The Oracle Against Babylon: A Signal of Judgment

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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Our sermon today is in Isaiah 13. If you want to go ahead and turn there.

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Isaiah 13. Now before we read this, just a few things to note.

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First of all, we've ended another major section on Isaiah. So the first section was about Isaiah's commissioning.

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The next section was about the Assyrian threat against Judah and against Israel.

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And now we move out of that into a series of oracles against the nations.

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So Isaiah is going to list all the nations and talk about the judgment that's coming to each one of them, beginning here with Babylon in chapter 13.

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And if you, you know, you want to peek ahead, you'll see that in 14 it begins an oracle concerning Assyria, an oracle concerning Philistia, an oracle concerning Moab, and so on and so forth.

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And so we're going to have chapter after chapter of oracles against the nations and judgment

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God has against them. So today we'll kind of set the stage for how we should think about judgment.

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I'd also like to make a few comments before we read about the first verse. The oracle concerning Babylon, which

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Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw. So this is an oracle that he saw.

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Now what that means that he saw this, you know, it's not entirely certain, but because these are words, right?

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And so how do you see words? Is he seeing something and then reporting on them? I think the idea here is that God's revelation is so powerful that it makes sense to use the strongest sense we have, sight, to describe what this is that Isaiah experienced and what he is sharing with us.

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I'd also like to point out that many people who doubt the truth of the Bible begin at this point and many points when

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Isaiah talks about Babylon to doubt that Isaiah is the author, because these things are just too far in Israel's future.

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You know, Isaiah is before Babylon falls. So for him to predict in this passage that Persia is going to come and destroy

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Babylon, to many seems too improbable. So they would say that Isaiah didn't write this.

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But if you believe in the word of God and you believe the Holy Spirit has moved men and given them information that is not otherwise accessible by natural means, and this is indeed the word of God, then there's no reason to doubt these things came from Isaiah's pen.

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So let's go ahead and read this whole chapter. Please stand for the reading of God's word.

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Isaiah 13. The oracle concerning Babylon, which

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Isaiah the son of Amos saw. On a bare hill raise a signal, cry aloud to them, wave the hand for them to enter the gates of the nobles.

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I myself have commanded my consecrated ones and have summoned my mighty men to execute my anger, my proudly exalting ones.

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The sound of a tumult is on the mountains, as of a great multitude, the sound of an uproar of kingdoms, of nations gathering together.

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The lord of hosts is mustering a host for battle. They come from a distant land, from the end of the heavens, the lord and the weapons of his indignation to destroy the whole land.

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Wail, for the day of the lord is near, as destruction from the almighty it will come. Therefore all hands will be feeble and every human heart will melt.

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They will be dismayed, pains and agony will seize them. They will be in anguish like a woman in labor.

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They will look aghast at one another, their faces will be aflame. Behold the day of the lord comes, cruel with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.

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For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light. The sun will be dark at its rising and the moon will not shed its light.

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I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their iniquity. I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.

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I will make people more rare than fine gold and mankind than the gold of ophir.

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Therefore I will make the heavens tremble and the earth will be shaken out of its place at the wrath of the lord of hosts on the day of his fierce anger.

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And like a hunted gazelle or like sheep with none to gather them, each will turn to his own people and each will flee to his own land.

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Whoever is found will be thrust through and whoever is caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes.

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Their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished. Behold I am stirring up the meads against them who have no regard for silver and do not delight in gold.

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Their bows will slaughter the young men. They will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes will not pity children and Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the splendor and pomp of the

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Chaldeans, will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when God overthrew them. It will never be inhabited or lived in for all generations.

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No Arab will pitch his tent there. No shepherds will make their flocks lie down there, but wild animals will lie down there and their houses will be full of howling creatures.

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There ostriches will dwell and there wild goats will dance. Hyenas will cry in its towers and jackals in its pleasant palaces.

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Its time is close at hand and its day will not be prolonged. Amen. You may be seated.

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Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you would bless the reading and preaching of your word. I pray that the things that you say about judgment here, that we would accept them, that we would appreciate them, and we would love all your truth as it is your truth.

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In Jesus' name, amen. So I'd like to begin by reading a similar passage that sounds like part of this passage, actually.

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Psalm 137. Psalm 137,

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I'll start at verse 7. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations.

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O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall be he who repays you with what you have done to us.

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Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. Now, I feel that I've probably heard that verse quoted more often from atheists than from Christians, because they want to show how disgusting, how reprehensible the religion of Christianity is, that we would have something like this in here about infants being dashed on rocks.

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And so, you have to ask yourself whether or not you have accepted

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God's judgment as being something that is good, as being something that is truly good, or is it something that you find that you don't quite appreciate or you don't quite love this truth as you might love others of God's truth?

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Judgment is something that comes from God's hand, and there is a reason that he has chosen to order his world in such a way that when he saves his people, he will do so by judgment.

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You know, if you look at the previous, there is a connection, even though this starts a new section in Isaiah.

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You know, he's talking about the hope for his people, and that hope comes from him destroying the enemy nations.

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So this is not something contrary to the gospel. You know, there is good reason to break up different parts of the

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Bible into this is bad news for sinners, this is the good news of the gospel. And people might say, oh, this is the bad news.

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This is the good news that is being described here. This is the hope for the people of Israel that their nations will be destroyed by the

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Lord. So I'd like us to walk through this passage, and let me just kind of sketch out the itinerary for you.

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I want to just walk through this and explain each verse, you know, and some of the imagery that's being used.

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And then afterward, I want us to come back and consider that we are saved through judgment.

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Now, when I say through judgment, I use an intentionally ambiguous preposition, through.

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Because through judgment, you could mean like, you know, save through the water and the storm or some phrase like that, and that would mean being saved from those things, right?

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Or you could say save through something, you know, save through the power of God, meaning you're saved by that thing, right?

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So both of these are true, that we are saved through judgment, we are saved from judgment, and we are also saved by God's act of judgment on the nations.

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And so when we come back through, we're going to look that both of these are true, that we are saved through judgment in the sense of being saved from it, and also in the sense of being saved by it, and that this is a good thing.

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So let's just walk through and I'll explain some of these verses. On a bare hill, raise a signal, cry aloud to them, wave the hand for them to enter the gates of the nobles.

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I myself have commanded my consecrated ones and have summoned my mighty men to execute my anger, my proudly exalting ones.

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So first of all, the parties at play here are Babylon, as it explains in verse 1, and then the

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Medes, or the Medes in Persia, as it explains later in verse 17. It's not until verse 17 that he begins to use concrete descriptors.

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Before, you know, it's all poetic imagery, until finally in 17 he reveals what he's talking about. But this is talking about the

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Medes coming to destroy the Babylonians. And so he's raising a signal for them to come, for them to come destroy.

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And these consecrated ones, it's a bit ironic that God would call these his consecrated ones.

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You know, these are his holy ones, but this is an evil pagan nation that's coming. And if you, you know, you see these descriptions, their wives ravished, you know, these are cruel men, not holy in the typical senses that you would think, but they are consecrated by God and they have been chosen by him to do his act of bringing destruction upon the nation of Babylon.

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Now, as we have gone through Isaiah, these various things about the nations, about Israel, about Assyria, about Syria, about Judah, we have been,

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I have been demonstrating a lot from New Testament citations of those verses that the

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New Testament authors consider these things to be fulfilled in the time of the New Testament.

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These are not something that still has yet to come, but something that's fulfilled now in this gospel age.

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Now, those citations will become less and less as we go through Isaiah as you look to the

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New Testament, but the principle still remains. And in this passage and the next chapter, which continues this oracle against Babylon, in Matthew 10 and Luke 10,

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Jesus makes reference to a couple of things in here to let us know that when he's sending out the disciples, he's fulfilling this oracle.

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I intend to show you a little more of that next time. For this time, I just want to point out one word.

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On a bare hill, raise a signal. Now, coming on the tail of the previous chapters, if you remember, this was the theme of chapter 11.

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This is a signal, that shoot from the stump of Jesse. And in verse 10 of 11, in that day, the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples.

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And in verse 12, he will raise a signal for the nations. Excuse me, that was 10 if I didn't say 10.

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Verse 10. And then verse 12, he will raise a signal for the nations. This signal that is the root of Jesse, you know, the son of Jesse being

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David, the great, great, great, great, et cetera, grandson of David being Jesus. This is speaking of Jesus.

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And so, in making a connection by that piece of vocabulary, in that alone, even without me explaining what

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Matthew 10 and Luke 10 say, there's good reason to understand that these things are fulfilled in Jesus.

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That Jesus Christ himself is a signal that lets people know not only his first coming of salvation, but destruction is coming on the wicked.

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Verse 4. So here you have a picture of, you know, if you imagine looking at mountains and hearing a sound that you can hear all the way from the mountains, there's a, there's an army gathering there, getting ready to descend down the mountain and come down to the valley and destroy.

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And so, in this picture, you can see that Jesus Christ himself is a signal for the nations. And to re -emphasize this picture of his consecrated ones, you know, usually when we talk about the

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Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Hosts is mustering a host for battle. The Lord of Hosts, usually that's referring to his angelic armies.

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And here it says he's mustering a host for battle. But what is that host? It is the

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Medes. These are a pagan, evil people, and yet they have this divine, holy, angelic force behind them to conquer and to do

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God's purposes. So though this judgment is coming by the hands of the wicked, it is coming ultimately from the hand of the

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Lord. They come from a distant land, from the end of the heavens.

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Another picture of there being an angelic power behind this. The Lord and the weapons is indignation to destroy the whole land.

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And just to describe some of the geography, you have Judah, and then you have Assyria, and then you have

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Babylon, and then you have the Persians. So, you know, far, far away. That's where the Persians and the

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Medes are that are going to come and destroy Babylon. From a distant land.

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Verse 6, So, first you have the threat, you know, the sound on the mountains, and then you have the people's response to it.

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They begin trembling. You know, if you've ever been nervous, and you feel yourself shaking, and you can't, you can't, you know, if you were to use a pen, you wouldn't be able to write straight.

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That is the response that's going on here. People recognize what's coming. They recognize judgment is coming.

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They're like a, like a woman in labor. If you want to read more about that, read Psalm 7 where it talks about the judgment on the wicked being like a woman in labor.

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She, she's developing this child within her, and in the metaphor, you know, this is a person's wickedness that's building up, and it's causing them no problems, but then suddenly labor pains come upon them, and they realize what's going to happen.

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They realize the pain they are about to endure. Verse 9, "...and

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to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars, the heavens, and their constellation will not give their light.

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The sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light." You know, these images of light being taken away reminds you of the, of the plague, the ninth plague, and also,

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I believe that's the ninth plague. Excuse me if it isn't. And then also, it's just a sign of hopelessness.

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These people are hopelessness. You know, hope is one of the, one of the big themes in Isaiah, and here is a people without hope, these people under judgment.

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"...I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity. I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant, and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless.

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I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of ophir."

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So God is going to get rid of the pride. People are proud in their, in their wickedness. They don't think they will be judged, and by his judgment he takes that pride away, and he will make the people desolate.

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This, you know, this picture of desolation is one that keeps resounding in this chapter. In verse 9 it said, "...make

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the land desolate." Now he's going to make the people rarer than gold from ophir, this place that has, that has gold, which of course gold is very rare, precious commodity.

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13. "...therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place at the wrath of the

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Lord of hosts, and the day of his fierce anger. And like a hunted gazelle, or like sheep with none to gather them, each will turn to his own people, and each will flee to his own land.

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Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword." These people, they're scattering.

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That's another theme within Isaiah. In the Old Testament in general, gathered people are strong people, people able to defend themselves.

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Scattered people are not able to defend themselves, are able to be destroyed.

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And so all these people will just be scattered like a sheep with no shepherd. Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes, their houses will be plundered, and their wives ravished.

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You know, there are a lot of people who look at this passage, and the one I read earlier, and they make all kinds of justifications for why this is okay, rather than just pointing to the true justification, which is that God is

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God over all, and he may do as he pleases. And all are sinful.

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Some people deny the sinfulness of infants, but the fact of the matter is that they are born in Adam and are sinful just as every other.

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Any thought that they have that does not glorify God is a sinful thought. And if you struggle to think that that is right for God, to destroy infants, then you don't understand your own sinfulness.

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Because you may accept that you are sinful, but if you think that an infant is not sinful and you are this sinful, and you don't realize that an infant is guilty, deserving infinite punishment apart from the grace of Christ, and you do not realize how much you are owed, how great the judgment should be against you, that is the real serious issue about not recognizing original sin, the guilt that belongs to every person, is that you do not truly realize your own guilt, even if you're willing to call yourself guilty, if you think that your guilt stems just from the more serious acts that you have committed against God and not recognize that there is simply a accrediting of Adam's guilt to you and then a total lack of ability to think right thoughts, to do right things that even plagues the child and their thoughts, and that you are simply hopeless apart from the grace of Christ.

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You are, without the grace of Christ, you are a sheep without a shepherd, and that includes infants who do not know him, those infants who do not know him.

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Verse 17. Behold, I am stirring up the meads against them, who have no regard for silver, and do not delight in gold.

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So here you have the concretizing of this statement. Everything before was very abstract.

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Here now, it is the meads are coming, you know, and the meads and the Persians together.

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It's kind of a unified nation. They don't have regard for silver or regard for gold.

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In other words, they can't be bribed off. There's no way to avoid this coming judgment. Their bows will slaughter the young men.

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They will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb, and their eyes will not pity children. You know, there's just no, yeah, there's no partiality.

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There's no mercy. I've seen, you know, those court shows where they pay people to have their issues resolved in front of, you know, some

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TV judge instead of going to an actual judge where they're not allowed to have cameras. And a lot of people really applaud when the judge is, you know, kind to this person who, you know, because of their condition, oh, they really can't afford to pay this fee right now, et cetera.

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You know, that just goes to show you that if it is truly just for them to not pay that fee, it shows you that the law wasn't just to begin with.

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But if it was just for them to pay something or to be punished for something, then that justice shouldn't be gotten rid of.

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There's nothing good about that. And so someone who might think that, well, because of my situation, because of my particular condition,

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I've done the best with what I have, et cetera, that, you know, God's going to be especially merciful to me on that day, that is not where your hope ought to be found.

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It really, it must only be found in Jesus Christ. You're not going to find special partiality because of you and your situation.

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You will find God perfectly accounting for things. He will account for anything in your life.

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But if you have sin, there is no justification for that. Any sin must be accounted for.

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And there is no hope apart from Jesus. In Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the splendor and pomp of the

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Chaldeans will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when God overthrew them. Sodom and Gomorrah meaning nothing left.

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You know, Isaiah had mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah before in chapter 1, verse 9, and the emphasis there was completely destroyed so that there's not anything left of the people.

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It will never be inhabited or lived in for all generations.

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No Arab will pitch his tent there. No shepherds will make their flocks to lie down there. Arab there meaning a nomad.

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There will be no nomads who, you know, as they're wandering through the area, would want to even stay there. It will be that desolate.

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And even domestic animals would not stay there.

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No shepherd would let their sheep stay there. Instead, wild animals will lie down there, and their houses will be full of howling creatures.

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There ostriches will dwell, and there wild goats will dance. It's possible that wild goats here should be translated goat demons.

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That's how it's translated in Leviticus 7, I believe. You know, he's giving this imagery of these wicked, unclean animals, you know, filling the city so that no person would ever dwell there again.

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Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces. Its time is close at hand, and its days will not be prolonged.

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This picture of all the animals dwelling, that was brought to mind about a year ago for me.

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I don't know if you remember these headlines, but there were a lot of headlines around April in the pandemic about how all these cities were seeing an increase of wild animals in the cities.

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And there were lots of pictures of coyotes going around San Francisco. And, you know, people were kind of surprised by this phenomenon of what was going on.

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And what immediately came to mind was Isaiah 13, this passage of ostriches and hyenas roaming in the city, showing that God's judgment had come upon the people.

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It was a sobering picture back in April to see that and to see that is just a light picture of God's judgment, just a small, small little foretaste of what it looks like.

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Its time is close at hand, its day will not be prolonged. That signal has been raised. Jesus Christ has been raised up on the cross, and the sign of judgment for the nations is present.

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It will not be delayed. It has been 2 ,000 years, but everything is perfectly on schedule, and it will not be delayed.

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So now having walked through this passage, let's consider salvation through judgment, both from judgment and by judgment.

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So we are saved. We are saved not just from some undefined force against us, but we are saved particularly from the very judgment that's being described here.

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There's probably a lot of things I could point you to. There's a lot of connections between this passage and many other passages in the

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Bible. But just starting with verse 19, where it says they will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when

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God overthrew them. You know, I mentioned that Isaiah had mentioned that passage before, and he speaks of God's people, a remnant being saved.

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Isaiah 1 -9, You see, this is the judgment that's due to people for their sin, and God, in saving us, is saving us from this very judgment that's being described here.

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That all those who trust in him, they should be like Sodom, they should be like Gomorrah, completely wiped out, unless God saves them.

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Then verse 7, You know, later on in Isaiah, you have the statement that because God is coming to save his people, they should strengthen their weak hands and weak knees and encourage anxious hearts.

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That's Isaiah in Isaiah 35 -3, saying God is saving from that very judgment.

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And you know that passage is later quoted in Hebrews 12 to describe our salvation.

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Verse 10, It is this very same judgment that God saves his people from.

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He's not saving them from something different, and then this judgment is something else. It is this very judgment that is owed to anyone who has sinned, including

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God's own people, apart from Christ. And then verse 13,

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This picture of an earthquake shaking everything. You know, this is another thing that Hebrews 12 picks up on, and it describes the whole earth and the heavens and all created things being shaken so that only those who are part of an uncreated kingdom, only those who are part of this eternal kingdom, may remain.

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Once again, this is a judgment that is coming, that is deserved by every single person apart from being in that kingdom that Jesus has founded.

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So here you have all these statements that let us know that we are saved from this very judgment.

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This is not just the judgment that goes on to God's enemies, but this is also the very judgment that we are saved from. Secondly, in being saved through judgment, there's that other meaning that we are saved by this judgment.

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I'd like to call your attention again to that word he uses, signal, in verse 2. On a bare hill, raise a signal.

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Jesus Christ has been raised up. It is this that is the answer to the previous chapters.

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How are people going to be saved in the previous chapters? Because that very signal that is calling

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God's people from around the world to himself is the same one that is calling destruction from his consecrated warriors on to the enemies of God.

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People will be saved because the enemies of God will be destroyed. I'd like you to go ahead and turn to Luke 3 and to see this one more time.

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Many people think of—they only think of Jesus' first coming as representing, as having nothing to do with judgment, right?

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And I mean, you might even quote a verse like John 3, 17, you know, I did not come to condemn the world, etc.

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But that's not the—even if his primary purpose wasn't to condemn the world, there is an implicit condemnation that comes with him saving a certain people and not the rest.

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In Luke 3, verse 15, we'll start there.

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As the people were in expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John whether he might be the

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Christ, John answered them all, saying, I baptize you with water. But he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals

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I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. Now you might be wondering, what does fire mean here?

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His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

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So this is what the coming of Jesus means. It means salvation for the wheat, destruction for the chaff.

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The signal has been raised, and God is bringing judgment.

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And we see that judgment in little bits and pieces as men get handed over to their own depravity, and they suffer calamities in this life on account of their sin.

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That judgment is the judgment that Christ brings and is a signal of.

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And this is what we will be saved by. We are saved by this very judgment.

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You might ask yourself, why is this a good thing, this judgment? Why didn't

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God just save people in a way where there didn't have to be judgment? There don't have to be, you know, pictures of infants being dashed on rocks.

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It doesn't have to be, you know, all these people who seem, you know, like relatively nice people being destroyed.

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Why didn't God save that way? And the answer is for your good, for your good.

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If it had been the case that God had done this, if the thing that we were saved by were different than the thing that we were saved from, there would be less of an opportunity to appreciate what

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God has done and to glorify God. And doing it this way, we not only see that God is our

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Savior, Jesus Christ is our Savior, conquering our enemies, saving us from some awful fate at the hand of our enemies, but we likewise see that that same thing was due to us.

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We not only get to appreciate what we are, that God is saving us, but in particular, we get to see firsthand as he is saving us what he is saving us from.

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So there should be no excuse to lack appreciation for this gospel as we consider it.

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There should be no ignorance of what it is that Jesus has done and how little we deserve.

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You know, there's a debate around grace, whether or not it should be defined as unmerited favor, you know, something we don't deserve, or demerited favor, something that we have actively worked against deserving.

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I don't—I have not studied this. I don't have a real position on that debate. But it certainly is the case that God's grace for us is not only unmerited but demerited, that we have demerited his grace, that we do not—not only is it something that is undeserved, but we deserve the exact opposite.

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And so as God has chosen to save us, not by some other means, but by judgment, from judgment, he has set it up in such a way that we can see and appreciate what he has done.

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We can look and say, that was due to me. If that was due to a child, how much more me, who has a lifetime of sin, how much more me?

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We can look to Jesus Christ with appreciation and thank him in our hearts that he has chosen to be kind to us, who have nothing to separate us from those who, you know, given worldly considerations, you know, seem far more humble, far more worth saving.

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When he chose us, while we were still sinners, that he was incredibly merciful and kind to one who did not deserve such a thing.

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And if he had chosen some other way, this would not be something that we could appreciate. So blessed be the Lord who not only saves us from judgment, but by judgment.

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Let me go ahead and pray. Dear Heavenly Father, pray that these truths, which are hard for many men to swallow, that we would have no difficulty, but be able to love them and embrace them.

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And pray that you would help us as we pray to be willing to pray difficult things, to pray and pray territory prayers that your judgment would be fulfilled, that we would be a people who are so in line with your will that we do not find these things reprehensible, but we would soberly accept them, recognizing that they are great illustrations of the grace that has been given to us.