Isaiah 24 - Introduction

Chapter 24 Worldwide Desolation and The Triumph of Yahweh.

The burden of Isaiah for the nations is now all brought together in a picture of worldwide desolation which will occur in the final bringing together of God's purposes. He has been brought to recognise, as a result of what he learned on his inaugural call (Isaiah 6:11), and through what he has learned about the world of his day, that that consummation can only come about through suffering. Not only the local nations, but also the whole world, must suffer in order that it might learn righteousness (Isaiah 26:9), prior to the establishment of a world of everlasting peace and joy (Isaiah 11:1; Isaiah 35:10; Isaiah 66:22) which will include the resurrection from the dead of all who are truly His (Isaiah 26:19). In that world death will be no more (Isaiah 25:7).

So he now depicts such a world, on which judgment has come because of man's sin, in the form of God's final desolations. Such a picture of ‘end time' desolations was common to the prophets (compare Isaiah 2:10; Ezekiel 38; Daniel 9:26; Joel 1-3 for example). Indeed it was the explanation as to why, prior to God finally acting in history the world would only get worse and worse. But then would come the final desolation as depicted here, and out of it God would act and bring in His everlasting kingdom of perfection.

To try to fit these great events into a simple historical pattern is to debase them. God's judgments are far too complicated and varied to be fitted easily into a pattern suggested by us. They speak of what is beyond our ability to appreciate in detail, conveying ideas rather than historical outline. The purpose was not to depict a programme, but in order to convey overall ideas. In one sense they depict God's judgment on the wicked occurring throughout history, but only as leading up to His final judgments on the world, which will issue in everlasting righteousness, and the deliverance and resurrection of His own to an eternal kingdom.

As he experienced the tribulations of his people Isaiah's thought was, if things are as bad as this now, what will they be like before the end comes? For he knew from what God had told him that that suffering was to go on, increasing in intensity, until the holy seed was produced (Isaiah 6:11). So whether these ‘end times' were to last for a short while, or for hundreds of years, he does not reveal, and did not know. For each generation the hope had ever to be kept alive so as to encourage the faithful who were going through tribulation, and sometimes great tribulation. But we who are privileged to have greater revelation do know that later the Apostles saw themselves as being in ‘the end times', for they saw those end times as having arrived with the coming of Jesus and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. And we can go even further, for we also know that those ‘end times' have lasted for over two thousand years. As 2 Peter reminds us, ‘With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Peter 3:8).

This fact that ‘the end times' began at the coming and resurrection of Jesus Christ is vital for the purposes of a full and complete interpretation of Scripture, and is therefore one that must be grasped. It is clearly stated in those Scriptures. For example Peter says, ‘He was revealed  at the end of the times  for your sake' (1 Peter 1:20), with the result that he can then warn his readers ‘ the end of all things is at hand' (1 Peter 4:7). Peter therefore saw the first coming of Christ as having begun ‘the end times'. In the same way Paul says to his contemporaries ‘this is given for our admonition, on whom  the end of the ages  has come' (1 Corinthians 10:11). He too saw in Christ's coming the fulfilment of promises concerning the end of the ages. To the Apostles then the first coming of Christ was to be seen as ‘the end of the ages', not the beginning of a new age. The writer to the Hebrews speaks similarly. He declares that ‘He has  in these last days spoken to us by His Son' (Hebrews 1:1), and adds ‘once in  the end of the ages  has He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself' (Hebrews 9:26). It is therefore clear that these early writers saw their days as ‘the last days', and saw this present time as the culmination of all that has gone before and as leading up to the end. Thus ‘the church, the body of believers' is described as being the product of the last days.

So it is the essence of ‘the last days' that we need to grasp, and not their timing, as we look at this apocalyptic passage, and then continue on through Isaiah. We know that these ‘last days' have been going on for two thousand years, but for the Apostles and prophets they had necessarily to be foreshortened, because they wanted to bring their message home to their own day. They did not see themselves as predictors of a long term future, but as men who had a message for their own times, although as it subsequently turns out they also had one for all times. Each generation saw itself as possibly being the one which would issue in the consummation, and when God's people were almost on the point of despair, it must have been a huge comfort to them to know that deliverance might be just around the corner (Isaiah 26:20).

From the moment when Christ sent out His disciples to take His message to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the furthest points of the world (Acts 1:8) they knew that the prophetic ‘end days' were in progress, and it was only as time progressed that they began to think in terms of them lasting a little longer than they had originally thought. That is something that we begin to discern in 2 Peter 3, and in Revelation 20, where ‘a thousand years' is the equivalent of the Old Testament ‘a thousand generations' (Deuteronomy 7:9; 1 Chronicles 16:15; Psalms 105:8), an indescribably long period of time. As far as we are aware no one has ever tried to literalise the phrase ‘a thousand generations'.

And it is in these last days that all that man exalts is to be abased, and all that man treasures is to be destroyed. And, we are told that, in the end, ‘man without God' will destroy his own world in one way or another, and yet that it will be under God's supervision. For the final fifty years of the last century we thought that man might accomplish it through nuclear weapons, (it was not Bible preachers but scientists who invented the idea of it being five minutes to twelve). Now we know that it might be through the catastrophes resulting from global warming, which none of us can at present predict. But who would dare to deny the possibility that somewhere in space, unseen by us, there is an asteroid with our name on it? We do well not to limit God's methods.

One view of these Chapter s therefore is to see them in terms of this scenario, and to see Isaiah here as depicting world judgment in an intense way, while at the same time recognising that, as ever, his aim is to convey the overall impression rather than to give a literal picture. We can compare this with Haggai's enhanced description in Haggai 2:22 of the triumph of Zerubbabel. To him it was God at work and therefore great things were seen by the prophet as happening from God's point of view. But much of the world would not necessarily have been aware of them as such. They would be oblivious of God's viewpoint, and would see what was happening very differently. They did not realise that they were living in momentous times which would eventually lead up to the arrival of the Son of God on earth.

Others, however see Isaiah here as speaking of a coming devastation of Israel/Judah. For the problem that we have in interpreting the passage is that ‘earth/land' ('erets) can be translated as either ‘earth' or ‘land'. Thus we can see what he is describing as ‘local' or ‘worldwide', and the only way in which we can decide the issue is by an examination of the context. And when doing so we must keep in mind that when Isaiah speaks of ‘the world' he himself has in mind the world as he knew it, the world in which he lived, the world of the Middle East and its surrounds.

However, if we see it as a general indication of the result of man's sin, and of His judgment on it, as occurring both in the short term locally, and in the long term world-wide, we can have in mind the local situation of his day, while at the same time projecting it into the future and seeing in it a reference to the wider world. Both ideas can then be held in tension. But the fact that it deals with the resurrection from the dead (Isaiah 26:19) debars us from seeing it as pointing to anything other than the final consummation. Furthermore the use of ‘world' (tebel) in Isaiah 24:4 in parallel with 'erets serves to stress the worldwide vista (compare their combination in Isaiah 34:1; 1Sa 2:8; 1 Chronicles 16:30; Job 34:13; Psalms 19:4; Psalms 24:1; Psalms 33:8; Psalms 89:11; Psalms 90:2 etc; Jeremiah 10:12; Jeremiah 51:15).

Certainly Isaiah regularly connects this passage with the first Chapter s of Genesis. He brings into account the curse given in the Garden (Isaiah 24:6) and the blighted earth (Isaiah 24:4) of Genesis 3:17; the windows of heaven (Isaiah 24:18) of Genesis 7:11; the everlasting covenant (Isaiah 24:5) of Genesis 9:16; the wine drinking that results in misery (Isaiah 24:7), as found in Genesis 9:20; the scattering of the inhabitants as at Babel (Isaiah 24:6) in Genesis 11:4. He sees man as having returned to primitive conditions and as having broken the everlasting covenant. So in the end all men are involved. We must now consider it in more detail.