December 6: FADING GLORY, BEAUTY, PRIDE
And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, The beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride, Will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It will never be inhabited… Isaiah 13:19-20a
The plains where Sodom, Gomorrah, and other smaller cities once flourished were famously lush and green, beautifully cultivated. Today this area, around the southern part of the Dead Sea, is a barren desert of salty sand with sulfur balls. It has been uninhabited since the event of Genesis 19:24-25. When God overthrows a thing, that thing is thoroughly overthrown.
He is available right now to help you and me “overthrow” those things in our lives that are not part and parcel of heavenly living. In fact, HE does all the work – but we must allow it, for He is a gentleman and will not force His way in! The best part is that He has great and wonderful things to fill us with, in place of those things that do not belong in a heavenly citizen. A succinct summary of these good things is found in Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Isaiah compares the overthrow of Babylon to that of Sodom and Gomorrah. It was 539 BC when Cyrus the Persian captured Babylon for the Medo-Persian Empire. The city fell without a fight (see Daniel 5). At that point, the city’s independence was forever lost. Some sixty years later, Xerxes I (the king who chose Esther for his queen) crushed an attempted Babylonian revolt against Persian rule. When Alexander the Great came along in 331 BC, he took the city from the Persians, also without a fight. Alexander had intended to make Babylon his eastern capital, but that idea dissolved upon seeing the state of decline of the once-beautiful city. By AD 198, the Roman Septimus Severus noted that the site of the famous ancient city was totally deserted. The ultimate end of the great city was abandonment.
The event that brought about the ultimate circumstance of abandonment was the conquest by Cyrus in 539 BC. He is portrayed as a prefigure of Christ.* Cyrus had his men dig channels to divert the waters of the Euphrates, enabling them to enter the city on the dry riverbed. The [formerly] underwater gates were not even locked!
Babylon’s fall is prophesied as a divine judgement in this chapter. Since literal Babylon had not yet fallen at the time of Isaiah, it’s not hard to imagine that anyone reading what Isaiah was writing would scoff and say, “That will never happen!”
In a foreshadowing of the end-time events, we can learn from Isaiah that spiritual Babylon** will surely fall, preceded by a drying up of support as more and more of God’s people awaken to the truth of the day that God set apart as holy. Isaiah speaks of the day of the LORD (13:6 and 9), alluding to the second coming of Christ when He will judge the world in righteousness (Acts 17:31 – see also Psalm 96:13; Revelation 19:11).
Babylon is fallen, is fallen! And all the carved images of her gods He has broken to the ground. Isaiah 21:9b
*Isaiah 44:27-45:4
**Jeremiah 51:6-9; Revelation 14:8; 16:12; 18:2
Note: The day of the LORD is not to be confused with the weekly seventh day, the LORD’s Day (Genesis 2:1-3; Isaiah 56:6-7; 58:13; Ezekiel 20:12; 23:38; Revelation 1:10).