#4 – They Are Children Are Corrupters

#4. Children that are corrupters

A fourth thought is continued is continued in the next phrase. All of the parallelism in this verse is completive or continuous, that is, it continues or builds on the thought of the phrase before it.

Parallelism is a rhetorical device involving one or more linguistic repetitions or correspondences (grammatical, lexical, semantic, or phonetic) in adjacent lines or phrases. While present in prose, parallelism is more prominent in biblical poetry, where it often appears to be a basic structuring device. An example is Ps. 103:10: ‘He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities.’ In this verse the syntactic, semantic, and lexical correspondences between the two phrases are many and obvious (e.g., ‘deal with’/‘requite’; ‘sins’/‘iniquities’; ‘according to’/‘according to’). Other verses may have fewer correspondences but may still be considered parallel.¹

They are the brood of evildoers, namely children who do what their parents have taught them to do. It seems like that is the point here. Not only are the children themselves, does Isaiah say, but they are only being what their parents have trained them to be. They are the seed of evildoers and thus are children who are themselves corrupters and will thus continue the process and will produce another generation like themselves.  The implication is that this is a primary reason why God is interceding – to interrupt this process!

“Children” is the plural of the Hebrew word for sons - the same word that is used in Isa. 1:2 where God referred to the “sons He Himself raised up:

“I have nourished and brought up children,
And they have rebelled against Me;

It is interesting that Isaiah has used three words in this sentence that where particular words used by God to refer to Israel as His people, a seed or brood, and a children. Israel had failed in all of these areas. They were not a unique people of God as God had desired them to be. They were not a seed, holy unto His Name, having mixed with the nations round about them. They were not children who honored and obeyed their Father, as God intended. It was as if they were bastard children, wayward sons living in disobedience and wasting the heritage that God had placed in their hands, and, in fact, were it not for the remnant that God Himself called out from among them, that is precisely what the case would have been!

The Progression

Notice the progression in the sentence. They are sinful, laden with iniquity, thoroughly sinful (the implication of the phrase), and corruptors themselves.

Of course, from a certain point of view, we are all sinful. None can avoid that. But that, as we have seen, is not what Isaiah has in mind. Israel is sinful in the fashion that the nations round about them are sinful.

Further, they were not only sinful, but they were virtually “laden” with iniquity. The picture is powerful. Iniquity was, as it were, ripe fruit, at the very point of falling off the vine to the ground. They had sported a great crop of sin where they ought to have been holiness!

Nothing happens in a vacuum. The Israelites alive at the time of Isaiah’s prophecy were the product of the training of their own family and national environment. They were the brood or seed of evildoers. Their sinfulness came naturally to them, as they came by it from their parents.

Because of their natural sinfulness, they had become corruptors themselves. Their own sinfulness had caused them to corrupt others. Sinfulness is always handed on! God had intended His people to be the vessels by which holiness and godliness were handed down to the next generation and by which they were held up to the unredeemed world around them. Instead of being that kind of vessel, they were instead one that actually caused corruption. How tragic and how ironic. They were the adopted people or sons of God, but they had now become corruptors.

“Corruptors” is from a word meaning to destroy, to lay waste, as an invading army does a city or country.  Josh. 22:33 uses the term in the context of the kind of absolute destruction that is the result of war:

So the thing pleased the children of Israel, and the children of Israel blessed God; they spoke no more of going against them in battle, to destroy the land where the children of Reuben and Gad dwelt.

Gen. 19:13 uses the word to speak of coming destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah which we know to have complete and absolute:

For we will destroy this place, because the outcry against them has grown great before the face of the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it.”

The “corruptor” then is not one who merely alters" or damages, but is one completely and fully destroys. 

There are a number of examples of this.  A corruptor is one who destroys a vineyard Jer. 12:10:

“Many rulers have destroyed My vineyard,
They have trodden My portion underfoot;
They have made My pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.

A corruptor can also be one who breaks down walls; Ezek. 26:4:

And they shall destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers; I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock.

It can be applied to conduct (as it is here, and means to destroy, or lay waste to virtuous principles; to break down the barriers to vice; to corrupt the morals. Gen. 6:12 uses it in this fashion:

‘And God looked upon the earth, and it was “corrupt” - for all flesh had “corrupted” his way - upon the earth;’

Deut. 4:16 uses the idea n connection with religious activity in warning the Israelites against mixing with other nations lest they draw them away and “corrupt” them into idolatry.

…lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure: the likeness of male or female.

Likewise, Joshua in his farewell address, admonishes Israel, telling them that will become corrupt after he dies and warning them of the evils of mixing with them…Deut. 31:29:

“For I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you. And evil will befall you in the latter days, because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger through the work of your hands.”

Judges tells us that they did, indeed, as with Joshua, do so.  No sooner had the authority was God sent died, Israel launched right back into the corrupt ways of their fathers.  Judges. 2:19 makes this plain demonstrating this point (as well as the prior three also):

And it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they reverted and behaved more corruptly than their fathers, by following other gods, to serve them and bow down to them. They did not cease from their own doings nor from their stubborn way.

And so they were not merely corrupt themselves, but they corrupted others, those around them and the following generations, by their example. This is always the case. When people become infidels and debauched themselves, they seek to make as many more as possible. The Jews did this by their wicked lives. The same charge is often brought against them.  This is made in so many words in Judges 2:12:

and they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt; and they followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them, and they bowed down to them; and they provoked the Lord to anger.

Zeph. 3:7 says:

I said, ‘Surely you will fear Me, 
You will receive instruction’— 
So that her dwelling would not be cut off, 
Despite everything for which I punished her. 
But they rose early and corrupted all their deeds.

The principle of separation from sinful peoples for the sake holiness and conformity to godliness a recurring theme in the Scripture.  It is an unbending command of God for His people to be holy and separate from and from the world around them.  Sadly, Israel failed miserably and repeatedly in this in all of their generations.