W W W  World Wide Web Witness Inc.  Home Page   Contents Page for Volume  What is New

CHAPTER THREE

THE ISAIAH 34 GIVES GROUND

FOR BEING GROUNDED IN THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD

 AWESOME ACTIONS OF THE LIVING GOD

THE SITUATION TO BE MET

Immediately after the wonder of what is coming in Isaiah 33, together with the realisation both from the Psalms (such as 2, 67, 96), and Isaiah (11, 32, 66) and Micah 7, that the Lord is going to rule amid ALL the nations, with the same scope as His international salvation decidedly affirmed in Isaiah 11, 32, 42:6, 49:6, we find desolation in the earth. It is like moving from the gentle quietness of an Autumn day,  to the extremities of an arid Summer. Indeed, we read that "the indignation of the Lord is against all nations, and His fury against all their armies: He has utterly destroyed them."

Nor is even this all: for "the host of heaven shall be dissolved," as in II Peter 3, when this earth having served its testing blessed purpose, it is dismissed as in Revelation 20, where we find that the present heavens and earth "fled away," for "there is no place found for them." (Revelation 20:11). We have already seen that the salvation of the Lord, the  Wonderful Counsellor and Prince of peace is to be found in a kingdom such that "of His government and peace there will be no end," and that it is He who will "strike the earth with the rod of His mouth," and  "decide with equity for the meek of the earth," and indeed that "the Gentiles shall seek him, and His reting place shall be glorious," as in Isaiah 11: 4 and 10.

Thus the background scope also is international, and just as His mercy is to the uttermost by the uttermost sacrifice, for any man (Isaiah 53-55), so is His judgment to any and all who insist on their sins and refuse as if refuse, irrelevant, His everlasting gift.

Focus however amid this international background is made on Israel, and the sudden impact of the very category of judgment is found amid His mercy, on a splenetic foe of that land. As embroilments of nations have sought to strip and rip her, strangulate and imprecate the people called by God to introduce the Messiah and showcase His mercy, so their own judgments will come with an enduring result, as  applicable.

To whom more in that day, than to Edom. This we learn in Isaiah 34:5. The sword of the Lord "will be bathed in heaven; indeed it shall  come down on  Edom, and on the people of  My curse, for judgment." Thus while for many, there is cure in the transcendently wonderful but earthily effective curse on the Messiah as in Isaiah 53:10, for whoever makes of His soul a sacrifice for sin and so becomes a child of God, giving to Him a spiritual generation and people, who lacked a physical lineage through death; yet there is something very different for those despising what He both says and does, and taking the law into their own hands. It is a curse. There is no intermission. It is cure or curse.

It is often so in life: you insure your house or you do not: in the one case fire leaves you homeless, in the other insurance leaves equipped all anew. You have that important operation involving cancer, and you are delivered; or you do not, and you die,  perhaps slowly, as the soul does in its  erosions, a living death,  for those who insist on their glorious self-sufficiency, yes for themselves or their human  appointees or philosophic inventions. There are many costs in the earth which man cannot bear; and there are many judgments which he might avoid.

That of God for merciless hatred amid rejection of His own mercy which might have changed their hearts (as in Isaiah 55), is outlined here in Isaiah 34:6ff.. Edom becomes a parade of folly and its sins are exposed with no small vigour in Obadiah.

Its remorseless, relentless attitude of hatred towards  Israel, then  site of scriptural salvation, even  for the Messiah to achieve it for any and  all who come to Him by faith through His grace freely, is  fiery as will be their own meeting with the sword bathed in heaven, active on earth.

To be sure, Israel would not escape for its own sins, the judgments of the Lord (Isaiah 65:13-15), and indeed the time would come when His rule would be manifest over all HIS people, and that terms of a new name, that of the Messiah in whom redemption is gained (cf. Isaiah 62:2). Alas in that day,  Israel itself would leave its own name "as a curse to My chosen," Isaiah 65:13, Romans 9:1-6, 10:1-4). Acts 4:11-12, Philippians 2), we come to another sort of assurance.

Equally true is it as in Romans 11:25ff.  and Zechariah 8:13 and Isaiah 66, the time would at the end come when a vast wave of spiritual power would surge into the hearts of many in Israel, and they would remove their burden, their guilt, their shame, as others may, and by the same means, faith in the crucified Messiah (Zechariah 12:10-13:1). How lovely that time is to be when "it shall come to pass that just as you were a curse  among the nations,  O house of Judah and house of Israel, so I will save you and you shall be a blessing." THAT, it will centre as in Zechariah 9:6 on One so humble in His salvation, that He will be found on an ass's colt, but having salvation!

RANK JUDGMENT ON RANK JUDGES

Alas for Edom, its very nation is to be readied for judgment, its inveterate violence, its remorseless contempt for Israel cutting the cord of revelation.  As it exalted in its ravaging of the stricken people (Obadiah12ff.), like an hyena, so it will be ravaged. Indeed it came to pass, with the ravages of the Nabataeans who destroyed its fortresses and profited from the trade route there to be found. It took a new name, Idumea, became tributary to Judah, its people being forced by the Maccabeans, to conform to the ways of Judah. Where was it to be found  ? Its rose-coloured site of Petra was researched not so long ago, by archeologists, explorers, who found that just as in Isaiah 34:11, so in fact, you could call to the nobles of this fortified site, and yet none would or could answer. Their sites in layers upward, like levels in an emporium, in the rocks, were lonely now, the place a wilderness; their capital meaningless, for the people are no more. Bozrah, their once capital, what now is it!

Many are those nations who might take care and beware, for God indeed forgets the sins of those who find in Him their mercy, according to His vast and magnificent undertaking in the Messiah, son of David, but more, Son of God sent from heaven as a sacrifice for sin, and the ONLY one acceptable for a task absolutely essential for stricken, sinful man. Yet He does remember the guilt of the impenitent, the poseurs of this world, the imprecating,  dominating, self-affirming, Christ-denying, falsity-aligning, evilly maligning, who refuse His salvation. In particular it is so concerning Israel, a people chosen for the transmission of His command to the earth, in writing, of His Son to the earth via a womb and His testimony in the earth, by what befell it. This was according to His word, in blessing and judgment, in deliverance and disaster, as they moved relentlessly to mixed marriages among the gods, or returned to find in the Creator-Redeemer the unmixed blessings that Job awaited (Job 19), and God provided.

Thus

	whether in Isaiah 51:17-23, where Israel is pointed to the one source of its deliverance, unchanged but now coming personally to earth as in 52-53, and the nations ravaging her are pointed to judgment, yes even to taking the cup they had handed in its poison to Israel, for themselves; or
	whether in Jeremiah 50:17-19, or 50:33-35, where Babylon the brutal belligerent against Israel, is cited for its long judgment which has rested on it even in the dust of continued desolation;  or indeed,
	whether in Genesis 12:1-3, where the principle of the curse is cited:

there is payment  for playing as a master in the history of a people under the direct jurisdiction of God, both for blessing and cursing (as in Deuteronomy 27ff., in a way most spectacular and dramatic).  To intervene and to interfere is like trying to snatch with bared hands, a lump of radioactive uranium in deadly state and condition. To say that it is unwise, is like suggesting it to be unwise to take the fangs of a viper and trying to make it pierce one's skin.

PRODDING PARALLELS

Thus, it is high time to realise, as in Psalm 2, of the rigours of judgment. After all, this is come with severity on the whole earth as in Isaiah 2 and 24, as in Revelation 6-9, as in Luke 21 and Matthew 24, as in II Thessalonians 1, and what is precise in prediction from the spectacularly all-comprehending mind of the Lord, and prodigious in comfort to those who simply in faith and with heart receive His redemption, is no less precise in judgment, where His word and will are put on the chopping block.

Edom was a special  case of this, and its evil is itemised in Obadiah 10ff.. The Lord does not desire what is outside His care, contrary to His will, inequitable in practice and pitiless in performance, to turn Israel into some sort of curry for consumption, as Edom did, abusing her when Israel was devastated for her sins, by a former judgment.

Measured is the divine response as was resolved for this case of  Edom, parallel to the Hitler attitude, the sacking of the vulnerable on the part of Edom, with its lofty capital of Bozrah. What then is in His mind on this topic ? for as in John 3, where John 3:16 is so near to 3:19, the loving gift to the ground of condemnation, and the forbidding judgment of 3:36 not far off,  so here. Just as non-reception of the Redeemer in John 3, implying dismissal of the divine diagnosis, of what brought such generosity to bear to meet such rampaging need, rapidly meets its dark results appointed to avoidance of the light, so here with Edom, you see it not at the individual, but at the national level.

They are parallel and examples of the modes of address to person or power, that God delivers. It all comes back in the end to each soul, as basis: namely to the sickly sinful condition of man's spirit before God, and then it continues to the condition of those who will not receive Him to correct their malady, that of man's soul. Such recidivism has results of weight, befitting so great a need unrecognised. Edom as a nation on a macro-scale illustrates it.  It had evidently rejected all kinship, all pity, all concern for a blood relative in Israel, and plundered with plunderers in the day of Nebuchadnezzar, the brutal Babylonian who had his own equations resolved by the Lord in due time! (cf. Daniel 4).

We return to the case of Edom, our text today, and the vicious effrontery of Edom maintaining mordant hostility in pitiless presumption against Israel, which God disciplined in His own way. As to this aggressor, its immovable enmity is now met with a divine initiative, with an immovable aim. Its desolation with the same thoroughness which it used against Israel. In this, the case is parallel to that of Babylon: both were extinguished, the great and the small.

THE POIGNANCY OF THE DESOLATION

Let us review and extend.

The introduction to this special judgment contains a waiting confrontation with all nations, as in Micah 7 and Psalm 2. "All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll." As in II Peter 3, there is to be a dissolution with noise and energy of the entire physical universe, preceding a new heavens a new earth, and the nations are to receive an everlasting lesson.

In particular, however, as a type of divine wrath and judgment, there is this Edom. There is to be " a great slaughter in the land of Edom ... For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance, the year of recompense for the cause of Zion."

We see imagery in which the flowing streams will become as flowing pitch and brimstone the accompaniment (Isaiah 34:9). It is, rather like Sodom, to be made a memorial to folly.

In Isaiah 34:10-15, we see the lonely inhabitants of snake and bird, each with its mate as at an infestation of ruin. Poignant is the scene where " They shall call its nobles to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all its princes shall be nothing." To increase the intense sense of desolation, "the night creatures shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest." No rest is for the stricken people, but for the wild inhabitants, free from man's presence, in the vast loneliness, there is for them, rest indeed!

Ín this setting, let us review it. The human inhabitants will be desolated, Bozrah the capital abased. It seems  Petra was a fortified city in its midst of Edom, and it is known to antiquity, site of excavations in relatively recent times, where the cliff-dwellings and the narrow defile leading to it is now famous. It matches with a great sense of precision, the biblical description, its imagery translated to actual lonely lostness, as explorers found its carved desolation and muted noise gone with its people. Thus the capital stands for its strength and shows its desolation while even its fortification is as death.

Edom was subject of great defeats at the hand of Israel, and in the days of the Maccabees, it is said that it was forced to conform to the ways of Judah, and it was annexed. It had lost its place to Arab Nabateans, who had defeated it and taken over its fortifications, making a name for themselves with the stolen opportunities of the defeated kingdom. Arab names appear around 500 B.C. and so the matter is as foretold, even to the point of the poignant atmospherics of Petra.

THE REALISATION IS NOT MERELY IN EXAMPLE

BUT SET FORTH IN SCRIPT

The Lord now asks us to realise something (Isaiah 16). It is this. Just as every wild creature will have its mate in the desolation described and to come, with the nobles called, but not answering, so we are invited to search throughout the entire book of the Lord and to read.

An instant parallel and extension is set up. What is true of one point, is true of all (precisely as  Christ made so  abundantly clear in  Matthew 5:17-20). What then of the entirety of what is written, prescribed, commanded in this, the Book of the Lord. What of each setting, whether in time or collation ? Not one of THESE shall fail, not one shall lack her mate: " for My mouth has commanded it, and His Spirit has gathered them."

In turning from the present prophecy to the entire Book of the Lord, we move from the particular to the general, from the example to the generic. The wild mates, each with the other, are like the biblical mates, each with the other, so that whatever in the Bible is given time and place, association and depiction, it will be precisely like that when the wheel of history turns. Why ? It is because the mouth of God, the speech of God, the orders and commands of God are not tendential but actual.

Whatever it is that appears in His word, whatever instruction to time  or for eternity, whatever point however small, it is going to happen, be supported, be maintained, come to pass, impervious and sure, imperial the source, assured the happening, distinct utterance from the mouth of God on the one hand, assured performance unit on the other. It is so BECAUSE, He declares,  "My mouth has commanded it."  It is verbal, it will be historical; it is uttered, no word is to be severed, all is to be taken as given. It has nothing to do with the use of imagination and imagery,  as in any literature. This is not a class on common sense. We are being told of the authority and certainty with which God speaks, and has spoken in just one locale: THE BOOK OF THE LORD.

As in our own DNA, which does not suggest but contrives to create new exemplars, for example, of what is human, with every new babe, so in our own doctrine and divine declarations in the Lord's book.

Why do we move from "these"  in 34:16, to "it"  as the verse ends ? It is because the detailed events described in Isaiah 34 are not only examples of the general power and precision of the word of God, but themselves the recipients of orders that they must be. "IT"  is whatever He commands, and it is close not only to the language of Matthew 5:17-20, that we come here, but in essence to the thought of I Corinthians 2:9-13.

Consider Corinthians here. Thus the THING is commanded by the word of God, the EVENTS collect as commanded, and the  Spirit of God has gathered not only the items in the prediction, but the words which depict them. It is in this style that we read in Isaiah 59:21, where we read,
 

" 'As for Me,'  says the Lord, 'this is My covenant with them. My Spirit who is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth, shall not depart from your mouth,
nor from the mouth of your descendants, nor from the mouth of your descendants' descendants,' says the Lord, 'from this time and forevermore.' "  

The Spirit of God is UPON them, and His WORDS are put in the mouth of the prophet, not to depart but to be fulfilled. 

Who can falsify it ? It is said and it is done. There is no other word like this, covering the millenia forward and backward, with a facility and an ease, lambent with eternity and omniscience, penetrating in thrust, thoughtful in content, decisive in kind, calling on man to find mercy where it MAY be found, and showing the judgments that the violation of the Lord's goodness by those in His image, now defiled, await to inherit.

It is to the mercy of the Lord that Isaiah then moves in the exposure of the Messiah's wonders in Isaiah 35, and in giving in Isaiah 36-39, testimony of the Lord's uncontainable power and goodness to those who wait for Him, in the case of Hezekiah and the archeologically confirmed devastation of the Assyrian host in that day.