Week 24 Isaiah
I read Isaiah 13-23 all-at-once – which was maybe a too-much-at-one-sitting mistake and I don’t think I’d recommend it. But it’s a coherent reading-unit where Isaiah looked out past Israel’s borders and forecast things that would be happening to other nations – to the outsider states.
So then I read Isaiah 24-27.
It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the section. Isaiah is a prophet who is mainly concerned with Israel, and then secondarily concerned with other states in his Middle East. But now in 24-27 Isaiah seems to take one more step out and starts talking about the whole world: the Lord is about to destroy the earth and make it a vast wasteland…the earth will be completely emptied and looted. Whereas in 13-23 Isaiah named names of identifiable local states now he’s speaking to: you people of the earth. Everyone.
One of the things bible prophets did was forecast things-to-come, and some of those things-to-come came-and-went. Future-of-the-past. But prophets also forecast things-to-come that even now we’re still waiting for, that still haven’t happened. Our future. And to me Isaiah 24-27 sounds like one of them.
Forecasts to the nations in 13-23 were seriously cataclysmic but 24-27 sound even more seriously, apocalyptically and finally cataclysmic.
The language of the section is pretty dispiriting and doesn’t leave me with a confident-feeling reassurance that that-was-then so I don’t need to worry now.
Note: quotes from Isaiah 24:1, 3, 17 (NLT version)