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Summary of Chapter 10 :5-34

God says: Woe to Assyria. It is indeed my means of punishing
Jerusalem. Yet such was not the attitude of Assyria. Assyria
boasts of its power:all its generals are like kings. But Assyria
really intended only to destroy. It destroyed for God Samaria and
Damascus. So it destroys Jerusalem.

Assyria boasts that it was its own power that enabled it to
strike these peoples. It was as easy as robbing eggs from the
nest of a bird. The axe should not boast against the arm that
swung it:nor should the King of Assyria boast against the
God who used him for His purposes, to punish Israel.

But The Lord will send a wasting disease against the warriors of
Assyria. It will quickly consume them.

Then the remnant left in Israel and Jacob will no longer
rely on Assyria, but will rely on the Holy One of Israel. That
remnant will return to God the Mighty (<El gibbor>). Yes, the
people used to be as numerous as the sands of the sea, but now a
remnant will return, for the Lord has decreed destruction.

So God tells them: do not fear the Assyrians. Soon my anger
against you will end, and will be turned to destroy them, just as
He once struck Midian, as He parted the Red Sea. Yes, they enter
Aiath go through Migron, put supplies a Micmash, encamp overnight
at Geba, so that Raham trembles, Gibeah of Saul flees and so they
continue on.

But the All powerful Lord will lop them off like so many
trees.

Comments on 10:5 - 34

The date of the invasions Isaiah speaks of here is much
debated. The important thing is this:God will use a foreign
power, as He has so often done in the past - recall Amalek,
Midian, Philistines - but then when His people finally repent, He
will humble these nations. Some think this speaks of the time of
Tiglath-Pileser - he did invade in 734 BC, but that time did not
take Samaria, which fell in 722. Others think of the time of
Sargon, second successor to Tiglath-[Pileser, who came to the
throne in 722. Still others think still later of Sennacherib. A
good conjecture would be 715, after Sargon's conquest of
Charchemish in 717.

However the vision of Isaiah is great, and it sweeps over
immense reaches of time. He wants to call the people to
repentance. If they do not repent, God will humble them, as He
did so often in the past. Then finally, after repentance, He will
rescue them, even though it be only a humble remnant that
survives.

Incidentally this picture is precisely what many like to
call the Deuteronomic theme: sin - disaster - repentance -rescue.
And they use that framework on a grand scale to say there are
three Isaiahs. As we saw above, their evidence is really scant.

But the prophet predicts Assyria after all the other
conquests will turn against Assyria. He speaks of Assyria as a
rod in the hand of God. God's providence controls all nations,
and He did intend to punish His people. Yet, even though Assyria
was doing God's will in one sense, in another it was not:it
became proud, and thought it was by its own power that it won, as
if an axe should tell the man who used it that the axe was the
winner!

In what way does God use even nations for His own ends? In
Proverbs 21. 1 we read: "The king's heart is in the hand of the
Lord; he turns it wherever he will." How does God do this?: We
must say it is by His transcendence, i. e., He is above and
beyond all our categories. We explained something about it
earlier, by a study of how He knows future free actions, though
no one can fully understand it.

Similarly, in His transcendence, He can cause humans to do
things, without completely taking away their freedom. We said,
"not completely," since there is indeed a reduction in freedom.

<In the ordinary pattern> God sends me an actual grace, to lead
me and to enable me to do a particular good thing here and now.
if I simply make no decision at all, no decision against it, it
will "work in me both the will and the doing" as Phil 2:13 says.
But what it works in me is decided by that omission of resistance
at the precise point at which a man could reject grace. That he
can reject grace is evident from experience, and from St. Paul, 2
Cor 6:1: "We urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain."
Similarly, all Scripture is full of exhortations to repent, to
return to God to be converted. All these are meaningless, even
mockery of the human, if we do not have the real power to reject
grace.

So in the <ordinary> process, the <first decision> on the
outcome is made by the human.

But there is <an extraordinary process>, in which the <first
decision> is made by God, e. g., when He sends an extraordinary
grace, that can either cut through resistance already present, or
prevent it from developing. Then God makes the first decision,
while the human seconds the motion. We call this extraordinary
since it is a reduction in the freedom that God in general has
pledged Himself to give us.

<When does God do this>, when does He use this extraordinary
mode? We distinguish two orders, the <external> and the
<internal> order. The internal order is that which includes all
the things and steps that lead to eternal salvation, or the lack
of it. In that <internal> category, God has bound Himself by
accepting the infinite price of redemption, to offer grace
without any limit, except what the resistance of humans imposes.
Since He has pledged to give us freedom, then to routinely
overrule that even in part would be self-contradiction.

The <external> order has to do with all else, including
whether or not a king will wage war, how it will turn out, etc.
In this <external. category God does not involve Himself in self-
contradiction, since in this category He has not pledged to
refrain from interference in freedom. Rather, as we saw in
Proverbs 21:1, He has announced He will do so as He pleases. And
in the case of the King of Assyria, God, as Isaiah says, had
turned the kings' heart to carry out God's will. The way in which
the king did it was not good, it was sparked by pride. God will
punish that pride. But that basic fact that Assyria does conquer
when and where God wills is part of the external order.

The mention that the Lord will send a wasting disease is
fascinating. It could refer to more than one period. We are
tempted to recall the appearance of Sennacherib before Jerusalem.
Hezekiah, one of the few good kings, the son of Ahaz, prayed to
the Lord when the threat came. God promised that Sennacherib
would not take the city. And he did not take it. The inscriptions
of these kings are full of boasting. Yet of this case Sennacherib
merely says he received tribute from Jerusalem. He does not claim
to have taken it. Instead (37:36) an angel of the Lord put to
death 185, 000 men in the Assyrian camp. It seems it was a sort
of plague. A plague could carry off so many, but the fact that it
struck at this particular time and worked so very speedily is due
to God's intervention. After it, as we shall read in chapter 37,
Sennacherib went back to Nineveh, and there while worshipping in
the temple of a false
God, was killed by two of his own sons.

To return to chapter 10:God says there will be a remnant who
will no longer rely on Assyria, as so many had once done, but
rely on the Holy One of Israel. In 10:21 Isaiah says they will
return to the Mighty God - the Hebrew is el gibbor, God the
Mighty, the very words Isaiah used in 9:5-6 for the Messiah. This
remnant theme, we will be seeing it several times more,
especially after the return from the great exile. And this
reminds us of the name Isaiah gave the son who accompanied him to
speak to Ahaz: <Shear jasub>, which meant: a remnant will return.

But before that point is reached, God says again: Be not
afraid of the Assyrians even though they take one city after
another on the way to Jerusalem. (The route described seems not
to be the actual one, but again, Isaiah is interested in the
broad picture as we said in the comments on the first part of
chapter 10). Yet He will cut the Assyrians down as He once did
the Midianites in the time of Gedeon. Assyria also serves as a
type of the powers arrayed against those whom God protects.
Assyria finally fell only in 612, with the capture of Nineveh.