Week 17 Isaiah
The Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem.
As the story unfolds it becomes more clear that the Assyrians were working with an information constraint.
They were chalking up their battlefield successes to their own military superiority – fierce destructive incontestable empire-builders. But Isaiah was trying to qualify that view – to explain its limitations. He quotes the Lord: have you not heard? It was I, the Lord, who decided this long ago. Long ago I planned what I am now causing to happen, that you (Assyria) should crush fortified cities into heaps of rubble.
So it wasn’t that the Lord was caught off-guard when he suddenly saw the Assyrian juggernaut, realized what was about to happen and had to zoom in on a rescue mission. Isaiah said the reality was that the Lord had designed that event – and all the million other events leading up to it – a long time before.
How long before? For all I know the Lord could just as easily have told David or Samuel or Moses or Abraham or Noah. The Jerusalem attack, the whole Assyrian Imperial Program was a small detail in a big design made long ago.
Of course the Assyrians didn’t care much about God. They were small-plan guys – focussed on their own interests agendas and cultural predispositions. But while they were hammering out their own preferred national business plan they were doing exactly what the Lord had designed for them to do.
Note: quote from Isaiah 37:26 (NLT).