“Nations Are in His Hand!” – FBC Morning Light (9/1/2023)

Well, a good Friday morning to you. Here we are at the end of the week, and we have also put into the history books two -thirds of this year.

So today, September 1st, 2023, getting into the last third of this year.

Well, today we're reading in our Bible reading plan Isaiah 9 and 10, Philippians chapter 1, so beginning that little letter to the church at Philippi, and then the fourth chapter of Proverbs.

And I want to look at a passage in chapter 10 of Isaiah that I want this passage to encourage us with a more accurate perspective on the affairs of this world.

So the passage is one in which the Lord is dealing with his people

Israel as well as Assyria. And so listen to just a couple of verses here in chapter 10, where the

Lord begins by pronouncing woe on Assyria, but listen to what he says. Assyria is the rod of my anger and the staff in whose hand is my indignation.

So what the Lord is saying, get this, the Lord is saying that Assyria, the

Assyrian empire, was in his hands a rod of indignation.

In other words, it was a tool that the Lord used to bring punishment upon another.

Let's look at what he says. He says, I will send him, Assyria, against an ungodly nation, and against the people of my wrath

I will give him charge to seize the spoil, to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

So the perspective that the Lord is giving to Isaiah, to give to his people, to give to Assyria, is that the

Assyrians, with all of their evil and their violence that they administer, going through their warfare, that all of that is in the hands of the

Lord. He's using this wicked nation of the Assyrian empire to punish and chasten his own people, to judge another.

Now, you could just read this and put it in a historical perspective and say, well, this is what the

Lord did, instead of reading this in such a way that says, this is what the

Lord does. This is what the Lord does. The Lord sovereignly has in his hands the affairs of this world and the ambitions and intentions and actions of the nations of this world.

Did the Assyrians know this? No. In fact, he goes on to say, Assyria, he does not mean so, nor does his heart think so.

It's in his heart to destroy and cut off not a few nations. In other words, what the

Lord is saying is, the Assyrians think that they're operating as an autonomous nation, doing what they want to do.

They want to be conquerors. They want to go overthrow nations, and so off they go. That's what the

Assyrians think. But what they don't realize is that the Lord is using that evil ambition on the part of the

Assyrians to bring chastening upon his own people. So no, the nations of this world are not autonomous, self -determining entities.

The nations of this world, including our own, are in the hands of our sovereign

God, and he is accomplishing his purposes, even in their evil intents.

Now, the Assyrians are not going to get away with this for long, because the Lord goes on to say in this particular chapter that he is going to come to pass when the

Lord has performed all his work on Mount Zion and Jerusalem. In other words, when he's used Assyria to punish

Jerusalem and Mount Zion, the Lord will say,

I will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the glory of his haughty looks.

The Lord says, I'm going to end up bringing punishment on the Assyrians. I'm going to use another nation to bring them down, is what the

Lord says. So what we're seeing here, what we're given in this prophetic pronouncement from Isaiah, is a behind -the -scenes look at the machinations of this world.

What's really going on behind the scenes with the leadership in Russia, the leadership in North Korea, the leadership in China, the leadership in Ukraine, the leadership in Iran, the leadership in the

United States of America, and on and on we can go through the nations of this world. What's going on behind the scenes, behind what we can see?

The sovereign Lord is in control, and he has every one of these nations doing his bidding, accomplishing his purpose for this particular time.

That's a helpful perspective to me, because it helps me to see that none of this that's going on in our world is headed in a way that is completely unknown and arbitrary, and it is not in the hands of men to determine the outcome of all of these things, no matter how hard they may try.

Our God is the one who is sovereignly in control behind the scenes, accomplishing his purpose in all of these things.

So our Father and our God, we are grateful today for that awareness, for that revelation, for pulling back, if you will, the veil a little bit so we can see what's going on behind the scenes.

Thank you for this, Father. I pray you'd bless these thoughts to our hearts today, in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

All right, listen, have a wonderful weekend, and I hope you can gather together with God's people this coming

Lord's Day at Faith Baptist. We're having morning service, Sunday school at 9 30,

Bible study time, and then the morning service at 10 30. In the evening, we're doing something a little different. One of the families in the church is hosting the church family at their home, and we're having a bonfire meal and devotional and all that at their home, and then some folks are spending the night, so a little different program for our church this

Sunday. I hope you make it to God's house on the Lord's Day. Have a good day and a good weekend.