Isaiah 21:1-10
Amen. Turn in your copy of the
scriptures to Isaiah, Isaiah 21. While you’re making your
way there, let me make a confession. I know
Isaiah is a very confusing book, and I am confused too. So don’t
worry, you’re in good company. Second of all, a little primer,
Isaiah is a prophet of the Lord, primarily to the southern kingdom,
Judah. The northern kingdom is going to get exiled by Assyria
in the 700s. That’s not but a little bit from
Isaiah’s time. And then about 100 years later,
not in Isaiah’s time because he doesn’t grow that old, Babylon
is going to come destroy Judah, Jerusalem and the temple. And
then Jeremiah will give his lamentation. And then, of course, exile 70
years. They’re taken care of and prosper. And God brings some back, a remnant
back to rebuild. We looked at that at Ezra, Nehemiah,
and Haggai a year or so ago. So there’s all these cycles in
the book of Isaiah of doom and gloom. Doom and gloom on Judah
and Jerusalem. There’s a little doom and gloom
on the northern tribes, and there’s doom and gloom on the surrounding
nations. But there’s always this big picture
in mind, and it’s this. God will save a remnant. And
some of them will be a remnant from Israel, from Judah and Jerusalem,
and even the northern tribes. And some will even be people
of the Gentile nations, Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and other
places. And so we see the widening of
God’s family over time. I think y’all looked at Romans
9, 10 and 11 in Sunday school. And you see that God grafts into
his vine or his tree people into the place of Israel. So don’t
get lost in the weeds. Or if you are, don’t worry too
much. But let’s give our attention to God’s word, Isaiah 21. And it says, the oracle concerning
the wilderness of the sea. That’s probably Babylon, meaning
the Euphrates River. So the oracle concerning the
wilderness of the sea. As whirlwinds in the Negev sweep
on, it comes from the wilderness from a terrible land. A stern
vision is told to me. The traitor betrays and the destroyer
destroys. Go up, O Elam, lay siege, O media. All the sighing she has caused
I will bring to an end. Therefore my loins are filled
with anguish. Pangs have seized me. Like the
pangs of a woman in labor, I am bowed down so that I cannot hear.
I am dismayed so that I cannot see. This is Isaiah speaking.
My heart staggers. Horror has appalled me. The twilight
I longed for has been turned for me into trembling. Now we’re
speaking of the Babylonian soldiers. They prepare the table, they
spread the rugs, and they eat and they drink. Arise, O princes,
oil the shield, for thus the Lord said to me, Go set a watchman.
Let him announce what he sees, when he sees riders and horsemen
in pairs, riders on donkeys, riders on camels. Let him listen
diligently, very diligently. Then he who saw cried out, upon
a watchtower I stand, O Lord, continually by day, and at my
post I am stationed whole nights. And behold, here comes riders,
horsemen in pairs. And he answered, fallen, fallen
is Babylon, and all the carved images of her gods he has shattered
to the ground. O my threshed and winnowed one,
what have I heard from the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel,
I announce to you? The oracle concerning Duma, one
is calling to me from Seir. Watchman, what time of the night?
Watchman, what time of the night? The watchman says morning comes
and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire
and come back again. The oracle concerning Arabia,
in the thickets in Arabia you will lodge. O caravans of the
Danites, To the thirsty they bring water to meet the fugitive
with bread, O inhabitants of the land of Tima. For they have
fled from the swords and the drawn sword from the bent bow
in the press of battle. For thus says the Lord to me,
within a year, according to the years of the hired worker, all
the glory of Kedar will come to an end and the remainders
of the archers of the mighty men of the sons of Kedar will
be few for the Lord, the God of Israel, has spoken. Well, just to prove to you how
confused I am, I meant to stop at verse 10 and pick up next
week at verse 11 so you get a little bonus. Okay. Think about this. God made the world and everything
in it. God took what was formless and
void and he formed it and he filled it. And after all of his
creation on day six, when he made man the crown of his creation,
he blessed it and he said, it is very good. So he gave his
creation a benediction, but he also gave it order. You recognize
in God’s creation how he made seed time and harvest. He made
the cycles of reproduction. He made the things that we study
in biology and ecology and all the rest. He made all those things,
but then Satan entered And God permitted sin. God permitted
Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and he permitted their fall
and he permitted evil to run this world. He permitted the
chaos and the curses. But we know that that is for
a short time for he promised when he told Adam and Eve of
this that he would send a son, the seed of the woman who would
crush the serpent’s head. And so while we live in a sin-filled,
cursed and chaotic world, we ought to remember there is still
great mercy. There are still remnants of righteousness
in fallen human beings. There are still remnants of the
past glory of creation. And there are what I call down
payments on the new heavens and the new earth. particularly as
we see springtime and flowers and new life come, we see down
payments of what things will be like when God gloriously renews
them. But we live in a world full of evil things. Take, for example, this past
week’s natural catastrophes. It’s hurricane season. We’ll
hear of earthquakes. We will hear of a tree falling
on a house and taking someone’s life. We will hear of other natural
disasters, global and local, and even things within our bodies. Cells don’t do what they’re supposed
to do. Sometimes they mutate and they
cause or form cancers. And you just drive down Church
Street and all the businesses are there for our fallen bodies.
And thank the Lord for people made in His image who can remove
things or help delay the full effects of the fall. But think
for a moment, especially in this time of our nation’s life, of
the evils of rulers. I mean, right now we are watching
for two and a half years a war between Russia and the Ukraine.
We’re watching Israel deal with all the surrounding nations who’ve
been attacking them and lobbying things over their borders. And
we’re still reeling in the fact that there are people not yet
rescued. And many people died in the attacks
of last October. You might have turned on the
local news and heard of the crime report. You may have had a person
in your own family go through something hard. recently, and
all these things add up. But what do we do with the proud
nations? What do we do with the nations that exalt themselves?
What do we do with the nations that build coalitions and become
mighty and powerful and make the rich rich and the poor even
poorer? What do we do when armies assemble
in a mass and rattle their swords? It scares us, and it should. But what can we do? What can
we do about these things? In one sense, nothing. In another
sense, we can trust God. And that’s easier said than done. But I want you to think of this.
There is so much more evil in the world God has restrained
or held back. We think about how Satan knows
his doom is sure. We think about Satan as God’s
devil. He’s on God’s chain. And like in the prologue to the
book of Job, Satan can only do what God permits. He can only
go so far as that chain, like a chained watchdog or guard dog can do. He can only go so far in that
God allows. Some years back, there was a
natural disaster or tragedy, I can’t remember what it was,
but somewhere about 20 years back. And in World Magazine,
Joel Bells, the longtime editor and founder of that magazine,
he wrote some article that went something like this. We cry out
to God when bad things happen, but do we ever praise him for
the many evils that he holds back from us? You know, we cry
out when there’s a tidal wave or when there’s a bridge collapse.
We cry out when there’s a war or a bomb goes off. We cry out
during those things. But do we ever give thanks to
God for the many mercies, the many evils he held back or restrained? That’s something for us to consider.
Well, tonight as we think of chapter 21, just one through
10, not all that I read, but just one through 10 of chapter
21, think about this question. If you could see, If you could
see 100, 200 years into the future and you knew the end, you knew
what was going to happen to your greatest enemy, how would you
change? How would you change? Would you
change? Would you be encouraged? Would you weep for the destruction
of your enemy? Would you pray for the salvation
of your enemies? What would be your response if
you could see down the road, down the line, into the things
of God, and how would you change? How would you respond? That’s
in a sense what we get in the life of Isaiah. God gives him,
sort of like John in Revelation, God gives Isaiah a window into
the future. And in a chapter or two, we’ll
see that Isaiah weeps. for the destruction of the enemies
of God. We’ll see that he labors under
these visions. Well, I mentioned earlier that
we’re thinking big picture about Babylon here. Babylon is not
yet a world power, as Isaiah gives this message. Assyria is
the world power. Assyria is going to take care of the northern
kingdom, haul them off, and repatriate with the people we call the Samaritans.
And then about 100 years or so later, Babylon is going to rise
and wreak havoc on Israel or Judah, the southern kingdom.
I know y’all have read Daniel. Y’all are good Christians. I
know you’ve read Daniel, and you’ve read chapter 5, and there’s the
visions of Daniel. And remember the king, Nebuchadnezzar, he’s
throwing a big old party. It’s like a six month long party,
and the wine never runs out, the food never runs out, the
revelers never get tired, and it’s just party, party, party
for about six months. And while they’re partying, the
nations, it was mentioned in our passage tonight, the nation
of Media, the Persians, and a couple of other little nations that
form an alliance, they’re beginning to while this party is going
on, surround Babylon. Now, Babylon is a great city,
a huge city, a big city. Imagine surrounding New York
City. Babylon’s got these walls that are like 80 feet across.
I forget how high they are, but you could drive transfer trucks
down them and pass. I mean, they’re just big, huge
city walls, and the city is square and got all these crisscross
streets, and it’s a big, well-planned place. So in the king’s palace,
they’re throwing a big old party, and the king decides we need
to ramp it up here. And so he says, bring the goblets,
bring the utensils from the temple at Judah and Jerusalem, those
that the king before me captured and took. And so they’re partying
with the utensils, with the cups, with the sacred objects from
the temple. They’ve been stored back in their
own treasury and they’ll eventually go back with with Ezra and Nehemiah
and all that crew. But for tonight, they are the
Dixie Cups, right? They’re the solo cups, they’re
the drinking cups, they’re the wine glasses. And while all this
is going on, guess what? The enemy God has raised up,
has surrounded the city and it will fall. And so Isaiah sees
this, Daniel sees this in a vision. It’s a terrifying thing to consider.
And I don’t know if you caught it, but tonight in our passage
in verse two, It has a little phrase that I think is very eye-catching,
even heart-catching. It says, all the sighing she
has caused I bring to an end. What a sweet little phrase that
is, as long as you’re not Babylon, right? Babylon has caused trouble. Babylon has wreaked havoc by
this point on nations and people. They’ve destroyed Judah. They’ve
destroyed Jerusalem. They’ve captured the city of
God. They captured the articles of
the worship of God and Temple worship has ceased, God’s presence
has departed, and the people are hauled off to another nation,
and they’re in exile, they’re in shame, and they are under
God’s hand and his wrath. But Isaiah has this sweet little
turn of the phrase, all the sighing she has caused I bring to an
end. In this passage, we’re thinking
about all the nations that are in the vicinity of Israel. We’re
thinking of territories in the vicinity of the promised land.
For example, you’ve got the Negev, which would be the desert near
the Dead Sea. You’ve got Babylon. You know what that is. You’ve
got Arabia. I mentioned Kedar and Tema, the
Edomites. It mentioned mostly, and importantly,
the wilderness and the sea, Euphrates and the nation of Babylon. So how do we think through what
God has shown to Isaiah. Just pick through it with me
for a moment, if you will. Verses 1 and 2, Isaiah gets a
vision or an oracle, and he speaks of whirlwinds in the desert,
the Negev. They sweep on. They come from
the wilderness, from a terrible land. A stern vision is told
to me. The traitor betrays. The destroyer destroys. Go up,
O Elam. Lay siege, O Media. Those are
the precursors to the Persians. All the sighing she has caused
I bring to an end. Don’t you imagine Isaiah’s like,
boy, Babylon is going to get it. It’s a little ways off, but
he’s pretty excited. Actually, if you look at verses
three and four, he’s in anguish. He’s in horror. He says, my loins
are filled with anguish. I don’t know if you know this,
but back in kind of the ancient times, you felt with your loins. When
we read about compassion, we feel it deep within our being.
And so he’s feeling anguish. He’s seized with pains like the
pains of a woman in labor. I know some of you who’ve been
through labor say, how does Isaiah know this? It’s pretty symbolic,
right? It’s bad news. It’s bad stuff.
I’ve been there and thought I was a dad, not the mom. But it’s
pretty bad what he is enduring. And he says, I am bowed down
so that I cannot hear. We love rivalries. There’s the
Duke rivalry, the Carolina rivalry. There’s the NFL ones and the
NBA ones. And of course, with the Olympics, there have been
the nations. I think we got the most gold. We won in basketball
again yesterday. You know, all is well in our
rivalries because we won and the others lost. And we like
to taunt each other. We like to, you know, get pretty
nasty and ugly about it. And that’s fine. That’s sports.
But what about when there’s spiritual rivalries? Should we feel anguish
for those who are perishing? Should we feel anguish for those
who deny that God is plain and visible? and has made himself
known clearly in creation, and yet they turn their eyes, they
turn their hearts, they turn their heads and say he does not
exist, and they continue on in sin. Are we bowed down so that
we cannot hear and dismayed like Isaiah, so that we cannot see?
I think we kind of rejoice sometimes, say, well, they’re going to get
it. That’s fine with them. Be that way. Go that way. But do
our hearts stop and pray for our enemies? You know, today’s
Sunday, you have the Sunday news cycle, all the talk shows, and
everybody runs out their person to, you know, let out little
nuggets on the news. And we find out pretty much what
we already knew, because common sense can, you know, be a pretty
good interpreter of things. And, you know, we kind of rejoice,
oh, that piece of news helps my cause and that piece of news
makes me rejoice because so-and-so gets outed or told on or whatever,
they’re going to jail, that kind of thing. We should really pray
for people. We should really hurt and be
burdened until God shuts the door of the ark or until his
trumpet sounds and he returns. We should feel in horror. Well, what is Babylon doing?
while God is preparing an enemy to surround them and make them
fall. The picture comes in verse 5 here. Just put in the back
of your mind Daniel and them partying for six months, Daniel
5. But look at their soldiers in verse 5. They prepare the
table. They spread the rugs. They eat and they drink. Kind
of sounds like the British when they were fighting us in the
Revolutionary War, you know, they had their tents and the
captains, they had their oriental rugs and their silver chest and
they were having tea in their tents while outside the cannons
were blasting. And this is a symbolic phrase
here that says nobody’s coming to get us. We can eat and we
can drink, you know, we can catch some game and roast it while
in the war camp. And so they prepare the table,
they spread the rugs, they eat and they drink. But the caution
here is arise, O princes, and oil your shield. Get ready for
battle. They had these leather shields and they would oil them
so they were flexible and could fend off and not break and crack
in the hot sun of battle. Arise, O princes, oil the shield,
for thus says the Lord, go set a watchman. I had a little random
thought come this week when I read that. I think it was To Kill
a Mockingbird, you know, hit its big anniversary a few years
ago. The writer, was it Harper Lee? She passed away and they found
a book that she had written and they published it after her death,
posthumously or however you say that. It was called Go Set a
Watchman. And good literary people, good writers, they use biblical
imagery. And so I wonder, I don’t know,
but I wonder if she had read Isaiah 21 and that went through
her mind. But while the armies of Babylon
are eating and drinking and saying, nobody’s going to come get us,
they should be oiling their shields and preparing for war. What does
God tell Isaiah? Well, he tells Isaiah in 6 through
9, for word that Babylon has been
destroyed. They have these runners. We just
had the Olympics and the marathon. It wasn’t the marathon 26-2 or
whatever. The man that ran from one city
to another to say the war was ended, whatever. They had these,
sort of like the Pony Express, these stations. And they would
run news and relay news because they didn’t have iPhones and
texting and all the rest. They have it so easy now. But
in six through nine, God says to Isaiah, go set a watchman
and let him announce what he sees. So when this guy is up
on the wall, he’s watching, he’s gonna see riders and horsemen
and pairs, riders on donkeys, riders and camels. Says, let
him listen diligently, very diligently. And then he’s up on the wall,
he’s watching diligently day and night. He says, upon a watchtower,
I stand, O Lord, continually by day, and at my post I’m stationed
whole nights, and behold, Here’s what he’s been watching for,
but here comes the riders, horsemen, and pairs. And he answered, Fallen
is Babylon. All the carved images of her
gods have shattered to the ground, and my threshed and wintered
one that I have heard from Lord of hosts, God of Israel, I announce
to you.” And so this vision is of a watchman giving a report
and that report is in verse 10 there that I just read. The enemy
has fallen and what’s true of Israel? What’s true of God’s
people? They’ve been chastised, they’ve been punished, they’ve
been hauled off to nations, they’ve been living among pagans, they’ve
been lost and forlorn and largely without hope except the little
promises of God a few of them have held on to. And God says,
when I’ve crushed you on the threshing floor, there’s a sense
where there’s the winnowing, the wheat in the tares, and the
wheat will grow again. And it will grow again till the
harvest when we hear in Revelation, fallen is Babylon, and the people
of God are carried away safely into heaven. And that’s the picture
we ought to have in our mind, both from these days in Isaiah,
but also from the last days in Revelation. We live in a world
that’s filled with sin. We live in a world where things
don’t work like they should and people do things they ought not
do. And yes, God restrains a whole lot of evil, but bad things do
happen to God’s people. Bad things do happen to the church.
Some Christians live in nations where there are hard things.
I know we’ve got it pretty good. There are other nations where
they’re terrorized for their faith, even killed. But we’ve
got it pretty good here and we ought to be thankful and hold
on to it as best we can. But what’s God saying? In the
end, should you fall under these great hardships? Beauty comes
from ashes. Growth comes from crushed seeds. Think of the Apostle Paul, who,
when he speaks of death, says, we sow what is perishable, but
it will be raised imperishable. My mom’s mother, we called her
Gran Cook, She was a funny old Scottish lady, and she spoke
with that accent from her family, but also she lived in South Carolina
and had a little gulla in her voice. And she would mutter these
things. I knew her when she was a very
old lady, because my mom was born late in life. So when I
was like three, four, five, six, my grand cook was well into her
80s and had a, oh, she had a touch of dementia. And she would mutter
these little sayings when she lived with us in the house. And
one of them she would say is, she’d say, ooh, ooh, child, they
can kill you, but they can’t eat you. And I always thought
of that so biblically and eschatologically, you know, the body they can kill,
but the soul they cannot take. And while the body may rest in
the grave until the resurrection, it will be united as we saw tonight
in Jesus’ resurrection. It will be united soul and body
and raised up in glory. And so it doesn’t matter what
goes on in this world. It’s not the end of the matter.
It’s only the beginning of our eternity with God. So think on
this and let’s go to God in prayer together. Lord bless us as we
go tonight into our week. May we have a rich and great
perspective on the affairs of this world and the sovereignty
of your throne and help us we pray in Christ’s mighty name.
Amen.