Sermon on Isaiah 13-14, 21 (13:1-3, 10-11, 19-21; 14:1-5, 9-10, 12-16; 21:1-2, 9-10); 2 Corinthians 10:3-5; and Revelation 18:1-6. Delivered 18 January 2015 at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church. The ninth installment of a sermon series on the Book of Isaiah; see also sermons on Isaiah 1, Isaiah 2, Isaiah 3-4, Isaiah 5, Isaiah 6, Isaiah 7-8a, Isaiah 8b-9, and Isaiah 10-12.
On the heels of tackling
the Assyrian crisis and urging Judah to look to God in “trust and
not be afraid” (Isaiah 12:2), Isaiah opens eleven chapters of
Oracles Against the Nations. They begin with Babylon, sitting at the
eastern end of the civilized world as the Israelites would have known
it; and the oracles end with Tyre, sitting toward the west. Isaiah
talks about Babylon and its fall, but we can see that he's speaking
of more than just a city or an empire. Even during the days of
Isaiah's early ministry in the eighth century BC, the city of Babylon
was already a major center of world culture, and it represents the
cultural dimensions of pointless human self-glory. Babylon signifies
the cultural domination of sinful paganism, of prideful human culture
set up in opposition to the kingdom of God. In our modern Western
world, it often manifests in the life that we call 'secular', or
worldly – though the religious impulse of the human heart won't be
quelled so easily. Worship is hardwired into our souls, and if we
don't direct it toward God, we'll find a distorted substitute.
That's the story of Babylon. But Babylon is not new; it is as old as
sin, and it's touched every time in history, from the age of Isaiah
to the time of Rome to the Founding Fathers and on down.
The city of Babylon, in
Isaiah's day, was the major exporter of cultural goods. Everyone
admired how refined and sophisticated the Babylonians were. In our
day, the United States of America is the greatest global exporter of
cultural goods – especially the culture epitomized by Hollywood, by
media outlets, by our corporations. I remember visiting a remote
Kenyan village a couple years ago, up in the mountains, and spending
some time with a few of the young men – and they started talking
about a few of their favorite American films! And in the Kenyan
cities, there isn't a place you can go, even in the most impoverished
slums, where you won't find Coca-Cola for sale. We are the greatest
exporter of cultural goods around the world, just as we look to
European nations as the standard of refinement and sophistication –
think Downton Abbey, think
French cuisine and art, think German cars. Aren't America and Europe
the “jewel of kingdoms” now (Isaiah 13:19), in a way?
But given our heritage as
a supposedly “Christian nation” – something that some of us
stress over and over – it can cause some problems. People around
the world who don't share our faith look at our media output – at
our movies, at our celebrity culture, at our news, at our
sensationalistic focus on the outlandish and extreme – and think
that this is the fruit of the gospel. And so they get the wrong idea
– the idea that Christianity means selfishness, exploitation,
violence, lust, immorality. That's part of the driving force of the
resistance to Christianity in the Middle East – and what kind of
witness is this? The 'culture' we export around the world is
dominated, not by the values of the church, not by the values of the
gospel, but by the values of elite media-producers, of opportunistic
politicians, of unscrupulous corporations, of aggressively secular
academic institutions. They all may applaud compromised churches,
but in general they look at most of the nation as “flyover country”
where people bitterly cling to guns and religion and prejudice; they
deem a gospel of faith and holiness to be “unsophisticated”,
“superstition”, “bigotry”. But Paul writes that “the
message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18) – and make no mistake, Babylon is perishing.
The culture-makers of
Babylon sneer at the countryside, at the ways of life cherished in
rural America. That's not where the action is, it's not where the
real 'thinking' happens, they say. It's a place to be escaped. And
the culture-makers of Babylon sneer at the inner-city as doomed to
stay stuck in its cycles of violence and poverty. But the church, in
its purity, doesn't see as Babylon sees. No, we know that life
outside of urban centers isn't a wasted life in a wasteland. We're
here to tend the garden of God, “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). And the church knows that life in the dark belly of the city
isn't wasted: as Jeremiah wrote, we actively “seek the peace and
prosperity of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7). And our hope looks
forward to New Jerusalem, a life where the garden and the city will
be one perfected union.
The culture-makers of
Babylon disregard the church's witness. Babylon thinks it's
hopelessly outdated to actually ask the questions we ask and offer
the hope we offer. At its kindest, Babylon ignores us as undeserving
of comment. More often, Babylon mocks us as undeserving of basic
respect or serious consideration. In recent years, we've
increasingly seen Babylon start demanding that Christians must
choose: we can have our convictions, or we can have a place in
society, but not both. I've lost track of how many times I've heard
people remark callously about Christian workers facing a struggle of
conscience: “Well, don't work in that field, then.” And we've
all heard the news about Atlanta's fire chief, who lost his job –
for what? For discriminating against anyone? No, he was cleared.
What then? For writing a book just stating what Christians believe
about sexual ethics.
Babylon's message is:
“Submit to our sacred dogmas, or else make yourselves scarce.”
And they ask, “You don't want to be on the wrong side of history,
do you?” But the church of the martyrs is always on the “wrong
side of history” – Revelation 17 history, that is, the large but
limited scope of history that falls under Babylon's sway. But just
the same, the faithful witness of the church is on the right
side of Revelation 18 history – the unlimited scope of history that
looks to Babylon's fall and beyond, onward toward the New Jerusalem.
If we're following Jesus and thinking with his mindset in accordance
with what scripture teaches – for, after all, “we have the mind
of Christ”, Paul writes (1 Corinthians 2:16) – then we will stand
on the right side of the Lord of History. But Babylon is on the
wrong side of history's Lord, even if shortsighted eyes, glimpsing
only the fleeting trends of the present, can't see far enough to
believe that Babylon could ever totter and topple.
What
do we do? We're called to give a persuasive witness – not in
arrogance, not in anger, but in open-handed assurance of the gospel.
We're called to answer accusations against us “with gentleness and
respect”, carefully explaining our faith and its good sense in both
words and actions so that “those who speak maliciously against your
good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (1 Peter3:15-16). And we're called to “always be ready” to do this –
to be prepared. So do we intentionally set ourselves to learning so
that we'll be equipped to give a serious answer suited for the time,
place, and people at hand? Do we intentionally set ourselves to holy
living so that we won't be caught with a gap between our preaching
and our practice?
Babylon
is all about the pridefulness of human works. It's all about what we
can attain or accomplish – in John Lennon's words, “No hell below
us; / above us, only sky.” It's the impulse we see at Babylon's
foundation: if we all work together in “the brotherhood of man”,
if we just get rid of everything of value, then we can achieve
a god-like task. That's the message of Lennon's enduring song.
That's the heartbeat of the Tower of Babel: if we all work together
and screen out anything higher, we can reach that sky, and we can
master the world (Genesis 11:1-9). That's the message of Isaiah 14. The Latin
translation may have rendered 'Daystar' as 'Lucifer', but viewed as a
whole, it isn't about Satan; it's about human pride. Isaiah's
heavenly images are borrowed from Canaanite stories of a second-class
god trying to dethrone the chief god. Shocking enough – but Isaiah
imagines a human
figure having the gumption to try pulling that off! And that madness
is what Babylon means: the human pride of trying, in effect, to
replace God with our achievements – a project doomed to be exposed
as a fraud, because we aren't the gods we so often pretend we are.
It
can be easy to fall into these kinds of traps in the workplace,
imagining that the value of a life is how high we climb the corporate
ladder, or how much we get done, or how much bacon we bring home.
But even in our spiritual lives, we may sometimes try to exalt
ourselves by our works. We may fall into the trap of thinking that
our own virtue will boost us up to heaven's heights, that we can find
favor in God's eyes through being good enough that he'll just have to
grant us a pass through the pearly gates. But that project fails.
In the words of one of my favorite songs (Josh Garrels, "Cynicism"):
Self-promotion's
how we function in this culture;
We
fight for the spotlight with a peacock's pride,
And
then condescend to all the lesser men
From
thrones we made of paid accolades and a compromise.
There
is no power that a man can have
Unless
it's given to him from above;
Our
ladders of success descend to hell:
Don't
sell your soul and lose your one true love.
But
the church's real message is a message, not of human achievement to
press higher and higher, but of bowing downward in faith before the
“High and Exalted One” who says, “I live in a high and holy
place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit”
(Isaiah 57:15). Our closeness with God doesn't come from building a
tower of human works; that's structurally unsound without the
Cornerstone and Foundation that is Christ Jesus (1 Corinthians 3:11; Ephesians 2:20), and our works are
too weak to support the weight of our load of sin. No, real intimacy
with God comes through repentance and humble faith. “I live by
faith in the Son of God”, Paul said (Galatians 2:20). Do we define
ourselves by what we do? Do we take pride in our accomplishments,
and judge people by what they 'make' of themselves? Or do we live by
humble faith, from which holy living follows?
Babylon
is all about questing for a self-made legacy – at the Tower of
Babel, they sought to build a name for themselves to avoid serving
God's mission (Genesis 11:4). It wasn't about fulfilling the reason
why they were made, the objective purpose that God had for them,
which was to spread through all the earth and make it a holy place.
The Babel project was about ignoring their objective purpose and
instead making a subjective purpose for themselves, to be “self-made
men”. In our world, we admire these “self-made men”, people
who didn't 'need' any help, or so we say, in pulling themselves up by
their own bootstraps. But that's Babylonian thinking. And we try to
give ourselves a legacy. We want to live forever on our terms. How
much of culture is a result of people trying to live on through their
work? How many broken dreams result from trying to live on through
our children, to live vicariously through their lives? But the Bible
tells another story. At Babel, they achieved only infamy – and who
wants the name 'Nimrod' as a legacy, anyway (Genesis 10:8-9)? But God called to
Abram, “I will
make your name great” (Genesis 12:2). Not Abram making his own
name great, giving himself a legacy. No, God would give him a
legacy, because God defines his purpose. And that purpose was to
turn Abram into Abraham, a vessel for God's blessings to sprinkle the
whole earth (Genesis 12:3). To which story do we belong: Babel or
Abraham? Am I trying to 'make a name for myself', or is my focus on
faithfully receiving whatever God in his grace offers and then
blessing others?
Babylon
as a culture exalts the individual's act of will to choose a
God-substitute and to remake the message to our own liking. Our
world is rife with personally tailored 'gospels' cut down to exclude
uncomfortable parts or enhanced with alien doctrines; our world is
rife with idols under many guises. As a culture, we like to found
our own private religions, custom-built for all our whims and wants.
Don't like the God of the Old Testament? Go ahead, ignore it all
from Genesis to Malachi. Don't like what the Bible says about caring
for the creation? Go ahead, snip that out, and forget the hope of
resurrection too, and replace it with an escapist heaven that leaves
the earth behind for good. Don't like what the Bible says about
marriage and sexuality? Sneer at it and offer some platitudes on
loving everyone instead. Don't like the verse that Jesus is the only
name under heaven by which we are saved (Acts 4:12)? Time to ignore
Jacob's ladder and build a tower to reach to heaven – as if that
hasn't been tried before.
But
the Bible calls us to be humble, and to partner with God, and to
always put his will before our own agendas. Too often, we put our
will before his. He calls us to “not give up meeting together”
as Christians, “as some are in the habit of doing” (Hebrews 10:25), and to bear gently with one another's faults in love and
forgiveness (Ephesians 4:2; Colossians 3:13). God wills our unity,
that we may be one people just as the Father and Son are one God
(John 17:22); but our fallen will is anonymity, and self-indulgence,
and grudge-bearing. God calls us to live a holy life and to put
aside pride; but our fallen will is to endorse sin and think it's no
one's business to “tell me what to do”. He calls us to love the
downtrodden (Deuteronomy 10:19); but our fallen will is to judge them
as lazy and to moan about the inconvenience of getting our hands
dirty. God calls us to worship him faithfully and go out to train
all people in following Christ (Matthew 28:19; Romans 12:1); but in
our sinful pride, we'd rather cling to our agendas of musical style,
of building architecture, of making Christianity a once-a-week or
private thing. How else can we explain leaving a fellowship of
believers over something as petty as the shape of the building, or
the color of the carpet, or the style of the music? God calls us to
put a united mission first, and to submit our own personal tastes to
the world's need for the Savior we know. Not that we're saved
because we meet
together or because
we serve the poor or because
we make disciples, but we're saved to
meet together and to
serve the poor and to
make disciples, and these all help us grow into a holy human
character that God, out of his love for us, desires us to have.
Some,
reading about the fall of Babylon, suggest we should “come out from
Babylon” (Revelation 18:4) by retreating out from the world, that
we should have a stance of condemning the world and the evils of our
culture, that we should insulate ourselves and our children away from
any contact with the world. Is that how we should respond to
Babylon? No, for Christ said he didn't come to condemn this
Babylonian world; he came to redeem it from the weight of its sin and
rebellion and error (John 3:17). Just as the Israelites gathered
gold and silver from the Egyptians in leaving that pagan power behind
(Exodus 3:22; 12:35-36), so Christians thousands of years ago talked
about their relationship to Greek philosophers as “spoiling the
Egyptians”, plundering the riches of what can be salvaged from
their culture.
All
truth is God's truth; and even the most corrupted thing bears the
imprint, however distant, of a reality God created. Every good
argument in philosophy, every true insight, every scientific
discovery, every beautiful turn of phrase in literature, every
creative use of cinema – it doesn't belong ultimately to Babylon,
it belongs in the service of the kingdom of God. In Acts 17,
preaching in Athens, Paul gladly took anything good in the Greek
poets to point to Christian truth; and the New Testament is saturated
in transformed Greek and Roman ideas, used to communicate the gospel.
If we deny the scriptural truth that we are genuinely “in
the world”, we may miss the chance to seize on tools God has given
us for the work set before us. We are to judge them by the light of
the gospel, and we are to avoid melting them down and making a golden
calf out of them (cf. Exodus 32:1-4), but we're called to take them
for good purposes.
Too
often, parts of the church have resisted God's truth in God's name;
we don't want to follow down that road. And if we refuse to be salt
and light – publicly tasted, publicly seen – then our witness
suffers. And we aren't just “in the world” as some unfortunate
fact; Jesus says, “I have sent them into
the world” (John 17:17) – a holy presence with a mission to live
out, here in the world. We are not passive; we are active, and the
tools of the trade have “divine power to demolish strongholds”
that presume to oppose “the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). But neither do we triumph over sin through bad manners and
flaring tempers.
“Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world
does” (2 Corinthians 10:3). We have other ways to answer God's
summons and to “rejoice in his triumph” (Isaiah 13:3). It isn't
about preserving our rights, it isn't about imposing virtue from the
top-down through force of law, it isn't about giving vent to
splenetic attacks on the wickedness of the world as though we
ourselves were immune. If we do that, then we have not “come out
of Babylon” at all; we carry Babylon in our hearts. No, we live
differently, and while we appeal to everything good in the culture,
we sift it, we test it, and we transform it in light of the gospel,
and so “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”
(2 Corinthians 10:5). In testing even things within the church, we need to
test them carefully, rejecting anything bad and welcoming the good
(cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22).
Centuries
ago, the literal city of Babylon did fall – and Isaiah lamented: “I
am staggered by what I hear; I am bewildered by what I see” (Isaiah 21:3). The human side of judgment is a tragic thing, because we were
made for so much more than our low self-made purposes. But the fall
of Babylon as a symbol, as a name for godless culture, still awaits:
the final judgment on all sin that hasn't been left at Christ's cross
and buried in his tomb. There is hope: to the people of God will be
joined those who were once under Babylon's sway, “and Israel” –
the global assembly united by faith to Jesus, the True Israelite –
“will take possession of the nations” (Isaiah 14:2).
The
fall of Babylon is good news for the world – but are we living by
faith unto holiness so that it will be good news for
us?
As Ash Wednesday looms a month away from today, as we prepare
ourselves in heart and mind for the self-discipline of Lent, that's
the question that stands over us. Are we vigilant watchmen and
winsome witnesses? Or are we in a “Babylonian Captivity of the
Church”, as Luther charged against the Roman Church in his day?
More than just lamenting what we see around us, we need to scrutinize
where we – as a denomination, as a church, as families, as
citizens, and as souls standing before God – might have compromised
in teaching, in behavior, or in attitude with ungodly cultural
powers. And we have this assurance: “Whatever bondage the Church
may fall into, God will choose her again” (Oswalt 1:313; cf. Isaiah14:1). And so, “resting in his might, lift high his triumph song,
/ for power, dominion, kingdom, strength to Christ belong!”
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