Oracles Against the Nations

Isaiah 13–23, 19:19–25 (with Philippians 2:5–11)

Before this session, read at least chapters 13–14 and 19 of Isaiah (and skim 15–18 and 20–23 if you have the time). Watch how often the words “This is an oracle about” open a new section, and notice that the same Lord who reigns in Zion reigns over Babylon and Egypt too. Above all, do not miss the astonishing promise in 19:23–25, where the old enemies are gathered in.

The LORD of Heaven’s Armies will pronounce a blessing over the earth, saying, “Blessed be my people, Egypt, and the work of my hands, Assyria, and my special possession, Israel!”

Isaiah 19:25

The Burden of the Nations

After the song of chapter 12, Isaiah turns to look outward, and the view is not a pretty one. Chapters 13 through 23 are a long series of oracles against the nations of the world, eleven chapters of solemn pronouncements that open, again and again, with the same Hebrew word. This is an oracle about Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw (13:1); This is an oracle about Moab (15:1); This is an oracle about Damascus (17:1); and on around the whole compass: Egypt, Philistia, Cush, Tyre, Arabia, and even, as we shall see, Jerusalem herself. The Hebrew word our translation renders oracle is massa’, and it means a heavy thing, a load lifted up and set down: a burden, a weighty word from God, dropped like a stone upon a nation. That is why these chapters have long been called the burdens. For the reader coming fresh from the song of salvation, it can feel like a forbidding stretch of foreign place-names and unrelieved doom. We need a way in.

It helps, first, simply to know what kind of thing we are reading. A prophet was God’s herald, and a herald does not speak only to his own people; he announces his king’s word wherever his king reigns. So Isaiah lifts up his voice over nations that never sent for a prophet and would not have recognized the God who sent him (Babylon, Egypt, the proud trading houses of Tyre) and pronounces the Lord’s verdict over them as though they were standing in His courtroom. They were. The strangeness we feel at a prophet of little Judah declaring the fate of the world’s great powers is exactly the point Isaiah means to press: this God’s writ runs everywhere, whether the nations acknowledge Him or not.

Let me say plainly that no one should feel he must master every detail of these chapters, the particular fates of Moab’s towns, or the lament over Tyre’s crowded harbor. A lay reader can be forgiven for finding the going hard here. But the section is not a tedious catalogue of ancient grudges. It has a center, and once you have found the center, the whole block opens up around it. And the center is a single, world-shaking claim about who God is.

The pagan world believed in many gods, each one tied to a place and a people. Babylon had her gods, Egypt hers, Moab his; a god was as local as the nation he belonged to, and powerful only within his own borders. The God of Israel, on this view, was simply one more national deity: the god of a small and unimportant people, no concern of Babylon’s. Isaiah 13 through 23 detonates that whole way of thinking. The Holy One of Israel pronounces His word over Babylon and Egypt and Tyre as easily as over Jerusalem; He raises up empires and casts them down; He holds the Nile and the Euphrates and the trade routes of the whole Mediterranean in His hand. He is not a tribal deity at all. He is the Lord of all the earth, the King of every nation, and there is not one square foot of the globe that lies outside His rule.

And that truth cuts in two directions at once. To the small and frightened people of God, hemmed in on every side by superpowers, it is enormous comfort: the empires that terrify you are under My word, and not one of them so much as moves without My leave. But to all human pride (and to the people of God themselves, whenever they grow proud) it is a sober warning: no nation, however mighty, escapes the reckoning of the Lord. The burdens are the law preached to the whole world at once, and their first message is just this: there is one God, and He governs, and He will judge, every people on the face of the earth.

There is a further turn of the screw in this, and Isaiah will sound it more than once: the Lord does not merely judge the nations from a distance; He uses them. Assyria, we have already heard, was the rod of His anger, swung against His own people and then broken for its pride (10:5, 15). Later in the book a pagan king named Cyrus will be called the Lord’s chosen one (in Hebrew, His anointed), raised up to set the exiles free (45:1). The God of these burdens is so completely the Lord of history that even the empires that do not know His name are tools in His hand, instruments of His justice, and sometimes of His mercy. Nothing happens among the nations that He has not bent, in the end, to His own purposes. And that is either a terror or a comfort, depending entirely on which side of His promises a person is standing.

Look How You Have Fallen

The first and longest of the burdens falls upon Babylon, and that is fitting, for in Scripture Babylon is far more than a city; she is the very symbol of human arrogance arrayed against God. Babylon is the place of the tower of Babel, where men first said, Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves (Genesis 11:4); and she will be, at the very end of the Bible, the great harlot-city of Revelation, the whole world organized in pride against its Maker. So when Isaiah pronounces the burden of Babylon, he is pronouncing judgment on the spirit of all human empire: the will to climb up to heaven and to be God.

And we should not file Babylon away as a dead city of the distant past. The spirit of Babel is perennial; every age builds its own tower. Wherever human beings pool their cleverness and their power to make themselves a name, to secure their future without any reference to God, to reach the heavens on a ladder of their own devising, there Babylon rises again, under one flag or another. Isaiah’s burden is not merely a piece of ancient history; it is a mirror held up to every civilization, and to every heart, that imagines it can manage quite well without the God who made it. The names stamped on the bricks change from age to age. The tower is always the same.

At the heart of the oracle is a taunt-song, a mocking dirge to be sung over the fallen king of Babylon, and it is among the most famous passages in the whole book. Look how you have fallen from the sky, O shining one, son of the dawn! (14:12). The shining one, the bright morning star (the Latin Bible’s Lucifer), now fallen out of the sky and snuffed out. And Isaiah tells us exactly what brought him down: not bad luck, not a stronger army, but the pride of his own heart. You said to yourself, “I will climb up to the sky. Above the stars of El I will set up my throne. I will rule on the mountain of assembly on the remote slopes of Zaphon. I will climb up to the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High!” (14:13–14). Count them: five times over, I will, I will, I will. The whole anatomy of pride is laid bare in those words: the self, climbing, grasping, determined to seize the very throne of God. And the answer comes back in a single line: But you were brought down to Sheol, to the remote slopes of the Pit (14:15). The five I wills of the ascent end in one long fall, all the way down.

The church has long heard something more in this taunt than the fall of one Babylonian king, and for good reason. The words I will make myself like the Most High are the oldest words in the world. They are the serpent’s promise in the garden, you will be like God, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5); they are the original sin lurking behind every other, the lifting of the self into the place of God. And so many of the fathers heard behind the king of Babylon the fall of the one who first spoke that I will: the shining star cast out of heaven, the devil himself, whose pride is the pattern of all pride. Luther, for his part, kept the passage firmly on the king of Babylon, and we need not press the identification too hard; the prophet’s first and plain target is the Babylonian king. But in that king he has laid bare the anatomy of a rebellion older than Babylon, and as near to us as our own hearts. I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven, the Lord Jesus would one day say (Luke 10:18): another falling star. Every proud I will, from the serpent’s to Babylon’s to ours, runs the very same course: up, in ambition, and then down, to the pit.

And of all sins, this is the hardest to see in ourselves, precisely because pride blinds the very eye that would have to see it. We can readily spot the obvious vices, our tempers, our appetites; but the quiet, settled conviction that we are the center of things, that our will ought to be done, that we would in fact make rather a fine god if only given the chance: that one hides. It does not feel like Babylon; it feels like ordinary self-respect, like simply looking out for ourselves. The taunt-song is given to us, in part, as a lamp, to find in our own hearts the same five I wills that brought down a king and, as the church has long heard it, the proud angel behind him. The man who can read Isaiah 14 and think only of ancient Babylon has not yet really read it.

The Two Ladders

There is, in all of Scripture, exactly one answer to the I will of Babylon, and it is the only ground we can stand on when our own pride has been exposed by this oracle. Set Babylon’s five I wills beside the great hymn Paul sings about the Lord Jesus, and you see two ladders running in opposite directions. Babylon said: I will climb up to the sky … I will make myself like the Most High, and was brought down to Sheol. The Lord Jesus, Paul says, though he existed in the form of God (already, truly, by His very nature, the Most High) did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, and did not clutch at it, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave … He humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death (Philippians 2:6–8): not merely death, but death on a cross.

See the reversal. Babylon was not God, and grasped to become like God, and fell. The Lord Jesus was God, and let go of His glory to become a servant, and a corpse. The one climbed, and was cast down; the Other descended, all the way to a grave, of His own free will. And then Paul turns the corner: As a result God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:9–11). The One who refused to grasp at exaltation was lifted to the highest place of all. The two ladders end at exactly opposite ends: self-exaltation ends in the pit; self-humbling ends in glory.

And mark what the exaltation actually consists of: God gave Him the name that is above every name, and in the Scriptures there is only one name above every name, the name of the Lord Himself. The servant who emptied Himself is confessed as Lord; the One who went down into the grave is given the very name of God, that every knee should bow to Him. It is the same truth we met in the cradle of chapter 9, where the child was called the mighty God. This is no mere good man rewarded for his humility, but God the Son, who stooped so low precisely because He was so high, and who could be raised to the highest place of all because that place had been His own from the beginning.

This is the very heart of what Luther called the theology of the cross, over against the theology of glory. The theology of glory is Babylon’s own religion: the endless human project of climbing up to God by our greatness, our merit, our towers and our achievements, our I will. It always ends precisely where Babylon ended. The theology of the cross is the way of the Lord Jesus, and the only way to God it knows is down: down off the tower; down from the proud throne of the self; down to the place of the empty-handed sinner who has stopped saying I will and can say only have mercy. It is the great irony hidden in the burden of Babylon, that the way up is down. The nations break themselves climbing; the kingdom is given to those who kneel.

And the way of the King becomes the way of His people. The Christian life is not a steady climb up toward God by our improvement, our zeal, our spiritual achievements; that is only Babel’s tower built out of churchier bricks. It is a daily going down: down into repentance, where we stop defending ourselves and confess; down into our baptism, where the proud old self is drowned again each morning; down to the rail, where we hold out empty hands for bread. The gospel calls us off the ladder we are forever trying to climb, and sets our feet on the only stair that actually reaches heaven: the one the Lord Jesus came down, and now carries us up. We ascend, in the end, only in His arms.

Blessed Be My People, Egypt

If the burden of Babylon shows us the law preached to the nations, the burden of Egypt shows us the gospel hidden inside the burdens, and it is one of the most astonishing passages in all the Old Testament. Chapter 19 opens, as the others do, in judgment: the Lord rides into Egypt, her idols tremble at His coming, the Nile dries up, her wise men are made fools, and the whole land reels in confusion (19:1–15). It reads, at first, like every other oracle of doom. And then, with no warning at all, the chapter turns, and grace pours in where we had braced for nothing but wrath.

That sudden turn from judgment to grace is not a quirk of chapter 19; it is the very shape of the gospel itself. The law comes first and does its leveling work (Egypt’s idols tremble, her wisdom fails her, her river runs dry) and only into that emptied and humbled land does the mercy come. It is always so. God does not pour His grace into a heart still swollen with itself; He first lets the Nile run dry. The order matters, and we will miss the wonder of verse 25 entirely if we hurry past the wreckage of the verses before it. Grace is most amazing to those who have first felt the full weight of the burden.

Six times the phrase at that time tolls through the back half of chapter 19, and it brings wonder after wonder. At that time there will be an altar for the LORD in the middle of the land of Egypt (19:19): an altar to the God of Israel, raised in the land of the old slavery, where Pharaoh once ground God’s people into the mud of the brickyards. The Egyptians will cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, and (hear this) he will send them a deliverer and defender who will rescue them (19:20). The same God who once sent Moses to deliver Israel out of Egypt will send a deliverer to rescue Egypt herself. The LORD will reveal himself to the Egyptians, and they will acknowledge the LORD’s authority at that time (19:21). The house of bondage becomes a house of worship.

Do not pass too quickly over that promised deliverer. The Lord says He will send Egypt a deliverer and defender who will rescue them, and the word reaches forward, as so much in Isaiah does, to the great Savior who would come for all the nations. The very Hebrew root we heard ringing through the song of chapter 12, in God is my deliverer, is at work here again: the God who is Himself salvation will send a great one to save even Egypt. And He did. The Savior given to Israel was given to the nations too, and the deliverance He worked was not from Pharaoh or from Assyria, but from the older bondage under which Egypt and Israel had groaned alike: the slavery of sin and death. Egypt’s promised deliverer and ours turn out to be one and the same Lord.

And then the verse that ought to take our breath away, the verse set at the head of this session. At that time Israel will be the third member of the group, along with Egypt and Assyria … The LORD of Heaven’s Armies will pronounce a blessing over the earth, saying, “Blessed be my people, Egypt, and the work of my hands, Assyria, and my special possession, Israel!” (19:24–25). Look hard at who is being blessed. Egypt: the house of bondage, the great oppressor of the exodus. Assyria: the brutal empire that had ground the northern kingdom to powder and dragged it away in chains. The two great arch-enemies of the people of God, the very nations groaning under the burden, and the Lord calls them my people and the work of my hands, and sets them alongside Israel His special possession, three peoples now, gathered as one under the blessing of the one God. The burdens against the nations end in the blessing of the nations.

And notice, before we go on, what the Lord does not say. He does not say, Egypt is now my people instead of Israel. He keeps all three names in His mouth at once: my people, Egypt; the work of my hands, Assyria; and Israel, still and always, my special possession. The nations are not brought in by shoving Israel out; they are added to her, gathered alongside her, so that the one people of God swells to take in the whole earth without ever ceasing to include the people of the ancient promise. This is no replacement; it is an ingathering. When Paul takes up the same mystery (Romans 11:17–24), he is careful to say exactly this: the wild branches are grafted in among the natural ones and come to share the same root; they do not saw it off. The God of this oracle has room at His table for Egypt and Assyria and Israel together.

This is nothing less than the gospel, seven centuries early: the mystery Paul would spend his whole life proclaiming, that in Christ the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile is destroyed, and God is creating in himself one new man out of two, gathering into a single people those who were once strangers and enemies (Ephesians 2:14–16). Egypt and Assyria called my people is the Old Testament’s way of saying what the New says outright: that the nations are coming in. And here is the part we dare not miss: most of us reading this study are Egypt and Assyria. We are the Gentiles, the old outsiders, the nations that once lay under the burden, and we have now been called my people and the work of my hands by the God of Israel. The promise of verse 25 has a name written on it, and for most of us, that name is our own.

The Burden of Jerusalem and the Key of David

There is one more burden we dare not skip over, for it keeps the whole section honest. Among all the oracles against the foreign nations, Isaiah sets one against Jerusalem herself: This is an oracle about the Valley of Vision (22:1). The one city that might have thought itself exempt, the city of the temple and the covenant, is weighed in the very same balance as Babylon and Egypt, and found wanting. When trouble came upon her, Jerusalem trusted in her walls and her weapons and her water supply, and threw a fatalist’s party (Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die! 22:13) instead of turning to the Lord who had sent the trouble. The lesson is plain and bracing: the people of God are never above the burdens. The same word that judges the nations judges the church whenever she trusts in everything but God. The law spares no one, not even those who carry the covenant.

It is worth pausing over how Jerusalem met the warning, for it is a temptation common to everyone who hears that judgment is coming. She did not repent; she threw a party. Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die! The only sensible course left, she reckoned, was to enjoy what little remained before the end. Paul would one day quote that very line as the motto of a world with no resurrection hope (1 Corinthians 15:32). It is the logic of despair dressed up as good cheer: if there is no God to turn to, then grab what pleasure you can on the way down. The burden of Jerusalem warns the people of God against just this failure of nerve: that when the walls are breached, we will reach for the wine and the table rather than for the Lord, who is the only one able to save us.

But even in this burden against Jerusalem, the gospel glints. Isaiah announces that a proud palace administrator named Shebna, who had carved himself a grand tomb and trusted in his high office, will be thrown down, and a faithful man named Eliakim raised up in his place. And of Eliakim the Lord says, I will place the key to the house of David on his shoulder. When he opens the door, no one can close it; when he closes the door, no one can open it (22:22). The key of the king’s house, the authority to admit and to exclude, laid upon a faithful steward’s shoulder. And the church has always seen here the shadow of a greater Steward, for the risen Lord Jesus takes these very words onto His own lips in Revelation, declaring Himself the one who holds the key of David, who opens doors no one can shut, and shuts doors no one can open (Revelation 3:7). The key that Eliakim held only in shadow, the Lord Jesus holds in full truth. He opens the door of the Father’s house, and no one can shut it; and the door He has opened to us by His own blood, no power in heaven or hell can ever close again.

There is a great Lutheran comfort folded into that key. The authority to open and to shut, to admit and to exclude, the Lord Jesus did not keep wholly to Himself; He handed it to His church, in what we call the Office of the Keys: the authority to forgive the sins of the penitent and to withhold forgiveness from the impenitent, an authority exercised every time a pastor declares, in Christ’s stead and by His command, that your sins are forgiven (AC XXVIII.5–8; SA III.7). When you hear that absolution, it is the key of David turning in the lock; it is the door of the Father’s house being opened to you by the One who holds the key, and no accuser, no doubt, no devil, and no sin of yours has the power to shut it again. The keys are not a threat hanging over the believer. To the penitent, they are nothing but gospel.

And over the whole sweep of the burdens there stands a refrain that the last book of the Bible will take up and make its own. Of Babylon, Isaiah hears a messenger cry, Babylon has fallen, fallen! All the idols of her gods lie shattered on the ground! (21:9), and John will hear an angel shout the same cry over the fall of the world’s last and greatest Babylon: Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great! (Revelation 18:2). Every empire that lifts itself against God will fall; every proud tower will come down; the I will of every Babylon ends face-down in the dust. And the One who pronounces all these burdens (who judges every nation, and gathers in His people out of all of them) is the One whom Revelation finally names King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16): the Lord Jesus, before whom every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will one day bow. The burdens against the nations are, in the end, the footsteps of the King of all nations, walking toward His throne.

And this is the quiet confidence in which the church has always lived among the empires. We dwell, still, in the days between the sentence and its execution: the verdict over every Babylon has already been pronounced, fallen, fallen, but the dust has not yet finished settling. The powers that strut and threaten and seem, for a season, to hold the whole world in their grip are already under a sentence that cannot be appealed. The Christian need not be overawed by them, nor frightened into trimming his confession to please them, for he knows how the story ends: every tower comes down, every knee bows, and the King of all nations takes His throne. We are not anxiously waiting to see who wins. We are only waiting for what has already been decided to become visible to all.

Gathering the Threads

Eleven chapters of burdens can look, at a glance, like the bleakest stretch in all of Isaiah. But seen whole, they preach a gospel every bit as much as a judgment. They tell us, first, that there is one God over all the earth: that the Holy One of Israel is no tribal deity but the Lord of Babylon and Egypt and Tyre, who holds every empire in His hand. They show us, in fallen Babylon and her fallen shining one, the anatomy of all pride, the I will make myself like the Most High that runs from the serpent straight to our own hearts; and they show us its only cure in the Lord Jesus, who reversed the climb, came down, and was therefore lifted up. They warn us, in the burden of Jerusalem, that the people of God are not exempt. And they astonish us, in the burden of Egypt, with the news that the nations under judgment are the very nations God means to call my people.

That last word is the one to carry away. We came to these chapters expecting to read about other people’s doom, and we found ourselves in them, for we are the nations, the old outsiders, the Egypt and the Assyria whom the God of Israel has gathered in and named His own. The Lord who judges every Babylon is the Lord who opens the door of His house with the key of David and will not let it be shut against us. The burdens against the nations were never the whole story. They were the dark frame around a startling picture of grace: the King of all the earth, coming down to gather a people for Himself out of every nation under heaven: Babylon’s children, and Egypt’s, and ours.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. The burdens reveal that the Holy One of Israel rules and judges every nation (Babylon, Egypt, Tyre) and not Judah alone. How is this at once a comfort to a small and frightened people of God, and a warning to all human pride? Where are we tempted to treat God as a “local” deity, concerned only with our own affairs?

2. The king of Babylon falls because of five proud words, I will … I will make myself like the Most High (14:13–14), and the church has heard behind him the oldest pride of all (Genesis 3:5; Luke 10:18). Why is the lifting of the self into God’s place the root from which every other sin grows? How does this oracle expose a pride that lies deeper than any single bad act?

3. Babylon said I will climb up to the sky … I will make myself like the Most High and was brought down; the Lord Jesus, who was God, humbled Himself and was therefore exalted (Philippians 2:6–11). How do these “two ladders” run in opposite directions? Why is “the way up is down” the very heart of Luther’s theology of the cross?

4. In the middle of judgment, the Lord calls Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands, gathered with Israel as one (19:24–25). Why is it so startling that the old arch-enemies are blessed and brought in? How is this the gospel of the ingathering of the Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14–16), and how are most of us its fulfillment?

5. Isaiah sets a burden against Jerusalem herself (22:1), the one city that might have thought itself exempt. What does it guard against to know that the people of God are judged by the same word as the nations? Where might the church today be tempted to trust her “walls and water supply” instead of the Lord?

6. Eliakim is given the key to the house of David (22:22), words the risen Lord Jesus claims for Himself (Revelation 3:7). What does it mean that the Lord Jesus holds the key, so that the door He opens no one can shut? How is that a comfort when we fear the door of God’s house might be shut against us?

Looking Ahead

We have heard the Lord’s word over the nations one by one; now Isaiah pulls back to take in the whole earth at once. The next session takes up chapters 24 through 27, sometimes called Isaiah’s “little apocalypse”: a sweeping vision in which the Lord comes to judge not this nation or that, but the entire world, until the earth dries up and withers under the weight of its sin (24:4). It is a dark and cosmic stretch of the book. But set like a jewel in the very middle of it is one of the brightest promises in all of Scripture: a banquet that the Lord spreads upon His mountain for all the nations, where he will swallow up death permanently. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from every face (25:8). Paul will quote that very promise at the climax of his great chapter on the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:54), and John will hear it again in the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:4). We will take up the day the Lord swallows death itself.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 24 through 27. It is a sweep, so read first for the movement of it, and then linger on chapters 25 and 26. Watch the whole earth come under judgment, and then find the banquet on the mountain (25:6–8). Do not miss the two great promises the New Testament will seize upon: he will swallow up death permanently (25:8), and your dead will come back to life (26:19).

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, Lord of all the earth, before whom the great empires rise and fall like grass, we confess that we have heard in the proud I will of Babylon the very voice of our own hearts, forever climbing, grasping, wanting to sit where You alone may sit. Forgive us the towers we build to our own glory, and bring them down, that we may learn the only way up to You, which is the way down: down to the foot of the cross, with empty hands.

And we thank You, O Father, that the burdens against the nations were never Your last word: that into the land of our old bondage You sent a Deliverer, a great one, and have called us who were once strangers and enemies Your own people, and the work of Your hands. We bless You that Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, holds the key of David, and that the door He has opened to us no power in heaven or hell can ever shut. Gather us with all the nations to Your holy mountain, and to the One who humbled Himself and was exalted, that we may bow the knee to Him now in love, before every knee bows to Him at the last; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.