When the Music Dies: The Hangover of a Godless World Text: Isaiah 24:7-12
Introduction: The Party Is Over
We are living in the midst of a global party. For several generations now, the Western world has been on a bender. We have been drinking deeply from the cup of our own autonomy, feasting on our technological prowess, and dancing to the tune of our own self-defined morality. The central creed of our age is that man is the measure of all things, and that we can create our own joy, our own meaning, and our own salvation, thank you very much. The music has been loud, the wine has been flowing, and the laughter has been constant. But the biblical doctrine of reality, which is to say, reality itself, teaches us that every party of this kind must end. And the end is not a gentle fading into the night; it is a hangover of cosmic proportions. It is a morning of grim silence, throbbing heads, and the bitter taste of regret.
Isaiah 24 is a vision of worldwide judgment. It is often called Isaiah's apocalypse. The prophet is not speaking about a localized judgment on Israel or one of its neighbors. The language is universal: "the earth" is the subject. This is what happens when the entire world gives itself over to transgression. And in the passage before us today, Isaiah describes the emotional and cultural fallout of this judgment. He shows us what happens when God turns off the music.
What Isaiah describes is the death of joy. Not true joy, the kind that is a fruit of the Spirit, but the manufactured, frantic, and hollow merriment that a culture uses to distract itself from the reality of its own sin and impending doom. This is the joy of the tambourine, the harp, and the wine song. It is the joy of the perpetual festival. But God says that when He brings His hand down in judgment, all this manufactured gladness will cease. The laughter will die in their throats, and the wine will turn bitter in their mouths. This is a profoundly relevant word for our generation, a generation that is addicted to entertainment and allergic to silence, a generation that pursues happiness with a desperate intensity, only to find it slipping through its fingers.
We must understand that God is not a cosmic killjoy. He is the author of joy. At His right hand are pleasures forevermore. But He is also a holy God who will not be mocked. A civilization that builds its house on the sand of rebellion cannot expect the party to last forever. The storm will come, the music will stop, and the silence that follows will be deafening.
The Text
The new wine mourns; The vine languishes; All the glad of heart sigh.
The joy of tambourines ceases; The rumbling of those exulting stops; The joy of the harp ceases.
They do not drink wine with song; Strong drink is bitter to those who drink it.
The city of chaos is broken down; Every house is shut up so that none may enter.
There is an outcry in the streets concerning the wine; All gladness turns to gloom. The joy of the earth is taken away into exile.
Desolation remains in the city, And the gate is struck down to ruins.
(Isaiah 24:7-12 LSB)
The Source of Joy Dries Up (v. 7)
The prophet begins with the foundation of their celebration: the fruit of the vine.
"The new wine mourns; The vine languishes; All the glad of heart sigh." (Isaiah 24:7)
Isaiah personifies the wine and the vine. The wine itself "mourns." The vine "languishes." This is a poetic way of saying that the very source of their carnal celebration has failed. In the Scripture, wine is a symbol of joy and blessing. A fruitful vine is a sign of God's favor. But here, the blessing is removed. The judgment is not just an external force; it strikes at the root of their gladness. The creation itself groans under the weight of man's sin, and it ceases to yield its strength to the rebels.
Notice the effect: "All the glad of heart sigh." These are not the righteous who are sighing. These are the "glad of heart," the party-goers, the revelers. Their gladness was entirely dependent on external circumstances. Their joy was in the bottle. When the bottle is empty, their joy evaporates. This is the fundamental weakness of all worldly happiness. It is circumstantial. It depends on health, wealth, and prosperity. When the stock market crashes, when the diagnosis is grim, when the wine runs out, the joy is gone. Christian joy, by contrast, is a fruit of the Spirit. It is not dependent on the vine, but on the Vinedresser. It can sing in a prison cell, rejoice in tribulation, and find contentment in loss.
The sigh of the glad-hearted is the sound of a worldview collapsing. It is the sound of a man who has built his life on creature comforts, only to have the creatures themselves turn on him. When you worship the creation rather than the Creator, you will eventually be betrayed by your god.
The Silence of the Revelers (v. 8-9)
Next, Isaiah describes the sound of judgment, which is silence.
"The joy of tambourines ceases; The rumbling of those exulting stops; The joy of the harp ceases. They do not drink wine with song; Strong drink is bitter to those who drink it." (Isaiah 24:8-9 LSB)
The soundtrack of the godless city is silenced. The tambourines, the harps, the loud rumbling of exultant crowds, it all comes to a dead stop. Our culture knows this sound. It is the sound of a stadium after a shocking loss. It is the sound of a festival ground the morning after. It is the silence of a society that has nothing left to celebrate.
A culture that lives for the weekend, that defines itself by its entertainment and its noise, is a culture under a soft judgment already. The constant need for distraction is a symptom of a deep spiritual emptiness. When God brings a hard judgment, He simply takes the distractions away. He forces the culture to sit in the quiet and contemplate its own bankruptcy.
And even when they try to rekindle the old feeling, it doesn't work. "They do not drink wine with song; Strong drink is bitter to those who drink it." The substance is still there, but the joy is gone. The alcohol that once brought laughter now only brings bitterness. This is a profound spiritual principle. When God removes His blessing from a thing, the thing itself becomes a curse. The very thing they sought for pleasure becomes a source of misery. Food without gratitude is just fuel. Sex without covenant is just friction. And wine without the joy of the Lord is just a bitter drink that cannot numb the pain of a guilty conscience.
The City of Chaos (v. 10)
Isaiah then gives a name to this doomed civilization.
"The city of chaos is broken down; Every house is shut up so that none may enter." (Isaiah 24:10 LSB)
He calls it the "city of chaos." The Hebrew is "kiryath-tohu." This is the same word, tohu, used in Genesis 1:2 to describe the world as "formless and void." This is a direct theological indictment. The city of man, in its rebellion against the Creator, attempts to build its own world, its own order, its own meaning. But because it rejects the Logos, the divine Word who is the source of all order, the end result is not a glorious new creation, but a regression to chaos. It becomes a "city of tohu."
This is the inevitable end of every humanistic project. Whether it is the Tower of Babel, the Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, or the modern secular West, the trajectory is the same. They promise utopia, order, and progress, but they deliver chaos, confusion, and collapse. Why? Because they are at war with the grammar of reality. They are trying to build a world where up is down, male is female, good is evil, and man is God. The result is not a city, but a heap. Not order, but chaos.
The result of this breakdown is social disintegration. "Every house is shut up so that none may enter." The judgment destroys not only the public square but the private home. Community collapses. Trust evaporates. Everyone is isolated, locked in their own little fortress of fear and suspicion. This is the opposite of the Christian community, the city of God, which is characterized by open homes, hospitality, and fellowship. The city of chaos ends in total, atomized loneliness.
The Exile of Joy (v. 11-12)
The prophet summarizes the emotional state of this ruined city.
"There is an outcry in the streets concerning the wine; All gladness turns to gloom. The joy of the earth is taken away into exile. Desolation remains in the city, And the gate is struck down to ruins." (Isaiah 24:11-12 LSB)
The people are crying out for the very thing that has failed them. They are lamenting the loss of their wine, the loss of their buzz. They still think the solution to their misery is to get back to the party. They do not repent of their idolatry; they simply bemoan the loss of their idol. This is the hardness of the unrepentant heart. Even in judgment, it longs for the sin that brought the judgment down.
The verdict is stark: "All gladness turns to gloom." The Hebrew is even more emphatic; gladness is "darkened." The light of their artificial joy has been extinguished. And then, a striking phrase: "The joy of the earth is taken away into exile." Joy is personified as a captive, led away from the land. Their sin has resulted in the banishment of the very thing they pursued. By seeking joy apart from God, they have lost joy altogether.
The final image is one of utter ruin. "Desolation remains in the city, And the gate is struck down to ruins." The gate was the center of civic life, of commerce, of justice. A broken gate signifies a completely defunct and defenseless society. There is nothing left. The city of man, the city of chaos, has become a ghost town, a monument to the folly of rebellion.
The Only True Joy
This is a grim picture, and it is a picture of our world apart from the grace of God. But it is not the final word. This chapter of Isaiah, this vision of global judgment, is precisely the backdrop against which the gospel shines most brightly. The city of chaos is broken down so that the citizens of that city might look for another city, one whose builder and maker is God.
The wine of this world will always fail. The music of this world will always stop. The joy of this world will always go into exile. But there is a wine that never runs out. Jesus' first miracle was to turn water into wine at a wedding feast, a sign that He has come to bring a joy that the world cannot give and cannot take away. This is the new wine of the new covenant, His own blood, shed for the forgiveness of sins.
There is a song that never ends. It is the song of the redeemed, singing praises to the Lamb who was slain. This is the joy that is not circumstantial, but Christ-centered. It is the joy that the apostle Paul had when he said, "I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content."
And there is a city that cannot be shaken. The author of Hebrews tells us that we have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. While the city of chaos is being broken down, God is building His indestructible kingdom. While the gates of the earthly city are struck down to ruins, the gates of Hades will not prevail against the Church of Jesus Christ.
The message of Isaiah is a call to leave the city of chaos before it collapses on your head. It is a call to stop drinking from the bitter cisterns of this world and to come to the fountain of living waters. It is a call to repentance. The party of rebellion is over. The hangover is setting in. But the wedding feast of the Lamb is being prepared, and the invitation is extended to all who will turn from their sin and trust in the crucified and risen Son of God, who is our only true and lasting joy.