Week 11: The Fall of the Morning Star

Isaiah opens his messages to the nations with Babylon. In his day it was a second-rate city under Assyria’s thumb, and Judah’s kings were tempted to see it as a useful ally. The Lord’s word reaches past it anyway. He calls up an army that doesn’t know it’s been drafted, and the sun and stars go dark over the fall of a world power. The Medes take a city that was proud to be called the jewel of the kingdoms. Then God’s people sing a funeral song over Babylon’s king. The dead in Sheol greet him as one of their own, and the “shining morning star” who planned to set his throne above the stars of God ends up thrown out without a grave. The lesson also takes up the old question of whether 14:12 describes Satan. It watches Assyria broken on God’s own mountain as a down payment on everything else Isaiah promised. And it closes on the question that runs through all of Part Two: who is actually running the world? Isaiah’s answer is in 14:27: “It is his hand that is outstretched, so who can turn it back?”