Dan Crabtree

The End of the World as We Know It - Part 2

October 7, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 24

Isaiah chapter 24. We began studying Isaiah's so-called little apocalypse two weeks ago and just began the first part of this outline, walking through this chapter, Isaiah 24. This week we will complete, Lord willing, Isaiah 24, and I will read the whole chapter, verses 1 through 23. "Behold, Yahweh will empty the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the creditor, so with the debtor. The earth shall be utterly empty and utterly plundered; for Yahweh has spoken this word. The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few men are left. The wine mourns, the vine languishes, all the merry-hearted sigh. The mirth of the tambourines is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased, the mirth of the lyre is stilled. No more do they drink wine with singing; strong drink is bitter to those who drink it. The wasted city is broken down; every house is shut up so that none can enter. There is an outcry in the street for lack of wine; all joy has grown dark; the gladness of the earth is banished. Desolation is left in the city; the gates are battered into ruins. For thus it shall be in the midst of the earth among the nations, as when an olive tree is beaten, as at the gleaning when the grape harvest is done. They lift up their voices, they sing for joy; over the majesty of Yahweh they shout from the west. Therefore in the east give glory to Yahweh; in the coastlands of the sea, give glory to the name of Yahweh, the God of Israel. From the ends of the earth we hear songs of praise, of glory to the Righteous One. But I say, 'I waste away, I waste away. Woe is me! For the traitors have betrayed, with betrayal the traitors have betrayed.' Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth! He who flees at the sound of the terror shall fall into the pit, and he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare. For the windows of heaven are opened, and the foundations of the earth tremble. The earth is utterly broken, the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken. The earth staggers like a drunken man; it sways like a hut; its transgression lies heavy upon it, and it falls, and will not rise again. On that day Yahweh will punish the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth. They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a prison, and after many days they will be punished. Then the moon will be confounded and the sun ashamed, for Yahweh of hosts reigns on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and his glory will be before his elders." So reads the word of the living God. Chicago had to burn in order to become fireproof. October 8, 1871: what is known as the Great Chicago Fire. The story goes that a thief was leaving an illegal card game in a barn, and in his haste he knocked over a lantern, which lit the place on fire and eventually burned down most of the city. Four miles of city devastated, 17,500 buildings burned down, 90,000 people homeless, in just a matter of days. It was said that there were wicked winds whipping around that created tornadoes filled with fire, throwing flame all over the city. D. L. Moody just barely escaped it himself. In the great rebuilding that inevitably followed that decimation, the city officials passed laws that buildings could only be constructed with, you guessed it, fireproof materials: brick, stone, marble, and eventually terracotta. Some of these were tested three years later, when another fire broke out in Chicago, but this one could not consume the city because of its new fireproof materials. One example would be the Palmer House, a hotel owned by Hilton that is still standing today in Chicago, which was marketed as the world's only fireproof hotel. In 1893, during the World's Fair, because they had survived multiple fires, they invented brownies. At least, that's what they claim. Who knows if it's true? That's what they say. In other words, you wouldn't have brownies if Chicago hadn't burned to the ground. Thank God. Amen. You know, this paradigm is true in our spiritual lives as well. You have to put off the old to put on the new, right? You can't bring all of the old stuff that's meant to pass away into the new. And that's also true for this fading, decaying world. We cannot bring this world into the next. In order for a fireproof world to be built, the first one has to burn down. This is, in fact, exactly what Paul himself says in 1 Corinthians chapter 3. He's admonishing the Corinthians for putting their hearts on earthly things. He says to them, 1 Corinthians 3:12, "Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done." It is that day of disclosure, regarding the things that last and the things that don't, that Isaiah sets his attention on in chapter 24 of his prophecy. This is the beginning of a new section in Isaiah's prophecy, Isaiah 24 to 27. I called it Isaiah's Revelation. And all of it is about how God will reclaim his world. It's all about God: Yahweh, 28 times just in the beginning of this section. God, God, God, God. It is how he will bring about an apocalypse, how he will wipe the slate clean, how he will save his people, and how he will receive all the glory for himself forever. We noted a couple of weeks ago, as we began to look at this, that the structure of this section of Scripture is a chiasm. We've seen a number of these in Isaiah. It's this X-like formation that accents what's at the center while noting parallel forms on either side. I won't bother going through all of it again, only to note where we're going next week: the feast of final salvation. That's right at the very center, where God banishes death forever and receives eternal praise. The other thing to mention is how it's accented, or punctuated, by songs. Do you see that? There's destruction, and then there are songs about God's glory. More punishment, and then songs. That's how it goes through the whole thing, because it's all about God and his glory. That's what Isaiah doesn't want us to miss. And so even in the passage we'll look at tonight, we'll see glimpses of the coming destruction of this world, accented by singing worship to God for that destruction, which can seem so odd to us until we read the book of Revelation, which we'll do a bunch of tonight, because I want you to see the remarkable parallels between Revelation and Isaiah 24. Revelation chapter 11 reminds us of this very same paradigm: God's going to burn it down so he can build it back up. Revelation 11:15: "Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, 'The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.' And the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God," saying (and this seems to be something of a song), "'We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, who is and who was, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations raged, but your wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged, and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints, and those who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.'" That's what's going on in this period of time that we often call the tribulation, or that the Bible usually calls the day of the Lord: this seven-year period in which God is going to overthrow the world of man, because it's his day. It's not man's day. It's the day of the Lord, when he will reclaim his earth. The Lamb has taken the title scroll of the earth from the right hand of him who sits on the throne, and now he is reclaiming that earth through judgment. And Isaiah here in chapter 24 is marshaling his most eloquent rhetoric, his most sophisticated theology, the most dramatic language available, to describe this unmaking of the wicked world that he sees. This comes at the end of the drivetrain of his judgment oracles on the nations in Isaiah 13 to 23, many of which have already been fulfilled as historical realities. Now he says it's not just going to be this one nation or that nation. All of them that are opposed to God are going to be wrapped up together in final wrath and laid to rest. And as we will see in the text this evening, while this should be a reality check for us to invest in those things that will not burn up, it should also be a cause for hope, for rejoicing, for worship to the God who burns it down to build it all back up again. So we began looking at this prophecy in seven parts: when the God of Israel empties the earth. The first is that he ignores the status of man. We saw that in verses 1 through 3, particularly in verse 2, where it says, "And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the slave, so with his master," this back and forth of different stations and classes of people: economic, vocational, even religious. And he says on that day none of that will matter. God is no respecter of persons in that regard. He elects whom he elects, but on that day, for those who are left on the earth, it doesn't matter how big your house is or how long your title is. All of it's going down. That's his point. What he's getting at is that it is an impartial judgment. This emptying of the earth, this unmaking of creation, doesn't take into account whether or not you went to Harvard. This is how it's said in Revelation 16:5–7: "Just are you, O Holy One, who is and who was, for you brought these judgments. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve! … Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments!" They're saying this is the right thing. You've done what's precisely fair. You haven't taken any bribes. You're not impressed with anyone's status. So that's what we looked at in the first three verses. Secondly, we saw that on that day he ends the excuses. That means there's a good reason why God is doing this. He's not just flying off the handle. God continues with what mankind has done to earn this catastrophic cataclysm, particularly in verse 5: "The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant." We noted how that refers both to the law written on our hearts through conscience and the law of God written in Scripture, and even seems to be a reference to the Noahic covenant: rampant murder filling the world, bloodshed left and right, that's being answered with more bloodshed. This is just retribution for violent murder, particularly, Revelation tells us, of Christians during the reign of the Antichrist. This is a just judgment. God is giving exactly what is deserved, such that at the end of verse 6, the inhabitants of the earth, who are the particular subjects receiving this judgment, are scorched, and there's only a handful of them left. What I think is meant by that is the end of the tribulation. Part of the way through the tribulation, a third of the earth is burned and a third of mankind is killed, and then by the end, all bets are off. So that's what we looked at two weeks ago: in this judgment, when God empties the earth, he ignores the status and he ends the excuses. Now we move on to the third part, and I'm going to say it this way: he stops the party. He stops the party. It's coming to a screeching halt. All celebration and gaiety on the earth is dried up. In drying up the earth, which we saw in verse 4 ("The earth mourns and withers"), God is also taking away one particular kind of plant, which is going to lead to lamentation across the world, intense sorrow. Look at verse 7: "The wine mourns, the vine languishes." All the booze is gone. All the party stuff, the thing that would make their hearts glad when they would get drunk and party across the world, all of it is gone, because the green plants are gone. They're dried up. They're withered. Wine, of course, is associated with abundance, with feasting, with merriment, with blessing. That's exactly what's meant in verse 7: "all the merry-hearted sigh." It means people who used to be happy are no longer happy. They're groaning; they're lamenting. Notice he says all the merry-hearted. This is not a localized thing. This is across the world. Verse 8. This is how we know that they're sad: "The mirth of the tambourines is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased, the mirth of the lyre is stilled." Do you remember when they got to the other side of the Red Sea? What did Miriam use when she sang her song of joyful celebration? The tambourine and the lyre. That's exactly what these people on earth had been doing. They've been celebrating with music. That's what we do. When you have a party, you put on music, you crank it up, and you celebrate, and all of that is silent. It's ceased. It's done. All these synonyms for basically the same idea: people who were exulting in battle triumph, in their temporary victories, are not anymore. Verse 9: "No more do they drink wine with singing; strong drink is bitter to those who drink it." They don't have any more drinking songs. Those are done. The idea of the second half of verse 9, "strong drink is bitter," is that they can't even enjoy drunkenness anymore. They're not any happier now when they're drunk than when they're not. They used to be able to forget their sorrows; now they can't. It's all bitter to them. Verse 10: "The wasted city is broken down; every house is shut up so that none can enter." We're going to talk more about this city motif next week when we get into chapter 25, so I'll save the longer biblical-theological explanation for then. What I want to draw your attention to in this verse is the word "wasted." I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. It's the Hebrew word tohu. It's rarely used in Scripture. It's used here, in Jeremiah, and in Genesis 1: tohu wabohu, "the earth was without form and void." He's evoking creation language, saying God is de-creating the world. He's going backwards and making it like it was before he formed and filled it. This city is uninhabitable now. It's broken down, and all the doors of the houses are shut. Everyone's terrified, anyone who's left, at least. This city is a sort of symbol of man's power, strength, might, technological advancement, resources, and wealth, and all of it is just emptied out. Like Babel of old, or like Rome, or one day like New York City, it will be a thing of the past, emptied out: a museum, a ruin, uninhabitable. Verse 11: "There is an outcry in the street." Instead of singing and merriment, the only thing you're hearing is wailing in the streets "for lack of wine." People are crying out. "All joy has grown dark; the gladness of the earth is banished." The streets here are haunted with lamenting, with wailing, because the wine is gone. And notice what Isaiah keys in on here. They're not lamenting because of all the mass destruction across the earth, though that's happening. They're lamenting because they don't have any more wine, because their entertainment, their libation, their celebratory liquid is gone. Their pleasures, their pastimes, are what they're lamenting for. They're not lamenting for their sin. They're not lamenting for global judgment. They're lamenting for wine. We see this in Revelation 18:14: "The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again!" That's the thing they're really upset about. I don't get to party anymore. The thing I had given my life to is gone. And so joy and gladness are gone because their diversions are gone. All that's left, verse 12, is "desolation in the city; the gates are battered into ruins." That tells you there's been some sort of massive army coming through and destroying it into nothingness. It's ruined. In verse 13 he says that's how it's going to be "in the midst of the earth," meaning everywhere in the earth, "among the nations, as when an olive tree is beaten, as at the gleaning when the grape harvest is done." He's already used this harvest metaphor in chapter 17, verse 6. We see the very same thing in Revelation 14, don't we? The angel calls to the one with the sickle in his hand and says the harvest of the earth is ripe, go ahead and gather in the harvest, and Jesus treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God, and the blood reaches to the horses' bridles. What's also interesting about this gleaning metaphor is that it implies a remnant is left: that it's not a total decimation, that there are some people left. That's what we're going to see in the next verses. But before we move on to that, just appreciate what it is that humanity will be so sorrowful about on that day: the wine, their merriment. I can't help but think of Vanity Fair from Pilgrim's Progress when I read this passage. Christian is walking through, and one of the vendors, the hawkers, cries out, "What will you buy?" Christian says, "We buy the truth." And for that, they throw him in jail. We can't handle people like that, who don't want to party with us, who don't want to get in on our lascivious lifestyle. And I think it's a heart check for us. What do we delight in that, if it were gone, we would lament? Is it something superficial like that? Is it something that will survive that day? What do we spend our time on? Is it wood? Is it hay? Is it stubble? Is that the thing that makes us glad? If it is, then on that day all of that stuff will be gone, and we'll have to figure out how to be glad in Jesus for the first time, or else we'll be caught up in this destruction. I think this is a reminder to Israel and to us: our joy is not in the wine, as wonderful a gift as these good things can be. It's not in the gold. It's not in what won't survive that day. So on that day God stops the party. Fourth, he receives the glory. This is right at the center of this text. He ignores the status, he ends the excuses, he stops the party, and fourth, on that day God receives the glory. In verse 14 we hear new voices breaking in. The voices of raucous merriment from the drunks have been silenced, but in verse 14 a new song erupts: "They lift up their voices, they sing for joy; over the majesty of Yahweh they shout from the west." I think it's supposed to be surprising, for this to be thrust into the middle of such a chaotic, dark text. All of a sudden, people are singing for joy? It's a strong word. The harvest of verse 13 apparently has left behind some gleanings. The "they" in verse 14 is not defined. It's not named. We don't know exactly who this is, but it seems to imply those who are left who are yet faithful to the Lord, particularly from the nation of Israel, because he says "the God of Israel" here, and in terms of where he's locating them, which we'll see in a second, east and west, it seems to be centered on Israel. So the remnant of Israel is now singing for joy at this destruction. They aren't the "inhabitants of the earth" named six times in this passage. There's someone else who's happy about this. "They lift up their voices," meaning this is a loud sound. It is marked by gladness, not drunkenness. This is the same kind of language used in chapter 26, verse 19, for the resurrection. And what do they sing for joy about? "Over the majesty of Yahweh." In Isaiah, "majesty" has mostly been a word translated "pomp" and "pride." The pomp and arrogance of the nations is now applied to God in his exalted splendor. It's a way of saying they were giving emphasis and praise to their own perceived exaltation and majesty, which was wrong. But now God rightly receives all the praise he's due, because he is actually majestic, actually exalted, actually worthy of worship. And then we hear directions from Isaiah: "they shout from the west. Therefore in the east give glory to Yahweh." He's calling forth a giant global choir, the remnant not just geographically in Israel but scattered all over the world. He's telling them to glorify God. From where? He says "from the west," literally in Hebrew "from the sea," likely the Mediterranean Sea. He says "in the east," literally "in the lights," a reference to the sunrise. He says "in the coastlands of the sea," usually used for Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, all around the Mediterranean. And then he says, literally, "from the wings of the earth." It's sort of a strange phrase, not often used, but it is used in Isaiah 11:12 for the ingathering of Israel from, as it's translated there, the four corners of the earth. Basically, the idea is everywhere. Everywhere the remnant is found, they're regathering in order to worship God, to praise God. "Songs of praise," it says in verse 16, "of glory to the Righteous One." That is, literally, psalms lifted to God declaring his beauty (this is the word for beauty we saw in chapter 23) as the righteous Judge. It's declaring his righteousness in these judgments. Of course, it seems odd to us to celebrate destruction, doesn't it? That can seem almost cruel and vile, but I think that's mostly because we don't face a visceral level of persecution here and now. I think if we did, this would not be confusing to us. We would understand why they're celebrating. Revelation 18:20, talking about the destruction of Babylon: "Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you saints and apostles and prophets, for God has given judgment for you against her!" Listen to that: "for you against her." That's why you rejoice, because it's for you. It is for your benefit, for your good. If he did not do this, you could not have heaven. You can't have all those wicked people running around heaven, or else it's not going to be heaven. So you've got to deal with them somehow, and God is doing that through this judgment. Why should we rejoice and worship God for righteous judgment? Because that's what righteousness means. For God to be righteous means for him to do the right thing, which is always to glorify himself the most. And he glorifies himself both through salvation and through judgment, hailed as King. We praise God for having ultimate regard for his name through the salvation of his people and the destruction of his enemies. He is glorious in both. And this isn't complicated. Maybe I'm making it sound theological and obtuse. The reason they're singing is because God wins the battle. That's why they're singing. Victory belongs to the Lord. And they get to participate in the spoils of that victory. He gets the glory for all that he does in this judgment. So first, in this day of desolation, he ignores the status. Second, he ends the excuses. Third, he stops the party. Fourth, he receives the glory. Fifth, he blocks the escape. He blocks the escape. And we find yet another voice interjecting in the middle of verse 16: "But I say, 'I waste away, I waste away. Woe is me!'" This seems to be Isaiah. Notice he said at the beginning of verse 16, "we hear songs of praise." Who is that? Well, it's obviously Isaiah, and maybe someone else, maybe the remnant as well. And his response may be surprising, but it's also, I think, very practical. When he says, "But I say, 'I waste away, I waste away,'" the lament that follows is highly poetic. It's screeching us back into Isaiah's time, about 700 B.C. or so, when this promised judgment had not yet come. He's looking around, and he does not see God being victorious over all his enemies. He often sees the enemies being victorious over God's people. And so his response when he sees this vision is, I'm wasting away. It's a word for leanness of flesh, like a wasting disease, like you're starving to death. And then he says, "Woe is me!" The only other time he uses that phrase, you know it: Isaiah 6:5, when he beholds the glory of God in the temple. He says, "Woe is me! … For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." He's saying, I beheld the glory of the Lord, and I saw my own sinfulness. Now I'm beholding the glory of the Lord in judgment, and I'm not seeing it here. There's a disconnect. The only thing he can do is pronounce judgment on himself, because it feels like he doesn't know if this judgment is ever going to come. That's how he finishes the verse: "For the traitors have betrayed, with betrayal the traitors have betrayed." Let me read it for you in Hebrew, just so you can get a sense of it. It sounds interesting in Hebrew too: bogdim bagadu, uveged bogdim bagadu. The English captures the sense pretty well. It's the same word, just used in different forms, as a verb and as a noun. The phrasing, of course, is dramatic. It heightens what I think is a sort of incredulity on Isaiah's part: how could this be? I look around me. He used the same phrase in chapter 21, verse 2, to talk about Israel's enemies, the foreign nations around Israel. I look around me, and I see all these wicked nations who used to be our allies turning on us, turning on each other, destroying rampantly, and not being judged for it. When's this going to happen, God? How long, O Lord? This is another way of saying that: how long? In some ways, this is the question of human history. How long? When is this day going to come? When is justice going to be done? And so God responds in verse 17, and his answer, in summary, is: oh, don't you worry, they won't get away with it. Verse 17: "Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth!" It's another very interesting phrase in Hebrew. He uses the same sound alliteratively three times, and then he develops it. Did you notice? Terror, pit, snare. And then in verse 18: terror, pit, snare. He's using imagery from hunting, where you scare an animal and try to get it to run into a ditch or a hole you've built. But then it climbs up out of the ditch, so you've laid some sort of trap there to catch it. It's a way of saying they try to escape from one thing, and they just get caught in another. They try to escape from that, and they get caught in another. There is no escape. That's the point. "Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth!" God is hunting you. "He who flees at the sound of the terror…" They saw Brent Crabtree sitting up in that tree, and they heard the bowstring tighten, and they fled in terror. Have you been out this season? Yeah. Have you gotten anything? They're fleeing in terror, that's why. [...] So they're fleeing in terror, but then they fall into the pit. There's some sort of hole in the ground, and then "he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare," something like a bear trap, we would think of it. Again, that's all metaphorical language. How is it that he can say they're not going to escape, that God hunts them down and gets his mark? How does he know? Verse 18: "For the windows of heaven are opened, and the foundations of the earth tremble." This is direct language from Genesis 7:11, the Noahic flood. He's saying it'll be like that day when Noah and his family went into the ark and God himself closed the door. Then the rain started coming down, and all of a sudden the world panicked, looking for an escape, and found none. The mountains were covered. There was nowhere they could run to. It was certain doom, utter destruction. Here it's not going to happen through a flood. It happens through various other means, fire and other ways. But the point is, you're not going to be able to escape if God has destined you for judgment on that day. For 120 years Noah was hammering away on that ark, and they could have listened. There was a time when God's patience allowed a way of escape, even like today, when there is still an ark, a way of escape, in the Lord Jesus Christ. There's still an opportunity. On that day, there won't be. Revelation chapter 9 describes just one of the judgments during the tribulation. There seems to be some kind of demonic creature coming up out of the pit, tormenting people. It says this in Revelation 9:5: "They were allowed to torment them," that is, the people on the earth, "for five months, but not to kill them," and, "in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them." They won't even be able to find that escape from this horrific day of judgment. This is a certain kind of doom that God has brought. So when God empties the earth, he ignores the status, he ends the excuses, he stops the party, he receives the glory, he blocks the escape. Sixth, he breaks the world. That's the language we find in verses 19 and 20. Isaiah here is ratcheting his language up to the highest, most extreme level. Look at verse 19: "The earth is utterly broken, the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken." The adverbs we see in English, "utterly" and "violently," are a way of trying to render a Hebrew construction I mentioned last week called an infinitive absolute. Basically, you have the verb and then the verb again in a different form, and it's a Hebrew way of intensifying it. The way we would say it is with an adverb, so "utterly" is a good translation. But it's also interesting because here it's mixed, four times, with a unique Hebrew stem. You're not going to be quizzed on this later, but I think it's interesting. It's the Hithpolel stem. What's interesting about it is that it's an actual grammatical construction in Hebrew where the actor does something to itself. So what he's saying is that this is intense, emphasized to the highest level, and it's the earth doing it to itself, both in the sense that it's guilty and in the sense that God is using the stuff of the earth to judge the earth. The earth itself is causing this brokenness. It's a massive earthquake shattering the world into pieces. The earth is utterly destroying itself. Of course, God is the one bringing this about, but the responsibility is on the earth. These violent earthquakes are described a number of times in Scripture in association with the tribulation: Revelation 16:18, earlier in Isaiah 13:13, Haggai 2, Hebrews 12. The earth just gets shaken. And eventually he changes the metaphor a little, to a person who staggers and then falls. Verse 20: "The earth staggers like a drunken man; it sways like a hut." Drunk with blood, with violence, it's stumbling around, inebriated, unsteady. It sways like a hut. This is the same word we saw in Isaiah 1:8, a hut in a cucumber field. It's a sort of temporary lodging they would build during harvest season, and if the winds came, that thing was going over. It was like a thin tent. Think of it that way. And the point is there's no firmness left in the ground itself. Everything is coming down. The earth is unhinged. Why? It says, "its transgression lies heavy upon it." It's the metaphor of a slave holding some burden on his shoulders, a yoke, and now it is so heavy he can barely stand. He's staggering around, and then eventually, he says, "it falls." It goes all the way to the ground. It's decimated. It's dead. It's done. And the reason you know that is because he says it "will not rise again." This is an ultimate, definitive, final kind of judgment. Now, there actually is going to be a more ultimate, more definitive judgment that comes later, but for this earth, in this way, this is the end. It's crushed under the weight of judgment for its own crimes, and it can't get back on its feet. There's no coming back from this one. There are no more chances. The time for forbearance has ended. There are no more appeals courts. And I think in Isaiah's day this would have been an urgent plea to a nonbeliever. If you hear this and you're not worshiping Yahweh, seeking Yahweh… He's going to go on to say in chapter 55, "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near." Jesus says, come to terms with your accuser quickly, while you are going with him. Don't wait. You don't know how much longer you have. The day is going to come like a thief, and then that's it. There's no more time to lose. Robert Murray M'Cheyne said it this way in one of his sermons: "Oh, do not keep away from Christ now. Now he says, Come. Soon, soon he will say, Depart. Oh, do not resist the Holy Spirit now. Now he strives, but he will not always strive with you. Soon, soon he will leave you. Oh, do not despise the word of ministers and godly friends. Now they plead with you, weep for you, pray for you. Soon, soon they will be silent as the grave, or sing hallelujah to see you lost. Oh, do not be proud and self-admiring. Soon you will loathe the very sight of yourself and wish you had never been." That day is an ultimate day. It's a day of last things. One of the most horrifying verses in the book of Revelation, I think, is Revelation 9:20. This is after a number of the trumpet judgments: a third of the earth devastated, a third of the oceans polluted, a third of the forests burned up. And it says this: "The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent." Isaiah is saying, friend, that door is closing. One day it will be closed, locked, bolted, and walled in, and it will never open again. And there won't be any more repentance either. But I think for the believer, this utter devastation of the world is supposed to be good news, because it means there's an expiration date on persecution. There's a day when all the pain and the suffering and the hardship and the toil will end, when all the fading things of this world will actually fade away. The fight has an end. God will finish what he started, he will save his people, and he will reclaim his earth. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord that he's going to do that, that we know there's an end to the struggle. It's not indefinite. And it's not just, well, we struggle in this life and die and then there's nothing left. Oh no, there's glory on the other side. We'll get there next week. It's a good thing to know that the day of wickedness has an end when he breaks the world. Lastly, when the God of Israel empties the earth, he ignores the status, he ends the excuses, he stops the party, he receives the glory, he blocks the escape, he breaks the world, and he humiliates the proud. That's precisely what we see at the close of the tribulation, when God will take the final rebellious beings left to oppose him and overthrow their arrogant uprising, and in so doing exalt himself over even the highest of creatures. Verse 21: "On that day Yahweh will punish the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth." The host of heaven here is likely a reference to the armies of Satan, the demonic forces that have been unleashed on the earth and in heaven during this time. And the kings of the earth, of course, are the mightiest nations, which Revelation teaches us are gathered together by the Antichrist and others for a final showdown on the plains of Megiddo, which is where we get the Battle of Armageddon. And the purpose of gathering them together, Isaiah says, is to punish, to destroy. We see this in Revelation 19:11–21, when Christ comes back on a white horse, Faithful and True, and slays the opposing armies with a sword from his mouth. Then verse 22 says, "They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a prison." Literally, they will be thrown into the abyss. The word "gathered" here means incarcerated, chained up. Notice also the language of a prison. What is this prison? He calls it a pit. It's a word for a dungeon. It's used sometimes for the grave, for hell. Here it seems to be describing the holding tank for demons described in Revelation 20:1–3: "Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him." Peter describes this place as Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4. Jude describes it the same way in Jude verse 6. I don't know why God chooses to do things in this particular way, why he says, I'm going to chain up Satan and the host of heaven and the kings of the earth and throw them in this pit for a thousand years, and then unleash them afterward. I don't know why. But that's what God chooses to do. He's fulfilling his promises for his millennial kingdom, at least. Notice this phrase in verse 22: "they will be shut up in a prison, and after many days they will be punished." I think that's a reference to the millennial kingdom, a thousand years. Ezekiel, by the way, uses this exact same phrase, "after many days," in Ezekiel 38:8 to reference the exact same period of time, but there with respect to Gog and Magog. In God's good purposes, he intends to establish Christ's reign on earth for many days before releasing Satan to punish him, which is exactly what we see in Revelation 20:7–10. And we're going to see that punishment in Isaiah 27:1, where he punishes Leviathan, the fleeing serpent. Then notice this: after Satan is overthrown and cast into the lake of fire, along with death and Hades and every opposition to God, verse 23: "Then the moon will be confounded and the sun ashamed." This is now the eternal state. There is no sun or moon anymore. You know why? Because you don't need them. There is a far brighter light source right in the New Jerusalem, named the Lamb. The Lord Jesus Christ is the light of heaven. I just love the beautiful poetic language here. The moon is shocked, and the sun is just embarrassed: oh, I'm just a tiny little ember compared to this. I might as well get off the scene. I don't belong in the presence of something so majestic, so bright. I'm just a meager flicker, bowing in reverence to the light of the Lamb. And the point here is that even the highest of the high, the greatest of the great, the armies of heaven, the kings of the earth, Satan himself, even the sun, is going to bow to King Jesus on that day, because Yahweh, it says, "reigns on Mount Zion." All who have opposed God will be humiliated for their pride, for their arrogance, but God will be exalted in this New Jerusalem. He says expressly, "on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem." That's where it's going to happen. And then this phrase: "and his glory will be before his elders." That's language taken from Exodus 24:9–11, when Moses took the elders up Mount Sinai and they feasted with God. But you know what? They couldn't stay there, because of the fire and the smoke. They were told not to stay on the mountain. This time, they get to stay. "His glory will be before his elders." It won't just be that his glory is there but wrapped in a shroud of darkness so that nobody can see it, not even Moses when he asked to see it. On that day, Revelation 22 says, we will see his face, and we will serve him and reign with him forever and ever. All his people will feast with him eternally on that day. And on that day, nobody will wonder why God had to burn it down. It will be obvious when you're in a pure, perfect, tearless, sinless, holy new creation. All of this couldn't come in. It's not worthy. But on that day God himself will remake everything, fit for eternal worship to him. The question I've been asking myself with this text, and I ask you now: are you holding on to something that will burn? Are your treasures fireproof? If they're not, are you willing to let them go for things that will last? On that day, God himself will receive all of the glory, both in judgment and in salvation. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for instructing our hearts with this stunning, gripping, shocking depiction of a severe, horrific justice to be poured out on this earth. You're right to be angry with mankind, and yet you are so merciful to shower love on us through Jesus Christ. So we hide ourselves in him. We take refuge in him from the storm of that day. And we ask, even as we sang earlier, God, give us faith to see how glorious that day will be. Set our hearts on heaven, that we might live for the next world, not this one that's fading away. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

A Tale of Two Cities

October 14, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 25:1–5, Isaiah 26:1–6

Well, please turn in your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 25. We're going to do something a little bit different this evening. We're going to be looking at two segments that are not contiguous. Just to explain why we're doing this before we get into it: if you remember the structure, which we'll look at in a moment, the structure of Isaiah 24 to 27 is a chiasm, so it's all sort of pointing towards the center. And as I was studying to prepare for this week, I just couldn't do the disservice to the very center of this section by trying to lump it in with everything else. It needs its own week. So rather than try to just cram it in, I figured instead we would focus on the two songs that surround the center. So that's what we're going to do. They pair well together in thinking about this theme, and they're structured to be parallel anyway, so that's why we're doing this. So, Isaiah chapter 25. I'll read for us through 26, verse 6. "O Yahweh, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the foreigners' palace is a city no more; it will never be rebuilt. Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you. For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat; for the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall, like heat in a dry place. You subdue the noise of the foreigners; as heat by the shade of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is put down. "On this mountain Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for Yahweh has spoken. It will be said on that day, 'Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is Yahweh; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.' For the hand of Yahweh will rest on this mountain, and Moab shall be trampled down in his place, as straw is trampled down in a dunghill. And he will spread out his hands in the midst of it as a swimmer spreads his hands out to swim, but Yahweh will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands. And the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust. "In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah: 'We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks. Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in Yahweh forever, for Yahweh is an everlasting rock. For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city. He lays it low, lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy.'" So reads the word of the living God. Isaiah is pleading with us through this text to stop trusting in the deceptive strength of the city of man, because we know how it will end. This section is framed by two songs near the center of this window into the future: one of these two songs largely about the downfall of the mighty, and one about the security of the needy. These songs remind us that in God's economy, it is the weak who are strong. It is the proud who are humbled. He reverses what we expect. It's the arrogant, self-sufficient strong men of our day, the supposed world powers, who will be crushed on that day. And it's the weak and the needy and the helpless and the poor, who rely on God and God alone, who will be exalted with him. And so Isaiah here is telling us to rip the deceptive mask off of the strength of the present, and to place all of our trust where we know our treasure will last. This is a deeply practical section of Isaiah's apocalypse. For those who are beleaguered and lonely, this is a reminder: it will not always be like this. For the persecuted Christian, this is a reminder that the attacks will end, that their attackers will be themselves attacked and overthrown. And this is a reminder that today, if you feel small and helpless and powerless, whether it's before a health challenge, before an international conflict, before conflict in your own home, whether it's before poverty or sickness or death or any other force in this world, if you feel faint and weary and weak, God is telling you, "Good. That's exactly how I want you to feel, so that you will rely on me and know on that day my perfect strength." The context, of course, here is Isaiah 24 to 27, usually called Isaiah's Little Apocalypse. I'm calling it Isaiah's Revelation. As we've noted in the previous weeks, it's shaped as an X, or a chiasm, meaning there are parallel structures all leading you to this emphasized point at the center, which is what we're going to look at next week: the feast. That's right at the middle of it. This week we're looking at the brackets to the middle, which are these two songs about cities. Chapter 24, which preceded this, is all about the end of the world, the destruction of the earth. Every form of might that man can conjure is going to be overthrown on that day. Before this, there's this whole long section where Isaiah is casting down nation after nation after nation, and then all of a sudden, in chapter 24, the whole earth is wrapped up in this great tribulation of judgment. And then God himself, it says, is reigning on Mount Zion in Jerusalem at the end of all of it. And so, chapter 25, verse 1: all of a sudden a new voice seems to break in. "O Yahweh, you are my God." An individual person speaking directly to God with songs of praise, and that lasts all the way through verse 5. Then verses 6 to 12, you have this feast in the middle, with the judgment that God will bring on his enemies at its tail. And then chapter 26, verses 1 to 6, another song, explicitly called a song there, about a strong city that will survive the judgment of that day. In a way, this is a response to the end of the world. If God is actually going to overthrow all nations and kingdoms in opposition to him, how does the earth respond? Well, his people respond with praise, with worship, with songs. How fitting. That's how it's always been. Exodus chapter 15: God delivers the people across the Red Sea, and what do they do? They sing. What does David do when God delivers him from trial after trial, from battle after battle? Well, he writes psalms. What do the saints do in the book of Revelation as they see God bringing judgment to the earth and wrapping all of human history up in one final great act of judgment? Well, they sing. So here we find, hopefully not surprisingly, more songs celebrating Yahweh's victory, and this feast in the middle. And I hope you noticed: these two songs in particular, 25:1–5 and 26:1–6, are all about cities. Did you notice that word? City, city, city, city. It shows up over and over again. This isn't talking about high-rises necessarily, or a place with a corner deli. This is talking about something bigger and broader, something that's been going on for millennia. And so before we even get into this text, I want to back up and do a little bit of biblical-theological work, again leaning on my friend T. Desmond Alexander in his book The City of God, to do a biblical theology of cities. When Isaiah approaches this issue, he's not coming at it empty-handed. He has a whole drivetrain of theology from Scripture that was written before him that he's bringing to bear when he talks about cities. He's not necessarily talking about one specific city here when he says, for instance, "You have made the city a heap." It's a theme, an idea that he's evoking, that's gathering up this whole thrust of biblical theology in order to make a point in this text. So I'll walk through this briefly: a biblical theology of cities. Meaning we're going to start from Genesis and go all the way to Revelation. What does the Bible have to say? How does it develop this theme of cities? And why does that matter for these songs and for our lives? Well, first, when God creates the world, he does not create a city. What does he make? A garden. And he places Adam and Eve in that garden, and he tells them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." Scatter across the whole face of the earth and fill it with my image-bearers to glorify me. Then, of course, they fall for Satan's trick. They're deceived, they fall into sin, and in Genesis 4 they begin having children, one of whom slays his brother. That's Cain, and God marks him to protect him and says, "You're going to be a wanderer across the earth." Cain, Genesis 4 tells us, goes some distance east of Eden, but then he stops wandering, and he builds for himself a city. Genesis 4:17 says he names it after his son, Enoch. This is the first city that we see in Scripture. The word "city" shows up over a thousand times in the Old Testament. It mostly just means a settlement with a wall, usually with some sort of fortification, some sort of protection. That's the idea of a city in the ancient world. And from the very beginning, these man-made cities are a construct in defiance of God. Cities made by men throughout Scripture are monuments of rebellion. They are a walled settlement, implying defenses, meaning, "We're going to protect ourselves." And this concern about cities is massive, especially in the Old Testament. When it comes to thinking about cities in Scripture, when people gather together, build their homes and businesses close to each other, and then protect it with some sort of mechanism, a wall or some other thing, there are three questions that you should ask. Number one, who built it? Number two, who guards it? And number three, who is glorified in it? That's what's set up in Genesis chapter 4, and we see all the wrong answers to those three questions: man, man, man, throughout the rest of the Old Testament. Genesis chapter 11: you fast-forward after the flood, and there man is building, wouldn't you know it, a city. They develop this new technology, brick, and they start making a large tower with it to reach up to heaven, rather than scattering over the earth as God had commanded and filling it with his image-bearers. They say, "No, we will congregate together." They say, "Let us make a city for ourselves, for our own name." It's to glorify themselves. We build it for us; we defend it for our glory. That's why we built this city. And of course, ironically, God himself has to stoop down to find their very big, tall tower, and he scatters them into different languages, confuses them, and it's called Babel because of that. This is the only time the ESV translates it "Babel." Every other time that word shows up in the Scriptures, it's translated "Babylon," which is significant. Anytime Babylon shows up, it evokes the idea of the proud self-exaltation of men enthroned in the form of a city. Then you get to Abraham. He's called to leave his city and to go wander around Canaan, the promised land, until God tells him where he's going to establish a new city. Hebrews chapter 11, verse 10 tells us, "Abraham was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God." Abraham knew that God was going to keep his promise to exalt God's name by building a city through Abraham. And here we learn that God is not fundamentally opposed to the idea of people gathering together, of a city, of buildings, of walls. It's not inherently evil. But he is against the ones that men make for their own glory. He himself will build a city, and Abraham believed in that promise while he was dwelling in tents, unwilling to take the matter into his own hands like the Babylonians. And so, fast-forward to Egypt. God appears to Moses, commissions him, and tells him in Exodus chapter 6 that God will dwell with his people one day, that he will be their God and they will be his people, after he delivers them and brings them to a land and builds them cities. Then, on the other side of the Red Sea, the people sing in Exodus chapter 15, the first song in Scripture: "You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain, the place, O Yahweh, which you have made for your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established." So now we know that in this promised land there's going to be a city where God himself is going to live, that God himself is going to build, where God is meeting with man. And it's going to be, he says, on a mountain. It's going to be something like Sinai. And so the people believe in a place that God will build to dwell with men, like the garden but different: a sanctuary, a temple on a mountain. And then eventually they do build a temple. They get a king. King David wants to build a temple. God says no; his son Solomon does. David has conquered Jerusalem, and in Deuteronomy chapter 12 God had promised that there was going to be a city where he was going to place his name, and it turns out it's that one. So Solomon builds this temple, the dwelling place for God, in Zion, in Jerusalem, on a mount, the place where God promised to dwell with man, a place that God himself says he has built, at least by instruction. And when Solomon builds the temple, do you remember how he decorates it? It looks like a garden, where God would dwell with Adam and Eve and where one day he would dwell with man again. And from that we get psalm after psalm after psalm with just exalted language about this city and about the temple, don't we? There are too many to name. Here's just one, Psalm 87: "On the holy mount stands the city he founded" — so God is the builder — "Yahweh loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things of you are spoken, O city of God," from which, of course, we get the hymn. And then you go to the prophets. Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and several others continue to see the importance of Jerusalem as the city of God, the city that God founded, where he would dwell with his people. Things actually seem to be moving in the direction that they should be. It's almost like we're going to recapture the garden, but now in a city. But then the prophets begin to tell us what the situation really is in that city. That city has left faithfulness to God. Judgment is roundly poured out on several ancient cities, including Jerusalem. And so it's to the future that the prophets look. Isaiah chapter 2, verse 2: "It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of Yahweh shall be established as the highest of the mountains." Or Ezekiel chapter 40: Ezekiel sees a vision of a city with a temple in it that's still yet future. He had seen the glory of God leaving Jerusalem, the city where he had dwelt, and now he sees it inhabiting the city again, but sometime in the future. Ezekiel 40, verse 2: "In visions of God he brought me to the land of Israel, and set me down on a very high mountain, on which was a structure like a city to the south." Zechariah similarly, chapter 8, verse 3: "Thus says Yahweh: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of Yahweh of hosts, the holy mountain." H. A. Thomas says, "Zion represents God's people living in God's place under God's rule." And the prophets say it's not happening now. Because of their sin, they have broken covenant with God, so God sends them into exile. Even after they come back from exile, God hasn't returned to his city. The city of man has become one with Jerusalem. By the time you get to the New Testament, when Jesus himself shows up in Jerusalem, which should be the city where God is dwelling, it's full of money changers. And they don't even recognize their King. Jesus himself laments over Jerusalem as "the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it," Matthew 23:37. Indeed, Jerusalem becomes the city of man. What should have, on this trajectory, become the glorious garden city of God has devolved into the place of man's power. And man attempts to murder God by crucifying Jesus. So Jesus, after his resurrection, sends his followers across the globe with the news that a new Jerusalem is coming, and only in Christ can they enter it. And of course, by the time you get to the end of the New Testament, in the book of Revelation, that's where you finally do see that city. Revelation chapters 21 and 22: John says, "I saw a city coming down out of heaven, like a bride adorned for her husband." It's the New Jerusalem in the new heavens and new earth, this biblical picture of God's city. John says it comes out of heaven, meaning God built it. He says there's no more death and no more enemies there: God guards it. And he says in Revelation 22, "His servants will worship him. They will see his face." God is glorified in it. It's the total opposite of the city of man. Finally, God dwelling with man in a city, of all places. Interesting that it has garden imagery all over the New Jerusalem, isn't it? There's the river of life; there's the tree of life for the healing of the nations. It's like the garden again, but it's even better. And there's city imagery. There are walls. There are dimensions to the thing. It's like this odd 3D structure. How does that work? I don't know, but somehow it works. You know what else was a perfect cube? The Holy of Holies in the temple. Now it's expanded to the whole city. God overrules man's defiance in the city and turns it to his own glory and to their good. And so Isaiah is coming into the middle of this very long, glorious picture of what God is doing to redeem man's futile efforts to overthrow him, by creating a garden city for his own people to dwell in. And Isaiah specifically has a keen interest in the concept of the city of man and the city of God. I'm sure you're familiar: Augustine, the church father in the fourth century, wrote a book called The City of God. He called them the earthly city and the city of God, or you could call it the city of man and the city of God. And Isaiah is keenly aware of this biblical concept and employs this theme all throughout his prophecies, maybe more than any other prophet. You remember back in chapter 1, he said the city is besieged, the city is destroyed. It's a lonely city. Isaiah chapter 1, verse 26: he calls it the faithful city that's become a harlot, but then it's going to be redeemed and be made into a faithful city. Isaiah 14:21: he tells them to kill Babylon, "lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the face of the world with cities." That was Babylon's goal: let me just fill the world with things that I make, things that demonstrate my might and my power. And God says, "No, I'm putting an end to that." Isaiah 13 to 35, you just see scattered images of cities being overthrown left and right. Isaiah 38, verse 6, God says, "I will defend this city," speaking of Jerusalem. Isaiah 45, verse 13, after the exile, he says Cyrus, this Medo-Persian king, is going to come and rebuild the city, Jerusalem, which of course he does. And then, passage after passage after passage in Isaiah, he is relentlessly pointing our eyes forward to the New Jerusalem, that glorious city, the ultimate city, the city of God. Did you notice even on this slide here, three whole chapters, Isaiah 60, 61, and 62, dedicated to that city, which we'll get to in, I don't know, a year, a year and a half, whenever we get there. The point is, he's constantly looking forward to this city, isn't he? This is a massive part of Isaiah's hope for the future. This is not an inconsequential theological idea for him. This is his hope: that there are all these cities out there with wicked men in them that are trying to overthrow God's city, but he knows in the end God will plant his city, and it will be secure, and God himself will be glorified in it. That's his hope. And that's why at the center of his eschatology, he has these two songs about two cities, one about the city of men, one about the city of God. It shouldn't be surprising if you look at the rest of Scripture. He's just keying in on what everyone else has been saying: that there's a city, or cities, that represent the strength and the power and the protection and the glory of man, and there's one that represents that of God, and only one of those is going to endure. That's what these songs are about: praising God for the glory of his city. It's a huge thematic concept in the Bible and in Isaiah, and these songs are a kind of climax of it. I think the thing that I don't want you to miss as we look at these verses is that what we're dealing with is worship. We're dealing with songs. The form of it matters. The fact that he said, "In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah," that's not inconsequential. It's the point. God will overthrow the city of man and establish his own city in order to glorify himself, to win for himself worship. As Isaiah shows us, the reason we can trust in God and in his lasting city is primarily about whose glory we love the most. And so we're going to look at this in two parts, for the two songs. We can praise God for two cities and their fate. First, we praise God for the end of the city of man. Look at chapter 25, verse 1, this first song. Isaiah says, "O Yahweh, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name." He doesn't explicitly call this a song in this section, but this is psalmic language. He's borrowing Psalm 25, verse 2; Psalm 7, verse 2; Psalm 31, verse 15; Psalm 30, verse 2; Psalm 118, verse 28; Psalm 145, verse 1. I mean, just over and over, he's borrowing language from the Psalms to sing about God's victory over the city of man, which is what he had just been describing. We didn't read it this evening, but for 23 verses in chapter 24 he was talking about how God is going to destroy the city of man, all of man's might and power and strength, emblemized by a city. He's going to overthrow that, and so he worships him for bringing an end to the city of men. And he does it in a personal way. Did you notice that? "O Yahweh, you are my God." He's going to get to the corporate later. But he starts by saying, "You are my God." And the way that the Psalter uses that specific phrase, it's always an expression of trust. It's not possession, like, "God, you belong to me, so I can make you do what I want you to do." It's an expression of dependence: "You're my God. You're the one I trust in." And it's also an expression of the culminating promise from Exodus chapter 6, verse 7, where God says, "I will be your God, and you will be my people." Revelation 21 quotes that exact same thing: "I will be with them as their God, and they will be my people." And this language is supposed to be an obvious contrast with the songs from the city of men, isn't it? You remember back in chapter 24, verse 8: "The mirth of the tambourines is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased, the mirth of the lyre is stilled." There's no more singing going on in the city of man. They had their drinking songs; those are done. This is way different. This genre of music is worship. He says, "I will exalt you." This is also language from the Psalter. It's a song celebrating God's defeat of the wicked. He says, "I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things": miracles, supernatural acts that God does when he redeems his people and saves them. The preeminent one in the Old Testament, of course, is the Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea and the wonders poured out on Egypt. He says, "You've done that, and you've done it again. You've done these supernatural things that have overthrown the city of man. They could never have stopped it. And so I'm worshiping you for it." He says that's according to "plans formed of old, faithful and sure," meaning this wasn't a detour. This wasn't plan B for God. This was always the plan. Meaning, from Isaiah's perspective, living in the eighth century BC, God wasn't out of control when Assyria was raging. No, that was part of the plan that leads to this. You can almost hear Ahaz quivering in the background, and Isaiah, with a firm footing in God's eternal decree, saying, "No, this has always been what God was planning to do. Formed of old, faithful and sure. God said it; it's going to happen." "Faithful and sure" is literally just two conjugations of the word "amen," meaning truth. Amen, amen. It's happening. God, before time even began, decided exactly what was going to happen. This is a promises-kept moment. The word is fulfilled, the doubt is removed, all is accomplished. And what is it that he's accomplished? Verse 2: "You have made the city a heap." The city, this representation of the power and the structures and the might and the military strength and the protection of man, he says all of it is just a pile of stones, a ruin. That's paralleled with "fortified city." The first word there is a slightly different word, less often used, qiryah. It's a synonym for a city, related to the word for building with wooden beams, so maybe a fort is how we might think about it, a walled village of some kind. And he says it's a betsurah city, a walled or fortified city. I think the word is supposed to be ironic. It means unassailable. You couldn't ever conquer this city. Its walls were ten feet thick, and you could ride so many horses on top of them. Oh, is that what's going to protect it? High walls, gates, bars? Well, no. It's also a ruin. All those big, important weapons and defenses that you managed to conjure up didn't do anything. "Ruin" is a word for a fallen thing, something that's collapsed, something that's struck down. Chapter 27, verse 10, he says, "The fortified city is solitary, a habitation deserted and forsaken like the wilderness." Just emptiness, nothingness, piles of stone, no people, no more defenses, totally destroyed. He says "the foreigners' palace is a city no more." It doesn't even exist as a city. This word "palace" is a citadel, some highly protected walled area. You might think of it like a castle, a keep, well-defended. "Foreigners" meaning the enemies of Israel. And he says it's so utterly overthrown, it's not coming back. Verse 3, here's the effect of that great conquest, God overthrowing all the strength of men: "Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you." The effect is an increase in Yahweh's esteem, even among pagan nations. This word "strong peoples" is exactly what it sounds like: people who had strength, people who had might, military strength, who could overthrow other nations. They themselves were overthrown by God, and so they had to give glory to God. They had to admit they were bested. There was one who was stronger. This word "ruthless," "ruthless nations," is used three times in these verses. Probably a better way to translate it might be "fearsome." Some people translate it "awe-inspiring." But I think the idea is that they inspire fear in other people. They're terrifying, bloodthirsty, violent nations, like the Assyrians of Isaiah's day. And it says they will fear you. That's supposed to be ironic. The people that everyone else was afraid of are now afraid of God, as they should be. It's sort of by transitive property: if you were afraid of him, and now he's afraid of God, who should you really be afraid of? The bigger fish, right? So, verse 4, the reason for it. He says, "For you have been a stronghold to the poor." God won this praise through the destruction of the mighty and the protection of the needy. The word "stronghold" here just means a place of protection, safety, a refuge. Sometimes it's a castle, sometimes it's a harbor, sometimes it's a temple, sometimes it's a mountain. Most of the time this word "stronghold" is used in the Old Testament, it's translated "refuge," and it's referring to God. God is our stronghold, our refuge, our strength: Isaiah 17:10, Isaiah 27:5. He is our refuge, our stronghold. And who is he a stronghold for? Is it for the strong people, the people who help themselves out? No, it's the opposite. "For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress." The idea is people who had nothing that they could contribute. They didn't have money. They didn't have an armory full of weapons. They didn't have strength to speak of. They were just helpless and in trouble. All they had was need. They had empty hands. Those are the people that God is the stronghold for. The people who are the antithesis of the fortified city and the palace are the ones that God saves. He says he's "a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat." He's going to use these two metaphors a couple of different ways. A storm: just a rainstorm. Rain comes pelting down, and there's some sort of overhang, some sort of shelter, a ceiling to keep you dry. And heat: the heat of the sun at midday, particularly in the desert, when it's beating down on you, and now there's a shade protecting you from it. That's God for his people. It's the same image used in Isaiah 4:6 and 28:15. And it gets at the central thrust of Isaiah's prophecies over and over again. Haven't we heard the same thing? Isaiah is just asking the people of Israel, what is your refuge? What is your shelter? To whom do you look for a sense of security? Is it an allied nation, like Egypt, or Syria at times, or eventually, we'll see, Babylon itself? Is it yourself and your own military strength? Is it your wisdom and your might? Is it any of the things that the nations themselves look to? He says here that on that last day, the only stronghold left will be God, and he saves the needy people. He clarifies his metaphor in verse 4: "For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall." The life and energy, the words and expenditures of the violent, of the bloodthirsty, all that they do in attacking and mounting up against God's people, it's like their breath. They're constantly breathing out threats and murder. I think of it like the big bad wolf. He's huffing and puffing, and he can't blow it down. There's a shelter that won't give. The heat metaphor is used again in verse 5: "like heat in a dry place," like in a desert. "You subdue the noise of the foreigners; as heat by the shade of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is put down." Here he's likening the sounds that God's enemies make to the heat from the sun: their taunts and their challenges, their threats and their boasts, their victory banquets. And God silences all of it just as effortlessly and as gently as a cloud passing under the sun. It's like he doesn't even have to try. They're constantly, furiously working up this din of noise and furor, and God just gently silences all of it. In a moment, all of the heat is gone. The song is put down. Again, it's ironic: a song about a song being put down, a song exalting God and ending all other songs. It's kind of like we sing in "Crown Him with Many Crowns": "the Lamb upon his throne; hark, how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own." That's what he's saying. He's harkening back here to 24:8 and the silencing of the wasted city. What he's saying is that, friends, one day Hollywood will be deserted. One day Nashville will just be a bunch of crickets. One day New York and London and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Mumbai, one day Washington, D.C., will be a meaningless footnote in the history of the greater glory of God and his city. There is nothing left of the city of man. It is a ruin, forgotten and powerless, and that's the point. That's what they're praising God for. They're worshiping God for overthrowing any attempt by us to exalt ourselves over him. "Look, look at the city I built." "Not impressed," God says. A couple of applications from this one. Don't set your hope on the city of man. Of course, that happens around election cycles. It happens when there's war, when there's famine, when there are viruses. We look to a government. We look to the strength of men: help us, save us. Isaiah would tell us, don't trust in that, the chariots and the horses. It's not that it's a bad thing to be mindful and to vote and to be aware and try to contribute in a meaningful way to democracy. I think now of the constitutional amendments that are coming up in Virginia. Just vote no to them. They're very confusing. I'm just clarifying. Just vote no. I mean, do you think if they pass, God loses? No. God hasn't lost one inch. That was part of his plan, formed of old. Eventually that city, no matter how much it thrives, is going down. So you don't have to put your trust in some political campaign or measure. In fact, I think what Isaiah is telling us here is that we can rejoice, knowing that the city of man one day is coming down, the city of wickedness and human pride. It doesn't last. As we sing, the worldling's pleasures are all being overthrown, but "solid joys and lasting treasure none but Zion's children know." It belongs only to the city of God to endure that day, but the city of man is going away. A day is coming, friends, when every abortion mill will be closed. A day is coming when every unjust judge will be behind bars, so to speak. A day is coming when every wicked law, every corrupt politician, every horrible scheme of man and device of murder and sedition and wickedness will be cast into the lake of fire, along with the devil and the Antichrist, forever and ever. And only Christ will reign on that day. So you don't have to be afraid of those things. It doesn't mean we don't have something to do today. We do. We've got work. But it does mean we don't have to fear that city. We don't have to be overwhelmed by it. "What are we going to do if this person wins this election? What are we going to do if this country does this?" Well, I don't know what we're going to do, but God's going to win. In the end, the city of man will be overthrown, and God will institute his strong city. And so we praise God for the end of the city of man. Second, we praise God for the strength of the city of God. And that's what we see in the second song, chapter 26, verses 1 to 6. He says, "In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah." After reflecting on the glories of the feast that will happen in that city, which we'll look at next week, he explodes with this song of praise to God, which he says is going to be sung in the land of Judah. It's particularized. It's localized to the place where God's people, his covenant people, are dwelling in Isaiah's day and will dwell forever. The survivors, the remnant who return, are going to sing this specific song. I mean, that's a statement in Scripture. It says this song will be sung. I take that literally. I think people will actually be singing this song. I don't know if it'll be in Hebrew or another language, but they'll be singing this exact song at some point in the future. And here's the lyric: "We have a strong city." Whereas the nations considered themselves strong, chapter 25, verse 3, "strong peoples," this one actually is strong. This is a strength of a totally different kind than the strength of the city of men. This is not just walls but bigger, stones but stronger, masonry but more delicately constructed. No, this is defense of a higher caliber. And he tells you what it is: "We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks." Meaning, walls are an illustration of the protection that comes through God's acts of salvation, acts of deliverance. And we're prepared to understand how this works by the Iron Dome. You're aware of this in Israel? The Iron Dome has, for 15 years or so, been shooting down missiles as they're being launched at Israel. They say it's intercepted over 10,000 pieces of ordnance with Tamir missiles at this point. The idea is that someone shoots a missile at Israel, they detect it, they shoot another missile, and it hits it and it's gone. So the threat is gone. It's not a literal wall, but it's like a wall, because it gets rid of the threat. That's what he's saying. God is salvation to his people, not just as another wall, but like a wall: he protects them in that he accomplishes these great acts of salvation that remove all the threats that would endanger them. This is accomplished by God in the tribulation, the overthrow of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon, the overthrow of Satan at the battle of Gog and Magog. Or even in Isaiah's time, he sees an illustration of this: 185,000 Assyrians dead in the night. God didn't need a wall to do that. He didn't even need a single sword. It was one angel. That was it. That's why he says in Isaiah chapter 12, verse 2, "Behold, God is my salvation." It's worth noting that the Hebrew word for salvation here is yeshua, from which, of course, we get Jesus. Verse 2: they now call to the rest of the nations, "Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in." So this is not some Jewish-only salvation, some ethnically homogeneous city. This is open to the nations. Revelation 21 says that nations are going to come in and out and bring their treasures into this city. This is a city for all peoples who trust in Yahweh. Notice it clarifies that "the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in." The nation that is bowed in humble submission to Yahweh, trusting him like Israel should: those nations are allowed in. And we've actually started to see little glimpses of that already in Isaiah. You remember back in Isaiah chapter 18, verse 7, we saw that Cush was bringing tribute. The African nations are bringing tribute to Yahweh in Zion. Egypt and Assyria, in Isaiah 19:23, are forming this massive highway, the center of which is Jerusalem, the city of God, Zion. Jeremiah 48 and 49 tell us about Moab and Ammon and Elam. Zechariah 14 says all of these nations are going to be observing the Feast of Booths, of all things, and coming into the city and worshiping God there: global worship brought to honor God, demonstrating the greater strength of his salvation and his city. And because of that, he makes this almost paradigmatic statement, this declaration of timeless truth, in verse 3. My son is memorizing this right now for AWANA: "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you." Fascinating little verse. It actually starts in Hebrew with the word "mind," and it's not the normal word for mind. It's a word that means intention, or purposes, or designs, your plans, that are "stayed." That's a passive participle of the word "support." It means the one whose plans and purposes and designs are being established by, supported by, steadied by God. That fearless mind, he says, is kept in perfect peace. That phrase "perfect peace" in Hebrew is literally shalom shalom. It's just a doubling of the Hebrew word, which our translators render "perfect peace," because that is the sense of it, the idea of completeness. And it's talking here about an internal peace. The external peace is obvious, but he's talking about the mind, the inner part of man. He says the man whose designs are supported, whose intentions are established by God, is fearless; he has perfect peace. There's no intrusion of anxiety or fear, because he trusts in you. God gives that peace to the people who trust in him. The one whose confidence is in God has a fearless frame of mind and is kept in complete peace. Again, that's a total contrast with Ahaz. He hears there are a couple of nations coming after him, and he starts shaking like a leaf on a tree. And Isaiah is saying, listen, if I submit all of my designs, all of my plans to God, then he will just give me perfect peace as I trust in whatever he wants to do with that. How is it that you can do that? Because, verse 4, "Trust in Yahweh forever, for Yahweh" — literally, Yah Yahweh — "is an everlasting rock." Because he's actually worthy of your trust. That's the symbol of the rock: something strong, stable, like a fortress you can always run to. Everlasting. It's not going anywhere. It's going to stay there forever. He's almost saying there are so many temporary pebbles that we put our trust in: ourselves, our country, our plans, our money, our doctors. He says those are not an everlasting rock. God is. So trust a trustworthy rock. Trust in a city whose foundation and builder is God, not in your own designs. Why? Verse 5: "For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city." Because God is ultimately committed to his glory. That's what he's saying. God will on that day lay low those who are self-exalting, the lofty city. We've seen this over and over in Isaiah: people exalting themselves, the pompous pride of their arrogance, as he calls it. He is going to level them and lay them low to the ground, to the dust. "The inhabitants of the height," he says: those who really did have some minor altitude advantage are now cast all the way down on that day, and now they're in the dust. When you trust in man-made strength, you will share in Satan's dust-licking humiliation. And in contrast, verse 6: "The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy." Again, the poor people, the people who have nothing to offer, the people who recognize, "I'm not strong, I'm not powerful, God is, so I'm depending wholly on him." Those people, who have the strength of Almighty God with them, are walking all over their enemies. You put that all together, and what's he saying? He's saying, if you want to have perfect peace, you submit all of your plans and designs to God, knowing that he will always ultimately exalt himself over every power and strength and glory of man. And if that is your greatest desire, then you have no reason to fear, because it's always going to happen. Right? If God always exalts himself, and what you want is for God to be glorified, then do you have anything to be afraid of at any point? Though the nations rage, though they plot in vain? Absolutely not. Because God is always going to bring all of human history toward this climactic end of his glory and the humiliation of any who would oppose him. First Corinthians 15:25: "For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet." And one day he will. He's saying, put all of your trust in God's strength. And that can sound kind of like a Christian Hallmark card, or like a platitude: "Just trust God, right? I don't know. I'm sorry stuff is hard. Just trust God." It can sound that way, until you get into this and you realize what he's saying. He's saying, you want perfect peace? You can have it. The way that you get it is to cause all of your intentions to be: God, be glorified. God, be glorified; I know you will on that day. God, however you want to do it in my life today, be glorified. Be glorified. If I don't get the job, be glorified. If you don't heal me, be glorified. If we lose the war, be glorified. Whatever it is, God, if you would exalt yourself, if you would win for yourself praise in an eternal hall of heaven, a city rejoicing in your strength over the strength of men, if you would do that, let me play whatever part you would have for me in that story. Only would you be glorified. So you see, at the end of the day, these songs are really deeply practical. They're about us and what we love. Do we love the glory that comes from the city of man? From our own strength? From what another person can give you, fear of man? From military might or power or YouTube likes or a million other things that people could give? Or do you love the glory of God more? Augustine himself put it this way in The City of God: "Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, 'Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.' In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, 'I will love thee, O Lord, my strength.'" You know, Jesus encountered this same dynamic in his own time on earth, which John tells us was reflected by Isaiah. John chapter 12, verse 36: "When Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them. Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him, so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: 'Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?' Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said, 'He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.'" Listen to this: "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him. Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God." So I think the question to ask yourself, when presented with this song of two cities, is: which glory do I love? The fading glory of a worldly city that's passing away, along with all of its entailments and enjoyments? Or do I love a city that will never fade, whose light is the Lamb and whose glory is God himself? Hebrews 13 says we don't even have a city here, but we seek a lasting city.

The End of the World as We Know It - Part 1

September 23, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 24

Well, I am very excited, because this evening we are going to start studying Isaiah 24 to 27, which is one of the coolest sections in the whole book of Isaiah. What we're going to do here at the beginning is I'm going to read through all of 24 to 27. It takes about 12 minutes. Calm down. And then we're going to start studying through 24. I ambitiously put on the slide "through verse 23." I actually think we'll probably only get through verse 13. That would be my guess, but we'll see what time the Lord gives us here this evening. Isaiah's so-called apocalypse, Isaiah 24 to 27. Behold, Yahweh will empty the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the creditor, so with the debtor. The earth shall be utterly empty and utterly plundered, for Yahweh has spoken this word. The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few men are left. The wine mourns, the vine languishes, all the merry-hearted sigh. The mirth of the tambourines is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased, the mirth of the lyre is stilled. No more do they drink wine with singing; strong drink is bitter to those who drink it. The wasted city is broken down; every house is shut up so that none can enter. There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine; all joy has grown dark; the gladness of the earth is banished. Desolation is left in the city; the gates are battered into ruins. For thus it shall be in the midst of the earth among the nations, as when an olive tree is beaten, as at the gleaning when the grape harvest is done. They lift up their voices, they sing for joy; over the majesty of Yahweh they shout from the west. Therefore in the east give glory to Yahweh; in the coastlands of the sea, give glory to the name of Yahweh, the God of Israel. From the ends of the earth we hear songs of praise, of glory to the Righteous One. But I say, "I waste away, I waste away. Woe is me! For the traitors have betrayed, with betrayal the traitors have betrayed." Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth! He who flees at the sound of the terror shall fall into the pit, and he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare. For the windows of heaven are opened, and the foundations of the earth tremble. The earth is utterly broken, the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken. The earth staggers like a drunken man; it sways like a hut; its transgression lies heavy upon it, and it falls, and will not rise again. On that day Yahweh will punish the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth. They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a prison, and after many days they will be punished. Then the moon will be confounded and the sun ashamed, for Yahweh of hosts reigns on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and his glory will be before his elders. O Yahweh, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the foreigners' palace is a city no more; it will never be rebuilt. Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you. For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat; for the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall, like heat in a dry place. You subdue the noise of the foreigners; as heat by the shade of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is put down. On this mountain Yahweh of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for Yahweh has spoken. It will be said on that day, "Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is Yahweh; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." For the hand of Yahweh will rest on this mountain, and Moab shall be trampled down in his place, as straw is trampled down in a dunghill. And he will spread out his hands in the midst of it as a swimmer spreads his hands out to swim, but Yahweh will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands. And the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust. In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah: "We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks. Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in Yahweh forever, for Yahweh God is an everlasting rock. For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city. He lays it low, lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy." The path of the righteous is level; you make level the way of the righteous. In the path of your judgments, O Yahweh, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of Yahweh. O Yahweh, your hand is lifted up, but they do not see it. Let them see your zeal for your people, and be ashamed. Let the fire for your adversaries consume them. O Yahweh, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works. O Yahweh our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone we bring to remembrance. They are dead, they will not live; they are shades, they will not arise; to that end you have visited them with destruction and wiped out all remembrance of them. But you have increased the nation, O Yahweh, you have increased the nation; you are glorified; you have enlarged all the borders of the land. O Yahweh, in distress they sought you; they poured out a whispered prayer when your discipline was upon them. Like a pregnant woman who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near to giving birth, so were we because of you, O Yahweh; we were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind. We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the inhabitants of the world have not fallen. Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead. Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed by. For behold, Yahweh is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain. In that day Yahweh with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. In that day, "A pleasant vineyard, sing of it! I, Yahweh, am its keeper; every moment I water it. Lest anyone punish it, I keep it night and day; I have no wrath. Would that I had thorns and briers to battle! I would march against them, I would burn them up together. Or let them lay hold of my protection, let them make peace with me, let them make peace with me." In days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots and fill the whole world with fruit. Has he struck them as he struck those who struck them? Or have they been slain as their slayers were slain? Measure by measure, by exile you contended with them; he removed them with his fierce breath in the day of the east wind. Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for, and this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin: when he makes all the stones of the altars like chalkstones crushed to pieces, no Asherim or incense altars will remain standing. For the fortified city is solitary, a habitation deserted and forsaken, like the wilderness; there the calf grazes; there it lies down and strips its branches. When its boughs are dry, they are broken; women come and make a fire of them. For this is a people without discernment; therefore he who made them will not have compassion on them; he who formed them will show them no favor. In that day from the river Euphrates to the Brook of Egypt Yahweh will thresh out the grain, and you will be gleaned one by one, O people of Israel. And in that day a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were lost in the land of Assyria and those who were driven out to the land of Egypt will come and worship Yahweh on the holy mountain at Jerusalem. So reads the word of the living God. Everyone seems to agree that the world is going to end. They just can't agree on how. Going all the way back to the intertestamental period, the book of Enoch records what's called an animal apocalypse. It's a story where people are represented by different animals, kind of like Animal Farm. Eventually a white bull comes that's supposed to represent the Messiah, who turns everyone else into white bulls. That's how the world is going to end, according to Enoch. Another apocalyptic book, the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel, was written in the seventh century A.D. In it, the governor Zerubbabel, who obviously didn't actually write this, is visited by an angel named Metatron, who shows him the hidden Messiah and shows him the Antichrist Armilus, who is born out of a pagan statue and has two heads, until he's destroyed and all is restored in a glorious third temple. That's another version of the end of the world. Buddhist texts also predict the end of the world. They say that the teaching of the Dharma will decline over time, eventually leading to the need for a new Buddha named Maitreya, who will return and bring in a kind of halcyon day of Buddhist acceptance, at least until we cycle through seven different suns, the last of which is going to just burn up the earth, and then we start over again, because reincarnation. There's the robot apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse, you name it. Humanity's guessed it. NASA has even gotten in on this. They have prophesied that the world will officially end in one billion years, when the sun gets 10% brighter and dries up all the oceans. After four billion years, the whole Earth will be basically like Mars, a red planet. You know what's suspiciously absent from all of those apocalypses? God. And particularly the glory of God, the worship of God, the name of God, the exaltation of God, which is the purpose for creation and the great goal of creation. It is the end to which all things are directed. God is the glorious burning center of all reality, and no less of the future. The end of the world? That's his idea. And it will happen by his power and for his great glory. I mean, how pathetic, in a sense, is it that we can't help but come up with apocalypses that are all about us in some way? The man-centered apocalypse totally misses the point. Isaiah obviously does not. In his unparalleled description of the end of all things, he does not for one second take his eye off of the one for whom all things will come to an end. Isaiah 24 to 27, the name of Yahweh... Oh, we've got a little mouse in here. He's going to come to an end too. We'll see exactly when. I guess it'll be at the end of class when we remove those. He's hiding back there. Do we need to pause and deal with that, or are you guys okay to keep going? Just keep going? All right. All right, Mickey, you get a stay of execution. I saw him. Yeah, he is. He is. You know, since we're here, when Isaac Watts, who wrote the hymn that we sang earlier, was little, he was precocious, and he made up lots of rhymes. He said, "There was a mouse for want of stairs, climbed up a rope to say his prayers." His dad was just fed up with all these little rhymes that he would make, so he said, "You'd better stop making up these little rhymes, or else you're going to get punished." And so he said to his dad, "Father, Father, pity take, and I will no more verses make." Anyway, it's just a little mouse aside there. All right, back to Isaiah. How do we refocus? The glory of God, that's right. In Isaiah 24 to 27, the name Yahweh occurs 28 times. It's all about him. The end of the world is all about God. It's God's world, God's justice, God's salvation, God's glory. Brothers and sisters, the way that the world will actually end is that one day, and maybe someday soon, God will return in fearsome power and might, and God will redeem for himself a people for his own pure worship forever. And God will receive the worship that is due to him for all of eternity. That's where all of our lives are actually headed. We might step into that day tomorrow. And even if you don't believe in Jesus, that's where your life is headed. One way or another, either to be destroyed by God in eternal hell or to praise God in eternal bliss, one day you're going to face that end. The question is, what is your relationship like with the God who made that day? Who is God to you today? That will affect everything about who he is to you on that day. We are just now entering into a magnificent portion of Scripture, Isaiah 24 to 27. As you could tell from our reading, it is a cohesive unit. It's a whole, set off at the beginning of 28, where we start getting into these woe sections, and set off from the previous section by the word oracle. We no longer see the word oracle that dotted the landscape from 13 to 23. Now we find ourselves in something brand new. It's often called Isaiah's Little Apocalypse. Some have called it Isaiah's Cantata or Isaiah's Oratorio. I think it's better to just call it Isaiah's Revelation. That's maybe how we would best understand it. Of course, apocalypse means revelation, but I think we better understand it when we see it as the Revelation of the Old Testament. This is, in some sense, God's plan to wrap up all of history for his name's sake and for his people's salvation. This isn't disconnected from the section that came before it, Isaiah 13 to 23, which we've looked at for however many weeks prior to this: one judgment oracle after another on the nations, Babylon and Philistia and Tyre and Aram and all the rest. At the end of all of it, it's like Isaiah is saying, "Let's grab all of them together, and let me show you not just these little acts of judgment that are happening along the way throughout human history. Let me show you the final judgment that's happening to all of them," where God brings all of it together and finally does away with all of his enemies. Isaiah drops the oracle language. He fixes his eye now on the distant future, what is for us still future. He widens his scope to include absolutely every nation, indeed to include heaven and earth. And he begins unfolding for us a compact description of the way that God will wrap up human history. There are so many parallels here to the book of Revelation, and also massive parallels to Jesus' own revelation of the future, the Olivet Discourse. There are lots of similarities to Daniel's future prophecies and even to Peter's eschatology that you find in 2 Peter. Isaiah's revelation of the end of all things is a tour de force in biblical prophecy, in end-times prediction, and in a God-centered vision of the eternal decree of God. He stretches all the way back to creation, through the flood, through Israel, through the church, all the way to the great day of the Lord, the return of Christ, the millennial kingdom, the final battle, the great white throne judgment, and the eternal state. All of it is here. If you want an eschatology in four chapters, here it is. And it is the relentless God-centeredness of Isaiah 24 to 27 that draws our attention this evening, especially in its structure. The way that the whole section is structured focuses on God and his glory. Not surprisingly, for those of you who have been here, Isaiah is using very tight, thoughtful poetic structure. As we've seen a number of times in Isaiah, he's using a chiasm. It's kind of like the shape of an X, where there are parallel thoughts at the beginning and end, and then sandwiched into the middle, leading all the way to one focus section right in the center. The idea of this structure is to focus your eye and your ear on what's happening right at the center. You should ask yourself, for instance, why did I start singing at the beginning of 25, and then start singing again at the beginning of 26? Well, it's because there's an intentional structure. That's what he's doing here. Notice some of the parallels here. These A, C, C, and A sections are more descriptive. They have more to do with judgment on the nations, generally speaking, and they include some parallel words like punishment and city. We'll get into this next time, Lord willing: the theme of city that's shot throughout Isaiah 24 to 27. But then you also see that this is marked by songs. Over and over again throughout this section, Isaiah is describing some sort of horrific coming judgment on the world, and then people break out into song, joyful song. Did you notice that as we were reading it? It almost sounds schizophrenic, doesn't it? It's like one second we're in the doom and gloom, and then the next we're celebrating. It kind of reminds you of Revelation, doesn't it? The book of Revelation often intersperses horrific judgments with glorious singing of the saints worshiping God: "Hallelujah! Her smoke goes up forever." And it's a very similar structure here. And right at the center is this beautiful, glorious picture of the feast of God, where he swallows up death and wipes away every tear, ushering in the eternal kingdom of God. So that's the structure of this whole thing. It's leading us toward this glorious feast, the culmination of all of history. And the point of it, whether you see it in the songs or in the feast, is that Isaiah's eschatology is doxology. His apocalypse is worship. His view of the end is a vista of the glory of God. When Isaiah thinks, "How is this all going to end?" he answers, "Worship." Worship to the one true God, the God of Israel. In the first chapter, then, of this God-ward end-times revelation, Isaiah means to show us the glory of God in judgment. That's where this begins. Isaiah chapter 24 is almost entirely judgment on the world. And we know that we should respond to this whole long section of judgment in worship, because that's exactly what Isaiah does. Notice, after chapter 24, chapter 25, verse 1: "O Yahweh, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure." You did that. You destroyed the cities, and I'm worshiping you now for it. That can seem very odd to us, and we'll explore this more as we go on: why it is that singing to God is an appropriate response when you see the judgment of the world. I was actually just looking this afternoon in the Sing! hymnal to see whether there are any songs celebrating the judgment of God. The answer is no. This seems very hard for us to do, but there are actually quite a few of them in the Bible. In fact, the very first song that you find in the Bible is a celebration of God's judgment. Do you remember this? Exodus 15, when they get to the other side of the Red Sea: "The horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea." They're celebrating God's overthrow of wickedness. The reality is, this is something that you and I also long for, even if we've become a little bit too squeamish to say it. When terrorists attack a country, when wicked jihadists are murdering Christians, when abortion legally murders 60 million-plus babies, don't you want that to end? So does God. And he will. And it's worth singing about, he says, and praising him for, on the day that he brings justice to this world. We should glorify God, he says, for destroying a wicked world. Most people assume the world is going to be destroyed, if by nothing else, by just basic entropy: eventually it's all going to go down. But Isaiah's vision of the gleaning to come puts God and his purposes right at the center. And assuming that this text is true, and of course I am, because the whole Bible is true, there really are only two ways to respond to a text like this about the coming decimation of the world, future judgment, the apocalyptic, climactic destruction of the world as we know it. The one is just terrified fear. You hear about this, and you can do nothing but fear. The other option is praise, glorious praise to God, because he has done it, and he has done it for his praise. He does all things well. My prayer is that as Isaiah reveals to us how God will wipe away all evil from the earth, you and I will be provoked to praise as well. So how does God intend to end all things? We find seven ways in this text, and again, we'll probably only get to a few of them this evening. When God empties the earth, how does he do it? The first answer that Isaiah gives us is that he ignores all status. He ignores all status. Look at verse 1 in chapter 24. He says, "Behold." He's arresting your attention with this first word. He didn't start the other segments this way. He started them with "The oracle concerning..." Now he starts a different way: "Behold. Listen up. Something new is happening, something even further into the future." And here it is: "Yahweh will empty the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants." This sentence is really summarizing all that is going to come, the destruction of the whole earth. A couple of things to note in this verse. First, the word earth: "Yahweh will empty the earth." It's the very common Hebrew word eretz. It's often translated "land." Because of that, there's some debate over this passage, and really the whole section. Is this just dealing with the land of Israel, or is this dealing with the whole earth, the globe? My answer would be that it's dealing with the whole earth. I don't think it's just dealing with the land of Israel, for a handful of reasons. One is that in verse 4 he uses a parallel word, translated "the world," which almost always means the inhabited world. Another is that verse 13 tells us, "It shall be in the midst of the earth among the nations." Another is that Israel is singled out from the other nations, and Israel experiences salvation where all the other nations experience judgment. And that same reality lines up perfectly with exactly what we see in the rest of Scripture in its description of the end time. So I think this is a description of judgment to come on the whole earth. It's an expansion from chapters 13 to 23 to now include the whole world. Another word to take notice of: it says "scatter its inhabitants." That word is used five times in this text. The earth usually means the physical earth, but with a target of the people living on the physical earth. They're the ones who are the problem. They're the ones who provoke God's wrath, the inhabitants. And so God is destroying not just the physical world, but everything on it. Basically, the reason he's overthrowing the natural order, sending earthquakes and floods and fires and all of that, is because he wants to judge its inhabitants. That's the point. But notice also, even in just this beginning verse, we start to see de-creation language, the unmaking of the earth. He's going back to Genesis 1 and using either antonyms, the opposites of words that are in Genesis 1, or some of the exact language of Genesis 1, in order to make you realize he's undoing what he did at first. A couple of examples. One would be the word empties: "Yahweh will empty." It's the opposite of filling. It was "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." He says, "Nope, now it's going to be emptied of its inhabitants." He also says he will twist its surface. That's literally the face, the face of the earth. That same language is used over and over again in Genesis 1, and in Genesis 1 the face of the earth is being ordered. Here it's being twisted, so it's being put out of order. And verse 10 says, "The wasted city is broken down." That word wasted is the word tohu. You find the exact same word only a few times in the Hebrew Bible, and one of those times is Genesis 1:2: the earth was tohu wabohu, formless and void. So he's saying this is a city that has now become like the earth was before God started ordering it, when it was just formless and void. God came as the Holy Spirit and brooded over it and then started speaking and giving order to creation. Now he's going in the opposite direction. Because of the wickedness of mankind, he is overthrowing his own creative order in order to undo it and destroy all of the inhabitants therein. Notice verse 3 has a number of parallels. It says, "The earth shall be utterly empty and utterly plundered, for Yahweh has spoken this word." Let me do a little bit of Hebrew homework here for you, just because it shows up a lot in this particular chapter. There's a construction called an infinitive absolute. It's basically where you have a verb, and then you have the verb again but in a slightly different form. So it would be like saying "running, I ran." Hebrew uses that often as a way of accentuating or emphasizing a certain concept. So the word that we have translated here "utterly" is just a way of accounting for that. "Utterly empty" means the earth shall be emptied, emptying, and plundered, plundering. It's a way of saying to the most extreme degree, absolutely. And this happens over and over again in Isaiah 24. Honestly, this whole section, 24 to 27, is just peak poetry for Isaiah. It's full of assonance and alliteration and even some rhyme, a fascinating use of language all throughout. This is just one example. He's saying the earth isn't just partially scorched as a result of this. This isn't like a local fire. This is utter devastation, entire eradication, because God is the one both predicting and accomplishing it. Verse 3: "For Yahweh has spoken this word." God's the one doing it, so you know it's going to happen. And then in the middle of this beginning section, we have this six-pair repetition of class distinctions in society that God says will be utterly meaningless on that day to save anyone from the destruction. It doesn't matter what class you are; it's not going to help you on that day if you don't have a saving relationship with the Lord. Verse 2: "And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest." Your religious standing is helpless on that day. "As with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress." Your vocational authority, "I'm in charge; I have a lot of people that work for me," is totally meaningless on that day. God will not care. "As with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the creditor, so with the debtor." The financial or economic leverage that you have had on this earth is utterly useless to bribe God on that day. He's not going to be impressed by your 401(k). Your mountain of gold, your country—who cares? It's going to do nothing to save anyone on that day. Revelation chapter 6, verse 15: "Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks." And do you remember what they said? They said, "Fall on us and hide us from the wrath of God and of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?" The answer: no one. It does not matter what status you have right now. It won't help you on that day. That day, the great day of judgment in the tribulation, will be a day of great clarity. All of our made-up titles, our pins, our badges, our certificates, our degrees, the initials after our names, the number in our online bank account, all of it will be nothing in the eyes of the King of kings. On occasion I'll hear crying from the other room in our house, and I'll go investigate. I'll ask the children, "Why is this one crying?" And sometimes I will get an answer like, "Because we were playing, and I'm the queen, so I get to take this toy right now." And then the queen will be taken by the king to receive discipline. It won't matter what the pretend title is that she made up. Even so, on that day it won't matter what pretend title you made up, that you got other people to agree on, that even the whole world is interested in and watching on Twitter and fascinated by. Nobody will care on that day. You will be just as low as anyone else without God on that day. Romans chapter 2, verses 6 and 11: "He will render to each one according to his works... For God shows no partiality." All of our career strivings before God amount to nothing more than an imaginary child's game. I mean, what real authority did we ever actually have? Your reserved parking space? How's that going to fare when a third of the earth is burned up? There will only be two categories on that day: sheep and goats. It doesn't matter if you put a hat on that goat. If you give him a title or a sign, he's still a goat. And that's what will matter on that day. Remember Jesus, when his disciples came back from being sent out to cast out demons? They were pumped when they returned: "Jesus, can you believe it? Even the demons are subject to us in your name!" And do you remember what Jesus says? "Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." That is the status you will want on that day. That's the title you'll want on that day: in the Lamb's Book of Life. That's what will count for everything. So when God empties the earth, he does so impartially. He can't be bribed; he can't be moved by our feeble efforts. He ignores all status. Second, he ends the excuses. He ends the excuses. Look at verse 4: "The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish." Isaiah here is describing the upheaval of the natural world as a kind of groaning, which we've heard before in Romans 8: the earth innocently subjected to decay because of the wickedness of man. The language here in verse 4 is vegetation-related, mourning and withering. It's like drying up and dying, like flowers that no longer have any water. So the de-creation of the world is now centered on plant life. We see this exact thing happen during the tribulation. Revelation 8, verse 7: "A third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up." Essentially, this is an undoing of the third day of creation. All of the plant life is taken away. And the effect is that even the most exalted suffer for it. That's what he says: "The highest people of the earth languish," meaning it's not just the plants that are getting burned up. It's the people who are going to go with them. And "the highest" is a way of saying everyone, because if it's happening to the highest, it's happening to the lowest as well. But you may ask the question, why? Why would God burn up all the plants? In order to affect the people. And verse 5 answers that question: "The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant." He's saying the earth has effectively been poisoned by the sin of mankind. It's sort of an odd thing to happen, isn't it? I sin, and trees go down for it? Why is that? Well, this is an outworking of the principle that you saw all the way back in Genesis chapter 3, verses 18 and 19, wherein God says, "Adam, because of your sin, thorns and thistles are going to grow up from the ground." There is an intricate relationship between mankind and the earth he inhabits. That's how God designed it to work. In fact, it's even built into the language of Genesis. His name is Adam because he was made from the adamah, the ground. He's a ground person. And so what Adam does, what men do, affects the earth in God's economy. When mankind sins, it affects the earth, not only as a judgment on the earth, but as a judgment on man. So the earth is defiled; it's poisoned by its inhabitants. Then he goes on to describe what it is that they've done that has so languished the earth, and he gives three explanations for it. First, he says they have transgressed the laws. This is not a reference to the Mosaic law. Notice it's plural, "the laws." I think it's probably a reference to the moral law written on the heart. Romans chapter 2, verses 14 to 15, says that even if you've never read a Bible, you know what's right and wrong, because you have this thing called a conscience that God put in your heart. And so you know, at least in some basic sense, that it's wrong to steal. It's wrong to murder. It's wrong to lie. It's wrong to be unfaithful. You know those things, even if you've never touched a Bible. They've transgressed that. They've crossed over it. They've violated their own conscience. Everyone has. Second, he says they've violated the statutes. Literally, it means "you've changed the rules." Here this likely does refer to the written word of God. That's almost always what "statutes" refers to: the instructions of God through Moses. For those who did have the law, he's saying they exchanged it; they changed it; they traded it out; they replaced it with something else that they wanted to keep that wasn't God's actual law. So if you don't have the law, you've transgressed it; if you do have the law, you've violated it. You changed it. There are a number of different examples of this. Probably the most obvious one is the Pharisees, who took the law and just made it keepable. Remember, they took "Honor your father and your mother" and made it into Corban, which basically meant, "I don't have to honor my father and my mother. I can give away my stuff to someone else instead of giving it to them." They made up their own laws to replace God's laws. Another example would be any false religion that claims the Bible's authority while usurping it, saying, "No, we believe God's word; we're just going to contradict it at every point." This would be the Roman Catholic Church; this would be Mormonism; this would be Islam. Another form of this might be the "That's just your interpretation" argument: "Well, I've heard the Bible; I know what it says, but I don't like what it says, so I'm going to cast a veil of suspicion over the whole enterprise of actually knowing it by saying that's just your interpretation. Anyone could interpret it any way, so it doesn't really mean anything, because nobody really knows, and we all disagree." That's really just a way of saying, "I don't like what the Bible says," calling God obtuse when really it's your own darkness of heart and mind. It's changing the statutes. That's the problem. God says something, and you say, "Not interested," either in your heart or explicitly on the written page. And then the consequence of that, the third, he says, is that they have broken the everlasting covenant. As you might imagine, there's debate about the identity of this covenant. What is it referring to? There are a number of covenants that are called the everlasting covenant, or an everlasting covenant, in Scripture: the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant; the Sabbath is called an everlasting covenant. But given the context of this prophecy, and particularly some of the language that we find later in Isaiah 24, I actually think this is probably a reference to the Noahic covenant. It could be a reference to all of the above, but I tend to think it's a reference to the Noahic covenant, which is also called an everlasting covenant. In fact, it's the first one to be called that. This is what God says in Genesis chapter 9, verse 15: "I will remember my covenant that is between me and you [Noah] and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." And God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth." Basically, God is saying, "I wiped out the earth once with water. I'm not going to do it that way again." Peter himself picks up on some of these parallels: the end-time judgment is like the flood in a number of ways, just without water. Jesus also picks up on this parallel when he says that the end-time judgment is going to be like the days of Noah, where two are in the field and two are at the mill, and one is taken and one is left. So there are a lot of parallels between the coming judgment, largely by fire, and the judgment of the flood, also a global judgment, but by water. The everlasting covenant with Noah is basically God saying, "I'm going to keep the normal order going like this until I do away with it, but I'm not going to do it by water." So how do you break that covenant? I mean, part of it is God putting a rainbow in the sky. How do you break it? Well, in Genesis chapter 9, verse 5, he tells Noah, right after he gets off of the ark, that if you kill other people, "I will require a reckoning." Isaiah chapter 26, verse 21, uses parallel language: "For behold, Yahweh is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain." I think that's what's in view here. There is mass murder going on. There's bloodshed filling the streets. Revelation seems to confirm this. And so all of this is a way of saying that whether it is for transgressing your conscience, or trading out the word of God for some other word, or plunging yourself into wanton homicide, whatever the case, it's a transgression against God and his holiness. And so what God is doing in response to it is fair. That's what he's getting at here. What God is doing is just. It's right. God isn't flying off the handle. It's not like someone can say, "Well, you didn't tell me. How was I supposed to know this was going to come if I did that?" Oh no, you got plenty of warning. "I made abundantly clear, for, as it turns out, thousands of years, what my standard was, what I expected, who I am, and who I have commanded you to be as my creatures and as my image-bearers. You refused it. You put yourself in my place, and so now the bill has come due." This is nothing more than justice. In a way, what we're seeing in Isaiah 24 to 27, the end of the world, is God actually making good on his first promise of judgment. In Genesis chapter 2, verses 15 to 16, he says, "Don't eat from that tree, because on the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." Adam eats from it and doesn't die right away. God has patience with humanity rather than wiping them out right away. He has patience, and he allows Adam and Eve to multiply. Their offspring don't die right away either when they sin. Lamech continues, and he has two wives, and on and on and on throughout all of human history. We sin, and we're still standing here. But God has a day marked on his calendar when he says, "That patience is done. I've given you more time than you ever deserved in my grace, and now I'm going to silence all of the excuses with judgment." Someone says, "God, I had a hard life. Can't you cut me some slack? God, if only you had given me this, then I would have..." On that day, all of those excuses will be so evidently empty, useless, and vain, because the books are going to be opened. It's going to be clear what one person has done and another. Nobody will be able to say to God, "You're doing something unfair." In fact, that's where he goes in verse 6. He says, "Therefore a curse devours the earth." A curse is a response to the breaking of a covenant. You keep a covenant, you get blessings. You break a covenant, you get curses. So because you've broken the covenant, you get a curse. And notice this: "Its inhabitants suffer for their guilt." God isn't making them suffer for anything other than what they themselves have earned. Romans 2:15: "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them." They didn't repent, and so justice is finally served. Well, we've got five more points to go, but I'll go ahead and stop there, and we'll do all of those next time. Why don't I pray? Heavenly Father, this is a lot to take in. This is weighty, and in some sense the heaviest of realities: eternal judgment. And so we ask for the sobriety to hear the warning that's here, to calibrate our lives so as to flee from the wrath to come by fleeing to Jesus Christ, who bore that very wrath on his shoulders for his elect, who took that punishment for our transgression of the law, that we might enter into eternal paradise rather than hell. May we cling to Jesus Christ even as we consider the fearfulness of that awful day. And God, would you make us faithful messengers of salvation? May the terror of a world undone in judgment cause us to open our lips with mercy, to share with those who don't know, and to beg them to be reconciled to Christ. God, even in the face of all of that judgment, we do look forward to that day. We anticipate the coming of our Lord. We want to be with him, the one whose eyes are a flame of fire and whose feet are burnished bronze, who comes with a sword in his mouth. He's our King. He's our Lord, and he's our Savior. Cause us to love him more each day as we lean toward that day. And we pray, come quickly, Lord Jesus. In his name, amen.

The Valley of Vision

September 2, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 22

Dan Crabtree | Isaiah 22:1-25

The Midnight of Providence

August 26, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 21

Dan Crabtree | Isaiah 21:1-17

A Bare Warning

May 13, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 20

The Lord of the Nile II

May 6, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 19:16–25

The Lord of the Nile

April 29, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 19:1–15

Man Will Look to His Maker

April 15, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 17

Until Tribute Comes

April 22, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 18

Lift Up Your Voice and With Us Wail

April 8, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 15, Isaiah 16

The Lord of History

March 25, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 14:28–32

The Scorn of Heaven, Earth, and Hell

March 18, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 14:1–27

Apocalypse Now

March 11, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 13

The Shoot that Tames the Snake

February 18, 2026 • Dan Crabtree • Isaiah 11:1–9