“Has the Lord struck Israel as he struck her enemies? Has he punished her as he punished them? No, but he exiled Israel to call her to account. She was exiled from her land as though blown away in a storm from the east. The Lord did this to purge Israel’s wickedness, to take away all her sin. As a result, all the pagan altars will be crushed to dust. No Asherah pole or pagan shrine will be left standing.”
Isaiah 27:7-9 NLT
In these verses from Isaiah, it is interesting that he wrote about the exile in the past tense. Isaiah lived between 740 and 681 BC, and the exile from Israel took place in 722 BC, so he must have been referring to the exile of Israel’s inhabitants. Israel was the Northern kingdom in Isaiah’s lifetime. The inhabitants of Judah, where Isaiah lived, were exiled between 605 and 586 BC, after he had died. But Isaiah asked the question, “Has the Lord struck Israel as he struck her enemies?” The answer is, of course, in the negative, because Israel’s enemies were defeated and destroyed. Where is the Assyrian empire today? Or any of the other nations and empires that treated Israel so badly, such as the Moabites or the Philistines? But the Jews today are still a distinct national group, with their own country restored to them, at least in part. They may be scattered throughout the world, and about 280,000 live in the UK, half of them in London, but they are distinct in their identity as God’s people. That has never changed.
In the 8th Century BC, the peoples of Israel and Judah were guilty of idolatry, having fallen into sin, committing idolatry with the foreign gods of the surrounding nations. Why would they have ever wanted to abandon the God who brought them out of Egypt, the God who fed them with manna for forty years, the God who drove out the nations from the lands He had given them? The terms of the covenant God made with them were clear, yet they abandoned Him to follow foreign gods.
When they entered the land of Canaan, the Israelites found a culture that integrated idolatry with everyday life, and they possibly felt safer being a part of that. Pagan religions used physical idols like statues and images, but God was invisible and intangible, something that perhaps challenged their imaginations. To continue to worship God, and Him alone, required a disciplined life and one that required obedience to His laws and ways. The Canaanite idols like Baal and Asherah promised control over rain, crops, and livestock, and the Israelites, transitioning to an agricultural lifestyle, found these direct promises appealing. Worship of these foreign gods provided sensory rituals, feasts, and festivals that offered immediate emotional or physical experiences. So, in all, we see a people whose morals lapsed into a state God couldn’t ignore forever. He gave them time to repent, and He sent prophets like Isaiah to warn the people of the consequences of their wickedness and sin, but to no avail.
But the Lord couldn’t destroy His people, as He did when He dealt with the people’s wickedness in the time of Noah. Although the Israelites failed to keep their side of the covenant that God had made with them, God never did, because He was, and is, faithful. We read in Deuteronomy 7:9, “Understand, therefore, that the Lord your God is indeed God. He is the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations and lavishes his unfailing love on those who love him and obey his commands“. Has the “thousand generations” numerically been achieved? If a generation is forty years, then there is a long way to go, but this cannot be taken as an exact figure, because the meaning in this verse is that God’s patience is extensive, but not unlimited. There will come a day when, as in the days of Isaiah, His patience will run out, and judgment will follow. The following verses in Deuteronomy 7 were a clear warning to the Israelites, “But he does not hesitate to punish and destroy those who reject him. Therefore, you must obey all these commands, decrees, and regulations I am giving you today“. And that warning still hangs over the peoples of this world today.
The Israelites were punished for their sins by being exiled to a foreign land. The process involved the death of many, and with the remaining people, including those with particular skills or social standing, being taken to places like Babylon and the surrounding areas where they were involved in farming, or as craftsmen and merchants. God’s people have always been workers, and God has always granted them success, often much to the dismay of the societies in which they live; hence one reason for the antisemitism that is so rife. But in 538 BC the Israelites started to return from exile, but not all of them, because many had become absorbed into the societies where they settled, abandoning God forever. And so God purged His people of the sins that they had committed, leaving a nation, much reduced in numbers, but one that had chosen to follow the Lord.
We pilgrims are a people of the New Covenant. Jeremiah prophesised about this time coming in Jeremiah 31:31-33, ““The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord. “But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people””. Jesus fulfilled this Covenant, as we read in Luke 22:20, “After supper he took another cup of wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you”“. More clarity comes in Hebrews 9:15: “That is why he is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant“.
Dear Father God. I don’t know how we pilgrims would have survived had we only had the Old Covenant available to us. We are so grateful for Jesus, who came to set us free from sin by taking onto Himself the punishment we deserved. Please forgive us for the times when we have followed the Israelites of old into modern-day idolatry, replacing You with our gadgets and things that we value so highly. You are the only God and it is You we praise today. Amen.
