Week 27 Isaiah 24-27
Isaiah puts together this grouping of four chapters where some of the material sounds like he’s talking about the end-of-the-world:
The Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; the earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered
The earth is broken up, the earth is split asunder, the earth reels like a drunkard…so heavy it falls — never to rise again. In that day the Lord will punish the powers in the heavens above and the kings on the earth below. The moon will be dismayed, the sun ashamed
On this mountain the Lord Almighty…will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth
The Lord is coming out of his dwelling to punish the people of the earth for their sins. In that day, the Lord will punish…Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent.
Some of the material is about Moab & Egypt & Assyria. But some of it sounds like Revelation. Some of it sounds like near-term forecasts and some like long-term.
A person listening to Isaiah speaking 2500 years ago would likely think that these chapters were all about near-term outcomes.
Me reading it today? Some of it sounds near-term (meaning they happened already). But some sound like they’re yet to come.
One more-or-less continuous-sounding prophecy but with two terminal points. And the border between them is pretty fuzzy.
Note: quotes from Isaiah 24:1-3 18-23 25:6-10 26:20-27:1 (NLT)