story of history, not these tyrants, bloodshed and tyranny. It’s Christ’s grace.

Finally, for myself, I think it’s safest to see similarities between myself and the tyrant here. Now, I’m not this kind of man, but I have pride like this. My pride is the worst enemy of my soul. It makes me think I don’t need to listen to a sermon like this. It makes me think I don’t need to be rebuked or convicted about this or that and beyond that. It makes me think I don’t need Jesus as much as I really do. My pride makes me angry towards people that I love, that are close to me, or towards total strangers who cross me and take something I wanted. My pride is my worst enemy. To see it described here, whether it’s Satan or the king of Babylon, I feel a similar elevation in my heart, saying, “Do you know who I am?” All of us have that. It’s part of the human race, part of our sin condition. Flee from it. Ask God to humble you. Humble yourself under God’s mighty hand. In due time, He will lift you up. Join with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on Isaiah 13:1-22. The main subject of the sermon is the total destruction of the Babylonians brought about by God.

We are aware from scripture that we have a personal enemy who seeks our very lives. His name is the devil or Satan, that ancient dragon. It says in 1 Peter 5:8 “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” But the scripture reveals that we have an impersonal enemy as well, one that surrounds us at every moment and threatens our souls as well. In 1 John, Chapter 2:15-16, it is called “the world.” “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world.” The world and its desires pass away. A man who does the will of God stands forever. We’re surrounded by the world, and by that, John means, I think, the world’s system. Not the created world that God made and all of its beauty, but the world system, that alluring, powerful, enticing, wicked culture that attacks our very souls and seeks our eternal destruction.

The world is made up of living, breathing people whose minds are controlled by the flesh and by the spirit of the power of the air, Satan. These people, as they live out their convictions, as they live out their world views, they craft a world around us that is enticing and luring us away from the things of God, away from Christ. Some of them have political and military ambitions to rule and dominate, perhaps a non-Christian politician running for office, or an Al-Qaeda terrorist masterminding the next terrorist attack somewhere in the world, or the publisher of a pornographic magazine, or an actress willing to do anything in a movie to further her career. It could be a marketing consultant urging a bolder approach to marketing clothing to teens in malls, or a financial expert writing a column on how you can be far richer than you ever dreamed if you just follow his approach of investments, or a motivational speaker telling spellbound audiences ten irrefutable laws for success the way he defines it. And a hundred, even a thousand other enticements are pulling you away from Christ. That’s the world. It’s a seething culture of unbelief, pulsating with the lusts that John mentions: lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of flesh. It is vicious. It is relentless. It is alluring and enticing. It is a cold-hearted enemy to your soul. It would have you. It would pull you away from Christ. It has a symbolic name in the Bible, and that name is Babylon.

Now I know that Babylon was a city in ancient Mesopotamia on the Euphrates River. From it arose a mighty empire that, for a time, dominated the world. From that empire came an army that conquered Jerusalem, tore down its walls and burned the temple of God. I’m aware of all that. It was the enemy of the people of God at that time, Babylon. Isaiah 13 clearly predicts the fall of that literal city of Babylon to the Medes in 536 BC. That’s predicted here in this chapter. But Isaiah 13 uses language that soars far above that one event in history. It speaks of God’s wrath poured out on all nations to the point where you can’t even see the celestial beings anymore. The sun, the moon, and the stars are darkened. It’s language that goes right to the end of time.

Isaiah 13 speaks of God’s relentless wrath poured out on Babylon, the enemy of His people. It’s fulfilled again and again and again and again in history, not just in one date, one time, 536 BC, but again and again, because from the smoldering ashes of one destroyed Babylon rises the next Babylon. Like a wicked phoenix, from the ashes up it comes to defy God and to attack God’s people. It happens again and again, and God is always against it. He controls that rise. He fights against it and throws it back down. And then the next Babylon comes along. So it is. And not until the end of the world will the final Babylon, the spirit of Babylon, and Babylon itself be crushed forever.

In Revelation 17, it depicts Babylon as a harlot riding on a beast with seven heads and ten horns. So you have pleasure plus power. That equals the world to me. That’s what it is. There’s going to be a final form of Babylon, and it will be crushed forever by the glory of the second coming of Christ. No more Babylon, friends. No more world the way John means in 1 John 2. We’ll be free forever and we will live in a pure world where Jesus will reign. There’ll be no enticements away from God, only powerful inducements to worship and to love Him forever. God is going to crush Babylon. That’s exactly what He’s talking about in this very serious and sober chapter. It’s not an easy chapter to read. It’s not pleasant. Yet it is joyful for us as the people of God to know that our enemy is God’s enemy too and that He will rise up and crush it someday

As we enter a new section of Isaiah’s prophecies, Isaiah 13-23, these are oracles against the nations, about eleven chapters or so of oracles against the nations, one after the other. Isaiah in these chapters (really throughout the whole book) portrays a God who sits on His throne and rules over the events of history 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He is working all the time to bring about His plan. It says, right in this oracle section, in Isaiah 14:26-27, “This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” God is in charge. That is a powerfully vital message for our time, when we’re barraged by a constant stream of news stories that can discourage you as a Christian and beat you down. Reading CNN, looking at CNN, or going to websites can be discouraging. You’re looking at Fox News or one thing after another, a constant stream of stories that gives you the sense that the world is spinning out of control. Well, it isn’t. The message of the oracles in these eleven chapters is that our God reigns. And the message of this first one is that God is against Babylon in any of its forms. He will destroy it in the end. So, we see God’s sovereign rule over the nations.

We begin with this oracle against Babylon. We’re going to go from that to oracles against the Philistines in Chapter 14 and against Moab in Chapters 15 and 16. We’re going to look at oracles against Syria and Ephraim in Chapters 17 and 18, Egypt in Chapters 19 and 20, and back to Babylon again in Chapter 21. Edom and Arabia are also in Chapter 21, and finally Tyre is in Chapter 23. These are oracles against the nations. In all of this, God’s going to give clear messages to His people. That’s us and them. The message is, first of all, do not trust in the strength or be allured or enticed by the strength of the nations and the peoples you see around you. Do not put your trust in them. Do not make alliances with them. Don’t put your hope in them. They are just nations. They are as a drop in the bucket, and they will be swept away in the end. The insight here again and again is that that there’s no righteous nation on Earth as we understand a political entity.

God’s wrath is against all of them, every one of them. He says very plainly in Isaiah 34:2, “The Lord is angry with all the nations; his wrath is upon all their armies.” That’s something good for us to consider, isn’t it? He’s against them all. Friends, our citizenship is in Heaven. That’s the message of the oracles of these nations. Also, do not question God’s justice when, for a short period of time, a godless people seem to be dominant and ascendant. He’s seen it before. We will see it again and again. God reigns even then. He is not unjust and God cannot be mocked. Judgment Day, the Day of the Lord, mentioned here, will come to them. So for us, as a people of God, trust in Him. Fear God and keep His commandments. Walk in His ways. Pray for the advance of His kingdom. That’s what I get out of the oracles of the nations. That’s a general introduction to the new section of Isaiah that we’re coming to.

Let’s look specifically here at Isaiah’s far-reaching vision when he talks about Babylon. Look at verse 1, an oracle concerning Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw. Many modern scholars seriously question whether Isaiah wrote these chapters. I love it and I don’t; I hate it. But I read it and I wonder how they come up with these things. What they say is that, at the time that Isaiah wrote, 725 BC, Babylon was really nothing. It was just a minor city with some people around it (the Chaldeans) and they were under the boot of the Assyrians like everybody else. So, it’s like Isaiah made a mistake prophesying against Babylon. They were nothing. It was Assyria that was the threat. Well, he’s dealt with Assyria and we’ve seen all that. But now he’s turning to Babylon. It’s no mistake friends. And it wasn’t written after the fact, friends. Not at all. It was written in 725 BC or thereabouts. Babylon and the Medes that are mentioned in this chapter are actually small allies, chafing under the Assyrian yoke. Isaiah is predicting the fall of Babylon to the Medes. Look at verse 17, the Medes are specifically mentioned. He names the people that are going to topple Babylon before either one of them are powerful enough to do anything about it.

That would happen one hundred and eighty-nine years after this oracle was given, almost two hundred years later. Can God do that? Can He make that kind of a specific prophecy that far in advance? We Christians, we know the truth. He actually can look seven and a half centuries ahead and talk about Jesus who died as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him; nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by man. A man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.” “We all like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him [on Jesus] the iniquity of us all.” (Is 53:2-3;6) Can Isaiah look into the future and see that kind of detail? Absolutely he can! Can he see that Jesus would be buried in a rich man’s tomb and then raised? He can see all that. He can see whatever God shows him, for God knows the future.

He says in Isaiah 42:9, “See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you.” This is the power of God. He knows the future. He doesn’t just know the future, He decrees the future and He declares the future! This is what God does. This is the plan determined for the whole world, and God is making it happen. So Isaiah has a far-reaching vision to look ahead one hundred and eighty-nine years from when he was living to the fall of an empire at a city that wasn’t even powerful in his day. He can do that.

Babylon has a symbolic role in redemptive history. Anyone who’s read through the Bible has bumped into Babylon again and again. It’s not just one time. The key question as we look at Isaiah 13 is “If Babylon isn’t even the issue at this point, if the real threat is in Assyria, then why does God give such a prominent place to the prediction of the fall of Babylon?” That’s a good question.

Babylon was the ancient leader in human rebellion among the nations. The nations derived their origin from the time when, in Babel, a tower was being built: the Tower of Babel in defiance of the command of God. God came down and confused the languages and that was the beginning of the nations. Babel became Babylon. It’s the same location. That’s where it was. That’s the origination of that national rebellion against God.

Babylon was also what we call the Neo-Babylonian empire. In the time under Nebuchadnezzar it was a leader in world empire-building. There had never been an empire like it. The cultural level of Babylon was much higher than that of Assyria. It mentions the nobles in our text here. We’ll talk more about that. But Nebuchadnezzar’s achievements were astounding in building Babylon to its level of human glory. We’ve got the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon and all of the structures there. It’s just a magnificent place.

Furthermore, the city of Babylon was mighty and powerful. It seemed invincible: 14 miles square, huge outer walls, which Herodotus tells us were 87 feet thick and 350 feet high. That’s a 35 story building! There were 100 great bronze gates in the walls and a limitless water supply, so they believed. Crops were able to be grown within the walls. You can’t conquer this city. You don’t have an army big enough to go fourteen miles on a side all the around to shut it up tight like a cork. You can’t do it. Even if you could, they could outlast you. They’ve got crops inside. They’ve got farmers. They’ve got water. They’ll just laugh at you, 350 feet above you. You’re not going to be throwing anything over the wall and you’re not going to burrow through it. There’s no way it could fall, so they believed. Babylon was the arrogant symbol of opposition to almighty God.

In the New Testament, Peter makes a not-so-obscure reference to Babylon. At the end of his epistle 1 Peter 5, he says this, “She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you her greetings, and so does my son Mark.” Church tradition tells us he wrote that from Rome. Why does he call Rome, Babylon? I told you, out of the ashes rises the phoenix of another world-conquering, God-hating empire. And that was Rome in Peter’s day. Even after Rome falls, there’s another one, another Babylon that keeps coming. It’s going to keep right on going until the end. Revelation will pick up on this Babylon theme, as we’ll talk about later in the message. But in Revelation 17, as I’ve already mentioned, and in 18, Babylon is there when Jesus returns. And He destroys it.

But here in Isaiah 13 we’re focusing on the first empire, the Babylonian empire and the city of Babylon. One hundred and eighty-nine years before it happens, the prophet Isaiah is predicting its fall. By the way, this is one of the most predicted events in history. It’s predicted here in Isaiah 13. It’s predicted in Isaiah 21. It’s predicted for five chapters towards the end of Jeremiah very specifically. It’s predicted in Habakkuk Chapter 2 very plainly. The details are astounding. I already preached through this. It’s recorded for us in Daniel Chapter 5 on the night of Belshazzar’s feast when the writing appears on the wall and Babylon falls to the Medes. It’s not a minor event in redemptive history. It’s a major one. God is summoning an army against Babylon, and, in this chapter, God’s activity is central. Seven times in this chapter God speaks about what He’s going to do against Babylon. He’s taking it very personally. He’s acting very directly. Look at verse 3, “I have commanded my holy ones; I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath – those who rejoice in my triumph.” It’s very personal for God.

Verses 11-13 say, “I will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins. I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless. I will make man scarcer than pure gold, more rare than the gold of Ophir. Therefore, I will make the heavens tremble.” Verse 17 even more specifically says, “See, I will stir up against them the Medes.” God raises up the Medes against Babylon. This is very personal for God. He is active and involved. Verses 6 and 9 call it the Day of the Lord. This is the Lord’s day, the day of judgment on the nations. God is acting directly to bring about judgment for His own glory. This is not some random swirling of events in human history that had no purpose, no meaning to it at all, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No, this is God, essential actor in history, bringing down judgment on a people who will not acknowledge His name or live through His glory. So God summons an army. That’s how He is going to do it.

Verses 2-4 say, “Raise a banner on a bare hilltop, shout to them; beckon to them to enter the gates of the nobles. I have commanded my holy ones; I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath – those who rejoice in my triumph. Listen, a noise on the mountains, like that of a great multitude! Listen, an uproar among the kingdoms, like nations massing together! The Lord Almighty is mustering an army for war.” God is mustering an army and they’re going to come and destroy Babylon. In ancient times, before radio communication, armies used colorful banners up on bare hilltops to signal across distances. Or they would use signal fires. The nations are massing together. They are organizing to come against the mighty Babylon. Again, it’s no accident. The Lord is mustering this army for war and they’re going to enter, it says, “the gates of the nobles.” These are the Chaldeans. These are the refined Babylonians who exported their Babylonian culture all over their empire. They’re the nobles, the blue bloods, cultured and arrogant. They’re going to be destroyed, all of them. And God calls this personal army to do His will.

They are His warriors. He even calls them “my holy ones.” Strange, isn’t it? Holy in this case means set apart for a purpose and for a job that God’s calling them to do. Later on in Isaiah’s prophecy, He’s going to call Cyrus the Great of Persia “my anointed one.” In Greek, it’s the Christ, the Messiah. Now we know that he’s not the Christ, but he’s anointed for a task. So it says in Isaiah 45:4, “For the sake of Jacob my servant, of Israel my chosen, I summon you by name and bestow on you a title of great honor, though you do not acknowledge me.” Cyrus doesn’t know Yahweh. He doesn’t know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he’s doing Yahweh’s will, even though he doesn’t acknowledge Him. We’ve already learned that in Isaiah, haven’t we? God raises up instruments to do His will, whether they acknowledge Him or not.

So this army that’s coming, these Medes and these Persians that are coming to destroy Babylon, they’re doing God’s will. This is the day of the Lord. Look at verses 5 and 6, “They come from far away lands, from the ends of the heavens – the Lord and the weapons of his wrath to destroy the whole country. Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; it will come like destruction from the Almighty.” The invasion of this international coalition of armies against Babylon is not an accidental occurrence. God has brought it. There may be human factors, but it is the Lord, spiritually, riding at the head of the army. It cannot be defeated and the reaction will be nothing less than terror. Look at verses 7-9, “Because of this, all hands will go limp, every man’s heart will melt. Terror will seize them, pain and anguish will grip them; they will writhe like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at each other, their faces aflame. See, the Day of the Lord is coming – a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger – to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it.”

There will be a future Day of the Lord. It is described in many places in the New Testament. That Day of the Lord will be like this one only a thousand times worse, a thousand times more intense. In history God just does the same things again and again, like dress rehearsals, and says, “As I did in Sodom and Gomorrah,” or “as I did in Babylon,” or “as what happened with the Romans.” It’s going to happen again at the end, getting us ready for the Day of the Lord. Thus, Isaiah uses extreme language to describe the fall of Babylon, He goes beyond the mere invasion of the city that night, the killing of the Babylonian king and the officials, and the taking over of the city by the Medes and the Persians.

He goes much further than that. Look at verses 10 and 13. It’s language that soars above that current event. It says, “The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light. The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light.” “Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the Lord Almighty, in the day of his burning anger.” This is language that is speaking of the end of the world.  It’s going to happen again. Babylon will be crushed again, and, at that point, the stars and the sun and the moon aren’t merely going to be darkened, they’re going to be removed. The stars will fall to the earth, it says in the Book of Revelation, as figs from a tree. God is going to clear everything away, and there will be a new heaven and new earth, the home of righteousness.

In verse 17, Isaiah names the invaders very specifically. This is God saying, “See what I can do? Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. I know history before it even happens. I can tell you who’s going to destroy Babylon. It’s going to be the Medes.” Look at verse 17, “See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold.” This is astonishing accuracy. As I mentioned, at the time Isaiah wrote, the Medes were no major player on the world scene. Like the Babylonians, they were conquered people under the yoke of the Assyrians. Who were the Medes? They were people living in what is now central Iran, east of Mesopotamia. They inhabited the Zagros Mountains and the high plateaus east of that mountain range. That’s where they came from. As early as 836 BC, the Assyrians referred to them as a threat, as enemies. In 612 BC, they joined together with the Babylonians in helping to crush what was left of the dying Assyrian empire. Assyria’s time was over and the Medes and Babylonians came together and went up the Fertile Crescent and crushed Nineveh. It’s predicted. Assyria is done, finished for good, and the Medes and Babylonians kind of joined together in doing that. But the Babylonians took over under Nebuchadnezzar. They were stronger at that point, and the Medes were subjugated. They were crushed under the Babylonian empire.

God declares in advance that once Babylon’s time has passed, the Medes will rise up and it’ll be their turn. They’re going to crush Babylon. Look at them, they’re a single-minded weapon of wrath. Verse 17-18, “See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold. Their bows will strike down the young men; they will have no mercy on infants nor will they look with compassion on children.” First of all, they can’t be bought off. You can’t send out a box of silver and gold and they go home, back to where they came from. They’re going to get it all. They don’t want one box. They want everything you have, Babylonians. They’re not going to be bought off that way. They’re ready to exact vengeance. They’re filled with wrath. They’re filled with rage. And they’re going to kill everyone. There’s a mercilessness here. Even the infants and the children, they’re not spared.

The desolation that is decreed and then fulfilled in verses 19 through 22 comes as an act of judgment by God. Why does the judgment come? Well, the central reason is always the same; it’s pride. It’s the arrogance of the Babylonians. He’s going to crush them because of their pride. Look at verse 19, “Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonians’ pride, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.” Isaiah 2 has already displayed how much God hates human arrogance, pride, and boasting. Anything that goes up, anything that gets lofty in defiance of God, He wants to throw down. And in due time, He will. Here, Babylon is called “the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonians pride.” It was for this very reason, as you remember, that Nebuchadnezzar was struck with insanity for seven years. Do you remember the King of Babylon? The Babylonian emperor is walking on the roof of his palace and feeling pretty good about his life and his achievements. “Is this not the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” He’d already been warned about this kind of thing a year before by Daniel. Even while the words are coming out of his mouth, an angel speaks and decrees. And God strikes. In that same day, he is driven away from people and goes out and starts eating grass like cattle for seven years. He’s like that until God grants him repentance and enables his sanity to come back to him. He lifts up his eyes toward heaven and he praises the Most High. He learns his lesson. He is able to be humble.

Well, Nebuchadnezzar learned it, but Babylon didn’t. Babylon didn’t learn it. Babylon is an enemy of God. It will fight against God forever. So if he won’t be that way, he’ll be replaced, and another king will come along who’ll rule Babylon. He’s going to get soft. And look at the horror of the judgment in verses 14 through 16, “Like a hunted gazelle, like a sheep without a shepherd, each will return to his own people, each will flee to his native land. Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their house will be looted and their wives ravished.” Destruction, this is what the next Babylon does to the last Babylon. It’s what they do.

They’re going to get judged when Alexander the Great comes. Then he is going to get judged. And the Greeks are going to get judged when the Romans come. And on and on it goes, one Babylon after another, bringing this kind of destruction. Look at the judgment, the desolation that’s predicted. Look at verses 20 through 22, speaking of Babylon, “She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; no Arab will pitch his tent there, no shepherd will rest his flocks there. But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there, owls will dwell, and there, the wild goats will leap about. Hyenas will howl in her stronghold; jackals in her luxurious palaces. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.” Desolation has been decreed for Babylon. No one will live there ever again. It will be leveled and it will never be rebuilt. Now obviously, if you take that literally, then how do you end up with Babylon all the way at the end of the world in Revelations 17? Well, the city itself on the Euphrates River is crushed and it has not been rebuilt. According to this, it never will be. But the spirit of Babylon lives on and it keeps floating from place to place, landing, coagulating in a human empire, and then the next Babylon rises. The last one will be that of the Antichrist, as he organizes the whole world in rebellion against God.

So, Babylon continues to live even while this city will never be rebuilt. This decree was fulfilled in stages. It didn’t happen all at once. Cyrus the Persian invades. In 538 BC he comes in and takes the whole empire except the city of Babylon. Darius the Mede (he’s got to be a Mede, of course) comes with the Medes to Babylon itself, and they get in. Jeremiah predicted very plainly, “I will make her officials, her leaders drunk and they will lie down and sleep and never wake up.” This couldn’t be plainer. He also says in Jeremiah, “I will dry up her streams.” What ends up happening is the Medes dried up the Euphrates River by diverting it with a canal. They crawl under the walls. They are very vulnerable to archers, if anybody’s on the wall watching. But nobody is watching, because they are all drunk in their beds because of Belshazzar’s feast. So the Medes come in. They open up the gates, and they run through the palace. They kill Belshazzar. They kill all of the Babylonian officials. But they didn’t kill Daniel, the third highest ruler in the Babylonian kingdom. Because that was Daniel.

Remember the purple robe and the gold chain? I don’t think he was wearing it that night. It wouldn’t have been a good idea. But God then sovereignly raised Daniel up to be the third highest ruler in the Persian kingdom as well! Only God could do something like that. Everybody else, though, dies, a direct fulfillment. But the gates and the walls still stood. It was useful. Why destroy it? It was there for a while until another Darius, some time later, actually pulled the walls down and destroyed it. Then Alexander the Great comes along. By this time, it’s little more than a pile of rubble. He decides he wants to rebuild it and make it the center of his empire. The problem is, in Babylon, he drank too much wine and died of alcohol poisoning. His grandiose plans never came to anything. God will not have that city rebuilt.

It got worse and worse. By 309 BC, Antigonus the First of Macedonia leveled Babylon. By 275, Antiochus the First took away all the remaining civilian population, deporting them to other cities. Nobody’s even living there in 275 BC. A Greek writer named Pausanias, geographer of the Roman period, said there’s literally nothing where there used to be Babylon. That’s during the Roman period. It happened in stages. In the last century before Christ, an ancient geographer, Strabo, wrote, “the great city of Babylon has become a wilderness.” I don’t think he’s saying, “Oh, I read Isaiah 13.” He is just saying what it is. It’s a wilderness. God made it that way.

The Roman Emperor Trajan, eager to visit the famous Babylon, was disappointed when he arrived at the site. There was nothing to see. There’s nothing there. No Arab will pitch his tent there. No shepherd will shepherd his flock there. There’s nothing there. In the present era, in 1811, an archeologist found it. From the end of the 1800s into the 1900s, there were major digs going on. Then Saddam Hussein took power. He wanted to make it the center of his kingdom. Well, two Gulf Wars took care of him! He’s not in power there. There won’t be any new Babylon on the site of the old Babylon, at least not under Saddam Hussein. Much to the chagrin of the archaeologists that are there, US troops are digging and using sand and rubble from the site to fill sandbags. I think they’re fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 13. They’re not that concerned about archaeology or any of those sorts of things. They’ve got to fill up sandbags because there are threats against them. They don’t want to get blown up. As a Biblical scholar, I look at that and say, “Amen.” Fill it up! Fill up those sandbags with ancient Babylon.

Now, of course, I appreciate archaeology and all that sort of stuff. But it’s happened whether you like it or not. If you’re an archaeologist who weeps over that kind of thing, it doesn’t matter. It has happened. It is going to be hard to get it back. Those guys go on hands and knees with toothbrushes, that kind of thing. These soldiers are in there with shovels, filling up bags. It’s God’s judgment, I tell you, on ancient Babylon. He means to keep it down. In the final judgment, however, Babylon is going to be overthrown like Sodom and Gomorrah. That’s what it says. It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah, but different. Sodom and Gomorrah were overthrown by fire and brimstone coming down from heaven. Judgment coming down from above so it’s clear that God is doing it. No question about it. So it will be at the end of the world.

When Jesus comes back in Revelation, chapters 17 and 18 describe Babylon’s final fall. Isaiah 13:9-11 says, “See, the Day of the Lord is coming – a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger – to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it. The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light. The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light. I will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins. I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless.” That’s the end of the world. God is going to judge it. Read about it in the Book of Revelation. In Revelation 17 it talks about when Babylon the great, mystery Babylon, is thrown down like a millstone. And Revelation 18 says that Babylon was destroyed by the sovereign power of God.

I was reading an article recently in which some professors were worrying, greatly worrying, terribly worrying, about over-population. Over-population is going to get us, folks. Did you know that? The estimation is that by the year 2050, it will take, these professors say, the resources of four planet Earths to handle the 9 billion people there will be at that time. I don’t think over-population’s going to get us. Look at verse 12, “I will make man scarcer than pure gold, more rare than the gold of Ophir.” The judgment of God is going to get “us,” if “us” is unrepentant rebels who love Babylon. That’s what is going to get “us.” Don’t fear over-population. Fear God. The judgment of God is coming on Babylon, and friends, we live in Babylon. We live in the city of destruction. I don’t just mean we Americans. I’m saying, we who live here on Earth, we live in Babylon.

God’s judgment is coming. It’s going to come once more. God sent His son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to rescue us from it, that we might not have to suffer its curses and plagues. So God says, “Come out from her and be separate.” Speaking of Babylon later in the Book of Isaiah, “Come out and do not share her plagues and her judgments.” Well, come out where? Recently, I was reading through Wayne Grudem’s “Systematic Theology” and he was talking about the attributes of God and God’s omnipresence. Where are you going to flee from the wrath of God? Where are you going to go? There’s nowhere you can hide. One theologian said there is nowhere to flee from God enraged but to God reconciled. There’s nowhere you can flee from God enraged but to God reconciled. And the only place you can find reconciliation with God is at the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus died on the cross. He shed His blood, under the wrath of God, that we might have a refuge place from the judgment that’s coming on Babylon, that we might have a place to come and be separate and pure and to be protected and to not suffer from the plagues. It says in Galatians 1:3-4, “The Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age.”

And so, what application? Flee to Christ. Flee to Him. I don’t know your spiritual situation. Do you know your spiritual situation? Have you fled to Christ? Are you standing under the shadow of the cross, having been cleansed by the blood of Jesus? Are you ready to face the wrath to come? Have you fled to Jesus? He is the only refuge there is and you don’t need to just flee there once. Friends, we still live in Babylon. It’s still alluring; it’s still enticing; it’s still pulling on us. We’re not done being saved. Flee there every day. Flee there many times a day. Come again and again to the cross of Christ when you’re being polluted by the world. It could be you’re sitting here this morning, Sunday morning, and your conscience is defiled. You know you’re a Christian. There’s no doubt in your mind that you’re a Christian. But you have done things and you have compromised with Babylon in some way. You have been polluted. Flee to Christ again. He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Pray that He might purify us.

Understand the control of God over the flow of human history. It doesn’t matter how many Babylons rise from the ashes of the last Babylon. God is in charge of all of it and He will crush it all at the end. There will be smaller Days of the Lord and then one final Day of the Lord.

Finally, call on God to fulfill His good purposes. Say, “Do it, Lord! Crush Babylon. Rescue your people out from her and crush her. Establish Your kingdom. May Your kingdom come and may Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

We come now to a time of celebration of the Lord’s Supper. This is a time in which we are able to look back at what I’ve just mentioned, Jesus’ sacrificial death on our behalf. We’re able to look around in this present time at our own hearts to know whether we’re in the faith, to know whether our consciences are defiled. We can confess our sin and get ready. We should not take this in a manner unworthy of the Lord. Thus, we come under His discipline. We take it very seriously. But remember, it’s for sinners. It’s not for the pure and holy. Jesus said, “I didn’t come to call the righteous but sinners.” So, if you have come to personal faith in Christ and you’ve testified to that by water baptism, you’re free to come and take from this table. We also look ahead to a time when the Lord will be finished with all of this unpleasantness, with all of the judgment, and He will usher in the new heavens and new earth. Close with me in prayer.