A translation and sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Oct 29, 2006
(1) A burden of Damascus:
Look, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and she will become a heap of ruin.
(2) The cities of Aroer are deserted; they will be for flocks,
which will lie down, and none will frighten away.
(3) And each will disappear:
- the fortress from Ephraim,
- and the kingdom from Damascus;
- and the remnant of Syria.
They will be like the glory of the children of Israel, declares Jehovah of Hosts.
(4) And in that day the glory of Jacob will be thinned out,
and the fat of his flesh will grow lean.
(5) And it shall be :
as when the reaper gathers standing-grain
and his arm reaps the ears,
and it will be as when one gleans the ears of grain in the Valley of Rephaim.
(6) Gleanings will be left in it,
like striking an olive tree—
two - three berries in a tip top,
four - five in the branches of a fruit tree,
declares Jehovah God of Israel.
(7) In that day the man will look upon his Maker, and his eyes will look to the Holy One of Israel.
(8) He will not look
to the altars,
the work of his hands,
and he will not look at what his fingers have made,
either the Asherim or the sun-images.
(9) In that day his strong cities will be
like a deserted place of the forest or the hilltop,
which they deserted from the face of the children of Israel,
and there will be desolation.
(10) For you have forgotten the God of your salvation
and have not remembered the Rock of your refuge;
therefore,
you plant pleasant plants
and sow an exotic cutting,
(11) during the day, you fence your plantation,
and in the morning, you make your seed sprout,
but in the day of your grieving, the heap of harvest will be like an incurable sorrow.
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(12) Oh, the thunder of many peoples; they thunder like the thundering of the sea!
Oh, the roar of communities; they roar like the roaring of mighty waters!
(13) The communities roar like the roaring of many waters,
but He will rebuke it, and it will flee far away,
chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind
and whirling dust before the face of a storm-wind.
(14) At evening time, behold, terror! Before morning, it is no more!
This is the share of our looters, and the lot of our plunderers!
This is the fourth of Isaiah’s eleven “burdens” or “oracles” against particular nations. In this passage, God speaks to the nation of Israel along with Damascus, Syria, once again reminding them that they will be desolate if they forget Him. Tennessee Williams told a story of someone who forgot—the story of Jacob Brodzky, a shy Russian Jew whose father owned a bookstore. The older Brodzky wanted his son to go to college. The boy, on the other hand, desired nothing but to marry Lila, his childhood sweetheart—a French girl as effusive, vital, and ambitious as he was contemplative and retiring. A couple of months after young Brodzky went to college, his father fell ill and died. The son returned home, buried his father, and married his love. Then the couple moved into the apartment above the bookstore, and Brodzky took over its management.
The life of books fit him perfectly, but it cramped her. She wanted more adventure—and she found it, she thought, when she met an agent who praised her beautiful singing voice and enticed her to tour Europe with a vaudeville company. Brodzky was devastated. At their parting, he reached into his pocket and handed her the key to the front door of the bookstore.
“You had better keep this,” he told her, “because you will want it some day. Your love is not so much less than mine that you can get away from it. You will come back sometime, and I will be waiting.” She kissed him and left.
To escape the pain he felt, Brodzky withdrew deep into his bookstore and took to reading as someone else might have taken to drink. He spoke little, did little, and could most times be found at the large desk near the rear of the shop, immersed in his books while he waited for his love to return.
Nearly 15 years after they parted, at Christmastime, she did return. But when Brodzky rose from the reading desk that had been his place of escape for all that time, he did not take the love of his life for anyone more than an ordinary customer. “Do you want a book?” he asked.
She was startled that he didn’t recognize her, but she gained possession of herself and replied, “I want a book, but I’ve forgotten the name of it.” Then she told him a story of childhood sweethearts. A story of a newly married couple who lived in an apartment above a bookstore. A story of a young, ambitious wife who left to seek a career, who enjoyed great success but could never relinquish the key her husband gave her when they parted. She told him the story she thought would bring him to himself. But his face showed no recognition.
“You remember it; you must remember it—the story of Lila and Jacob?” After a long, bewildered pause, he said, “There is something familiar about the story, I think I have read it somewhere. It comes to me that it is something by Tolstoy.”
Dropping the key, she fled the shop. And Brodzky returned to his desk, to his reading, unaware that the love he waited for had come and gone. (from http://net.bible.org/illustration.php?topic=574)
Brodzky lived a desolate live because he forgot his wife. In Isaiah chapter 17, God reminds that we are desolate if we forget Him.
Israel had forgotten God. As we saw in Isaiah 7, King Pekah of the Northern Kingdom of Israel had struck an alliance with Rezin, king of Syria, thus this prophecy takes Syria and Northern Israel together. They were building security and comfort independently from God, and as a result, God promises through Isaiah to knock out all their props. The prophecy includes:
Here was a nation which forgot its God and which was stockpiling glory for itself (v. 3), and that glory become heaps of ruins (v.1). Are there ways in which you have forgotten God and started stockpiling glories for yourself that will end up in heaps of ruin? Jesus taught us to “Lay up treasure in heaven!” (Matt. 6:20). If we will remember God we will stockpile glory for Him in heaven, there no thief can break in and steal, no insect can destroy, and no rust can corrupt.
Israel forgot God and, and devastation was the result. The passage in Isaiah 17 talks about these invasions in terms wasting away due to sickness in verse 4, in terms of of a harvest of grain in v. 5 and in terms of whacking the trunk and branches of an olive tree to harvest it in v.6. The olive harvester gathers up the olives that fall to the ground, but no matter how hard he whacks the tree, there are a few olives that won’t shake down, and he leaves them. This becomes a symbol here in Isaiah for a remnant of people who turn back to Him.
When God brings judgment and shakes up the olive tree, He is pleased when people respond to judgment by turning back to Him in unshakeable faith. Verse six mentions a remnant, and verse 7 uses the definite article “the” designating this remnant as “the man” and says that this remnant will look to God his Maker rather than to man-made idols.
A remnant of people from Israel did indeed do this, for a few years later, King Hezekiah of Judah issued an invitation to everyone in both kingdoms, and the historical record of 2. Chron 30 states that some from the Northern Kingdom “humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem” to worship!
When you feel the rod of discipline upon your backside, turn your eyes upon Jesus! You are part of God’s remnant if you respond to God’s punishment by looking to Him and turning away from the works of your hands that God hates.
That’s what the people in the city of Thessalonica did in the Apostle Paul’s day: 1Th 1:4-10 “For we know, brothers loved by God, that He has chosen you… (6) you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, (7) so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. (8) For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. (9) For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, (10) and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.
They were experiencing affliction but when they heard the word of God preached by Paul, they responded in faith and looked eagerly for Jesus to return. That is an example to us!
But the majority of Israelites would experience desolation because they forgot God. Verse 9 describes fortified cities becoming deserted and as lonely as forests and bare hilltops. Medieval Jewish commentators Ibn Ezra and Kimchi comment that the simile in v. 9 is a historical allusion to the Canaanites deserting their cities when Joshua fought against them. Their abandoned cities will be desolations.
The reason for this desolation is found in verse 10: “you have forgotten the God of your salvation and have not remembered the Rock of your refuge.”
Moses warned Israel early on against forgetting God: Deut. 32:15-20 "But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked; you grew fat, stout, and sleek; then he forsook God who made him and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation. (16) They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominations they provoked him to anger. (17) They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded. (18) You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth. (19) "The LORD saw it and spurned them, because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters. (20) And he said, 'I will hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be, For they are a perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness.
Jeremiah warned the people soon after Isaiah did: Jer. 2:26-32 "As a thief is shamed when caught, so the house of Israel shall be shamed: they, their kings, their officials, their priests, and their prophets, (27) who say to a tree, 'You are my father,' and to a stone, 'You gave me birth.' For they have turned their back to me, and not their face. But in the time of their trouble they say, 'Arise and save us!' (28) But where are your gods that you made for yourself? Let them arise, if they can save you, in your time of trouble; for as many as your cities are your gods, O Judah. (29) "Why do you contend with me? You have all transgressed against me, declares the LORD. (30) In vain have I struck your children; they took no correction; your own sword devoured your prophets like a ravening lion. (31) And you, O generation, behold the word of the LORD. Have I been a wilderness to Israel, or a land of thick darkness? Why then do my people say, 'We are free, we will come no more to you'? (32) Can a virgin forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet my people have forgotten me days without number.
What follows is a description of the activities of these forgetful people:
(10) you plant pleasant plants
and sow an exotic cutting,
(11) during the day, you fence your plantation,
and in the morning, you make your seed sprout,
seeking to inherit heaps of harvest
Note three characteristics of these forgetful people:
a) Busyness: They are busy about something, but it is not the Lord’s work. They are planting gardens, but apart from faith in God. They are not waiting on God to make the crops grow, the text says “you cause your seed to sprout.” They are busy seeking exotic or strange new things to plant. This could also refer to creating places of worship for foreign gods. One of which was Asherah, a fertility goddess whose worship involved sexual perversion in special groves of trees. Are you feeling busy but for no good purpose? Step back and evaluate all your activities in light of what God has called you to do.
b) Protection: they are not trusting God to protect them, they are erecting their own fences and obsessing over protecting their interests. When you start obsessing over protecting things, that is a sure sign that you are forgetting God.
c) Stockpiling: They are like the rich man in the parable in Luke 12:16ff who was preoccupied with collecting wealth and getting comfort, so he keeps building bigger barns to store it all in until one day God snuffs out his life, and then what good is all the stuff the man collected?
All the stuff we heap up will become an incurable pain, a woeful sorrow, a bitter disappointment, says v.11. ILLUSTRATION of my family packing tons of junk furniture when we moved from Denver.
It’s so easy to forget, isn’t it and get wrapped up in busyness and protecting our interests and stockpiling our things. How do we fight against these trends and remember the God of our salvation and the Rock of our refuge?
a) Fellowship – Heb 3:13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. How can you remind each other every day of God if you never see each other? Heb 10:23-25 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. (24) And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, (25) not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Opposite is isolation or partying)
b) Scripture – “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee” Ps 119:11 (Antithesis is trivia that pours out of the media.)
c) Prayer – “Thy Name be hallowed, Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done” reminds us what it’s all about! Opposite of frenetic activity.
d) Lord’s Supper – “do this in remembrance of Me” says Jesus (antithesis is to forget to use food to remind us of God and instead obsess over the food itself, whether in gluttony or dieting)
e) Tithe – reminds us that all our finances come from God, so we give Him tribute
f) Submission to godly authority – when we have to obey someone else, it reminds us that we are under God’s authority and are not independent. Rom 8:7-8 “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. (8) Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
g) Memorials – When Noah got out of the ark, he built an altar, when Jacob saw the vision of the ladder and talked with God, he erected a memorial stone, when Joshua crossed the Jordan at flood-tide with the nation of Israel, they set up 12 stones to remember God’s mighty act. Every time a Jew walked by one of those places and saw that heap of stones, he was reminded of an amazing act of God. What kind of memorials can we build? Family photo albums, songs, scripture on the walls, whatever works to trigger your memories of God! (Antithesis is entertainment which is designed to make us forget real life.)
God is just. If we are not diligent to remember, we will suffer God’s judgment. You can read the rumblings of that oncoming judgment in Isa 17:12-14. Isaiah hears the crashing din of multitudes of Assyrian soldiers rolling in.
Yet at the same time, God expresses His justice by announcing the sudden downfall of the Assyrian army in the end. V. 14 “At evening time, look there it terror! Before morning, it is no more!” This fits exactly the historical account recorded by Isaiah years later in chapter 37:36 “And the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, “Look at all these dead bodies!” (37) Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed…”
If therefore, God is just and will certainly punish all who forget Him, let us strive all the more to remember Him, to fill our lives with ways of remembering Him, and if we do this, we will find delight. As the Psalmist says; “I will not forget your word; I will delight in your statutes.” (Psa 119:16)
Paul Harvey once told a story of a unique memorial that one man developed. In October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life. Somewhere over the South Pacific, the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. After eight days, their rations were gone, and they were facing starvation. Rickenbacker writes, “Captain William Cherry, “read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off. Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food…if I could catch it.” And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. You know that Captain Eddie made it. And now you also know…that he never forgot. Because every Friday evening, about sunset…on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast…you could see an old man walking…white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls…to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle…like manna in the wilderness.
(Source: http://net.bible.org/illustration.php?topic=1252 “The Old Man and the Gulls” from Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story by Paul Aurandt, 1977)
Eddie Rickenbacker was not going to forget how God delivered him through that seagull. And like that seagull came down, Jesus also came down to give His life for us. But Jesus died on a cross in order to take God’s just punishment for our sins upon Himself so that God could justly forgive us. Jesus has saved all who believe this. Believer, never forget! Remember the God of your salvation and the Rock of your refuge!