So Isaiah 47 and 48, these are God's words. Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon. Sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans. You shall no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstones and grind meal. Remove your veil, take off the skirt, uncover the thigh, pass through the rivers. Your nakedness shall be uncovered. Yes, your shame will be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will not arbitrate with a man. As for our Redeemer, Yahweh of hosts, is His name, the Holy One of Israel. Sit in silence and go into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans. For you shall no longer be called the Lady of Kingdoms. I was angry with my people. I have profaned my inheritance and given them into your hand. You showed them no mercy. On the elderly you laid your yoke very heavily, and you said, I shall be a lady forever, so that you did not take these things to heart, nor remember the latter end of them. Therefore hear this now you who are given to pleasures, who dwell securely, who say in your heart, I am, and there is no one else besides me, I shall not sit as a widow, nor shall I know the loss of children. But these two things shall come to you in a moment, in one day, loss of children and widowhood. They shall come upon you in their fullness, because of the multitude of your sorceries, for the great abundance of your enchantments. for you have trusted in wickedness. You have said, no one sees me. Your wisdom and your knowledge have warped you. You have said in your heart, I am, and there is no one else besides me. Therefore evil shall come upon you. You shall not know from where it arises. Trouble shall fall upon you. You will not be able to put it off. Desolation shall come upon you suddenly, which you shall not know. Stand now with your enchantments and the multitude of your sorceries in which you have labored from your youth. Perhaps you will be able to profit. Perhaps you will prevail. You are wearied in the multitude of your counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, and the monthly prognosticators stand up and save you from what shall come upon you. Behold, they shall be a stubble. The fire shall burn them. They shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame. There shall not be a coal to be warmed by, nor a fire to sit before. Thus shall they be to you, with whom you have laboured. your merchants from your youth. They shall wander each one to his quarter. No one shall save you. Hear this, O house of Jacob, who are called by the name of Israel, and have come forth from the wellsprings of Judah, who swear by the name of Yahweh, and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in truth or in righteousness. For they call themselves after the holy city and lean on the God of Israel. Yahweh of hosts is his name. I have declared the former things from the beginning. They went forth from my mouth and I caused them to hear it. Suddenly I did them and they came to pass. because I knew that you were obstinate and your neck was an iron sinew, and your brow bronze, even from the beginning I had declared it to you, before it came to pass I proclaimed it to you. Lest you should say, my idol has done them, and my carved image and my molded image have commanded them. You have heard, see all this. And will you not declare it? I have made you hear new things from this time, even hidden things, and you did not know them. They are created now and not from the beginning. Before this day you have not heard them, lest you should say, of course I knew them. Surely you did not hear. Surely you did not know. Surely from long ago your ear was not opened. I knew that you would deal very treacherously, and were called a transgressor from the womb. For my name's sake, I will defer my anger, and for my praise I will restrain it from you, so that I do not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver. I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I will do it. For how should my name be profane? And I will not give my glory to another. Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel my called. I am he, I am the first, I am also the last. Indeed, my hand has laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand has stretched out the heavens. When I call to them, they stand up together. All of you, assemble yourselves and hear. Who among them has declared these things? Yahweh loves him. He shall do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be against the Chaldeans. I, even I, have spoken, yes, I have called him, I have brought him, and his way will prosper. Come near to me, hear this. I have not spoken in secret from the beginning. From the time that it was, I was there, and now the Lord Yahweh and His Spirit have sent me. Thus says Yahweh, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am Yahweh, your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you by the way you should go. Oh, that you had heeded my commandments Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Your descendants also would have been like the sand, the offspring of your body like the grains of sand. His name would not have been cut off nor destroyed from before me. Go forth from Babylon, flee from the Chaldeans with a voice of singing. Declare, proclaim this, utter it to the end of the earth. Say, Yahweh has redeemed his servant Jacob. And they did not thirst when he led them through the deserts. He caused the waters to flow from the rock for them. He also split the rock and the waters gushed out. There is no peace, says Yahweh, for the wicked. And then this ends this reading of God's inspired and errant word. So Babylon and Israel are both sinners. And the only reason Israel ends up in deliverance is because the Lord has decided to invest his name in delivering them. He announced to them who he is from the beginning. He has entrusted his word, even his word about himself as creator, which he has preserved as he carried Moses along by the Holy Spirit to write down the book that we now have as Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus numbers in Deuteronomy. He had told them that from the beginning, from the beginning of their nation, he told them in Deuteronomy, that they were gonna sin and he was gonna punish them, but they weren't going to repent until he exiled them. And then when he exiled them, there would be a repentance and he would bring them back. Those things he told them from the beginning. What he hadn't told them from the beginning, what he waited to tell them about right until the ministry of Isaiah is that it would be Cyrus the Persian by whom he would deliver them. And then he does it so suddenly. that the suddenness of it both shocks Babylon in chapter 47, as he prophesies in chapter 47, and proves to Israel that not only did it come by the man whom the Lord had named and appointed, but even in the way that the Lord had named and declared so that they would be absolutely certain that there is no other explanation than that Yahweh, the God of Israel, the Holy One of Israel, has redeemed them, and not because they were good, for His own namesake. And so that's the overview of chapter 47 and 48, more specifically than the first, the sin of Babylon in chapter 47. Babylon was very haughty, arrogant, conceited in themselves. And so the Lord is going to bring them low. Babylon's going to lose their throne, verse one. They have to sit on the ground. They're not going to, they're pictured here according to the young ladies of their court, who often, and may the Lord season your hearts, my daughters, that you not be full of yourselves, because it's often the young ladies who are the most full of themselves, especially in an upper class situation or a wealthy situation. But here they go from from being images of Babylon, the lady of kingdoms, verse 5, and wearing their fancy clothes and prancing so delicately, verse 1, to hard labor of slaves. grinding meal with the millstones, which is not necessarily a slave, someone could grind their own meal, but definitely the uncovering of the nakedness and the shaming and the having to dress At first, verse 2, like a man, and then uncovering nakedness in verse 3 is not just the humiliation of clothing of a slave, but even implied much harder things that are done to slaves. And this is what they deserve for what they have done to other peoples and especially to the Lord's people. Apparently Babylon also was proud of their political acumen, their political prowess. Their ambassadors would make negotiation. They were a great empire. But God is not hearing God is not receiving any visits from Babylonian ambassadors on this one He says I will take vengeance and I will not arbitrate with a man the one who has the true then Political prowess as it were or Israel and not because they have any skill in themselves but because the Lord is the one who reasons on their behalf and The word redeemer, and perhaps you've heard the phrase, I'm certain you've heard the phrase, kinsmen redeemer, because we have used it often for this Hebrew word, goel. It means that nearest of kin who takes up the cause on behalf of someone else because they are not able to take it up for themselves and they don't have anyone else to take it up for them. And so the Lord is our nearest of kin. Someone who is wealthy and they get themselves into trouble, they may say, let's wait for my lawyer, he'll handle this. Because he has a very high dollar, highly skilled, very effective probably. well-connected lawyer who takes up his cause. But if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you belong to God by faith, belong to his church, You know that the Lord is the kinsman redeemer. Yahweh is the kinsman redeemer Of his people. He's the one who takes up the cause and so The punishment that is coming If they were to try to arbitrate and to verse 3 they would find themselves in trouble because Yahweh himself is taking up the other side of Verse four, and there's no, this isn't a discussion, it's a sentencing. The daughter of Chaldeas is being taken down now, and daughter sometimes is used euphemistically of a city. So probably Babylon itself is being personified in verse five, maybe earlier in the earlier verses to which we read as well, verse one through three. And we see here something that helps us. You remember when Joseph said to his brothers, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. God meant the exile for good. He didn't mean it for easiness. He meant it for chastening. He meant it for purifying. Remember in the next chapter, in chapter 48, which we read, he says, I purified you. Not quite as silver. He didn't even get it that hot. I chastened you a little, but still it was for good. It was part of his keeping the covenant. It was part of the terms of the covenant that he had given them in Deuteronomy that this was going to happen. It was God being faithful and God being merciful. God carrying out a plan of everlasting salvation that he had already told them about. So that when he does it, we see that he who is good intends it for good. But he, even in his goodness, uses instruments, second causes, who have their own will. And just as Joseph said to his brothers, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Now he comes to Babylon and says, I meant it for good, but you meant it for evil. He says, I was angry with my people. I profaned my inheritance. I have profaned my inheritance and given them into your hand. And says, I meant it for good, the chastening. You, however, you meant it for evil. You showed them no mercy. On the elderly, you laid your yoke very heavily. Very important for us to see here that God cares about what we call just war. That not only does just war include only waging war in a just cause, with jurisdiction and according to duties that God has laid upon your nation under God, under Christ, in service of the Lord. But it also, just war means waging war in a just manner. He expects Babylon to have known that even when you are taking a people, even if they deserve it, and Babylon might have thought they deserved it for other reasons, then the Lord righteously said they deserve it. You do not lay the yoke heavily upon the elderly, that those who are feeble, those who are defenseless, those who are tender, those who are vulnerable, Even in war, you make special consideration for them. This is one of the reasons why war in Christian Europe had rules that had never really been seen in warfare before. Because there was an idea of just war. This was one of the things that was so shocking about the northern invasion of the south and the war between the states. is that for the first time in a long time in what was thought to be the Christian world, rules of just war were not being followed, were completely disregarded. He says here, on the elderly, you laid your yoke very heavily. You said, I shall be a lady forever. See, in Babylon's arrogance, they assumed that they are the standard. What they want to do is the standard of what is right and wrong. Therefore, hear this now, you who are given to pleasures, you who dwell securely, you who say in your heart, I am, and there is no one else besides me. Babylon thought themselves invulnerable. They were widowing others, but they thought, I'll never be widowed. They were just destroying the children of others. They thought, I'll never know the loss of children. And so the Lord says, this is going to come on you and it's going to come on you suddenly. Now, one of the things to pay attention to, then you're going to have to, for the sake of time, summarize a little bit more than going straight through it. One of the things then to pay attention to in verses 9 through 13 is that this was actually an administration in Babylon that kept some of the old forms of the idol worship but had turned to what we would call science. Observations of the stars, observations of the earth. Those who got good at predicting things would rise up. This was one of the ways that Daniel rose up. Because he was good at predicting things. He wasn't doing science. He was a prophet. Angels told him things. God told him things, gave him knowledge. But they actually had this scientific sort of meritocracy that was the primary way they functioned, although they kept some of the old forms. When Cyrus was planning his invasion, he made a secret pact. with some of the disaffected priests of Marduk, one of the gods that the Persians and the Chaldeans had in common, because the priests of Marduk were upset that religion was kind of on the decline in Babylon, in their view. But you see what God says here. He says, your science is also a religion, because your science is not trying to get its knowledge from me. You think that you're divining things from the creation. It's witchcraft, it's sorcery. Science without a creator, general revelation without a revealer is sorcery and witchcraft because it depersonalizes that which is personal. God made everything. And if we think that we are going to get knowledge without him or power without him, We are Babylon who a couple of times here say, I am and there is no other. I am the height of the evolutionary ascendance. Now they didn't use that language because Darwin hadn't happened yet. But although they didn't use that language, that's the concept they had. You can hear that in chapter 47, can't you? The world finally got good when Babylon came along. We have figured things out, and that's why we are going to dominate forever. And if that sort of thinking sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly the same sort of thinking that permeates all of the nations today. Well, all of the ones that flatter themselves as so-called civilized nations today. And so the Lord says, all right, bring your science. See if it's going to help you, end of verse 12. Stand now with your enchantments and your multitudes of sorceries. Perhaps you will be able to profit. Perhaps you will prevail. No, you're going to be wearied by them, verse 13. They're going to utterly fail you. Some of the things that the Lord very quickly and suddenly did to most of the so-called civilized world during COVID. They had their science. It was very obviously a religion, the way the scientists acted, well, the officially approved scientists acted on TV. And God humiliated them over and over again. That's exactly what he said he was going to do to Babylon. The rest of the story with Cyrus is the priests of Marduk got him in and the actual emperor of Babylon at the time made a quiet exit because he could see that things were crumbling and that Cyrus and Persia were getting too strong. And so he left his son, Belshazzar, in charge of the city of Babylon. And the priests of Marduk snuck, sneaked, I think both are correct now, but sneaked was first. The priests of Marduk sneaked Cyrus and his invading advance force into the city and they all suddenly appeared and the city fell actually without a battle. And then those who resisted, suffered the fate that the conquered people do. But there were a lot of people who embraced Cyrus. Now Cyrus, we have an inscription that describes this called the Cyrus Cylinder. And the Cyrus Cylinder credits Marduk, not Yahweh. I mean, praise God for calling Cyrus and using that language of calling him, and in Isaiah especially, he's a type of Christ. But don't think that he is converted, because historically, as far as we know, maybe he was, and maybe this was just written in his name. or whatever, but be careful, be wise about how you interpret history when we have so little information outside of the Bible, and the Bible is silent as to whether or not he is converted. But Isaiah 47 and 48 say Babylon and all their apparent knowledge and apparent power was not the great God, and it was not Marduk who gave Babylon into the hand of Cyrus. It was Yahweh who called Cyrus by name hundreds of years before he came. And he humiliated Babylon because of her arrogance. So let us watch out for our arrogance. Let us remember that any true knowledge comes only from the Lord." Well, that's his address to Babylon. He then addresses Israel in chapter 48, warning them that although they were using his name, they were not faithfully or righteously or truly using his name, but he will use his own name faithfully, and he will vindicate his name. that's what he's doing. And he says that he does things in the way that he did, even waiting to prophesy about Cyrus until the book of Isaiah, so that they will not be full of themselves. when it happens so that they will see that they are sinners and That they not need to be forgiven and delivered that their religion has been offensive to God Using right words, but not with a right heart This is offensive to God And so he is showing himself to be the one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, by allowing Cyrus in verse 14 to just have his way with Babylon. Because God is the one, the God who created all things to begin with. is the one who creates now this moment in history, this new thing, when he brings Cyrus in, but he's also creating something new. Verse 16 now refers not to this suddenly, lately announced one, who is Cyrus. From verse 15 to verse 16, there's a transition. This is the one who has not spoken, has not been a secret from the beginning. And he is speaking, and it's Christ in verse 16. From the time that it was, I was there, and now the Lord Yahweh and His Spirit have sent me." Very obviously, I think, now that the Lord Jesus has come and revealed to us God as triune, we can see that, can't we? In verse 16, the second person of the Godhead saying, I am the sent one of the triune God. And so Yahweh, the Redeemer, the near kinsman who takes up the cause, He says, thus says Yahweh, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, I am Yahweh, your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you by the way you should go. And he warns them that just being a member of Israel does not mean that you will have peace, that you will be saved. He tells them, if you had been obedient, this would not have happened. Now I'm giving you a deliverance, verse 20, that will be joyful and for the purpose of announcing that the Lord is the Redeemer, that Yahweh is the Redeemer. Just like verse 21, I delivered you from Egypt and the Exodus, but verse 22, remember, that in these national deliverances, God has shown himself the one who punishes sin. There is no peace, says Yahweh for the wicked, is the concluding verse in this two-chapter section of the book of Isaiah. And so look, being a part of his church, knowing the right words to say, Sounding correct when you use His name? These are not the things that save. The Lord delivers His church and honors His name in His church to turn each of our hearts individually to Him, to have life from Him and faith in Christ. so that having life from God and faith from God and righteousness from God, we will be the ones who are delivered, not in a moment of history in which God reveals who He is and declares who He is, but those who have life and faith and righteousness from God will be delivered everlastingly. with the great deliverance, of which these many deliverances, it's pretty amazing to call the Exodus a mini-deliverance, or springing Israel out of Babylon, a mini-deliverance. But compared to the deliverance that Christ brings, they are many. And God announces Himself to us to be this deliverer, so that we will hope in Christ and have that deliverance. So let each of you hope in Christ for your everlasting deliverance, for your everlasting salvation. And you will find that God is your kinsman redeemer, your near of kin in Jesus who takes up your cause. Amen, let's pray. Lord, we pray for your help. It's late afternoon and there are aspects of the passage that are very complicated, but Lord, recognizing that we are sinners and that you are a savior of sinners who trust only in you. is not complicated. It's just hard for us because of our remainings in our original nature. And so we pray that you would forgive us and help us. That your spirit would make us to see how you invest the glory of your name in being kinsmen redeemer. And so give us faith by your Spirit, give us faith by your Spirit's use of your Word, and make us not to be proud in ourselves or trust in ourselves or think that there is any knowledge or ability apart from you. Help us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.