Isaiah 46: 1 – 13
Hey, I’m Talking To You
Bel bows down, Nebo stoops; their idols were on the beasts and on the cattle. Your carriages were heavily loaded, a burden to the weary beast. 2 They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but have themselves gone into captivity. 3 “Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been upheld by Me from birth, who have been carried from the womb: 4 Even to your old age, I am He, and even to gray hairs I will carry you! I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. 5 “To whom will you liken Me, and make Me equal and compare Me, that we should be alike? 6 They lavish gold out of the bag, And weigh silver on the scales; they hire a goldsmith, and he makes it a god; they prostrate themselves, yes, they worship. 7 They bear it on the shoulder, they carry it and set it in its place, and it stands; From its place it shall not move. Though one cries out to it, yet it cannot answer nor save him out of his trouble. 8 “Remember this, and show yourselves men; recall to mind, O you transgressors. 9Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, 10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’ 11 Calling a bird of prey from the east, the man who executes My counsel, from a far country. Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it. 12 “Listen to Me, you stubborn-hearted, who are far from righteousness: 13 I bring My righteousness near, it shall not be far off; My salvation shall not linger. And I will place salvation in Zion, for Israel My glory.
This chapter is the reversal of Genesis 11. Can you take a guess what happened back in the first book of our bibles? For those of you who responded that it dealt with the Tower of Babylon, you are right. You win a cookie. For the rest, let us take a look at what chapter 11 says, “Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. 3 Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6 And the LORD said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Our Holy Father Adoni Yahweh is on the road to His triumph, but in contrast, the phony gods of Babylon, are in total disarray, being borne away on carts, or on the backs of asses, to disgrace. They are on the road to humiliation. Their makers are confounded. This must be so when our Great God Yahweh triumphs. It is a necessary part of the picture. Babel’s growth right from the beginning meant that the world had turned away from God and set itself up in opposition to Him. So Jehovah Elyon’s triumph must result in Babylon’s disintegration, and the humiliation of their man made gods.
Isaiah here brings out the strong contrast between Babel’s gods and Israel’s God, and is preparing the way for the rise of God’s Servant and its consequences. Babel’s gods are probably to be seen as representative of all the idols that he has been deriding, the ones about whom the greatest boasts have been made. All men revered the gods of Babylon. And it is these very gods which will be humiliated and shamed.
Bel bows down, Nebo stoops; their idols were on the beasts and on the cattle. Your carriages were heavily loaded, a burden to the weary beast. 2 They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but have themselves gone into captivity.
This vivid description is of the gods of Babylon being carried away from Babylon into captivity. Babylon is creaking at the seams. And these great idols did not leave in triumph; they were being borne by beasts, by mules and oxen, possibly in carts or on the backs of beasts of burden. They had previously been borne in triumph at festivals, but now they had become simply a heavy burden over the long miles, an uncomfortable burden that made the beasts very weary. The beasts stumbled, but these gods were such that they were unable to render any assistance.
The idols themselves just bobbed up and down helplessly ignominiously fastened on with ropes. They are at the mercy of the movement caused by the stumbling beasts, bowing down to all around.
Please notice the great statement of our Precious Holy Spirit Who said, ‘They could not deliver from the burden.’ There is probably a double emphasis here. They could not deliver Babylon from the burden coming on it, and they could not even deliver these poor dumb beasts from their burden.
By the way, Bel was by this time the same as Marduk, the city god of Babylon, Nebo was his son, and was the city god of Borsippa and the god of writing and wisdom.
3 “Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been upheld by Me from birth, who have been carried from the womb: 4 Even to your old age, I am He, and even to gray hairs I will carry you! I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.
In contrast with the gods of Babylon who have to be borne away on the backs of beasts or on carts, for His own people, God is the One Who Himself does the bearing. Those who have survived of Jacob/Israel after the Assyrian transportation of Israel and the subsequent massacres in Judah, and who are true to Him, have been ‘borne’ by Him from belly to birth, and through life until old age. He has made them and He will bear them, and what is more, in carrying them He will deliver them (as the Babylonian gods were even unable to do for the beasts who bore them). So Yahweh is the great Bearer of His people, and He never has to be carried. He both carries and delivers His people.
5 “To whom will you liken Me, and make Me equal and compare Me, that we should be alike? 6 They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver on the scales; they hire a goldsmith, and he makes it a god; they prostrate themselves, yes, they worship. 7 They bear it on the shoulder, they carry it and set it in its place, and it stands; from its place it shall not move. Though one cries out to it, yet it cannot answer nor save him out of his trouble.
God wants all idols to be put firmly in their place. He asks contemptuously to whom they will liken Him and whom they will count as His equal, and put on a par with Him. Surely not the silver and gold image, made into a god by the goldsmith, who has to be carried everywhere and when set down, stays exactly where it is put. And when someone cries, it can neither answer nor deliver them out of trouble. For whatever they may claim, that is the fact of the matter. Will they really compare Him to Babylon and its idols, when all they are is a burden to their worshippers?
8 “Remember this, and show yourselves men; recall to mind, O you transgressors. 9Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, 10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’
I want to make sure you did what I asked you to do in our last study and that is to write down verse 9 of chapter 45 and memorize it. It says, ‘Woe to you who strives with his Maker.’ Take my advice, do not mess with our Great Creator God, in any way. You will never win, believe me. I am well experienced with the pains of misfortunes or as the bible says, ‘Woes’. Consider Job who our Great Majestic God back in chapter 1 was bragging about to His angels. Job never sinned with his mouth for all the troubles thrown at him, but look with me at chapter 38 when our Holy Majestic Ruler addressed him as God to man, “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: 2 “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3 Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me.”
Our Holy Master wants them to remember the former things of old which will prove that He, and He alone is God, and respond. Let them consider the gods of Babylon bobbing along on the backs of donkeys. Then let them consider the fact that He Is the only God, and that this is revealed by the fact that He declares the end from the beginning, revealing the whole of things from beginning to end, and reveals things that have not happened long before they do. It is also revealed by the fact of His sovereign statements when He declares that what He has counseled will stand, and He will bring about what He determines. Thus He is supreme. How foolish of them then to transgress against Him.
11 Calling a bird of prey from the east, the man who executes My counsel, from a far country. Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it.
Let them remember the former things, His ancient activity, and what He has declared which is still not yet done. It is amazing that we do not learn from things that have happened before. Look with me at some of these famous quotes;
"What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
G. W. F. Hegel
History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time."
Anonymous
"History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."
R. G. Collingwood
'With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present'. –
Kenneth Stampp
'We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.' –
F.W. Maitland
'We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.' –
Jose Ortega y Gassat
Isaiah is now dealing with God’s prime purposes in history and their fulfillment, and he therefore again briefly recapitulates the advent of Abraham, for the prime example of Yahweh’s ancient activity is Abraham and the raising up of the Servant. He was called from the East and descended as a bird of prey on Canaan, establishing himself in the land, ridding it of the king of Babylon (Shinar) and then through his descendants driving out the inhabitants. He was also a man after God’s own heart, who did all His will and followed His counsel. He was truly and literally ‘a man of my counsel’. He above all men vividly received the counsel of Yahweh, and responded to it. His whole life resulted from following that counsel.
12 “Listen to Me, you stubborn-hearted, who are far from righteousness: 13 I bring My righteousness near, it shall not be far off; My salvation shall not linger. And I will place salvation in Zion, for Israel My glory.
This is an apt ending to a chapter which has concentrated on God’s uniqueness and the fulfillment of His purposes, which is Isaiah’s constant prime concern. It explains why our Great Adoni Yahweh has brought His bird of prey, who executes His counsel, from the east. It is a call to the stubborn people of his day, in accordance with his instructions at his inaugural call, to recognize all that God is going to do. For through His Servant, His Holy Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Father Yahweh will certainly bring about His salvation in Zion for the sake of the true Israel, who are His prized possession, the One Who Is to bring glory to His name.
