Spring Forward

If you look back on the last 10 to 50 years the amount of change we have experienced in this country is pretty staggering, isn’t it. From propeller planes to space shuttles, from Ozzie and Harriet to Ozzie Osborne, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. But at least we’ve had the same government, more or less, and the same borders, which is a luxury the residents of Jerusalem didn’t have during the time Isaiah was prophet. Even with all the changes we’ve experienced, it’s been a whole lot more stable an environment than the last 50 years of the 8th century BC, when Isaiah was around. Let me give you a little background.

After Solomon died, the kingdom he had built on the foundation King David laid fell apart. From then on, there were two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. And the people in the northern kingdom didn’t want to go all the way to Jerusalem to worship. Besides, controlling the only authorized worship center gave Judah too much power over them. So King Jeroboam the 1st built a separate temple in Bethel, just across the border, and another one all the way up north, in Dan, so that nobody would have to travel too far. He also appointed all his own priests, and didn’t pick them from the house of Levi the way God had commanded Moses, and then he built idols so that people would have something concrete to focus on.

So you can see already that the northern kingdom was going to be in big trouble with God. Their days were, in fact, numbered. But, as usual, God gave them plenty of warnings, and plenty of time to shape up, before bringing up the heavy guns.

For the next couple of hundred years, then, Israel was an independent country, sometimes fighting with Judah and sometimes forming alliances with her against other enemies, like the Arameans and the Moabites. They had palace revolts and civil unrest and more than a few coups, but they managed to muddle along from one dynasty to the next. But then a new kingdom, one so much more brutal than any they had ever fought before that they almost had to invent a whole new vocabulary to describe their atrocities, began gaining power in the north. Right around the year Isaiah started preaching in the southern kingdom of Judah, a king named Tiglath-Pileser took the throne of Assyria. And King Tiglath scared King Ahaz of Judah so badly that instead of allying with Israel or remaining neutral, he actually entered into an alliance with Assyria.

It was sort of like the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, back at the beginning of WWII. And Isaiah did not approve.

You see, Judah was supposed to be the good guys in this story. And good guys do not sign treaties with bad guys, just to save their skin.

But the truth of the matter was that King Ahaz was not a good guy even if he was a Judean. And Ahaz didn’t like Isaiah, and didn’t listen to him, and didn’t want anyone else to pay any attention to what Isaiah said, either. And besides, Isaiah kept harping on religion, too, not just politics. I mean, everybody knows that there’s no connection between personal behavior and leadership ability, don’t they? I mean, what does who you worship have to do with the strength of your armies?

Isaiah had the nerve to recommend cutting down the sacred groves where people held their fertility rites. And then he criticized Ahaz for melting down the temple gold to make images of himself. And to top it off, he had the nerve to denounce the practice of sacrificing your first-born to Ba-al! Isaiah was not, you might say, politically correct.

Of course, he said the same things about Israel, too. By this time there wasn’t that much difference between Judah and Israel, you’d think they’d be natural allies, wouldn’t you.

But hey - survival is survival, right?

And frankly, Ahaz just did not see how anyone could prevail against Assyria, so he made a deal with Tiglath-Pileser and sat tight behind the borders of Judah while Assyrian soldiers shipped away the people of Israel - some to slavery, some to be tortured to death for the amusement of the troops, and some just hauled away and dumped in other occupied territories so that they wouldn’t have a base to mount a rebellion from. A few refugees made it to Judah. The city of Jerusalem nearly doubled in size in those last few years. And the Assyrian troops kept whittling away at the territory surrounding Jerusalem, until she was not much more than an island in the middle of a sea of desolation. Ahaz’ signature hadn’t bought much.