AP

From: Bruce Christian
Isaiah 47:5-8a   “Sit in silence, go into darkness, Daughter of the Babylonians; no more will you be called queen of kingdoms.  I was angry with my people and desecrated my inheritance; I gave them into your hand, and you showed them no mercy. Even on the aged you laid a very heavy yoke.  You said, ‘I will continue for ever – the eternal queen!’  But you did not consider these things or reflect on what might happen. Now then, listen, you wanton creature, lounging in your security and saying to yourself, ‘I am, and there is none besides me.’”

Two chapters earlier in Isaiah’s prophecy (45:5-6), God had revealed himself and established his unique/exclusive identity with the words, “ I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the LORD, and there is no other.”

So now, he is condemning Babylon for making a blasphemous claim, usurping the LORD’s rightful, absolute authority.  What wicked Babylon needed to realise was that all their apparent victories over the LORD’s Covenant People were only a playing out of his own sovereign plans to punish his rebellious people for their sins, and now that these plans were fulfilled, his next plan was to punish Babylon severely.

This sinful attitude of the Babylonians became the paradigm of ALL human sin, so that in the Revelation given to the Apostle John some nine centuries later, ‘Babylon’ came to symbolise every world-view that tried to usurp God’s true authority (“This title was written on her forehead: MYSTERY BABYLON THE GREAT THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.  I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.  When I saw her, I was greatly astonished.” – Revelation  17:5), which would lead to the same condemnation: “Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said: ‘With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again.’” (Revelation 18:21).

In the light of all this, to what extent are we pleading to God for mercy for our own nation as we daily see every aspect of our own culture being taken over by a ‘Babylonian’ world-view that is trying so hard to ‘cancel’ God’s authority and replace it with militant humanism?