Ahab, this rotten king, we read in 1 Kings 21, 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, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of Isaiah chapter 23 with today's edition of Cross-Reference Radio. There are still blessings within it.
Setting Things Right, that's the title. I'd like to start off by saying that God judges the nations for the way they treat each other. Well, nations are made of people, so it always comes down to people.
It's not the nations, it's the people in the nation. In Romans chapter 2, Paul was telling them that God knows how to deal with those who've never heard the gospel. He certainly knows how to deal with people who have heard the gospel, those who have rejected it. He says, For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law. Well, God judges people by the way they treat him and other people. He really can't separate them. It's very perplexing when you come across someone who claims to be a Christian and they have all these gifts and they're the most loveless people you could find.
That shouldn't be that way. Well, let's get to it because we've got a lot. Verse 1 of Isaiah 23, the burden against hire. Well, you ships of Tarshish, for it is laid waste so that there is no house, no harbor from the land of Cyprus.
It is revealed to them. Be still, verse 2, you inhabitants of the coastlands, you merchants of Sidon, whom those who cross the sea have filled. And, verse 3 now, and on great waters of grain, Shihor, the harvest of the river is her revenue and she is a marketplace for the nations. Well, a lot of places are mentioned here, Tyre, Tarshish, Sidon, Shihor. A lot of people lived in these places. This is about the people. Just millions of souls that are being addressed and all that's being said by the prophet. Tyre, for centuries, was the maritime center of that ancient world, world, the commerce. There is a website, What's Going On With Shipping, that I like.
Well, it's actually a YouTube channel. And I like watching it because he gets into what's going on around the world with shipping. And it's just so much has to do with us. The prices we pay for things, the oil, the cargo, the politics involved, the war in the Ukraine, the black fleet that shouldn't be, but is, and the breaking rules, so much. It's all commerce.
And that's what's going on here. Tyre controlled the Mediterranean. That grain that grew in the delta in Egypt, the Nile Delta, well, it found its way through the coastlands of the Mediterranean and then the trade routes throughout the world because of Tyre. These were the Phoenicians. Some of the Phoenicians were physicians, well-established, seafaring traders. And they became Gebors, those of renown and power, but not to God.
Among men, they became a problem. And it will take centuries to completely take them out of the picture. And God is calling that through Isaiah. He's telling the people who will be listening to his prophecies that, you know, that financial, that commerce center, that maritime center is going to be judged. And it's not going to be judged in one generation. There are going to be many generations that will suffer this judgment because they know about me and yet they choose their gods. And I'm going to deal with them.
I'm going to set things right. And this will run down through chapter 20, well, it runs throughout the Bible, of course. And so what as Tyre stood for in her time as a commercial power, Babylon represented imperial power. Well, just because these kingdoms are gone, others have filled their spot, have taken their place.
We still have commercial powers and imperial powers to this day on various scales. Now, Sidon, also mentioned with Tyre, also a Phoenician city, was the older of the two cities, the older established city, both of them in modern day Lebanon. And that Israel's neighbors to the northwest, you can stand in Israel, you can look right over and you can see Lebanon.
Look to the right, you see Syria. Well, anyway, these, at this time, they became popular targets of the prophets against the surrounding nations because of their wicked influence on the Jewish people. The prophets would take issue with them in the eyes of God.
Well, that's what's happening here with Tyre. The Phoenicians greatly influenced Israel's idolatry, which it explains why the prophets had such indignation and didn't forget them when it came time to talking about the foreign nations. Let me tell you about Tyre, you know, that maritime center of commerce of the world, let me tell you what's going to happen to them importing all these idols into our land. King Ahab, he is the one that had just so much wickedness in him. He was a king in the northern kingdom when the monarchy divided Judah and Israel.
He was a king in the north and a very powerful one at that. And it was through him that Baal worship really flooded into the northern kingdom, which the prophets Amos and Hosea tried to combat through their prophecies and their preachings. Because they didn't just sit down and write prophecy, they preached also to the people. And we see a lot of that in the book of Ezekiel. They're coming to the house of Ezekiel to hear him preach and play instruments, which he did do. Well, this Ahab, this rotten king, we read in 1 Kings 21, But there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself to do wickedness in the sight of Yahweh, because Jezebel his wife stirred him up.
How many lessons are in that? How important women are seen in a verse like that? How much influence she had over this man and how much he allowed her to have, but this time it's for wickedness. So this Ahab, he introduces Baal worship through her, through Jezebel on a national level.
1 Kings 16 documents this for us. She did her utmost to purge Yahweh from the north and place this cruel and hideous man-made demonic god in place of Yahweh. Jezebel was the most hated woman in the Old Testament. Herodias, perhaps the most hated in the New Testament.
Well, what did she do? Well, she asked for the head of John the Baptist. Now John's disciples, they weren't Christians as we know Christians.
They may have become, but they were still Old Testament believers. The hatred was fair game with them. They hate their enemies. And you know they didn't love her when the story got out. She was the one that was behind the beheading of the beloved John the Baptizer. So that's some of what's going on here with Tyre, their history in relation to Israel.
Shihor, that's briefly mentioned in verse 3. Somewhere along the Nile, known for the grain that it produced and of course the Phoenicians would transport it. What good is it if you have all of this grain sitting in silos and you can't distribute it? Well, rot where it is.
Well, this is world commerce and it fed a lot of people. A lot of pagan people at that. Verse 4, Be ashamed, O Sidon, for the sea has spoken, the strength of the sea, saying, I do not labor nor bring forth children. Neither do I rear young men nor bring up virgins. So the sea says, you're not my family. Don't be acting like you come from me. I'm not your mother nature. So that's poetic language of Isaiah saying to the Phoenicians, Tyre and Sidonians, that don't be too impressed with yourself. The earth is larger than you in spite of your success.
Because when people are very successful, they start to feel like everything belongs to them. You look at these people running around trying to save the planet. You better think about saving souls. You're worried about the planet flooding because ice melting? Well, what about Noah? What do you think of Noah? He was talking about a flood coming too. His flood happened. Yours is not going to happen.
Anyway, coming back to this. How many Christian scientists, not the fake religion Christian scientists, but how many scientists are Christians that are working in Antarctica right now? There's a lot of scientists there. And of course, they don't have any interest in God.
They think they're quite successful without him. After all, they can live in the harshest climate on earth without God. Yeah, you won't survive death with that attitude. Anyway, coming back to verse 5 now. When the report reaches Egypt, they also will be in agony at the report of Tyre. Verse 6, cross over to Tarshish. Well, you inhabitants of the coastlands. Verse 7, is this your joyous city? Whose antiquity is from ancient days? Whose feet carried her off to dwell?
Well, there's a lot here. Of course, the shipping industry of Tyre fed the Mediterranean. That's what he's... Tarshish, we don't know exactly where it is. Probably Spain, somewhere in North Africa.
Far away is sufficient. We don't have to really know that. But her judgment will demonstrate the sovereignty of God over all the earth. The Jews were supposed to live like they knew that, and most of them did not. Isaiah, of course, is letting us know that he understands economics, the world system.
Not part of it, but he understands it. Where it mentions in verse 7, Tyre's feet. Those are her trading fleets, her many ships that belong to her. And the colonies, the Phoenicians set up colonies along the Mediterranean to establish trade.
Carthage was one of them, modern Tunisia. Again, thinking themselves successful through Baal, or whatever god they worshiped. Who needs Yahweh? Look how well we are doing. It is a mistake of mankind. Cain was doing pretty good with his farming. Killing his brother was secondary.
That goes back to how we treat people. Anyway, the joyful citizens of this economic dynamo of those days would fail. Just a brief. First, the Assyrians will begin to trouble Tyre and Sidonian and cut back on their profits. Nebuchadnezzar will come a hundred years later, and he will take out the land. Tyre had two parts. There was on shore, on land, Tyre, the city. And then there was about a half a mile away, out in the Mediterranean Sea, was offshore Tyre. And when Nebuchadnezzar shows up to conquer onshore Tyre, he does that. He wipes out the city, turns it into debris. But they fled to offshore Tyre. He would have said, nah, nah, nah, you can't get us, and he couldn't.
He was infuriated by that. Alexander the Great will come along, and he will say, hey, let's take this rubble here, and let's just build a causeway out to that offshore Tyre. And between that causeway and our fleets, we'll take them out. And that is exactly what happened. And this is exactly to detail as Ezekiel the prophet in Ezekiel 26 lays out for us. Now, this took over 200 years.
It happened in sessions. Tyre would rebuild itself each time. Now, it wouldn't be as great.
Her glory would fade each time until the Saracens in the 4th century, in the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, they come along, and they really put the kibosh on it. Today, in Lebanon, Tyre, the fourth largest city in Lebanon, but it is just a tour stop. Tourism is its income.
There's still a lot of fishermen there, but most of them aren't doing well in the fishing industry. And so that's just an overview of what's happening. Isaiah called it. Ezekiel called it.
We take it for granted. If you look up, you know, ancient Tyre and where it is today, you might miss the fact that the prophets called this. And there are more details, and I'll maybe hit on them, too, with the fishermen and their nets. Verse 8, who has taken his counsel against Tyre? The crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traders are the honorable men of the earth. The money makers, the power brokers, the geebores, like in Genesis 6. In Genesis 6, they had too much power, and the result was this corruption and this violence on the earth that God put an end to. The honorable men of the earth, it says, they're not honorable men of heaven. Otherwise, they would not be coming under this judgment. So people were like, oh, you know, these, the Tyrenians are so great, you know, they got all this money and they control the world and God is going, I'm going to deal with them. I'm going to set this right. Judged because of how they treated people on earth so they could get their prophets and their disregard for the true God of heaven.
And it always comes to this. There would be people in that ancient world that would get word from these prophets and believe them. Otherwise, that's why we come across these proselytes in the New Testaments, these Gentiles who become Jews. So it wasn't like, you know, they weren't hearing these things. These things were published. Word circulated. Caravans would take scriptures if they could from time to time and sell them on the open market. Anything they could transport and people would buy them. There were gigantic libraries in those days.
So, you know, we don't think of the ancients as just people who, you know, were so archaic. They didn't think, they thought very much. They built, Babylon was destroyed by the Assyrians and then they built it into this wonder of the world.
Afterwards, this went on all the time in various places. And to this day, builders are still putting these incredible buildings, these bridges, all foot bridges, bridges for trains and for cars. Incredible to us.
Wonders of the world. But it's not new. It's been happening. Anyway, just as Yahweh judged Egypt in chapter 19 and Babylon in chapter 14, he due to Tyre, verse 9, Yahweh of hosts has purposed it to bring to dishonor the pride and glory, to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth. Verse 10, overflow through your lake like a river, O daughter of Tarshish, there is no more strength. And so God's tolerance of their arrogance is running out.
They're approaching the flashpoint. Arrogance is something that, such a big issue with God, because it ends up treating, the maltreatment of others comes from this arrogance of an individual and those in power. We know that. We have powers today that do whatever they want to do.
They jam things down your throat. Well, Obadiah, his entire prophecy is about Edom, who's just loaded with pride and arrogance. He lived out in the desert fortress and really had nothing to show, but that didn't stop them from being arrogant. And so the prophecy of Obadiah says, I'm going to set this right.
He has, and that now is a tourist stop. Anyway, verse 10, the overflow through your land like the river, O daughter of Tarshish, there is no more strength. It will reach to the colonies.
Anarchy will break out there. Verse 11, he stretched out his hand over the sea. He shook the kingdoms. Yahweh has given a commandment against Canaan to destroy its strongholds.
Verse 12, and he said, you will rejoice no more, O you oppressed virgin daughter of Sidon. Arise, cross over to Cyprus. There also you will have no rest. And so the Lord says, I'm on you now. I'm going to deal with you.
There's no escape. Those who have been influenced and promised land by the Sidonians as well as the Sidonians, they're going to be judged. And as I mentioned, the Assyrians began this judgment that spanded centuries, ultimately, into the Dark Ages. I mentioned Nebuchadnezzar starting it.
Ezekiel 29 talks about the fishermen would be working on their nets, their fishing nets, on the debris from offshore tire, that causeway, to offshore tire, that causeway, the debris that was put there by Alexander the Great. And it's still there to this day. It is still part of the Taurus stop to see. Look at that. You see those big blocks of stone?
Alexander the Great put those there so he could get out to offshore tire. But they'll leave out many times, unless they're, of course, Christian. They'll leave out that this is what Ezekiel prophesied hundreds of years before it took place.
So there we go. Again, Ezekiel 26, 28. Amazing, literal accuracy for the fulfillment of what the prophets said. Verse 13, behold, the land of the Chaldeans, this people, which was not Assyria, founded it for wild beasts of the desert. They set up its towers. They raised up its palaces and brought it to ruin. Of course, when it's really raised up, they erected it.
They tore it down. They used these siege towers to overcome whatever fortifications the Babylonians had. This is before Nebuchadnezzar. And they tried to make it so it would never rebuild, but it did rebuild, and it ended up being built up so strong that they conquered the Assyrians in time. And so he says, verse 14, well, you ships of Taurus, for your strength is laid waste. Well, if the Babylonians could not resist the Assyrians, you will not be able to either. Verse 15, now it shall come to pass in that day that Tyre will be forgotten. Seventy years according to the days of one king. At the end of 70 years, it will happen to Tyre as in the song of the harlot. Verse 16, take a harp, go about the city, you've forgotten harlot, make sweet melodies, sing many songs that you may be remembered. What do you make of that in your devotions? This is a lot of work to get, but the key is in it. You've forgotten harlot. That is the key. She's not what she used to be.
She's got to use a song, an instrument just to get attention. And the prophet is saying, that's you, Tyre. You're going to be this, your glory's going to fade, and the time is going to come where you won't be able to drum up business. And again, that has happened to the city. The 70 years, a fixed period. Well, that's about how long the Babylonians were in power under Nebuchadnezzar. Well, the kingdom he started, but that's about how long it was.
That fits perfectly. We have no reason to doubt the total accuracy of those numbers. We just don't have the fixed dates.
They didn't write down, you know, the date from here to here. But we have enough historical information to understand, hey, that's not far-fetched at all. And by faith, we know it's accurate. Verse 17, and it shall be at the end of 70 years that the Lord will deal with Tyre. And of course, we think of Israel had a similar judgment on her.
Judah did. She will return to her hire and commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world on the face of the earth. And so I mentioned earlier that she didn't just go away. She would rebuild, but the glory would not be what it was each time.
It was less and less and less until finally it became an insignificant village. And of course, the Lebanese have taken it, and they have built it up. But I don't think any of you stayed awake at night figuring how you can go visit Tyre. Anyway, verse 18. Well, I guess you know, you might say, well, I'd like to see Rome. I'd like to see the Colosseum. I'd like to go to Turkey and see modern, you know, cities that were part of the seven churches. But you probably don't say, but I'd like to go to Tyre.
But if you're, you know, the deeper students would want to go there and see those, that debris there in the Mediterranean Sea. Anyway, verse 18. Her gain and her pay will be set apart for Yahweh.
It will not be treasured nor laid up, for her gain will be for those who dwell before Yahweh and eat sufficiently and for fine clothing. This is messianic, and it is also part of the repatriation of Israel. Ezra 3.7 talks about the Jews hiring the Sidonians and those from Tyre to bring materials in the building of Zerubbabel's temple, which would be the second. Solomon's temple having been destroyed, and Zerubbabel comes back 70 years later, and they begin building, rebuilding the temple.
Then it stops because of the protesters. Yeah, they had to deal with those two. So anyway, the work stopped, but God raised up the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. And they excited the people to do what they were supposed to do through good preaching.
How forceful are right words? It says in Ecclesiastes, and the people rebuilt the second temple. Now we come to Isaiah chapter 24, and passing from the judgment of this maritime superpower of the day, Tyre, we now come to the judgments on the whole earth. And the prophetess is again telling the Jewish people, our God runs the world. Why are you worshipping these local gods?
Why are you worshipping this chunk? Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.
You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new editions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick right here on Cross Reference Radio.
