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Context No. 850 of 4322 · Isaiah

Context · Reflection

Isaiah 17:1-14: in context

1The burden of Damascus. “Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap. 2The cities of Aroer are forsaken. They will be for flocks, which shall lie down, and no one shall make them afraid. 3The fortress shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria. They will be as the glory of the children of Israel,” says the LORD of Armies. 4“It will happen in that day that the glory of Jacob will be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh will become lean. 5It will be like when the harvester gathers the wheat, and his arm reaps the grain. Yes, it will be like when one gleans grain in the valley of Rephaim. 6Yet gleanings will be left there, like the shaking of an olive tree, two or three olives in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outermost branches of a fruitful tree,” says the LORD, the God of Israel. 7In that day, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will have respect for the Holy One of Israel. 8They will not look to the altars, the work of their hands; neither shall they respect that which their fingers have made, either the Asherah poles or the incense altars. 9In that day, their strong cities will be like the forsaken places in the woods and on the mountain top, which were forsaken from before the children of Israel; and it will be a desolation. 10For you have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not remembered the rock of your strength. Therefore you plant pleasant plants, and set out foreign seedlings. 11In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make your seed blossom, but the harvest flees away in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow. 12Ah, the uproar of many peoples who roar like the roaring of the seas; and the rushing of nations that rush like the rushing of mighty waters! 13The nations will rush like the rushing of many waters, but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far off, and will be chased like the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like the whirling dust before the storm. 14At evening, behold, terror! Before the morning, they are no more. This is the portion of those who plunder us, and the lot of those who rob us.

Isaiah's oracle against Damascus and its ally, the northern kingdom of Israel, describes a stripping-down. The fortresses fall, and the glory of Jacob is made thin, reduced, the prophet says, to what is left after a harvest, when only a few gleanings cling to the topmost branches, two or three olives, four or five. It sounds like pure loss. But there is a purpose folded into the shrinking. In that day, Isaiah says, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will turn to the Holy One of Israel, and no longer to the altars their own hands have made. Sometimes what it takes to make a people look up is to strip away everything they had been looking to instead.

And the prophet names the root of the whole trouble in one plain sentence. You have forgotten the God of your salvation, he says, and have not remembered the Rock of your strength. That is the quiet sin underneath the ruin, not some dramatic act of rebellion but simple forgetting. And forgetting is never a vacuum; the moment God is forgotten, something moves into his place. So, Isaiah says, you plant pleasant plants and set out foreign seedlings, you build your own carefully tended securities, and for a while they look promising, but the harvest flees in the day of grief. The self-made props cannot hold. What the judgment finally does, by taking away the idols and the fortresses and the pleasant gardens, is uncover the Rock that had been forgotten underneath them all along.

Isaiah traced the ruin to one thing: you have forgotten the God of your salvation. Who is the God I have quietly forgotten, and what pleasant, self-made securities have I planted in the place where he used to be?

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