Isaiah 34:1,6,7b,9,10b

Isaiah 34 is pretty heavy. It is a judgment on all the nations. So far in Isaiah, most of the judgment has been directed at a particular nation. More often than not it is Israel. However, the very start of this chapter makes it very clear that all nations (excepting Israel) are involved in this judgment.

‘Come near, you nations, to hear;
And heed, you people!
Let the earth hear, and all that is in it…’ (Isaiah 34:1)

I think it may be a prophecy concerning the very end of time, because it is very complete. You can read for yourselves the whole chapter, to get the picture of how incredibly angry God is, but I will put a few verses here:

‘The sword of the LORD is filled with blood,
It is made overflowing with fatness,
With the blood of lambs and goats,
With the fat of kidneys and rams.
For the LORD has a sacrifice in Bozrah,
And a great slaughter in the land of Edom.

…

Their land shall be soaked with blood,
And their dust saturated with fatness.

…

Its streams shall be turned into pitch,
And its dust into brimstone;
Its land shall become burning pitch.

…

For generation to generation it shall like waste;
No one shall pass through it forever and ever.’ (Isaiah 34:6, 7b, 9, 10b)

This seems pretty final – ‘forever and ever’, so we can expect that this hasn’t happened as yet. There are many things in the chapter to ponder, but I think, as an overarching theme, one of the most important things to see is just how serious God is. How angry He is at the nations. All nations. He is angry at the whole earth. And it is not some passing, fleeting anger. It is serious. We see great slaughter, so much so that ‘the mountains shall be melted with their blood.’ (verse 3). We see Edom (as a representative of all the nations) becoming a volcanic wasteland full of streams of pitch and dust of brimstone, so much so that no-one passes through that area any more. We see the ‘hosts of heaven’, the heavenly bodies, falling out of the sky, the heavens being rolled up like a scroll. This is big, big stuff.
I think often through the daily grind of life and our happy-go-lucky friendships we come to some sort of acceptance that God is just there for us, He’s our friend in time of trouble, and He’s a good person to follow. But God is so much more than that. God is serious. When you follow God, you approve of the verses of this chapter. You say ‘Amen!’ when God talks of destruction of the ‘nations’. It is, in the humanly speaking sense, brutal. But God is serious when it comes to sin. He hates it. And, likewise, so should we. DO you ever think to yourself, in the same sort of words used in this chapter, that you hate the sin in your own life? Does sin really upset you? Because, as followers of Jesus, God, we not only grow to be more like Him by loving others more, being nice to people, caring for their needs and so on, but we grow more like Him in our detestation of sin in all its manifestations.

Let’s think about that for a bit today!