Spiritless religion does not sit well with God.
Going through rituals without a relationship with God really offends him. You know, when Jesus went to the seven churches in Revelation, addressing each one of them, he pinpointed their problems and he also highlighted areas where they excelled. And you say to yourself, why would he do that when these people had Jezebels in them?
While they had Jezebels, they also had true worshipers and he did not lose sight of that. We will go right to the first verse. Woe to Jerusalem, woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt.
Add year to year, let feasts come around. Sometimes these prophets speak almost in code. They know what they were saying. This reference to the city where David dwelt. Well, David took Jerusalem from the Jebusites, 2 Samuel 5.
But Ariel will grab much of our attention in the beginning. It is a poetic name for Jerusalem. But it is introduced with a woe, woe to Jerusalem, woe to Ariel. And so there's this emphasis that Isaiah is preaching concerning Jerusalem, the city of God, the city of peace. And Ariel means literally from the Hebrew, lion of God, Ariel.
But there's a dual meaning here. The lion of God, an altar. It also is used to refer to the altar of God. Because what should have characterized Jerusalem with all that God invested in his people, with all that he had done for them? Heroism and sacrifice. That is characterized by that one word in context to how the prophet is using it and how Ezekiel uses it. Heroism and sacrifice.
It is the lion's altar. Of course they fell short. As a people they failed. Well, don't get discouraged when ideals fail you. These high standards, God's standards high.
We can't reach the top. But we are so much better off trying than giving up in discouragement and walking away. God never walked away from his people. He withdrew but he did not abandon them. And that comes out in the prophecies of Isaiah in this 29th chapter also. The lion of God defiantly, defiantly holding the Assyrian army at bay because that's what's happening historically here. This is about initially the siege of Jerusalem. Assyria again, the whole life of the prophet Isaiah is in the shadow of Assyria.
This death knell that was looming or sounding in the background all of his life. And he writes about it. He addresses it.
When he gets into the position of prophet, preacher, he addresses these things. But that is what Jerusalem is doing. They are defying the Assyrian army.
We'll get to that in chapters 35 a little further up. And thus the name is descriptive of Jerusalem. Ariel, the heroic city. The heroic symbol of divine truth. It was supposed to be a beacon to the world. This lighthouse saying, we have the truth, you don't. But if you want the truth, come get the truth.
Well, they failed on that latter part miserably. But it was an emblem of truth. David knew it. Ariel, also the altar where the sacrifices were burned. Ezekiel 43, 15 and 16.
I'll come to that in a minute. It is God's place of sacrifice. He is the one that gives value to it. You build an altar anywhere. It is nothing until God acknowledges it and accepts it. How do we know Abraham? Abraham, throughout the landscape of the promised land, he left altars, places of worship to his God. And verse 2 will clearly point to that place of sacrifice and fire because of course fire belongs to this sacrifice of this altar as opposed to the incense altar. Which is fire was involved there too, but not certainly the flames of the brazen altar. As I mentioned, Ezekiel, he picks up on what Isaiah is saying here. Some of the commentators, you know, they debate whether it means Jerusalem or the altar of God and back and forth. Well, I wouldn't get to my understanding without having to read all of their arguments. I don't mean arguments in the sense of fussing at each other, but their positions.
And my conclusion is it is both. Isaiah and Ezekiel give us an interpretive rendering. There's nothing wrong with that. If you're reading your Bible to a child, say the child is four years old and you're reading and you come across words and meanings that are over the child's head. But you know you can reword it in a way that the child will understand without harming the text. That is an interpretive rendering.
I do it sometimes from the pulpit. You know, if I read that word, it's going to cause more questions than give answers. And if I just read the translation of the word literal or alternate, it will put to rest that question.
So there's nothing wrong with that as long as the meanings are not changed. I'm not saying that we should do that with our scripture, not at all. So it's referring to the place where the altar of God always burned or at least was to always burn.
The flame was not to go out. And this should have lionized Jerusalem. We say lionized, we make a hero out of Jerusalem. Ezekiel, he picks up on how the people failed, but how God would not abandon them. Ezekiel 36, and I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations.
Well who did that? His people. Because he tells us. Which has been profaned among the nations which you have profaned in their midst. And the nation shall know that I am Yahweh, says Yahweh, when I am hallowed in you before their eyes. Don't miss that word, hallowed, because we preface Jesus, when teaching us a pattern for prayer, he prefaced it with hallowing, Father. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.
You could say that about no one else, except the members of the Godhead. He says here, in verse 1, add year to year, let feast come around. Well these are God's yearly festivals.
There were three that were mandated for the men, but there were about seven festivals that the Jews largely engaged in. And the people were making their rounds with the sacrifices. They were going through the religious motions. But they didn't mean it. It became cultural. It's sort of like celebrating the resurrection of the Lord with bunnies and eggs.
Not even a good breakfast of those two. It steals the thunder. It's supposed to be the day when we are focused on the risen Lord and what he has done for us as sinners and what he continues to do as Lord over our sin through the cross of Christ. There's not supposed to be a runner up. There's not supposed to be some emblem that competes with the greater emblem of the cross of Christ in the empty tomb. This is offense to many people. Well my response would be, well I'm offended by the bunnies. The chocolate ones get an exception. They're okay because we can eat those.
Okay, not really, but I mean it makes a difference. Coming back to what's going on here, the people were having their feast days. They were following it according to the letter of the law and the priest. They were coming to Jerusalem. And yet Isaiah is pronouncing a woe on dead religious activities and attitudes. He's saying woe to Jerusalem, that place of worship that was supposed to be heroic. You're going about your feast days.
The Assyrian army is coming and it's coming because you messed it all up. These things, these rituals, listen to what Paul says. These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom and self-imposed religion, false humility and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh. You ever meet a Christian all caught up in diet and wardrobe to a fault? I mean I believe in wardrobe. I think people should come to church with clothes on.
You know, but you can push something way too far. And Paul was dealing with these types of people and he knew the church in Colosseum was also. And he said, listen, this stuff doesn't, they have these rituals they go through and these rules and regulations, they have nothing to do with righteousness.
They do not make you better Christians. Well, that's what was happening in ancient Israel at this time. Isaiah was saying, yeah, I see you going to the feast, but you don't mean it.
You know, we're going to get to that because he's not going to let it go. Jesus even brought it up hundreds of years later. Verse 2 now, he says, yet I will distress Ariel. There shall be heaviness and sorrow and it shall be to me as Ariel. Typical Isaiah playing around with these words in the Hebrews, the phrases, and that's not a bad thing.
Just very intelligent man. And here he is saying, spiritless religion does not sit well with God. Going through rituals without a relationship with God really offends him. You know, when Jesus went to the seven churches in Revelation, addressing each one of them, he pinpointed their problems and he also highlighted areas where they excelled. And you say to yourself, why would he do that when these people had Jezebels in it? Well, because while they had Jezebels, they also had true worshipers.
And he did not lose sight of that. But he warns them as a group to fix it. It's just the mercy of God and dealing with. Of course, he gets to the church of Philadelphia and Smyrna and he has no rebuke for those two churches, which means that churches can find great favor with God and dodge the rebuke. Well, judgment has to come to Jerusalem and it would come upon the altar. It would come upon the people. And the city of peace would be everything but that. And the thing about an altar is that it burns up everything around it except itself. It survives the heat. And whatever touches the altar must perish.
Well, in its proper place, that's the way it's designed. But when Israel becomes an altar and everything around it is destroyed, such as the countless villages and tribes and people that the Assyrians were wiping out, taking and enslaving them, that was unacceptable. So the surroundings of the once heroic city will be also ablaze.
Isaiah is playing with the word Ariel. This is the city of God. But it's an altar.
It's an altar to the Lord. But it's also burning up stuff as a judgment because it's being misused. Sort of like saying fire is a very good thing and it's not on the curtains.
And it has come to the curtains here. Ablaze like a sin offering. The Jews would appreciate this kind of language. The Jews in this day, they would have been on the edge of their seats listening to this sermon. It had everything to do with what they believed. There should be heaviness and sorrow.
That's not a good thing. That's one element of the judgment. And the invaders, the Assyrians, and then later the Babylonians, and then there would be the Romans, just a chain of judgment from these countries. The overtones of prophecy run throughout everything these prophets have to say. They never lost sight of the end, which was the millennial kingdom. But everything in between, they didn't sweep it under a rug. They didn't say, well, these are our people and we're going to always, we're going to push out propaganda.
We're going to make our people look like they're better than everybody else. That's not what the prophets did. They called it like it was, as I just read from Ezekiel. They should have been a light to the nations and they failed. And there's a big problem when you have Christians that pretend things that God has forbidden are somehow acceptable.
It doesn't mean we have to be savage about it. We just cannot just ignore the things that God has called us to address. That's what was happening here in Jerusalem. They were bringing their sacrifices to the temple. They were ignoring sin. Here's my sin offering.
But they didn't care anything about their sin. And it's throughout the prophets. There's no way to escape it. This is not easy reading. You know what?
I'm feeling down. I think I'll read Hosea. You're going to open up these, you know, how God is addressing the curse upon humanity. And it shall be to me Ariel.
And so you have this double use. Yet I will distress Ariel the city and it shall be heaviness and sorrow and it shall be to me Ariel the altar. See, that's Isaiah playing with the words. That's why Ezekiel picks it up in chapter 43 when he's talking about the new altar in the kingdom age. And he gets to that section, I don't know, verses 13 through 16 in Ezekiel 43. And he uses four different words for the altar in the Hebrew. And so looking at Ezekiel 43 verse 15, the altar hearth is four cubits high with four horns extending upward from the hearth. And so he's talking about the altar. And then he says, the next verse, the altar hearth is, that's a different word. Two different words. For the altar.
That second word is Ariel. See, he picked up on what Isaiah was saying. He understood that the altar of the Jew was supposed to be the lion of God.
Where does that come up for us? The lion of Judah, the lamb of God. There you have the hero and the sacrifice rolled into one.
How do you write such things? How do you get 66 writings by all these different authors over a couple of thousand years to all point in the same direction? Well, the Holy Spirit. But there, of course, was this corruption of the heroic lion, Jerusalem, and of God's flaming altar, which would bring judgment. That's what verse 2 is talking about. Verse 3 says, I will encamp against you all around. I will lay siege against you with a mound.
I will raise siege works against you. He's talking to Jerusalem, which is the people. He's personifying Jerusalem. But it's the people in Jerusalem. God did encamp against Jerusalem through the Assyrians, and then 115 years later or so with the Babylonians, more than once. They took three heavy visits by the Babylonian army to Jerusalem, and on the third one they said, that's it.
We're going to demolish the city, and that is what they did. And they're not the last ones to have demolished Jerusalem, especially the Temple Mount area. And so when God is against one, there's nothing one can do except repent and endure or be doomed. The prophet is trying to get them to repent. Remember, all the prophets, they weren't alone.
There was a remnant, albeit small, marginalized largely. They were not alone, and that was a blessing of the Lord. Even Jeremiah had Baruch, who God blessed heavily, the prophecies of Jeremiah. Verse 4 now of Isaiah 29, You shall be brought down, you shall speak out of the ground. Your speech shall be low out of the dust. Your voice shall be like a medium's out of the ground.
Your speech shall whisper out of the dust. You know, the older King James version would cause so much more explanation. That's why I prefer the New King James. The Septuagint does a lot of interpretive rendering, just as a passing note if you come across some of these things. They're not contradictions.
You just have to dig more to make them line up. Anyway, God is saying everything about talking spirits, talking to the spirits, talking to the dead, praying to Mary. This stuff is an abomination to God. It's clearly laid out in Scripture.
People do it anyway. Deuteronomy and Leviticus get right to the point with these things. The Old Testament prophets, they condemn these occult practices. And for Isaiah to say to the people of God, you're going to be behaving, and he uses these occultic practices to characterize them, rebuke all by itself. And so, the city that had a proud past, Jerusalem did.
You think of David, of course, and Solomon. What happened there, as far as what the righteous achieved, is now perverted, presently perverted in the days of Isaiah, and is facing this fearful future full of woe, terrified by the Assyrians, and again, demolished later by the Babylonians. Because you say, well, Jerusalem survived.
Yeah, but think about it. Your country, the capital city survives, but all the other cities are wiped out. Well, that would be horrific.
You have family members, loved ones, your land. And that's what took place. And when the Rabshakeh shows up, some of the other cities were still smoldering. And they had good reason to be terrified. And that's why the way he talked, the foul language he used, the intimidation, terrorist tactics, when the Jews said, can you hold it down so no one heals us? We're talking here as diplomats. He got louder and more obnoxious.
Of course, it didn't work well for him. Anyway, what he is saying here is that the city will come to dust, and the people of the city, they're going to hide themselves in the dust and the rubble. They're going to pretend to be dead, to escape the enemy.
They're going to be so scared that if they communicate, they're going to be whispering so nobody hears them. A very detailed prophecy by the prophet. Verse 5, Moreover, the multitude of your foes shall be like fine dust, and the multitude of the terrible ones like chaff that passes away. Yes, it shall be in an instant, suddenly.
This is an abrupt change now. He moves from the antagonist, from the Assyrians. He now comes to the protagonist, to the Jews. And as he moves through the verses, it's pretty easy to connect.
So the entire mood changes with this word, suddenly. The Lord saving Jerusalem from Assyria. And as he'll get that in verses 6 and 8, we get that again in the latter chapters of Isaiah, and then we have it also in Kings. So the foe, he is saying, the Assyrians I'm going to use to judge you, but they're not out of control. They're under my control, God has said, as sovereign. They are his instrument of judgment, but Jerusalem is the object of judgment also.
It's not going to annihilate the Jewish people, as it did some of the other people, such as the Edomites. Verse 6, You will be punished by Yahweh of hosts with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with storm and tempest and flame of devouring fire. Verse 7, The multitude of all nations who fight against Ariel, even all who fight against her and her fortress, and distress her shall be as a dream of a night vision.
So there you see, he's taught the abrupt changes about Ariel, Jerusalem. And he's saying, your enemies, the vanquish of the Assyrian army, or the vanquisher, will be vanquished. The Assyrian, with her foreign troops, and she had many of them. When God wipes out the 185,000 of them, they all were not born in Nineveh.
Many of them were from peoples that the Assyrians had conquered. You know, if you were a young man living in that ancient world, you didn't have any options. If you can get into the military, you could have a pretty good life if you were on the side of a juggernaut, like Assyria was, until Babylonians came along, then you were on the wrong team. Otherwise, what were your options?
I mean, farming, if you could be a merchant, if you had family. So you had a lot of men from all over the region as a part of this army, and when they raised or demolished a city, the loot was theirs if they could get their hands on it, and that was the incentive. So that's why we pick up Isaiah 37, then the angel of Yahweh went out and killed in the camp of the Assyrians 185,000, and when the people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses, all dead. Reminds us of the Egyptian army that was swallowed up by the Yam Suph, the Sea of Reeds, as they chased Moses and the people, trying to re-enslave them, and the Jews woke up the next day, and there were the corpses on the shore of Egypt's army. Anyway, verse 8, It shall even be as when a hungry man dreams, and look, he eats, but when he awakes and his soul is still empty, or as when a thirsty man dreams, and look, he drinks, but he awakes, and indeed he is faint, and his soul still craves, so the multitude of all the nations shall be who fight against Mount Zion.
When he wrote this, he didn't say, you know, people many generations later, they don't need to hear all this stuff, but for his generation, they wanted to hear this. They would go home thinking about the graphic language that he used, such as here in verse 8. Deliverance is assured. All the nations that rise up against Zion will suffer dissatisfaction. So he says, it shall be as when a man is hungry and he dreams, and look, he eats, but he awakes and his soul is still empty. And so he's saying, these conquerors that come down, they're not going to be satisfied. That's not the reason why they're coming. They think that's the reason why. God is saying they're coming to execute judgment on you.
If I don't put these checks and balances in place, number one, I will end up perpetuating, enabling the Jewish people to be worse, and number two, I will be guilty of not dealing with the corruption when it reaches levels of intolerance. 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.
