A sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, 08 Oct 2006
(1) The burden of Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
(2) On a bare hill raise a signal, y’all;
Raise your voice to them;
wave a hand so they will enter the gates of the nobles.
(3) I myself have commanded my consecrated ones,
and called my mighty men to execute my anger,
my jubilant haughty ones.
(4) The voice of a multitude is on the mountains as of a great people!
The voice of an uproar from kingdoms of nations being gathered!
Jehovah of hosts visiting (with) a war host
(5) They come from a land from afar,
from the end of the heavens,
Jehovah and the weapons of his indignation,
to destroy the whole land.
(6) Wail, for the day of Jehovah is near;
as calamity from the Almighty it will come!
(7) Therefore all hands will be feeble,
and every heart of man will be melted.
(8) They will be dismayed:
pangs and agony will seize them;
they will be in anguish like a woman birthing.
They will look aghast, each man to his friend;
their faces will be aflame.
(9) Look, the day of Jehovah comes,
Cruel wrath
and fierce anger,
to make the land into a desolation and
to destroy her sinners from her.
(10) For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light;
the sun will be dark when He goes forth,
and the moon will not shine its light.
(11) And I will visit evil upon the world,
and iniquity upon the wicked,
I will finish off the arrogant proud,
and humioliate the pompous pride of the ruthless.
(12) I will make people more rare than fine gold,
and mankind than the gold of Oman.
(13) Therefore I will make the heavens tremble,
and the earth will shake out of her place, at the wrath of Jehovah of hosts
in the day of his fierce anger.
(14) And like a hunted gazelle, or
like unshepherded sheep ,
each will face toward his people, and each will flee to his land.
(15) Everyone who is found will be thrust through,
and everyone who is intercepted will fall by the sword.
(16) Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes;
their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished.
(17) Look, I am stirring up the Medes against them,
who have no regard for silver
and do not delight in gold.
(18) Their bows will dash apart the young men;
they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb;
their eyes will not pity children.
(19) And Babylon,
the glory of kingdoms,
the splendor and pomp of the Chaldeans,
will be like God’s overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.
(20) She will not remain forever, and she will not dwell from generation to generation;
The Arab will not camp there;
and shepherds will not make pasture there.
(21) But wild animals will lie down there,
and their houses will be full of howling creatures;
there ostriches will dwell,
and there demons will dance.
(22) Hyenas will cry in its towers,
and dragons in the pleasant palaces;
Her time is near to come, and her days will not be prolonged.
“Justice Will Be Done” song by Hank Williams Jr, “I went down to the Mary Carter Paint store / I said give me one of them Smith & Wesson magnum 44’s / Cause there’s a man that the law let loose / And justice was not done” He complains that the man who killed his wife and son had hired a smirking big-name lawyer and had gotten off on a technicality in court. But if he takes personal revenge with that .44, will justice be served?
Some cheats prosper; some crime pays; bad things happen to good people. People do not often get what they deserve. Life isn’t fair. – Tim Holt
BBC News - August 9, 1998 - US President Bill Clinton has again promised that he will not rest until the embassy bombers in Africa are caught. Those responsible for Friday's blasts in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed at least 130 people, would be pursued "until justice is done", he said in a live radio broadcast from the White House Oval Office… Publicly, US politicians are refusing to names suspects as the US receives up to 30,000 threats a year. But privately some believe the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden may be responsible for the synchronised bombings… SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/147738.stm Three years later, justice had not been done and the United States was hit with a terrorist attack on the trade towers, so Bush took up the refrain that “justice will be done.”
We all have a sense that good should be rewarded and evil should be punished. 18th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant, even brought out this point as an argument to prove the existence of God, for he said that there must be a rational reason for why so many people try to live according to morals, and that reason, he concluded, is that there is a God who can bring justice to those who violate moral law. (Source: Tim Holt, http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/kantianmoral.html Oct 3, 2006)
Sequential actions carefully and personally orchestrated by God to deal with people on earth.
In 539BC, about 200 years after Isaiah’s prophecy, Cyrus overthrew Babylon.
· The prophet Daniel describes briefly the night of the overthrow which he witnessed, including the king going pale and slack just as v.7&8 prophecy (Dan 5:6).
· As v. 4 states, the invading army was indeed composed of soldiers from a number of different nations which Cyrus had conquered, and which he gathered together in the Zagros mountains northeast of Babylon.
· The cruelty that Isaiah mentions in v.9 corroborates with the historical record of Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in 30 BC that the Medes were particularly cruel to those beneath them.
· V.14 mentions foreigners in Babylon escaping to their home countries, which is exactly what the medieval Jewish commentator Kimchi reported.
· Xenophon’s history of this overthrow of Babylon mentions Cyrus’ order to kill everyone found in the streets of Babylon when they invaded, which is exactly what Isaiah prophecied in v.15.
· As v.17 states, Cyrus was a Mede, and as history bore out, the Mede’s reason for overthrowing Babylon was not so much for economic gain but rather for revenge to overthrow an oppressive government.
· Over the following decades, Babylon’s walls were knocked down, and by 40BC, the historian Strabo called it a “desert,” fulfilling v.19
· A couple of years ago, when U.S. Marines penetrated Iraq to Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, the ruins of ancient Babylon were still there next to the palace and still uninhabited by all but some wildlife, just as Isaiah had prophecied in v.20 Pictures of the ruins taken by these soldiers are easy to find on the internet now.
· In the nineteenth century, the eminent Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius discovered stories among the locals around Babylon that ghosts inhabited the ancient city. The ancient Jewish Targums, the Greek Septuagint, King James Version, and even the reformer John Calvin translated v. 21 with “demons” rather than natural “goats” as being the inhabitants of the wasteland that God made of Babylon.
Do you see the incredible detail with which God prophecied the fall of Babylon and brought it to specific fulfillment? The detailed fulfillment is so striking that it has secular scholars scrambling to figure out a way to prove that Isaiah did not actually write this chapter, but rather someone hundreds of years later!
The modern commentator E.J. Young observes, “When we doubt the power of God, let us look to the wilderness where Babylon once was. So will He judge the wicked.”
Fine and good if at one point in world history, God meted out justice upon a wicked nation. But is this a consistent pattern of God? Is this God’s character? Can we really expect this kind of thing to happen again? The very wording of this chapter gives a resounding “YES.” Isaiah uses identical words and phrases to prophecy the downfall of Babylon that He used with prophecies against other nations. The downfall of Babylon is just one of many visitations of God’s justice throughout history.
Isaiah reminds us by the very phrases of this prophecy that God is consistent: He judges sin. He’s rendered justice to the nations in the past and He will do it again.
The Proverbs warn us that we can’t get away with sin.
· Pro 6:29 “So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife; none who touches her will go unpunished.”
· Pro 11:21 “Be assured, an evil person will not go unpunished, but the offspring of the righteous will be delivered.”
· Pro 16:5 “Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the LORD; be assured, he will not go unpunished.”
· Pro 17:5 “Whoever mocks the poor insults his Maker; he who is glad at calamity will not go unpunished.”
· Pro 19:5 & 9 “A false witness will not go unpunished…”
· Pro 28:20 “A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.”
It is God’s nature to judge meticulously; justice will be done.
So in light of God’s justice, how should we live? Hear God’s word from 2 Peter 3:11-15
“Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, (12) waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! (13) But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. (14) Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. (15) And count the patience of our Lord as salvation…”
Between now and the “Day of the Lord” is the Day of Salvation!
That’s what Peter says we should do in light of God’s justice; be found IN CHRIST, Hastening His coming by prayer and evangelism, and waiting with patient hope in Him for His promise that justice will indeed be done.
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