The Lord has first spoken to Israel and Judah. Isaiah is going to speak of the Gentile nations in chapters 13-23. Babylon is the first to be condemned.

1. The call of the hosts of the Lord (vs. 1-5)

The worshipper decides to praise the Lord, even though he has felt the Lord’s anger against him. How glorious when the anger of God is turned away! In the larger sense, His anger is turned away because of what Jesus did on the cross. Jesus put Himself in between us and the anger of the Lord, and receiving that anger in Himself, He turned away God’s anger!

2. The coming of the day of the Lord (vs. 6-16)

This refers prophetically to the end times. (vs. 6, 7 & 13). Several prophetic passages describe the cosmic disturbances that will precede and surround the return of Jesus (Joel 2:10, Revelation 6:12-14, Isaiah 34:4). In fact, Jesus was probably quoting or paraphrasing this passage from Isaiah in Matthew 24:29. The soldiers of Babylon will be afraid (vs. 6-8) when Jehovah makes the stars turn dark (vs. 9-13). The picture of God’s judgment, upon both Babylon and the world in general, is unrelenting. It is like one of the nature movies where the hunted gazelle is overtaken by the lion, and it utterly consumed. There is no escape from God’s unrelenting judgment. If you take comfort in Jesus, remember that this is the same unrelenting judgment that was poured out upon Him on the cross. In this picture from Isaiah, Jesus was the hunted gazelle, and willingly made Himself so!

3. The conqueror of the Chaldeans (vs. 17-22)

The Babylonians will be destroyed by the Medes (vs. 17-19) and people will never live in the city of Babylon again (vs. 19-22). This prophecy was made decades before the Babylonian Empire defeated the Assyrian Empire and became a superpower; it was even more before the time when the Medes came against the Babylonians, conquering them as instruments of God’s judgment. A city called Babylon is to be rebuilt and destroyed in the future. (See Revelation 18).

Categories: Isaiah