In that wonderful day when the LORD gives his people rest from sorrow and fear, from slavery and chains, you will taunt the king of Babylon. You will say,

The mighty man has been destroyed.

Yes, your insolence is ended.

For the LORD has crushed your wicked power

and broken your evil rule.

You struck the people with endless blows of rage

and held the nations in your angry grip

with unrelenting tyranny.

But finally the earth is at rest and quiet.

Now it can sing again!

Even the trees of the forest—

the cypress trees and the cedars of Lebanon—

sing out this joyous song:

Since you have been cut down,

no one will come now to cut us down!

(Isaiah 14:3-8, NLT)

I am the local Isaiah Fan of the Wesley, and I’ve decided to finally do what I said I was gonna do perhaps a year ago now: journeying all the way through the book, front to back, reading only a few verses a day, in contemplative prayer. This has been rather challenging. Sure, reading the Messianic passages in Isaiah 9 and 11 during the Advent and Christmas season was lovely, but right after the famous part in Isaiah 11 where the prophet says that the calf and the lion will hang out together and a child will put their hand in a snake-hole, and there will be no more hurt or destruction… we immediately get descriptions of war. Victorious war, but still war.

If that wasn’t challenging enough for me, Isaiah 13 turns towards the destruction of Babylon with phrases like “Scream in terror, for the day of the LORD has arrived” (13:6) and “Everyone in Babylon will run about like a hunted gazelle, like a sheep without a shepherd. They will try to find their own people and flee to their own land. Anyone who is captured will be cut down—run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked, and their wives will be raped” (13:14-16). All this by an army that is said to be dedicated by the LORD, mighty warriors called to express His anger, who will rejoice when He is exalted (13:3). Even if many interpretations of the following chapter focus on the identification of the king of Babylon with Satan/Lucifer, these descriptions in Isaiah 13 make it clear that the king’s followers are human beings too.

God’s vengeance is something I do not like to be confronted by, honestly. Punishment as a concept is something I have long chafed against, especially eternal punishment. I find myself having compassion for even those who are very obviously doing evil things—even fictional characters! But also real people too, and maybe that’s because I know that I live in the United States of America, and if there was a place that mirrored Babylon from the ancient world to the modern one, we would at least be among the comparisons. I’m no expert on the Book of Revelation, but I do know that Babylon is depicted as the woman of the world, the evil of men. I know that I am someone who benefits from a world made by mighty men who struck the people with endless blows of rage.

But God does not punish the innocent with the guilty… and often he does not punish the guilty either. When Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, Lot and his family are allowed to escape through the intercession of Abraham, even though they have largely fallen into the evil culture around them. We Christians meanwhile can be comforted by the fact that we have an intercessor in Jesus and in one another. Isaiah 13 describes the darkening of the heavens on the day of the LORD’s vengeance—which we see again in the death of Jesus on the cross, the Lamb who was slain, the King who conquered the grave. Jesus took on all our sins, all the evils of this world.

Still, there’s a discomfort I feel with the idea of any vengeance at all, of any violence against other human beings, of punishment from a God who created each of us in His image and loves us, who has compassion beyond any human compassion, mercy beyond human mercy.

These are questions we’ll always have as Christians. But the ending of Isaiah 13 and the beginning of Isaiah 14 begins to say something to them. Isaiah 13 describes the desolation of Babylon in terms of the humans who refuse to enter its ruins… and the animals that take up residence instead: “Owls will live among the ruins, and wild goats will go there to dance. Hyenas will howl in its fortresses, and jackals will make dens in its luxurious palaces” (Isaiah 13:21-22). The reclamation of nature and the joy of Creation are made more explicit in Isaiah 14 in the lines quoted at the beginning. The trees rejoice, for there is no longer a great nation to exploit them and cut them down. The earth can finally rest. It is quiet. Now it can sing.

Modern American culture is antithetical to rest and quiet. Even writing this, I found myself stressing about finishing it when I still had the time, stressing about not getting enough done in a particular day, stressing about social screw-ups related to privilege and perhaps a lack of listening.

But modern American culture, like all human cultures across history, has its songs. Beautiful and heart-wrenching or simply produced to fill the silence. We sing because we’re human. And because we are human and songs are part of our chemistry, we say that the earth sings when we are quiet and when we listen to its sounds. Freed from its treatment as a mere resource rather than something that sings praises to God the Creator of all, the land can rejoice. We can rejoice. We can be reminded of our humanity and our compassion and the One who made the cypresses and cedars and knows the number of their leaves and needles and of the hairs on our heads. There’s something redemptive in it, in the emptying. In the rest and quiet that run contrary to the ideals of the culture around us—the culture that largely serves the king of Babylon.

When we rest, when we are quiet, we relearn how to sing.

Finally the Earth Is at Rest and Quiet—Now It Can Sing Again: Ashley Palmer

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