We said last time that God, having introduced the topic of His complaint against Israel, is now going to itemize a list of seven specific complaints against this, His chosen people, this nation He has sought to nurture and provide for over the centuries. It has been clear that He has done all that he can to make them the apple of His eye and they have, in turn, done virtually all they can do to dishonor and degrade His calling and election in their lives. He picks up in verse 4:
“Alas!” is a an interjectional particle. An interjection is simply an exclamation word that can stand alone grammatically. It is used in two main fashions in the OT. First it is used to express woe or intense sadness or grief as in a sudden exclamation of grief. Secondly, it can be used as an exhortation toward a goal. “Come on!” The common thread between the two ideas is that of emotion and intensity. The first is negative and the second is positive. It is often almost a non-verbal thing, a cry of emotion. In this context it is, of course, negative. The rest of the verse describes sin, the great sin of the Israelites and the tremendous sin they had fallen into. This first word is the exclamation of the great sadness or anger that lay beneath the assertion to follow. It is always indicative of a desire to call immediate attention to what follows.
1. A Sinful Nation
But the phrase rendered ‘Ah! Sinful Nation’ is not a mere exclamation, expressing astonishment. It is rather an interjection denouncing threatening, or punishment. ‘Woe to the sinful nation.’ The Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible says: ‘Vae genti peccatrici.’ underscoring the sinfulness of the condition and the coming punishment that is due because of it.
“Nation” is “Goy” in Hebrew. It was used in three basic ways in the OT[1].
First and primarily, it was used of a people in general, a nation, i.e., a large group based on various cultural, physical, geographical ties, and often extended clan relationships. Gen. 10:4-5, speaking of the descendants of Noah, speaks of the sons Javan and says that:
From these the coastland peoples of the Gentiles were separated into their lands, everyone according to his language, according to their families, into their nations.
Genesis 25:23 in the prophecy the Lord gave to Rebekah when the Lord finally moved and granted her pregnancy and two children struggled within her womb.
And the Lord said to her:
“Two nations are in your womb, Two peoples shall be separated from your body; One people shall be stronger than the other, And the older shall serve the younger.”
We ought to note here that that this reference was to both Jacob and Esau and that it can after Abraham, mysterious and perplexing, untidy, but there it is…
Second, it was used to speak of a human population in the terms of an animal. Joel 1:6 says:
For a nation has come up against My land, Strong, and without number; His teeth are the teeth of a lion, And he has the fangs of a fierce lion.
Zeph. 2:14-15 says:
14 The herds shall lie down in her midst, Every beast of the nation. Both the pelican and the bittern Shall lodge on the capitals of her pillars; Their voice shall sing in the windows; Desolation shall be at the threshold; For He will lay bare the cedar work. 15 This is the rejoicing city That dwelt securely, That said in her heart, “I am it, and there is none besides me.” How has she become a desolation, A place for beasts to lie down! Everyone who passes by her Shall hiss and shake his fist.
Third, there was a specific sense in which it was used to speak of the Gentiles, i.e., a national group or groups that are not Jewish, with the associative meaning of being uncultured, pagan and heathen. Neh 5:8 tells us:
And I said to them, “According to our ability we have redeemed our Jewish brethren who were sold to the nations. Now indeed, will you even sell your brethren? Or should they be sold to us?”
It is important to see the linkage between the three ideas here in Hebrew thought. In the Jewish mind the word had become almost entirely negative n its context. In the average Jewish mind, the Gentile was simply “them”, the others, unclean and outside the Covenant. But for the Leadership, they were the enemies of God and the oppressors, the opponents of His Kingdom and, by extension, of Jewish blessing and prosperity.
A portion of this was justified. The Gentiles were outside of the Covenant of God, They had no mediating connection to make provision for their sins or to allow them to enter His presence or please Him. They were yet in their sins, in rebellion and even the religious things they did, however well-intentioned, were abominable, because the fundamental problem of their sinfulness was still between they and their Maker.
It is not Isaiah’s point here either to endorse or to dispute this point. Rather, he simply takes it and uses it to underscore his own message from God. The Jews had become no different that the Gentiles at which they looked down their noses. They were, as a nation, no different than the Gentile nations around them. This is a recurring theme which we see again and again in the book.
Isaiah 10 is a good example. In a passage that is developing ideas that Israel would readily agree with, the punishment of the unjust, etc.; the table are suddenly turned.
“Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees,
Who write misfortune,
Which they have prescribed
2 To rob the needy of justice,
And to take what is right from the poor of My people,
That widows may be their prey,
And that they may rob the fatherless.
3 What will you do in the day of punishment,
And in the desolation which will come from afar?
To whom will you flee for help?
And where will you leave your glory?
4 Without Me they shall bow down among the prisoners,
And they shall fall among the slain.”For all this His anger is not turned away,
But His hand is stretched out still.
Arrogant Assyria Also Judged5 “Woe to Assyria, the rod of My anger
And the staff in whose hand is My indignation.
6 I will send him against an ungodly nation,
And against the people of My wrath
I will give him charge,
To seize the spoil, to take the prey,
And to tread them down like the mire of the streets.To all of this, Israel would have heartily shouted “Amen and Amen”. This was talking about the Goyim, “them”!
7 Yet he does not mean so,
Nor does his heart think so;
But it is in his heart to destroy,
And cut off not a few nations.
8 For he says,
‘Are not my princes altogether kings?I’m sorry, what was that? I missed it…
9 Is not Calno like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad?
Is not Samaria like Damascus?
10 As my hand has found the kingdoms of the idols,
Whose carved images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria,
11 As I have done to Samaria and her idols,
Shall I not do also to Jerusalem and her idols?’ ”
Wait, hold on here, we weren’t talking about Jerusalem, we were talking about Syria and Damascus! We were talking about their great sin and wickedness, their great offense against God!
Well, they were at least partly rightly…Isaiah was talking about offense to God…
12 Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Lord has performed all His work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, that He will say, “I will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his haughty looks.”
Note that the sense of the statement has changed…Now the focus of the work is not out there; it is on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem. Once that work is done (elsewhere we see that the instrument that God uses to do the chastening in Jerusalem is this same Assyria) He will then turn His attention to Assyria and punish them for their wickedness.
18 And it will consume the glory of his forest and of his fruitful field,
Both soul and body;
And they will be as when a sick man wastes away.
19 Then the rest of the trees of his forest
Will be so few in number
That a child may write them.
The Returning Remnant of Israel20 And it shall come to pass in that day
That the remnant of Israel,
And such as have escaped of the house of Jacob,
Will never again depend on him who defeated them,
But will depend on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.
21 The remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob,
To the Mighty God.
22 For though your people, O Israel, be as the sand of the sea,
A remnant of them will return;
The destruction decreed shall overflow with righteousness.
23 For the Lord God of hosts
Will make a determined end
In the midst of all the land.
Note that the aim of the chastening that God puts in place in Israel’s life is entirely different than it is in Assyria’s by the way. In Israel’s, it is restorative. In Assyria’s it is destructive. This alone is a profound idea, one which we will take up in detail as we progress through the book. That the same or similar acts of chastening can serve very different purposes in the lives of the different participants in that action is one of the amazing and mysterious truths of the Bible and one of the great demonstrations of the Great mind and power of the Almighty.
Just as an aside, the entire issue of accountability for Assyria, created, raised up and used by God to chasten Israel is an interesting one that we will address later in the book. The entire reason, in so far as the Bible tells us, for the existence of Assyria, was to serve to demolish the Northern Kingdom and take Samaria into final captivity from which it, as a nation, would never return. Isaiah has much to say about this and we will be amazed at his eloquence and the depth of his theology as we move through the book.
The corruption Isaiah will describe pertained to the nation, and not merely to a part. It had become general. The character of the nation had become sinful, wicked and depraved. It was national. We might also note that this is no longer the fault of the leadership, or of the Priests and Rabbis, it is the fault of the entire nation. It is true that the people on go as the leadership leads, but there comes a time, when leadership is so very corrupted, that their sin becomes so obvious and clear that the “average” person is more than able to spot it and when the common person becomes responsible before God for their own condition.
Of course, people are responsible for their own condition, ultimately, before God at all times, but we are speaking of a more general, corporate situation here and thus we see that the leadership bears a huge responsibility before God, but that a given point, the corruption ceases to be a matter of the leadership only, becomes an affliction of the entire nation. Of course there is an application to our own nation here. Have we gotten to this point? Is the “average person” in America so corrupted by the vices our leaders have led us into that we are now approaching the kind of national guilt that Israel was guilty of at the time of Isaiah? It is certainly worth pondering!
The Character of Israel’s Corruption
Moreover, we need to remember the character of the corruption of which we are speaking. “Sinful” is actual a verb, a participle. Remember that a participle is a verb that is kind of acting like an adjective. An adjective is a describer and so this is a verb that is an active describer.
The word basically refers to missing a mark. It is used over 235 times in the OT. In reality, the word can, according to the context, be used in both positive and negative contexts, but by far it is used negatively with a sinful implication. The idea here is that God has set forth a standard and Israel has missed it. Because God is holy, that standard is an absolute and inflexible one. This standard is the Law of God. All men are required by God to measure up to that standard and all men have universally missed that mark.
Thus the word came to refer to sin[2], or to do wrong. God is the authority in the universe and the One Who gets to set the rules. Any breaking of those standards is sinful or wrong. Thus the one committing the sin comes to bear blame, or to be guilty before that authority. They commit an infraction of law or agreement, implying a penalty must be paid or forfeited.
When Abimelech became aware that Sarai was Abram’s sister and thus to have taken her as wife would have been a great sin against God he was furious and called Abram before him in Genesis 20:9:
And Abimelech called Abraham and said to him, “What have you done to us? How have I offended you, that you have brought on me and on my kingdom a great sin? You have done deeds to me that ought not to be done.”
So also in Exodus 9:27, when God sent thunderings and hail upon Egypt, Pharaoh was filled with fear and a sense of his own sinfulness:
And Pharaoh sent and called for Moses and Aaron, and said to them, “I have sinned this time. The Lord is righteous, and my people and I are wicked.
In both of those cases there was an inherent idea that there was penalty naturally attached to the offense. That is the nature of sin – it is not simply a matter of falling short, but carries with it the sense of debt, of owing the master and needing to pay that debt. That is a key idea throughout the entire OT and finds its resolution, of curse, in the cross of Christ.
The irony here is that this is exactly the way the Jews of the times thought of the Goy around them, the sinners. Yet, here they are, declared by God to be themselves utterly and completely sinful. This is the essence of hypocrisy. While a certain amount of their actions and attitudes were not deliberate, the greater part of it was knowing and thus deliberate sin. The Major and Minor Prophets make that very clear, and we will pursue this further as we move along.
[1] Swanson, J. (1997). Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.) (DBLH 1580, #3). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
[2] Ibid, DBLH 2627, #1.
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