An Awkward Advent Passage
Advent Devotion (Pt. 3): Isaiah 13:1-5
An Advent Prayer: Almighty God, you have made us and all things to serve you, now prepare the world for your rule. Come quickly to save us, so that wars and violence shall end, and your children may live in peace, honoring one another with justice and love; through Jesus Christ, who lives in power with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.1
I made sure that my wife was downstairs. My sons were out of earshot. With a final furtive glance, I pushed a button on my computer to replay the image of brave soldiers hemmed in by an overwhelming enemy force. One of my guilty pleasures is watching highly trained soldiers face overwhelming odds and win. Every time I watch, I’m energized, excited, and awestruck by their victory. But those emotions come with a tinge of guilt. How can I enjoy such feelings as a Christian? It doesn’t seem like there is ever a place for such emotions in our journey with Jesus. But then I read the passage for the third Sunday in Advent:
Raise a banner on a bare hilltop,
shout to them;
beckon to them
to enter the gates of the nobles.
I have commanded those I prepared for battle;
I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath –
those who rejoice in my triumph. -Isaiah 13:2-3
The book of Isaiah shifts focus in chapters 13-27. The first chapters focus on the inability of God’s people to follow in the footsteps of Abraham, the father of their people. He left behind the life he had for the promise of a better life.
The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. ‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse. and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
-Genesis 12:1-5
God fulfilled this promise by making Abraham’s progeny into the nation led by David and Solomon. As discussed in the previous Advent post, the carefully planted vineyard produced unexpectedly bad fruit. They produced:
hard-heartedness instead of repentance
unbelief instead of faith
indifference instead of love
impurity instead of holiness
Stranger still, the people of the promise didn’t see it. They remained committed to their religious traditions. At the same time, they’d lost sight of their core commitment to God. As a result, they lost their hegemony. As Isaiah put it, again in our passage from last week:
Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.’ The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in. And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. -Isaiah 5:5-7
The Israelites were caught between battles of the superpowers. The Assyrian Empire was dominant for much of Isaiah, but before the book ends Assyrian domination will have unraveled. Numerous enemies made alliances and waged war on Assyria from all sides. When their capital Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC, they left the world stage permanently, to be followed by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which would dominate the region for much of the following century. God’s people have forgotten Yahweh and are suffering the consequences. But God has not forgotten his commitment to fulfill the promise to Abraham and his descendants.
Chapters 13-17 reflect the way God, against overwhelming odds, would fulfill his promise of protection in Genesis 12:
The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. ‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse. and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
Our passage is a call to arms against the Babylonian threat:
A prophecy against Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw:
Raise a banner on a bare hilltop,
shout to them;
beckon to them
to enter the gates of the nobles.
I have commanded those I prepared for battle;
I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath –
those who rejoice in my triumph.Listen, a noise on the mountains,
like that of a great multitude!
Listen, an uproar among the kingdoms,
like nations massing together!
The Lord Almighty is mustering
an army for war.
They come from faraway lands,
from the ends of the heavens –
the Lord and the weapons of his wrath –
to destroy the whole country. -Isaiah 13:1-5
That sounds an awful lot like one of my guilty pleasures. The heroes are in danger. Their enemies and their overwhelming power surround them. Some of God’s people have been hurt. Others soon will be. All hope seems lost unless God keeps the promise to Abraham.
This is the “all hope seems lost” moment, in my guilty pleasure, when an AH-64 Apache helicopter rushes into the scene at 188.7 mph, firing laser-guided hellfire missiles and spinning its M230 electrically cycled autocannon in a strangely exciting sound of armor-piercing rounds released at a rate of 5 per second. In less than a minute, all threats of annihilation for the brave soldiers are destroyed. I breathe a sigh of relief.
What if our passage in Isaiah is not a guilty pleasure but a means of redirecting, even purifying, this human longing toward its proper end? Reading it this way fills my heart with a longing for God to fulfill the promise to protect his people and bless the world. It opens up the idea that the utopia I long for will come, not through a military victory of one country over another or an electoral victory of one candidate over another, but through the coming of Jesus. Isaiah 13:1-5 is an appeal to prepare myself for his second coming in the fullness of the Kingdom of God. I can join with the choir in Handel’s Messiah2 singing:
“And He shall purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an
Offering in righteousness.” -Malachi 3: 3
Now we can revisit the prayer of confession from the first week of Advent and find a deeper sense of meaning:
An Advent Prayer of Confession: God of the future, you are coming in power to bring all nations under your rule. We confess that we have not expected your kingdom, for we live casual lives, ignoring your promised judgment. We accept lies as truth, exploit neighbors, abuse the earth, and refuse your justice and peace. In your mercy, forgive us. Grant us wisdom to welcome your way, and to seek things that will endure when Christ comes to judge the world.3
Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), p. 175.
There are many wonderful renditions of Handel’s Messiah, one of which is by the Bratislava City Choir, availabe on Spotify. The quote is the second scene, the sixth movement of the oratorio.
Op. Cit., p. 167-168.