Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 105th episode. In this episode I want to study Isaiah chapter 41. This chapter is further encouragement for the Israelites who were exiled in Babylon. The encouragement was mixed in with assurances that God was the one who lifted up this new and powerful conqueror, Cyrus the Great. God was the one directing his steps to victory. It was God’s name whom Cyrus called upon – even if he didn’t realize it. The message for the Israelites is the same for us today: We do not need to fear because God is always with us.
I tend to think that human beings go through three broad stages of psychological development. This is a massive oversimplification but I think the general concept holds true. We begin our lives in naivete – this is the first stage. Naivete is the innocence of childhood. It’s believing that the world and everyone in it are basically inherently good. Prolonged naivete is a negative side-effect of a safe and prosperous nation. Naive people make up the legions of followers who get behind the more clever, more sinister leader who claims to be able to usher in the utopia without God. The leader who pushes for a Marxist model of centralized power is not naive. This leader is simply manipulating those who are naive.
So one characteristic of naivete is the belief that humanity is basically inherently good. I’m choosing my words very carefully here. It’s fundamentally incorrect to believe that human beings are inherently good. Although is not incorrect to believe that human beings are capable of being good. The difference is that truly good people realize and accept the struggle that it takes to be good. Inside the crucible of suffering is where you can tell the difference between those who are truly good and those who have the capacity of being good but have not yet struggled for it.
Human beings begin their lives with this sense of naive ignorance. Then reality or truth invades their world and shatters their perception. This is the second stage. This is the permanent dissolution of the safe space. This is the tragic realization that life is not what you thought it was or what your naive self wanted it to be. Once naivete is stolen from you by the fallen nature of the world you can never return to that stage. Many, many people who enter this second stage remain there permanently. These are the people you meet who are bitter and resentful. Most of them have lost their arrogance at this point. Most of them have buckled under the guilt and shame of refusing to bear up under the truth of reality. Some of them even fall into the mire of misery that attends unwillingness to work and the abusive manipulation of those around them who are still trying to be good.
But occasionally you get one who is able to enter this second stage with their arrogance still intact – and these people are the real danger. Mixing resentment and arrogance results in the murderous desire to inflict the pain you feel onto others. These are the ones who – when the toxicity is fully metastasized – become rapists, murderers, and mass shooters. These people are like Cain in the Cain and Abel story. Degenerating into that type of person is one of the worst case scenarios. But it’s far more common for people who lose their naivete to simply become cynics. They’ve lost all faith in the potential for good in the world and in themselves. Nihilism is one way to get here rapidly. It’s quite tempting to believe that everything ultimately ends in nothing because then you are absolved of the responsibility that comes with faith in the good. For a person whose been given a clear, hard look at the fallen nature of the world – I actually don’t think it’s possible to recover from that without God. I don’t think it’s possible to see past temporal reality without a relationship with transcendent reality.
A relationship with transcendent reality – a relationship with God through Jesus Christ – is what takes you from the second stage and into the third stage. The third stage of psychological development is something like what Carl Jung called integration of the shadow. It’s recognizing the evil in the world and in yourself and choosing to be good despite that. Those who aren’t tempted by evil are either actively submerged in it or unaware of its existence. If you think, well that’s crazy I could never be an evil person, then you just haven’t been subjected to the various forms evil takes. Do you think the Holocaust was evil? Your answer is obviously yes. But let’s play a little thought experiment.
Imagine that you’re living in a country that has just lost a war and your economy is in ruins. Each night you go home and see your malnourished kids looking at you and wondering why you aren’t providing for them. You can’t sleep at night because you’re stressed about what kind of life you and your family are going to have. Your kids wake up cold because you have no heat in winter. They go to school where there is no electricity because the nation’s infrastructure has been destroyed. You walk through your neighborhood and you see shop owners who make more money than you. These are people who don’t even belong in your country anyway. These people are greedily taking advantage of your broken condition.
Then one day a young firebrand rises to power and promises to make your country powerful again. He’s going to provide for your future through the security of a strong military and a wealthy economy. All you have to do is get on board with his vision of deporting those shop owners who shouldn’t even be there anyway. That doesn’t sound so bad so you decide to enlist and join the movement. At first you and your comrades go in and remove these shop owners from your neighborhoods. You find yourself feeling a little sad at the sight but then you toughen up and realize it needs to be done – think of your family. Once the movement really gets off the ground you start hearing rumors about how these captive shop owners can’t just be deported, they actually need to be killed because otherwise their future generations will want revenge against you and your people. You can’t build a society if the society is infected with these people.
The thought of extermination makes you uneasy but you help shuttle these people off to holding facilities anyway because now you’re afraid of what will happen if you speak up. You’ve heard about the shadowy branch of government that’s supposedly raiding homes and silencing dissenters. Again you think of your family. The prisoners in the camp look pathetic to you. You can’t help but blame them for their own condition. Maybe you do that to protect your own mind. At first it kills you to watch them, especially the children, walk into the gas chamber – or rather, it kills something inside of you. You have a few nightmares at first. What have we done? But after weeks and weeks of exposure the nightmares stop. Not only are you able to look upon them without empathy – but now you can even laugh and have fun with your friends at the resort nearby when your shifts are over. After all, you’re not killing human beings you’re killing Jews. Just another day in Auschwitz.
I walk you through that thought experiment because you need to know that evil is not born overnight. It is built up inside of you by a series of painful events, rationalizations, and arrogant beliefs that you can perfect the world. You get to a point where the end justifies any means. Just because you have a good reason to do an evil thing doesn’t change the nature of the thing’s evil. This is important to know because at first you might think you’re simply paying a sacrifice for the greater good. But what happened to the Nazi prison guards is that their character adjusted to the actions. Evil changes you even if you begin with good intentions. Not only do you acclimate to evil and become comfortable with it – but you actually begin to enjoy it. That process has warped many people in the past and it will warp you too if you aren’t aware of it.
So the third stage of human psychological development – the stage that requires a relationship with transcendent reality – is understanding the tragedy of your situation and choosing to resist evil and walk through the tragedy by faith. This is the crucifixion that is followed by the resurrection. This is the death and rebirth that is symbolized by water baptism. This is the narrow path that restores you to proper relationship with God and it’s only possible because Jesus walked this path first to show you the way. The person who has been redeemed from the fallen world is the person who resides in the most advanced form of human psychological development.
This place is where God was trying to bring the Israelites in chapter 41. They were currently inhabiting the cynical zone of tragedy because they lived hard lives in exile. They needed a reason to hope and they would find their reason in transcendent reality – or in God Himself. The Persian conqueror Cyrus’s reputation had spread through the regions east of Mesopotamia. He was unlike any other leader the mountains of Iran had produced before. After taking control of Media and the Babylonians, Cyrus had a large kingdom from the borders of Babylon and Elam in the south, to the Aegean sea across Asia Minor, to the Black sea in the north, and to the borders of India in the east. God was moving in Cyrus and directing the course of history through him. Let’s read chapter 41:1-4:
Isa 41:1 Listen to me in silence, O coastlands; let the peoples renew their strength; let them approach, then let them speak; let us together draw near for judgment.
Isa 41:2 Who stirred up one from the east whom victory meets at every step? He gives up nations before him, so that he tramples kings underfoot; he makes them like dust with his sword, like driven stubble with his bow.
Isa 41:3 He pursues them and passes on safely, by paths his feet have not trod.
Isa 41:4 Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he.
God invited the Hebrews and the foreign nations to come forward make their case for idolatry. He wanted them to do their level best at disproving His sovereignty in favor of their own made up worldview. He also challenged the unbelieving people to match the strength He had given to believers. The reason He did this is because He wanted to lay out the evidence for them as in a courtroom. Then the people would be free to make their own judgment. At it’s core this was God’s invitation for the people to see Him as sovereign over history and to see Him as the source of renewal for their strength.
God pointed to the rise of Cyrus as the first piece of evidence for His sovereignty. Cyrus’s reputation had spread far and wide at this point so the people knew who God was talking about. The name of the Persian king had reached the lips of those who sat in the world’s seats of power. Cyrus began his rise when he was crowned king of Persia in Pasargadae. Pasargadae was located in the Iranian mountains east-southeast of Babylon. Then he rebelled against Media and conquered their capital Ecbatana. This key victory made Cyrus the ruler of the vast Median empire and it happened exactly according to God’s plan. Cyrus had become a king who was empowered by God and that made him unstoppable in combat.
But the Persian was also a master diplomat. When he took Media he found that many of the empire’s vassals were unhappy with the status quo of things. He used their dissatisfaction to his advantage and gained the loyalty of many without so much as a struggle. Cyrus was skilled in dealing sensitively with the religious and ethnic differences of his subjects. He paid close attention to what the people wanted so he was able to gather many territories into his campaign trail without ever having to personally be there.
I mean what would you do if you were one of these territories? You probably never had enough to eat and your respective empire didn’t care whether you lived or died. Along comes this charismatic Persian who sends your community financial relief, rebuilds your infrastructure, and shores up your own religious institutions. You’re probably going to take your sweet time responding when your imperial overlords cry for help in defending against him. You see unlike the brutal Assyrian emperors, Cyrus’s main goal was political and military victories rather than personal deification and ego-boosting.
God showed the people the success of Cyrus and then reminded them He’s been raising up leaders like Cyrus from the beginning of time. Even this new Persian king was just another cog in God’s machine. God called Himself the first and the last – which is how Jesus refers to Himself in the book of Revelation. This means that before anything was, God is. Generations come and generations go but God has been with each one of them since the beginning.
This is one of the reasons that I absolutely love studying history. All of the disciplines provide value for edifying the Christian but I think there’s something special about history. When you study history with a mind for God then you see his fingerprints all over it. God challenged the people in this chapter to review the historical record and see that He is in all, through all, and above all. In the same way, I think we should accept the challenge of surveying history to see the innumerable ways God has worked in the past. Let’s read verses 5-7:
Isa 41:5 The coastlands have seen and are afraid; the ends of the earth tremble; they have drawn near and come.
Isa 41:6 Everyone helps his neighbor and says to his brother, “Be strong!”
Isa 41:7 The craftsman strengthens the goldsmith, and he who smooths with the hammer him who strikes the anvil, saying of the soldering, “It is good”; and they strengthen it with nails so that it cannot be moved.
When the islands and far away coast-land nations heard about what God was doing through Cyrus – they trembled with fear. These are the people who came forward to make their case in favor of idolatry. Instead of looking to God they looked to each other for strength. I want to make clear that this passage is not condemning fellowship with other people. But it is condemning the prospect of looking to other people or to another person as taking God’s place in your life. I can tell you exactly why this is a terrible idea.
When you meet someone who is impressive to you the temptation is to idolize them. One problem with idolizing a person is that you’re either ignorant of or irresponsibly overlooking their flaws. If you’re ignorant of their flaws then you’re in for a rude awakening the moment you get close enough to see the ugliness. If you’re intentionally blind to their flaws then you’re putting them in an impossible position. You’re projecting a fiction onto them that they’ll never be able to satisfy in reality. You begin to worship this fiction and that makes the relationship thoroughly one-sided and imbalanced. The person you idolize will likely lose all respect for you and maybe even start to dislike you. Not to mention the fact that your relationship will likely be full of deception and unsaid truths. It’s highly toxic and it can only lead to catastrophic failure. Instead, understand and accept that all human beings are fundamentally broken and make the choice to love them anyway. Keep God on the throne.
So these people who heard about the spread of the Persian Empire turned to each other for support instead of turning to God. The result was that they all set to work building more idols. In the ancient world, when an idol fell off its pedestal onto the ground it was considered a sign that the god was impotent. So they soldered the statues and nailed them down in an attempt to stabilize their work. The stupidity of their actions seems obvious to the modern reader. And it might have been obvious to them as well.
Their insistent dependence on idols was likely caused by their own personal pride – not their ignorance of the true and living God. You can tell this by how they reacted to each other upon finishing an idol. They clapped each other on the back and said it is good. This is a strong textual link to the creation account where God says of His own creation: it is good. This link suggests that the idolaters were in the mindset of believing themselves to be their own gods – which is really the heart behind idolatry. Human beings are designed to worship. We can’t help but worship something. Idolatry is simply the natural consequence of a person who refuses a relationship with God. That’s what idols are – they’re objects that you can worship without relationship. There’s no need to obey an idol and you only have to acknowledge it when doing so is convenient for you.
The desire to stabilize their idols is indicative of a genuine human need. All of us need stability. God is the only reliable source for that stability. His statutes stand firm. His world is firmly established. His throne is established forever. His Word will never pass away. His character is unchanging and eternal. Both Israel and these other nations needed stability. The pagan nations tried to get it by nailing down what they already believed and boasting to each other about it. Israel chose to get it from God’s eternal order of word, salvation, and creation. Let’s read verses 8-10:
Isa 41:8 But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
Isa 41:9 you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, “You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off”;
Isa 41:10 fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
God reminded Israel that they inhabited a story filled with His purposes. He qualified their relationship to him along four different dimensions. The first was servant. Israel was God’s servant which meant the people actively sought to do the will of their master. The second was chosen. God graciously chose Israel out of His love for them. They didn’t do anything to warrant being chosen by God. They didn’t deserve it or earn it. The idea of Israel being God’s chosen servant meant that He maintained close possession of them and desired to use them to carry out His plan.
The third qualifier of their relationship with God was their lineage to Abraham. The Israelites were honored to have a genealogical and spiritual connection to great forefathers like Abraham. God addressed them using their heritage to show them that they were included on His past call and covenant with generations gone by. They, too, were a part of His plans that extended far back into history. So it’s like He was uniting His current purpose for the Israelites with the purpose of their predecessors. Lastly He referred to the Israelites as His friend. God loved the people of Israel just as much as He loves us today. He wanted them to be reassured that He had not rejected or forgotten them.
After Babylon conquered Jerusalem and took its people into exile, some of the Israelites were dispersed to borderlands and to the far corners of Palestine. God’s call meant that they should worship right where they were until He unfolded His plan to return them to the Temple in Jerusalem. Worship meant being God’s instrument to perform His will and His messenger to carry His messages. The people were dispersed and no longer in the Promised Land – but they found themselves at the center of God’s strategic purpose.
It wasn’t the first time God had worked with individuals from a far country. Back when Abraham was called Abram, God took hold of him, strengthened him, and gave him the faith necessary to go on the journey to Canaan. God’s plan was to raise up a mighty nation through this one man. This nation was Israel and God’s purpose for Israel was that it would bring a blessing to all the other nations on Earth. During the exile, God remembered His covenantal promise to Abraham and He had no intention of abandoning His people during this time of trials and warfare. Today, all who come to God by faith in Jesus Christ are included in that family and are beneficiaries of God’s unwavering love and commitment.
The people of the foreign nations had to secure and fasten down their idols during times of trouble. But for Israel, God secured and fastened the people down during times of trouble. They had God’s call on their lives. This probably brought them a tremendous sense of meaning and purpose but it may also have been attended by some fear and anxiety. It’s likely that they felt anxious over being in the presence of God because that meant the stakes could not go any higher. But they were also afraid of being abandoned by God. They were probably well aware of their various sins and their relative uselessness that came as part of being insufficient. They felt that God had proper grounds for abandoning them.
God assuaged these fears by insisting to them: I am with you. This was the same thing He told Moses. Jesus also said it to His disciples when He sent them out into the world. He declared to Israel that I am your God. So despite the fact that Israel had breached God’s covenant prior to being exiled, they didn’t have to face permanent separation from Him. Not only did God not abandon them – but He actually strengthened them and upheld them throughout their entire ordeal. We saw God do the same thing for Moses and the Israelites when they failed to enter the Promised Land and had to wander in the wilderness for a generation. He fed them and kept their clothes and shoes from wearing out. Let’s read verses 11-13:
Isa 41:11 Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.
Isa 41:12 You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all.
Isa 41:13 For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you.”
The Israelites suffered the traumatic consequences of abuse. They were fearful of the human powers who had brutalized them throughout the exile. God simply reminded them of what happened to the previous human powers who victimized His people. The Midianites, the Arameans, the Assyrians – all of them were shamed, confounded, and doomed to extinction. Babylon was rapidly earning its way onto the list. The defeated and broken Israelites would be vindicated because no human hostility can stand up to God. God made clear that He was the source of the Israelites being able to survive and rebound from exile. He spoke directly to them – without the intermediary of a prophet – when he said: Fear not, I am the one who helps you. Let’s read verses 14-16:
Isa 41:14 Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel! I am the one who helps you, declares the LORD; your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.
Isa 41:15 Behold, I make of you a threshing sledge, new, sharp, and having teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and crush them, and you shall make the hills like chaff;
Isa 41:16 you shall winnow them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the tempest shall scatter them. And you shall rejoice in the LORD; in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory.
Being in exile meant that pretty much the entire world viewed you as weak people. But by the power of God the Israelites would be transformed from weak people into a powerful force that could remove even mountainous obstacles. Of course, this project would actually be carried out by Cyrus and not the Israelites themselves. But if you get into a street fight with Mike Tyson on your side then the two of you are going to look like a very formidable force whereas you by yourself would look like a weak worm. God called Himself the Israelites’ Redeemer which was an indication of His intent to rescue them from their captivity and foster conditions under which their spirits could flourish.
Cyrus was the conqueror who would deliver the Israelites from exile. He was likened to a threshing sledge which was a wooden platform studded underneath with sharp objects. It was dragged across harvested crops to rip them open. God also used the terminology wind and tempest to reference His guidance of the forces of history. The Israelites’ didn’t have to worry about being God’s enforcer against Babylon – their job was to support and encourage Jerusalem in the restoration of the Temple. God wanted the Jews to rejoice and sing praises as they worshiped Him. Their job was like a continuation of the order given to Moses: You are to be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. Let’s read verses 17-20:
Isa 41:17 When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
Isa 41:18 I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.
Isa 41:19 I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive. I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together,
Isa 41:20 that they may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the LORD has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.
The Israelites refused the false salvation of idolatry and instead looked to God for their rescue. God stirred up Cyrus to defeat Babylon so that the Israelites could return home – but one of the downsides to this was that they’d have to survive the journey. So God reminded them that in addition to controlling the tempest of history – He would also pour out refreshment on His people for His own glory. This was like a commentary on the Israelites use of natural resources to survive once they were leveraged out of their homes in exile.
It could also be understood to mean that God provided them with spiritual sustenance while they were surrounded by dry idols that did nothing but sit there. Jesus called Himself the source of Living Water and He said that whoever drank living water would never thirst again. The abundant production of water was a common theme among visions of God redeeming the creation. This was likely an indication of the fact that God is the source of life, and water is also a fundamental prerequisite for life.
God’s motivation for doing this was the same motivation for sacrificing Himself on the cross – because He loves us and He wants us to come to Him. Before the exile, the Israelites were proven guilty of spiritual blindness while Isaiah preached to them. But God didn’t give up. His hope was that they would view their release from exile in combination with their survival in the wilderness as well as the new call on their lives as evidence that God was still with them.
If they could just look back and review the historical record they would see God’s movement all over it. The rise of Assyria; the fall of Samaria; the salvation of Jerusalem in the face of Sennacherib; the collapse of Assyria; Jerusalem destroyed by Babylon and now the Persian king Cyrus on the march to liberate them. It was all God the entire time. He planned it and He did it – Isaiah saw it – and now it was time for the Israelites to see it as well. But they would have to resist the temptation of idolatry that surrounded them. Let’s read verses 21-24:
Isa 41:21 Set forth your case, says the LORD; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob.
Isa 41:22 Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come.
Isa 41:23 Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified.
Isa 41:24 Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing; an abomination is he who chooses you.
These verses begin a passage that will extend into the next chapter and they show God challenging the false claim of human idols. God presents that His servant is the only hope for humanity and he invites everyone on Earth to praise Him for His salvation. God’s servant is an allusion to Jesus Christ because Christ came first as a suffering servant and will return as a conquering king. Once again God invited the nations to come forward with their idols and demonstrate the truth of their beliefs. Obviously He knew they would fail.
The thrust of God’s challenge was for the pagan’s to bring forward a coherent worldview. If their idols are in fact gods, tell us what happened at the beginning of all things and what will happen in the future? Give us a framework of context that we can use to understand life without degenerating into chaos. This project went beyond the scope of the idols because idols were just inventions of humanity.
The same holds true today regarding the secular scientific worldview. The power of science to describe the objective world and bring us advanced luxuries has resulted in people erecting a religion around it. The basic scheme of thought follows that if science can do all of this, surely it should be able to tell us why we’re here, why we should care about the well-being of others, and what will happen to us when we die. Science fails to do this because you cannot derive values from facts. The result is individuals who must try to invent their own values which the cornerstone of the pathological behavior postmodernism has ushered into our culture. I’ve done a lot of work on this in previous episodes so I’m not going to fully unpack it here. Just consider this one point before I move on: If our brains are the products of mindless, unguided processes then why should we trust ourselves in our ability to discern what’s ultimately real?
So the idols were challenged to lay out the causal connections of historical events. If they could accurately interpret history they should be able to use it to make sense of the present. Furthermore, they were asked to accurately predict the future and cause it to come into being. The idols, of course, were silent in the face of these challenges. So God told them if they are real – just do anything. Make a sound, perform a miracle, do something good, do something bad, do anything to make us be dismayed, to fear you and to acknowledge your reality. But all that happened was silent nothing.
I want to unpack this idea of an idol worshiper being an abomination. If you actually know what it means to love God and to love your neighbor – and still choose not to do it – that can only be a consequence of your arrogance and your malevolence. It means that you know exactly how to exploit your neighbor’s vulnerabilities and you choose to do it for your own gain – or worse – for your own pleasure. I actually don’t think this is the major problem in the West today. I think ignorance is the major problem. Too many people simply don’t know what it means to love God and to love their neighbor according to the biblical worldview. If they did they would see that they already obey these commands most of the time. This obedience is the reason why our society is the most free, most prosperous civilization ever to exist.
For most people in our society malevolence is not the cause of their worldview malfunction. One of the chief causes for the spread of secularism is that the West is saddled with this ideological, misinformed, cartoon-version of Christianity and so many of the self-purported secularists are simply attacking this straw man. Many of our society’s brightest minds chose university over the church because they believed the church is where you go to intellectually check-out. And that is the church’s fault.
Our religious forefathers were some of the greatest thinkers in history. But the modern church has pushed these types of people away and into the universities because they didn’t want to have any conversations that caused them to think about and evolve their dogmatic belief structures. This is why so many people today live and act as Christians while also disavowing Christianity. Okay this is not a problem of the heart like it was with the ancient idolaters. This is a problem with stupidity and an unwillingness to have the humility required to acknowledge that we don’t know everything and we need to educate ourselves so that we can improve. I could on and on about that issue but let’s finish up with verses 25-29:
Isa 41:25 I stirred up one from the north, and he has come, from the rising of the sun, and he shall call upon my name; he shall trample on rulers as on mortar, as the potter treads clay.
Isa 41:26 Who declared it from the beginning, that we might know, and beforehand, that we might say, “He is right”? There was none who declared it, none who proclaimed, none who heard your words.
Isa 41:27 I was the first to say to Zion, “Behold, here they are!” and I give to Jerusalem a herald of good news.
Isa 41:28 But when I look, there is no one; among these there is no counselor who, when I ask, gives an answer.
Isa 41:29 Behold, they are all a delusion; their works are nothing; their metal images are empty wind.
Once God summarily dismissed the impotent idols, He Himself answered His own challenge by predicting the arrival of Cyrus and the Persians. God called Cyrus the one stirred up from the north and from the east. As king of the Medo-Persian empire, Cyrus was ruler of Media in the north and Persia in the east. Cyrus did not know God but he called on God’s name for his own diplomatic advantages. God used the policies of Cyrus to advance His purpose for the Israelites. This accurate prediction of the rise of Cyrus was held in contrast with the idols complete silence when challenged to see the future. Not only was God able to foresee the conquests of the Persians, He was also the One who caused it all to happen.
The Israelites had been given the announcement regarding Cyrus before Cyrus actually arrived. They were already designated, chosen, and equipped to carry this news to Jerusalem. The historical record matches this claim by showing us that the initiatives to restore Jerusalem did in fact come from Mesopotamia. Sheshbazzar, Zerubbabel, Nehemiah, and Ezra were the leaders of the initiative. So God was able to successfully present evidence of His omniscience where the idols failed to do so. The only reasonable conclusion was that the idols were all a delusion and that their works amounted to nothing.
This same conclusion is being arrived at by many thousands of people today. They’re asking themselves the difficult questions about their presuppositions and discovering that their worldviews amount to nothing. This nihilism is resulting in the widespread scourge of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. You cannot believe and act out a nihilistic worldview and maintain your well-being at the same time. This is because you are not the source of life and well-being – God is.
At the beginning of this episode I walked you through what I consider to be the three broad stages of psychological development that each person goes through. We start off with innocent wonder at life and all the possibilities. Then reality and the truth of human nature invades this innocence and shatters it. And finally, by the power of God, we transcend our suffering by voluntarily acknowledging the crucifixion of innocence on faith that this sacrifice will result in a resurrection of ourselves as the truly good and truly loving people that God always intended for us to be.
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