The Taunt Against Babylon: The Fall of Satan

Our scripture reading for today is found in Isaiah 14, beginning in verse 3.

Now, before we read, just a few words of introduction. We are here in this section of Isaiah, which is a bunch of oracles against the nations, and it starts off with this two -chapter -long oracle against Babylon.

So we're in the third message about this particular oracle, this oracle against Babylon, and in the last message on it as well.

And then we'll be moving on, as you can see, from the headings in the ESV to the oracle against Assyria, Philistia, Moab, etc.

So that's kind of where we are in Isaiah right now. Another thought about this chapter.

I realized as I was kind of preparing this that I consider this chapter very significant, but maybe others don't.

I've spent a lot of time doing theological reading, and I know that saints of the past have cited this chapter often, and yet I don't think that it's one that's necessary preached on often now.

So I thought of a verse I could compare it to. So Jeremiah 29, 11. You all know that verse.

I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper you and to harm you, etc.

So that's a very—people consider that now to be a very significant verse. I did a search comparing that between Isaiah 14, 12 and Jeremiah 29, 11 across public domain works to see, you know, of the saints of the past, which one was more popular.

And it is this verse, Isaiah 14, 12. And the whole chapter is more popular than the many passages that we would consider—is more significant to—sorry, let me say that again.

This chapter has been considered more significant by many of the saints of the past than many of the chapters that we might consider very significant now.

So just keep that in mind as we read this. As we go through Isaiah, we're going to hit different obscure passages that you've maybe never have looked at, etc.,

but this one is—it's been considered by many people to be a very significant piece of Isaiah.

So let's go ahead and stand for the reading of the Word of God. Beginning in verse 3,

Isaiah 14, 3. When the Lord has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon.

How the oppressor has ceased, the insolent fury ceased. The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of rulers, that struck the peoples in wrath with unceasing blows, that ruled the nations in anger with unrelenting persecution.

The whole earth is at rest and quiet. They break forth into singing. The cypresses rejoice at you.

The cedars of Lebanon sing. Since you were laid low, no woodcutter comes up against us.

Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come. It rouses the shades to greet you, all who are leaders of the earth.

It raises from their thrones all who are kings of the nations. All of them will answer and say to you, you too have become as weak as we.

You have become like us. Your pomp is brought down to Sheol. The sound of your harps.

Maggots are laid as a bed beneath you, and worms are your covers. How you are fallen from heaven,

O day star, son of dawn. How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low.

You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high.

I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.

I will make myself like the most high. But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.

Those who see you will stare at you and ponder over you. Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who did not let his prisoners go home?

All the kings of nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb. But you are cast out, away from your grave, like a loathed branch, clothed with the slain, those pierced by the sword, who go down to the stones of the pit, like a dead body trampled underfoot.

You will not be joined with them in burial, because you have destroyed your land. You have slain your people.

May the offspring of evildoers nevermore be named. Prepare a slaughter for his sons, because of the guilt of their fathers, lest they rise and possess the earth and fill the face of the world with cities.

I will rise up against them, declares the Lord of hosts, and will cut off from Babylon name and remnant, descendants and posterity, declares the

Lord. And I will make it a possession of the hedgehog, and pools of water, and I will sweep it with a broom of destruction, declares the

Lord of hosts. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you once again for the many riches you've blessed us with, for your

Son whom you sent to die for the sins of your people, for this word that you've given us, to point us to him that we might contemplate his greatness and be transformed by it.

I pray that you would use this word to cleanse us, to wash us, to grow us in holiness, to conform us to the image of your

Son. And as we ponder these thoughts about Babylon, I pray that we would have a right disposition toward our enemies and a right disposition toward your enemies.

In Jesus' name, amen. So in football, there's rules against excessive celebration, right?

And at the same time, people really enjoy excessive celebrations sometimes, depending on the nature of them.

There's one football player, Ocho Cinco, if you've heard of him. Anyway, he one year had budgeted $100 ,000 toward paying fines for excessive celebrations, since he determined it was in his best interest to do these, you know, and increase his popularity, etc.

And one of his excessive celebrations was just to hold up a sign saying, please don't fine me again for excessive celebrations.

So you have this kind of paradox.

These two polar tensions, you know. One is that people enjoy the excessive celebrations.

Two is people consider them unsportsmanlike. But what if you have an enemy who is truly an enemy and not merely, you know, just a fellow man who you should get along with and have a good sportsman relationship with?

Then mockery, then taunting, etc., becomes perfectly appropriate.

And this is what you have in this passage here, is the Lord explains what will happen when the enemies are defeated, how the people will taunt the king who has fallen.

And this is not just referring to the nation of Babylon. This is used in a way that foreshadows the fall of Satan, as we'll see when we get to the relevant passages.

So let us consider, as we go through this, what our disposition ought to be toward our enemies.

Let us consider the fall of Satan. And what I want to do is, we're going to see different people respond to the fall of Babylon, different groups of people.

And then in the end, I'm going to kind of collect it all together and give you a little synthesis, some thoughts on what this ought to mean for us as we consider the world with eyes of faith.

Just beginning in verse 3 here. Yeah, this is a longer passage compared to what

I might normally preach, though. Yeah, that's kind of… explains the arrangement for this.

You know, I'm just going to try to explain a lot of this first before coalescing it into a single idea or thought.

When the Lord has given you rest from your pain and turmoil in the hard service with which you were made to serve, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon.

So the people are going to go away into bondage into Babylon. We've looked at the New Testament passages that speak of and know that it foreshadows just the eventual believer, the elect's bondage in sin prior to being saved.

And then once they are saved, they are able to glory in the

Lord and to rejoice in the victory that God has had over enemies. So that's how we ought to be thinking about this.

Lord has given you rest from pain and turmoil from that hard service while you were in bondage, and now that you are free, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon.

So first we see the response of Israel as they taunt Babylon. How the oppressor has ceased, the insolent fury ceased.

You can see in a footnote that this has been interpreted different ways.

One of the interpretations is golden city. Some people think it refers to the prosperity of Babylon being destroyed, not just that their fury has stopped, but that they had built such wealth and it's all crumbling down.

The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of rulers, that struck the people in wrath with unceasing blows, that ruled the nations in anger with unrelenting persecution.

So this is how the enemy operates. The enemy operates with a scepter that swings and kills and destroys and is merciless.

But God has a righteous scepter. You know, Hebrews 1 .8 speaks of the scepter of righteousness that Jesus rules by.

We have pictured in the Bible this dichotomy between these two rulers of this earth, the one who would seek to kill and to destroy and the other who would seek to give life by his power of righteousness.

And then next we have, in verse 7, the response from the earth.

So not just the response from Israel, but now a response from the earth, from created things in general.

The whole earth is at rest and quiet. They break forth into singing. So, you know, the world is at peace, and then suddenly

God's purposes are so accomplished that the created world, you know, rocks and trees, etc.,

see that God has brought about his purposes, and their purpose being his purposes, rejoice that God is fulfilling what he has planned.

The whole earth is at rest and quiet. They break forth into singing. The cypresses rejoice at you. The cedars of Lebanon sing, since you were laid low, no woodcutter comes up against us.

If you remember several chapters before, this picture of a woodcutter chopping down trees was a picture of Assyria's great pride, that they would think themselves higher than the cedars of Lebanon, chop them down, and pridefully consider themselves above the rest of creation.

And so creation looks on at Babylon, looks on at anyone who would consider themselves above God, who would not submit to the

Lord, and they see a prideful man who seeks to chop down creation and put it underneath them, when they are a lowly aspect of creation, one doomed to be far more lowly because of their great sin.

Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come. It rouses the shades to greet you.

All who are leaders of the earth, it raises from their thrones all who are the kings of the nations. So now we have a new response.

We had Israel, we have the earth, and now we have the response of fallen kings, those who have gone away into Sheol, Sheol being the place of the dead.

There's different interpretations for whether or not Sheol refers to just a generic grave that both believer and unbeliever would go to, or if it refers specifically to a place of judgment.

I'm of the minority opinion that passages like these indicate that it primarily refers to judgment and is not just a general place of the dead.

But regardless, this is a picture, and the shades of the earth, that's the biblical word for, you know, the dead, for ghosts, essentially.

They rise up to greet this new one who's coming down to them. You know, he's being greeted by other kings, but it's very ironic, right?

It's this very ironic picture of a bunch of kings greeting this other king, but they all have fallen. They've all been humbled.

They're not proud kings. They are disgraced kings. All of them will answer and say to you, you too have become as weak as we.

You have become like us. Your pomp is brought down to Sheol. The sound of your harps.

Maggots are laid as a bed beneath you, and worms are your covers. So you have this picture of physical, the physical corruption of the body as well.

Maggots and worms, the arrogance of the king of Babylon being brought down to hell, and the ironic sounds of harps.

You know, you might imagine a king with harps around him declaring his royalty, and those sounds ironically descending into hell with him, you know, heralding his way before him.

And so it is with all the powers of the earth that consider themselves higher than God. They all consider themselves greater than God, and anyone who does not submit to the

Lord considers himself greater than God because he does not submit to him. If God were greater than he, he would submit to him.

So it might sound odd to say that, you know, your aunt, whoever who, you know, is not a

Christian, considers herself greater than God. But if she does not submit to the Lord, she does indeed consider herself greater than the

Lord. And we see this exposed more as the prophet responds.

Now the prophet responds. There's some transition here, and you can see that when you see some of the things that are said.

At some point, this is the prophet speaking. It's no longer the kings that are talking directly to the king of Babylon.

It's now the prophet speaking to the king of Babylon about another set that will then look at him.

And I think this is a fairly pivotal point in the passage because you have these different responses that are all insightful in their own way, but now you have the prophet's response.

The prophet is going to give his interpretation of what he sees. "'How you are fallen from heaven,

O Daystar, son of dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low.'"

See that reversal? He chopped down trees. He cut down nations. Now he is cut down. Now, do people here know what word is used instead of Daystar in the

King James Bible? Does anybody know? Sarah knows back there behind the glass.

Emmanuel, what is it? Okay. Lucifer.

Right, yeah. Instead of Daystar, it's Lucifer. So, if you didn't know before, Lucifer became a common way of speaking of Satan.

Lucifer was another name for Venus, and Venus being a Daystar, a star, you know, it's not really a star according to, you know, the way we categorize these things now, but a heavenly body that you can see in the day sometimes depending on the conditions.

So, the king of Babylon is being pictured as a planet that you can see that's so bright you can see it, you know, if you imagine it being a star, it's a star so bright you could even see it in the daytime.

That's how bright it is. That's not really how the physics of it works, but, you know, it's the brightest of the stars.

And then how it is brought down. So, even though it's the brightest of the stars, it's gone. It's cut down.

And you can see just from that word, Lucifer, that there is a reason that many people have taken this to refer to Satan.

People have taken this passage and they've said, this is ultimately not talking about the king of Babylon.

Ultimately, it's pointing forward to the destruction of Lucifer, the destruction of Satan, how he is cut down.

I'm going to have a little more to tell you about at the end of all this, but yeah, just that's a kind of important piece of trivia here in this verse is that this, in many

Bible translations, says Lucifer, and it does rightly refer not only to the king of Babylon, but also to the fall of Satan.

And this whole passage is about his fall as he is cut down and cast into hell. You said in your heart,

I will ascend to heaven above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high. I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like the most high.

So here's a picture of Satan, even the king of Babylon, trying to build essentially his own tower of Babel, right?

Babylon is near the historic… You know, Babel, the tower of Babel, that's way back from Genesis 11, and the people of Babel in Babylon, they didn't come until much later.

But there's not only a geographic similarity, reason why they get their name, but biblically you can see why the

Holy Spirit inspired it so that the course of history would flow such that you would have this incredibly proud and arrogant people situated in this one place where the tower of Babel was built.

It's because they likewise want to ascend into the heavens. The king of Babylon wishes to ascend above to the heavens above God, place himself there beyond the clouds.

And once again, this is not just a picture of the king of Babylon or of Satan.

This is a picture of anyone who seeks to place himself above God, who seeks to do something other than submit themselves to him.

They wish to be above the clouds, above the Lord, and yet they will be brought down to Sheol.

It is a great arrogance to think that you can be greater than God. Of course, stated that way, it is obvious on the face of it.

But if you just think about the way people usually think about this, you know, they live as though they will live forever.

You know, they live as though they can deny God's supremacy and as though they will not go off into judgment.

And let's say that they deny the existence of the Lord and they think there is no God. They still live as though, you know, if there's no

God, there's no meaning to anything. Everything's going to die in the heat death of the universe. But they still live as though they will live forever, as though they have some kind of eternal meaning.

They live as though they will ascend to the heights of the cloud. This is the state of man in his natural mindset, is to ignore the reality that he will be plunged into Sheol because the wages of sin is death, and to instead implicitly, even though he would rarely say it, to embrace this idea that you can raise yourself above God and live forever.

And this is what each action of the one who denies God, this is what each action declares implicitly.

But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit. He wants to go high, he ends up descending far below the earth.

He wants to be far above the earth, far below. He chopped things down, but now he is chopped down.

He destroyed, now he is destroyed. Now you have another response.

The onlooker, specifically those who are still living, who see the body, lame slain.

Those who see you will stare at you and ponder over you. Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who did not let his prisoners go home?

He's this man who is very cruel to all others, you know, asserted his strength over all others, and now with no one attacking him is destroyed.

And then it continues, all the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb.

So this is how a king is properly buried, right, in a tomb. Speaking of which,

Isaiah later declares that this is a significant sign that Jesus is king, right, is that he was laid not only a tomb, but a rich tomb, you know, a rich man purchased a tomb.

I was reading through the Gospels recently, and I think I remember it was 90 pounds of spices, you know, that's just, that's a crazy amount.

Even today that sounds expensive, and how much more would have been back then. But he is not buried this way.

He is buried with an inglorious death. But you are cast out away from your grave like a loathed branch.

One possible interpretation for loathed branch is a miscarriage. You're cast away like a miscarriage.

Miscarriages usually don't get, you know, real burials. This is a way of thinking of him.

And, you know, if you've read Job and you've seen Job wish that he had never even been born, that he had just been miscarried, you know, this is, you know, he's wishing for some awful fate for himself.

This is the fate that has become of the king of Babylon, that has become of Satan. Just cast away without any reverence, just like a miscarriage would be.

Close with the slain, those pierced by the sword, who go down to the stones of the pit like a dead body trampled underfoot.

So he's lying, not even by himself, but with many other dead bodies around him, just one of the mix, nothing to distinguish him from the others.

You will not be joined with them in burial, because you have destroyed your land, you have slain your people.

An interesting point there that this is the final judgment. Why is he being destroyed?

Because you have destroyed your land and have slain your people. So while certainly the king of Babylon is judged on behalf of the, or on account of the fact that he has destroyed other lands, what is singled out and pointed out here is his cruelty to his own people, you know, as we consider

Satan, as we consider Lucifer. The cruelty he has to those who would be in his camp as opposed to the

Lord's, you know, what does he do for them? Nothing good. You know, there's fantasies about signing some deal with the devil where you're able to have amazing abilities, etc.,

you know, and usually it doesn't work out too well. Rarely does someone even get that, right?

It's just, it's usually just a miserable life and full of guilt and knowing that the accuser,

Satan, has something against you, and he has power apart from the Lord. Apart from Jesus Christ, who takes away the power of the accuser,

Satan has power. And now you have, once again, a transition, and you can see it indicated in your

Bible, and I think this is a good place to make the transition to the Lord instead speaking. So you've had all these responses, you know, the people of Israel, the earth, the physical earth, the dead kings, the prophet, the passerbys, and now you have the

Lord himself speaking. May the offspring of evildoers nevermore be named, prepare slaughter for his sons because of the guilt of their fathers, lest they rise up and possess the earth and fill the face of the world with cities.

I will rise up against them, declares the Lord of hosts, and will cut off from Babylon, name and remnant, descendants and posterity, declares the

Lord. So here, all the children of Babylon, which we read about earlier, right, all the children of Babylon being destroyed.

Why? So that they cannot rise up again, so that there is no remnant, right? And if you've been following along in Isaiah, you know how important that word is, remnant.

God destroys Israel as well, but he leaves a remnant for he will save them. There will be no remnant with Babylon.

I will make it a possession of the hedgehog and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction, declares the

Lord of hosts. You know, broom is something that you clean with, right? God wants to make his world clean, and so he will sweep it clean, but it's called a broom of destruction because it will only happen by destroying the enemy completely.

And thus ends the taunt against the king of Babylon. Now, I would have us consider this in light of—and there are a couple of passages

I could go to, but I think the best is Luke 10. So if you turn to Luke 10 and then keep your finger back in Isaiah, because we're going to go back and forth a little,

I would like you to consider some of these things, observations. I've mentioned before that many of the things in Isaiah are not referring primarily to the historical fulfillment in the time before Christ, you know, with the actual destruction of Babylon, and they're also not primarily talking about what will happen at the very end.

But typically in Isaiah, what you see is they're—while they refer to those things, they're primarily talking about the victory accomplished at the cross, and we're not always going to have lots of New Testament statements to prove that, but we've set a pattern as we've gone through, and here's another passage where we have a lot of evidence from the

New Testament that the Holy Spirit would have us most significantly consider—not the end, not the historical example of Babylon, but what

Jesus Christ has already accomplished at the cross. So looking at Luke 10, verse 12.

Well, I'll start at verse 10. Now, if you remember earlier in this oracle against Babylon, which has been about two chapters long, we talked about Sodom.

So in Isaiah 13, 19, it said, So you have this same kind of comparison made.

What I'm trying to show here is that in Luke 10, Jesus makes several allusions to Isaiah 13 and 14 to let you know that it's being fulfilled in the course of his ministry in Judea.

And then he continues on in verse 13. Okay, so we're in this set of oracles against the nations.

We're currently on the first one, which is Babylon, and guess which one the last one is in Isaiah 23.

It is the oracle against Tyre and Sidon. So you have

Jesus making this reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, which refers to this one.

You have an allusion to the last oracle against the nations, and then he says in the next verse,

That aligns well with this picture we've seen of the king falling down, this worldly power falling down into hell, into Sheol.

When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the word they would use for Sheol is

Hades. So think of this as the same word, even though, you know, in our translation we're using two different words,

Sheol and Hades. And I'll just go ahead and keep reading the next verse.

Now, does that not sound like verse 12 of Isaiah 14?

Verse 12, which said, So Jesus, in making all these allusions to this oracle, he is saying that this prophecy is fulfilled not primarily, you know, hundreds of years ago in Babylon, not primarily thousands of years in the future at the second coming, but primarily in his first coming.

And so several things to think about. One is that the certainty of destruction on the wicked, it has already been accomplished.

Isaiah 14 isn't just something to worry about in the far distant future, it is something that has already been accomplished.

And those who consider themselves high and mighty, who would put themselves above God by not submitting to them, to him, they are setting themselves up to be like the king of Babylon, cast into hell.

The harps that they play, the entertainment that they enjoy now, will ironically descend with them into hell.

Secondly, consider what this means for Satan, that his destruction has already been accomplished.

By Jesus's work on the cross, he has taken away the power of the devil, the power of his to accuse.

Now he, apart from Christ, he has that power to accuse you. But if you are in Christ, he has no power to make accusation because that penalty of death has already been paid for by the

Lord Jesus. This statement of victory is one that has already occurred.

This is a taunt that not one day we will get to declare, that we can already declare ourselves that God has triumphed over evil and he has granted us victory, that he has swept with the broom of destruction, that he has given us rest from pain and turmoil and hard service.

This is something that we can take and rejoice in what the Lord has done to his enemies, to our enemy.

Now, I'd also have you consider something that I find fairly profound, that Jesus declares that, that he saw

Satan fall from heaven, and he says that not after his death, burial, and resurrection, but prior to it, shortly prior to it, but prior to it.

There is something powerful about the declaration of the gospel. He has them, the disciples, go around, declare the kingdom, the coming kingdom, to make this declaration, and it is by the power of that declaration that these things are accomplished.

So consider this, that if you were sitting there at the cross, if you saw the resurrected

Lord, you might, because of our human weakness and our ability to see with eyes of faith, we might have a greater sense of God's victory and what he's accomplishing.

But when we sit and we hear a sermon like now, or we think about the world going forward by our missionaries, etc.,

do we have that same sense that God is accomplishing his victory, that by the declaration of the kingdom of God, Satan's falling from heaven, that Satan having already fallen from heaven is being plunged further and further into Hades?

We do not necessarily have that sense, and yet we should, because Jesus declares that he saw

Satan fall from heaven like lightning even prior to his death, burial, and resurrection.

The declaration of the gospel has power, has a great power, even though the cross was just promised.

It was something that was going to happen but had not yet happened. We should have that same trust in the word of God.

We should come to these sermons with expectations, you know, pairing with what Josh said about the importance of the office, etc.

You know, not so much the office, but think about this act of preaching. You should come with expectation.

Doesn't matter who the preacher is, doesn't matter which passage is being opened up to, but consider that the word of God has power, and regardless of what vessel

God chooses to use, it has power and can transform, and it can defeat evil.

And consider that as you pray, as you pray to a God who's accomplished these things. Consider that as you come to home groups, as you come to Sunday school, that power is at work with the word of God, the word of God, the proclamation of the kingdom that has cast

Satan down from heaven like lightning. When I was a kid,

I used to set up long strings of dominoes. I really enjoyed doing this, you know, flipping them down. I got pretty good at it.

And, you know, when you look at them, you know, they're parallel at the same plane. You don't think that this one could possibly, possibly knock down this other one because, you know, they're both at the same height, but eventually, lo and behold, they do.

This is how it is. The first domino has already been cast down. Satan has already fallen from heaven like lightning, and even though it is not fully manifest before your eyes, we ought to have eyes of faith that recognize that even though it's not fully manifest, even though that last domino has not fallen, where we see with our own eyes

Jesus Christ on his throne ruling the nations, that Jesus Christ is already king of the earth, and he has already defeated our enemies, and he has already defeated his enemies.

And it is by that power that we have a great victory to have peace in the

Lord and know that whatever it is that we are up against, whatever evil thing, whatever stronghold

Satan has over your unbelieving neighbors and friends, these things Jesus Christ can break because he has already done so.

Amen. Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that as we consider these things, that you would bring them to our hearts, that you would, by your word, transform us, and that those who hear these things and who have not repented, who have not submitted to you, that they would not continue playing their hearts as they go down the shale, but I pray that they would turn and repent from their sins.

I pray that you would open people's eyes so that they would recognize that they have made themselves greater than you if they do not submit themselves to you.

I pray that you would accomplish these things by the power of your Son, by the power of your Spirit, and the power of the word. In Jesus' name, amen.