Telescopic Predictions (Part A)

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Paul said, I'm a believer too, and I've received this from the Holy Spirit, and I'm sharing these things that I have from Him with you. And that's what Isaiah is saying here in verse 10. That which I have heard from Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, I have declared to you. And again, how can he say this with such authority?

And these things are so far away because it was a genuine work of God in his life. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Isaiah.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, here's Pastor Rick in Isaiah chapter 21 with today's edition of Cross-Reference Radio. Telescopic predictions and that is what it's like. I mean, Isaiah, he saw so much so far ahead into the future and he wrote so much of it down.

You know, the critics like to pick on Daniel. He could not have prophesied so many things ahead of time like that. Well, what about Jeremiah and Isaiah? Do you think these guys just sat around making stuff up that came true?

Well, they didn't make it up, but it did come true. The question is, is it relevant to us? 2700 years later, are the prophecies of God to his people relevant to us? Absolutely.

They're absolutely. They may not apply directly to us, but they belong in that category of things that edify us, that make us stronger. This unstable region in the days of the prophets, constantly in turmoil, the Jews were supposed to be spared all this nonsense, but they were not. I think, you know, the longer you go in Christianity, if you are maturing in the faith, the more vital prayer becomes to you.

The more you realize just how many things are impossible to repair through human hands and the appeal to the Lord is no wonder Paul encouraged believers to pray without ceasing. Incidentally, Babylon and Assyria, they're located in modern Iraq. The Persians, they're in modern Iran, today's Iran, and all of these fit into what's happening in these prophecies. And he is saying in the beginning when the first one up will be Babylon, and he's saying there's a storm coming your way and you're not going to survive it.

As we go forward, I'll try to clarify some of these things because it takes knowledge of history to kind of keep up with the prophets because they weave in and out. But verse one, the burden against the wilderness of the sea as whirlwinds in the south pass through, so it comes from the desert from a terrible land. Now this is Babylon, this wilderness of the sea.

The context will bring that out as he moves forward. And verse nine will just make it very clear to us. This wilderness by the sea, of course, the desert is a wilderness.

There's nothing there spiritually. The sea is in constant turmoil. So the language that the prophet is choosing to use is on purpose. He's being creative. He'll use that quite a few times in this. Babylon, idolatrous, spiritually decadent, immoral as the desert. He continues as a whirlwind in the south pass through, so it comes from the desert from a terrible land. And so it will be sudden. It will sweep upon them. Ultimately, it will be the Persians, the Medes and the Persians that will defeat the Babylonians and then enter the city without with hardly no bloodshed. Verse two, a distressing vision is declared to me.

The treacherous dealer deals treacherously and the plunderer plunders. Go up, Elam, besiege, O media, all its singing sign for me. I have made to sing. It should be singing.

I've made to cease. And so God is getting down to business with his judgments. Elam and the Medes, they are under Persian authority. The Persians will defeat the Babylonians in war, but they won't enter the city of Babylon through violence. They will get into the city in the night, Daniel 5, when the handwriting is on the wall. That's the night that the Medes and the Persians entered the city and took it over.

And there was no more Babylonian kingdom after that. Verse three, therefore, my loins are filled with pain. Pangs have taken hold of me like the pangs of a woman in labor. I was distressed when I heard it. I was dismayed when I saw it. Verse four, my heart wavered. Fearfulness frightened me.

The night for which I longed, he turned into fear for me. So the metaphors that he is using depicting his reaction to the bad news, what he saw as a prophet concerning the Babylonians, who at this time in the history that he wrote this, that he saw these visions. Babylon was not the world power. Syria was still the power.

It'd be a hundred years, over a hundred years before the Babylonians would defeat the Assyrians. And he sees what's going to happen, and he has a physical reaction to this. It was similar with Moab, when he gave the visions over Moab. And this speaks to the heart of the man. He's part of the human experience. He's not a self-righteous religious Jew who is removed from the misery of the Gentiles.

He's very much plugged in. It is no surprise that God gives a man like this so much vision to, again, as though he's looking through a telescope and he's seeing things that are so far away. And the details that belong to these events, the Elamites and the Medes, they're part of the Persian army that defeated Babylon 539 years before the Christ. But Babylon and Assyria, they would have war, two big shootouts with each other, two wars. Assyria won the first one. Some 84 years later, Babylon won the second and they became the world power. The first time the Assyrians beat the Babylonians, that meant doom for Judah, because the Assyrians figured, you know, Judah is sending to Babylon to have a union against us, to team up against us, and so they took care of the Babylonians and they came down and conquered almost all of Judah, everything except Jerusalem, and that's only because the Lord sent his angel on behalf of the Jews. As I mentioned, Babylon won the second war with each other, and we read this, and to us this is boring, but this was fantastic news if you were a Jew, especially if you were coming out of the captivity, which hasn't happened yet in Isaiah's day. Again, that's 170 years away. But when it does, the Jews are going to look at these prophecies, yep, all this happened. It happened around our lifetime. And leading up to it, you would think that the Jews in the days of Jeremiah would have read these prophecies because Jeremiah rings in on a lot of them and he echoes Isaiah, but it didn't register. They didn't want it. And that's what we're up against when we talk about the prophecies in the New Testament and the Old, that Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies, that there will be a one-world government under an Antichrist, that there will be just this time of Antichrist sentiment that will be global unlike ever before.

And even though the evidence is right in front of folks, they won't receive it. Well, ultimately, his prophecies against Babylon are fulfilled against Antichrist because his regime and that culture that supports him will be as Babylon was. We talked about this in earlier chapters. It's mentioned in Revelation 14 and Revelation 18.

Politically, culturally, economically, spiritually, it will be just as wicked as Babylon was to God. And so he says in verse 3, the pain, the pangs, the distress, the dismay, the fearfulness, the fear, a real reaction he had to seeing these things. And it's just amazing. God is saying to Isaiah, I'm going to show you some things. And Isaiah, he was almost sick over what he saw. Verse 5, prepare the table, set a watchman in the tower, eat and drink, arise, you princes, anoint the shield, for thus has the Lord said to me, go set a watchman, let him declare what he sees. Now, he's using sort of poetic language. He's the watchman ultimately, but he's telling the leaders of these kingdoms of Babylon to set your watchman because it's coming.

The enemy is going to come and you're going to fall. But on the other side, the spiritual side, Isaiah is the watchman. And as I mentioned, Daniel 5 records the fall of Babylon at Belshazzar's feast. And you see, Babylon thought they were impregnable. They lost on the battlefield.

That's all right. Nobody can get into the city. And of course, the Persians, they found entrance in the city through the waterways and they did get in and they killed Belshazzar that night.

Daniel survived. They were caught unprepared. And Isaiah warning them 100 years earlier, go set a watchman, let him declare what he sees. But they didn't bother with this.

Their complacency was their downfall. Verse 7, and he saw a chariot, the watchman that is, with a pair of horsemen, a chariot of donkeys, a chariot of camels. And he listened earnestly with great care. Then he cried, a lion, my Lord. I stand continually on the watchtower in the daytime.

I have sat at my post every night. And the very poetic language he's using here. And the Hebrew brings this out. The watchman is the prophet, but he's sort of, you know, he's running parallel to what the watchman should be for the Babylonians. But spiritually, he's the watchman. He sees the approaching army on the Babylonians. And when he says, a lion, my Lord, the force of the words, and the Hebrew backs this up, is that the watchman is the lion. He's brave. He's standing his post, as Habakkuk said, I will stand and watch and see, stand my post and see how he will answer me. And so this is a reference to having the nerve, the courage, to see what is happening, to report it in detail, to not run from his post and panic. And it is a dual, again, has a dual application to what a watchman should be on guard duty and what the prophet is receiving the vision. The lookout is to tell only what he sees. He is to report it that way. And it would take a man of courage to do it.

Is that not true? Is it not true that it takes courage to be a Christian in front of opposition? I mean, anybody can sing psalms and hymns in the church when you're around a bunch of believers. But what about when you're out face to face and you see things that the Bible has told you and you have the opportunity to say it, to share it? It's going to take courage. You have to say, a lion is the watchman. I'm lion-hearted.

I'm not going to back down from what I have to say. And Christians have done that for centuries. They've gone to the stake, abiding in Christ all the way. Verse 9, and look, here comes a chariot of men with a pair of horsemen. Then he answered and said, Babylon has fallen, has fallen, and all the carved images of her gods he has broken to the ground. And so the watchman proclaims the tragic end of mighty Babylon that was supposed to be invincible. And it happened initially under the Assyrians. When the Assyrians beat them on the battlefield, Babylon wasn't as great as it would be when Nebuchadnezzar becomes king.

His father was very much part of that. Anyhow, it will finally happen at the Persians and then spiritually be fulfilled in Antichrist. And so his prediction looks forward to the ultimate end of this great enemy of God in the end times. And John verifies this, as does Jeremiah. How much more to pick out of this that will maybe wake you up if you're saying, boy, there's a lot of history, a lot of detail.

What does it have to do with me? It has everything to do with the fact that here you have a man receiving this kind of prophecy and telling it like it is going to happen, even though he's not going to live to see any of it. He's not going to live to see the Assyrians and the Babylonians fight. In fact, on the way to that fight 100 years from now, from the time that Isaiah said these things, Josiah, that good king, will be slain, poking his nose where it didn't belong.

And the four kings after him or his children, they were all rotten. Anyway, all the carved images of her gods, he has broken to the ground. Now, the Babylonians were known to treat idols of other people's gods and even their own gods as embodiments of the god. God was in that idol. And they would dress the idols, they would put food out to feed it. You see this now, you go to a Thai restaurant, if they're practicing that type of religion, you'll see little food out offered to their gods.

And he never eats it, it's just wasted food. And you would think that they would connect it. Somehow the physical and the spiritual are not crossing over. Maybe there's no one there, as Isaiah said. You know, shout louder.

Maybe he's busy. So anyhow, they would treat these, they would dress them up and parade them around during festivals, things like that. But they also respected the gods of the conquered peoples many times in that world. And they would take those gods back to their temple and put it there as a trophy.

And eventually it would go back to the people. And we saw this in 1 Samuel 5, when the Philistines got hold of the Ark. They put it in the temple of Dagon.

And they were doggone when they found it there. Their statue of Dagon was ... his hands fell off his head. Anyway, Daniel chapter 1 also talks about this very thing. And so the idol worshippers, they feared that if they treated the idols the wrong way, there would be retaliation. And so they would show some respect for the conquered people. But here, all the carved images of her gods, he has broken to the ground. Yahweh was doing that long before this took place. King David would pulverize them.

Josiah destroyed them. Verse 10, O my threshing, O my threshing and the grain of my floor, that which I have heard from Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, I have declared to you. Well, this is how revelation or prophecy is supposed to come to us.

This is how it is imparted. And the inspiration behind the revelation, of course, is God. And Paul wrote to the Corinthians, For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Paul says, I'm a believer too. And I've received this from the Holy Spirit. And I'm sharing these things that I have from Him with you. And that's what Isaiah is saying here in verse 10. That which I have heard from Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, I have declared to you. And again, how can he say this with such authority?

And these things are so far away because it was a genuine work of God in his life. Verse 11, the burden against Dumas, he calls me out to Sierra, Watchman, what of the night, Watchman, what of the night. And so he's continuing with this Watchman who is to see the trouble that is coming. Now he's talking about Edom. He's going back away from Babylon, which is in the future.

And he's coming back to the time that he's living in Syria, the tyrant in that region. Their armies, of course, put dread into all the people there. The Edomites include them. The Edomites lived by these fast food chains.

That's why they call them the Edomites. Okay, they live south of the Dead Sea. That's where their territory was.

And so you had the Edomites and going north, you had Moab and then Ammon. Today, all of that is in modern Jordan, just across the Jordan River. And I don't know why they didn't call it the Israel, the Israeli River. Why did they call it?

Why does Jordan get to name it? Okay, I'm digressing. Coming back to this, the dread that they were feeling in those days. Now he's going to personify Edom, asking it, you know, they're going to ask him, what hope do we have? And it's not like he was in actual dialogue with these people. He's preaching and he's writing these prophecies. And it's for his readers to look at this and ask questions and to be moved. Apparently, it was well done enough to keep it in circulation. They didn't just write his prophecies down and say, boy, this stuff is crazy. Who can understand it and throw it away?

They preserved it because they got it. Whether all the peoples believe it or not, of course, that's another matter. But the righteous, they knew that this was God's word to the prophet. And so this word, duma, it means silence. And as is the custom of Isaiah, he has word play all over the place. It would be nice if we all could speak the ancient Hebrew and read it that way.

We wouldn't have to, it would be right there in front of us. So he moves one letter from Adam or Edom and he moves it to duma, which means silence. His creative way of saying, Edom will be silenced. Edom will be no more.

And we know this is Edom because he mentions Sierra, and that is, again, his reference to them indicates that using duma is word play, a corruption of Edom. In that territory, there's Petra, that rock city exists. And also Aaron is believed to have been buried on Mount Hor, which is in the territory of Edom, though they're not sure where that mountain is.

We do know it's in Edom's territory. Anyway, they were descendants of Esau, the brother of Jacob. And Esau was a man's man, but he just wasn't spiritual. Spiritual things did not move him.

They did move Jacob even though Jacob was, you know, a swindler. He was more sensitive to the spiritual realm. Surely God is in this place and I knew it not. Well, we never hear of, you know, the God of Esau. We never hear of Esau calling on the Lord.

That's an accurate portrayal. And it's the spirit and attitude that God says, I hate that attitude. Anyhow, the Edomites were descendants of Esau and Esau was nicknamed Edom, which means red. And that territory, the landscape, the mountains, the soil, there's redness to it, as I mentioned, south of the Dead Sea. These people, they did not get along with the Jews. The psalmist writes about it and it's in the history. But they would be conquered by the Assyrians. And after the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 70 AD, after Christ had ascended to heaven, we don't read of them anymore. Herod, the think he was so great. I mean, how do you say Herod the Great and the man was a monster?

You know, you need to revise that. Anyway, he was an Edomite, as were the Herods, and they pass off the scene. Verse 12, the watchman said, the morning comes and also the night, if you will inquire, inquire, return, come back. And so there's an invitation here. He says, you know, ask, you know, return and come back. Seek Yahweh is what the watchman's message is to those who would hear.

Edom, of course, declines the invitation. They never turn to Yahweh, though the Herods thought they were friends of Yahweh, building the temple and the other things, but they were false the whole time. Verse 13, the burden against Arabia in the forest, which is really the thicket in Arabia.

You will lodge, O you traveling companies of the Dedenites. Verse 14, O inhabitants of the land of Timah, bring water to him who is thirsty with the bread they met him who fled. Verse 15, for they fled from the swords, from the drawn sword, from the bent bow and from the distress of war. Verse 16, thus Yahweh has said to me within a year, according to the year of a hired man, all the glory of Kedar will fail.

Verse 17, and the remainder of the number of archers and the mighty men of the people of Kedar will be diminished for the Lord God, the Lord Yahweh of Israel has spoken it. So this is Arabia and the Dedenites were the descendants of Abraham and Keturah. And you would think, you know, well, they weren't from the chosen son, Isaac.

Abraham had no less than 12 sons with Keturah after Sarah had died. And these Arabians, the children of Keturah and Ishmael, another son of Abraham are known to us as the Arabs today. And Isaiah, he saw that the day was going to come when the Arab caravans traveling these routes would be hiding from the Assyrian army and that the desert peoples from Timah, an oasis town, would bring relief to them. But they would eventually be driven, the Arabs, deeper into the desert. And the prophet says within a year the glory of these events, within a year the glory of the Arabian tribes would be gone. And they were powerful in the desert, well respected, and that would all be gone. Again, to reference Lawrence of Arabia, his task to fight the Turks that were in that part of the world during World War I was to unite the Arab tribes into a fighting force because they fought each other so much that you couldn't do anything with them. And he succeeded in doing that and they were successful in driving the Turks out. Then the British ended up with Jerusalem. And that's how eventually the Jews got back into Jerusalem through the British. Well you can go to Jerusalem now and you can still see old jail houses from the British that the British army built when they were occupying Israel before they turned it over to the Jews.