Sunday, November 23, 2025 PM

Isaiah’s Oracle of Judgment Against Ahaz

Isaiah prophesying of a day of judgment to King Ahaz. In doubt shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly that is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.

They will come and all of them will rest in the desolate valleys and in the clefts of the rocks and on all thorns and in all pastures. In the same day the Lord will shave with a hired razor with with those from beyond the river with the king of Assyria the head and the hair of the legs and will also remove the beard.

It shall be in that day that a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep so it shall be from the abundance of milk they give that he will eat curds for curds and honey everyone will eat who is left in the land.

It shall happen in that day that wherever there could be a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels of silver it will be for briars and thorns. With arrows and bows men will come there because all the land will become briars and thorns and to any hill which could be dug with the hoe you will not go there for fear of briars and thorns but it will become a range for oxen and a place for sheep to roam.".

So this is the explanation of the judgment that God promises by the sign of Emmanuel that God is not absent from the life of Judah. He is not far away and distant from the political situation that King Ahaz is so worried about.

Now he certainly thinks that the Lord is far away. He thinks that the Lord has not helped him which is why he calls for help from Tiglath-Plazar II, the king of Assyria. This is why he's interested in the gods of Damascus because to his mind the Lord is not there.

The Lord is not helping. The Lord is not intervening. So the Lord's sign to him is one that emphasizes yes he is there, Emmanuel, the Lord with us. He's very much involved and involved in a way that Ahaz will not find pleasant.

So this is a sign. The sign of Emmanuel is a sign against the children of Israel. Ahaz, the house of David, and the nation of Judah were in a very bad relationship with God. Ahaz could have quipped, the Lord, you can't live with him and you can't live without him.

This is his conundrum. Because they are in covenant with the Lord, Ahaz would like to be free from the demands of the covenant. He would like to be free from the restraints. He would like to do things in the way he sees best, but they can't.

And God's covenantal judgments, the curses that he brings to pass cannot be ignored. So Judah's commitment to idols and foreign nations is the main problem. If they had repented, if they had submitted to the Lord in faith, they would have seen his salvation, they would have received his blessings.

This is obviously the case when you think about what happened not so long after the reign of Ahaz. We remember the reign of King Hezekiah and how bad things were going for them. A later king of Assyria, Sennacherib, with his hundreds of thousands of troops, had invaded Judah, surrounded Jerusalem, and begun to taunt the people of God about how there was no hope for them, sending his spokesman Rabshakeh to speak in Hebrew so that all the people would hear the taunts and the threats, a bit of psychological warfare.

And then Hezekiah, the whole royal house, Isaiah, the people gathered together in repentance before the Lord, confessing their sins to God, asking for his deliverance, and he delivered them. So this was just a handful of years later, and in a much more dire situation than this moment with Ahaz.

If they had repented of their sins, if they had confessed the Lord's goodness, if they had abided by the covenant, humbling themselves before the Lord, then the Lord would have responded and blessed them, but they were entrenched in their pride.

They were fully committed to their idolatry. So now they faced God's judgment and received his curses. They did not fear the Lord. Wisdom says in Proverbs 8 36, Lady Wisdom says, He who sins against me wrongs his own soul.

All those who hate me love death. You ever meet somebody that loves death, and they would be surprised to find out that they do, perhaps. But if you find someone who is ardently opposed to wisdom, offended at even the mere suggestion that they need wisdom, you find someone that is headed for destruction.

Ahaz should have trusted in the Lord as his king, but he did not look to the Lord as his king, he looked to somebody else as his king. He willingly brought himself, the house of Judah, the capital of Jerusalem, the resources of Judah, he willfully brought them under the headship, the kingship of Assyria, appealing to Tiglath-Pileser saying, I am your humble servant.

He was essentially entering into a treaty with the king of Assyria saying, we are your vassal state, and therefore protect us. And here's a bunch of gold and silver from the temple to convince you to protect us.

You see what he was doing? By taking the gold and silver away from the Lord's temple, the Lord's house, where the Lord's throne was on the mercy seat, he was saying to this king of Assyria, you are our king, you are the throne before whom we are going to bow.

And so that's why ultimately he refused to ask any sign of the Lord. He wasn't interested to hear what the Lord might do, he was interested to hear what the king of Assyria would do. He was fully invested in that plan.

And so the Lord gives a sign anyway, the Lord will not abdicate his throne so easily, he will not walk away from the covenant, he will be faithful and he will say, I am still your God, I am still your king, I am still in covenant with you, and I'm going to give you a sign anyway.

Even if you won't ask for one, I'll give you one. Which again is an affirmation that he is the king. And he says, this other king that you have trusted in, I will personally bring him, the king of Assyria, down to Judah, not as a savior, but as an agent of judgment.

This new vassal king, this new king that you have made yourself a vassal of, to whom you have given the gold and silver, he's going to come and try to take the rest. He's going to come and invade you in a way far worse than Pecah and Rezin ever did, the other kings that Ahaz was concerned about.

And in addition, consider the ironic mercy of God that the sign that God gave to Ahaz, remember Ahaz who's rejecting God as his king, appealing to Tiglath-Pileser, the king of Assyria, as his king, the sign that God gives to Ahaz is a sign of a king.

Emmanuel, the child. Because, as we continue reading in Isaiah, we come to chapters 9 and 11, the focus is still on the child, the promised child, and who is this child, but God's chosen servant, the king, who will rule, who will reign.

The government will be upon his shoulders, and his throne will know no end. So, it's important to remember in this portion of Isaiah, the setting is still the same. Isaiah is talking to Ahaz at the aqueduct.

Isaiah is there with his young child Shear-Jashub. He prophesies of Emmanuel, and he lays out God's program of judgment. There's an international invasion, that's verses 18 through 20, that brings about an economic exile, verses 21 through 25.

This international invasion will be so effective that the people living in the land, it'll be like not living in the land. And you can see the thoroughness of the invasion, that it thoroughly saturates the land, that it completely affects the people, in verses 18 through 20, to the degree that verses 21 through 25 show the people of Judah, okay, fine, they're still within the territorial boundaries of Judah, but it's like they're living as nomads.

They're no longer actually living off of the land and enjoying the land, it's like they're back in the wilderness again. So, all of this is brought together by a repetition of the phrase, in that day, in that day, in that day, and the descriptions are layered in and described for us, a day of the Lord.

Very often, some particular judgment in mind, whether it's of Judah, Israel, or some other nation, is called the day of the Lord, reminding us that the Lord sets the day when He brings His judgment. When it's time for wicked men to fall, when it's time for justice to be done, God will act, but it's on His timetable, it's when He decides.

We have the expression, when the day, the day is yours, or the day is ours, in terms of victory speak, the day of the Lord, the day is His. It's not only the day He picks, but it's the day He wins and will prove Himself in that day.

The big picture is this, in this day of the Lord, a day of reckoning, a day of threshing, a day of sifting, the big picture is this, whereas Ahaz thought that God was too small, too limited to Jerusalem, too restricted to Judah to have any real power or impact on international politics, God was too small, too focused, too limited to deal with Ephraim, to deal with Syria, to deal with Egypt, to deal with Assyria, that's not the case.

The truth of the matter is Ahaz is too small. Ahaz's vision is so impaired, so short-sighted and narrow, that's the problem. God's sovereignty thus is declared by His prophet, by His seer, by the one who shows who God really is, and the truth is the Lord is actually driving all of the political freight that Ahaz is concerned about, and He's actually going to run over Ahaz with an 18-wheeler of judgment.

And so we have the international invasion in verses 18 through 20. And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly that is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.

They will come, and all of them will rest in the desolate valleys and in the clefts of the rocks, and on all thorns and in all pastures. In the same day the Lord will shave with a hired razor, with those from beyond the river, with the king of Assyria, the head and hair of the legs, and also will remove the beard.

There's two images here that meet us in the expression of the thoroughness of God's judgment. This is the first half of Isaiah's oracle of judgment here in chapter 7, and this first image is that of insect swarms, and the second image is that of shaving.

But both have the theme of thoroughness. There's some unique characteristics, though. The first image of swarms that the insects emphasizes a thorough judgment upon the land. The insects are everywhere on the land.

There's not a nook and cranny without these insects. But the second image emphasizes thorough judgment on the people of the land. They are completely shaven top to bottom. So the first image is that of being swarmed in verses 18 and 19.

So notice the insects in verse 18. The Lord whistles for the fly that is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. And, of course, given the history of the plagues, we remember one of those plagues in Egypt being of the flies.

Now some of those plagues, you could say, were more or less somewhat expected given Egypt. There were a lot of frogs, but not that many. There were a lot of flies and gnats, but not that many. I don't think they'd ever had a problem with a Nile turning to blood before.

That was completely out of the blue, though there was a understanding of why the Nile turned to blood after they had tried to kill so many Hebrew male children in that river. So there was a fittingness to all of those plagues.

In Egypt, it was common for them to have a problem with flies. The Nile would regularly flood. They would use the flooding cycles of the Nile River for their farming, for their irrigation, they would use that for their productivity.

But there was also a cycle of disease outbreaks in Egypt which followed the floods because of all of the flies that would be spreading there. They were known for their flies. If you were going to go down to Egypt, you'd better get ready for the flies.

That was just...it's like going to Alaska in the summer and the mosquitoes are this big. You just got to be ready for it. So Egypt was known for their flies, and so the flies of Egypt...God can whistle for the flies of Egypt.

Ahaz, again, remember he thinks God is so small that he's not very involved with all these things, but God can whistle for the flies of Egypt and they'll make all their way up, all the way to Judah. And instead of plaguing the people of Egypt, they'll come and plague the people of Judah.

It's interesting the kind of respect that Egyptians gave to the fly because they had so many problems with them. They considered the fly to be quite formidable. In their military decorations, they also had the order of the fly that was awarded to soldiers for bravery, for persistence.

Well, this is a metaphor that is saying the armies of Egypt are going to come and they are going to thoroughly saturate your land. And in the same way, we have the bee of Assyria. The bee of Assyria is going to come buzzing down from the north.

God can whistle for flies. He can also whistle for bees. And you have the sense of being swarmed and overwhelmed and chased. I remember one of my parishioners back in Tennessee, his name was Larry Easterling, and he had kind of halfway fallen into working a pest control business.

And he was working for a man and, of course, he kind of hoped that one day he would take over the business. And so the old man was teaching him the ropes. And so one day, he took him to a problem in a tree.

It was a big old angry hornet's nest up in the tree. And so he said, suit up. And so Larry had to put on all this gear. And he got into the lift bucket and he was lifted up to the branch of the tree. And he had had his instructions.

And he said, as soon as he reached and grabbed the hornet's nest, everything went black. And all he heard was this loud, roaring, buzzing hum in his ears, so he couldn't even think. And he talked about, this was the, he had never been as scared in his life and ever since.

And he had to do everything blind trying to capture this hornet's nest and get rid of it all. And he got done with that. And he went home and changed his pants and said he was done for the day. So he ended up, he ended up working that pest control business.

But I think he also had his assistants handle those dirty jobs later on, too. We don't really appreciate how scary the swarming insects are until they come after us. And all of a sudden, even just one of those stinging insects is enough to set us to flight.

The Lord says in Deuteronomy 144, Amorites who dwelt in that mountain came out against you and chased you as bees do and drove you back from Syria to Horma. There are other expressions in the Old Testament that describe armies acting like swarms of insects chasing people and they're scared and running.

And we all, perhaps we've all had an experience or two when the buzzing insects are after us, and what do you do? You don't usually look very dignified in those moments. The idea is that God is the one who's bringing the flies of Egypt and the bees of Assyria, and he's bringing them into the land of Judah.

And of course, we understand innately that we are outnumbered by the insects. There's more of them than there are of us. That's also an idea here. There's going to be more of them than there are of you, and you're not going to be able to stop them.

There's an idea of these insects swarming and flooding in. Sometimes we have the metaphor of locusts. Remember, the locusts come, the locusts of the foreign armies come, and then they eat everything, and they completely destroy everything.

But with all of this swarming, the point is made very clear. God is the one who whistled for the flies and the bees, and so he controls it all. Now, this is not the first time that we've heard about God whistling and calling and arranging judgment.

So in Isaiah chapter 5, verses 26 through 30, we've already heard this. He will lift up a banner to the nations from afar and will whistle to them from the end of the earth. Surely they shall come with speed swiftly.

So this is in response to how wicked Judah has become. He says, my remedy is I'm going to whistle for these nations, and they're going to come and attack you. And he says, whistle to them from the end of the earth.

Well, Assyria is pretty far north from where Judah was, Egypt's pretty far south, and so it's a fitting repetition of what God has already said. Now, verse 27, no one will be weary or stumble among them, no one will slumber nor sleep, nor will the belt of their loins be loosed, nor the strap of their sandals be broken.

And so what God had said in blessing his people in the wilderness wanderings is now said of their enemies and their approach against Judah. Verse 28, whose arrows are sharp and all their bows bent, their horses' hooves will seem like flint and their wheels like a whirlwind, their roaring will be like a lion, they will roar like young lions, yes they will roar and lay hold of the prey, they will carry it away safely and no one will deliver.

In that day they will roar against them like the roaring of the sea, and if one looks to the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened by the clouds. So God layers in all these different metaphors, these pictures of judgment.

They're like a lion running after you, pouncing on you, and overwhelming you. It's like a storm and you're at sea and you're being tossed to and fro and there's no hope. It's like a swarm of flies and a swarm of bees meet and completely cover your whole land.

He just layers in the images showing what it's going to be like. The prophets are borne along by the spirit with these metaphors that use the aspects of creation to talk about how creation is unraveling in judgment.

You can call it de-creation metaphors. But what are they saying? And however they're putting it, the Lord is the Lord of hosts, He's the Lord of the bees, He's Lord of the flies, in the pestilence, the insects coming, He's the Lord of the locusts, He's in charge of the storm, He's in charge of the lion, He's in charge of all of it.

He's using all of creation just as He wants. He is Lord of hosts. The infestation in verse 19 says that all of them will rest in the desolate valleys and in the clefts of the rocks and on all thorns and in all pastures.

You may remember that when you read the book of Judges, when their cycles of judgment would come and then repentance and then relief and then they would go back to their idols and then here comes the judgment again and then it would just cycle again and again.

When that happened, the enemies of Israel would often be unleashed by God as a form of judgment and then the people of Israel would escape to the hills. They would cede the valleys, the fertile valleys, the easy living areas, they would cede those to their oppressors and they would kind of hide out on the high ground where it was a bit rougher to live, but at least they could try to defend themselves.

In this passage, in Isaiah chapter 7, Isaiah prophesies that not even the clefts of the rocks will be safe, because the whole area is going to be so thoroughly infested with their enemies. Someone might try to hide from wild beasts in the thorns, but you can't hide from flies and bees inside the thorns.

You can't get away from them. They're swarming, they're coming after you. The idea is that there will be no relief or refuge. Now, this is something that God had said was going to be the case. This was not the only outcome of God's relationship with Judah.

He had also said other things about them trusting him, them acknowledging the gift of the land, and how to use all that God had given them for his glory, how to properly steward the gift of the promised land and all the abundance thereof.

And you can read about that in Deuteronomy chapter 8. But Deuteronomy chapter 8 verses 1 through 20 spells all of this out, and even says something to the effect of, if they forget God, if they become arrogant in their prosperity, if they begin to go after other gods, then God will begin to treat them like he treated the nations that lived there before them.

And that is exactly what's being described here in Isaiah chapter 7. Now, the following image that we'll talk about next time is one that emphasizes a thoroughgoing shame that comes upon the people of Judah.

With that in mind, then the following information is about the economic exile. To think about it this way, a thorough invasion, a thorough shaming, and then to be, in a sense, exiled in your own land.

But all of this, many, many, many years prior to when they actually were shaved as slaves, as captives, and marched to Babylon in a geographical exile. Look how patient God is to show them, this is what's going to happen to you.

At this point, they're not going to lose the land. At this point, they're not actually captives of a foreign nation and going to be taken away out of their land. This is all punishment towards that, and it will feel that way, but it's not that way yet.

And in this, don't we see the long-suffering of God, the patience of God, even in this severe chastisement and judgment, that he is correcting them in a way that still gives them yet more opportunities to repent, yet more opportunities to turn.

And in this, we are reminded of the long, long-suffering of the Lord, for which we ought to be grateful. Let's close with the word of prayer. Father, we thank you for the day that you have given to us, and I thank you for the love that you have for us, and I pray these things in Jesus' name.