The Great Unraveling
Introduction: A Necessary Offense
We live in a soft age, a sentimental age, an age that has manufactured a god in its own image. This god is a celestial therapist, a divine affirmation machine, whose chief attributes are niceness and an inexhaustible supply of affirming pleasantries. He is a god who would never, ever get angry. He is a god who would never judge. He is, in short, a god who does not exist. He is a pathetic idol fashioned from the felt and fluff of our own emotional demands.
And into the room where we are all cooing over this plush-toy deity, the prophet Isaiah walks in, tracks mud all over the carpet, and reads this chapter aloud. The text before us today is an offense. It is designed to be an offense. It is a blast of arctic air into the stuffy, overheated room of modern spirituality. It speaks of indignation, wrath, slaughter, stench, and cosmic dissolution. And we desperately need to hear it. Because a god who cannot hate evil is a god who cannot truly love good. A god whose holiness has no wrathful edge is not the Holy One of Israel. He is a cosmic neuter. A god who will not judge the nations is not the King of kings; he is a constitutional monarch with no actual power.
Isaiah 34 is a universal court summons. It is Yahweh, the covenant God of Israel, asserting His total and absolute jurisdiction over every nation, every people, every square inch of the planet, and every star in the sky. This is not a private memo to Judah. This is a declaration of war against all human rebellion, in all its forms, everywhere. And in this terrifying declaration, if we have eyes to see, we will find the shadow of the cross and the only true place of safety in the entire universe.
The Text
Draw near, O nations, to hear; and pay attention, O peoples! Let the earth hear, as well as its fullness, the world and all that springs from it. For the indignation of Yahweh is against all the nations, And His wrath against all their hosts; He has devoted them to destruction; He has given them over to slaughter. So their slain will be cast out, And their corpses will give off their stench, And the mountains will be drenched with their blood. And all the host of heaven will rot away, And the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; All their hosts will also wither away As a leaf withers from the vine, Or as one withers from the fig tree.
(Isaiah 34:1-4 LSB)
The Universal Summons (v. 1)
The chapter opens with the bailiff of heaven calling the court to order.
"Draw near, O nations, to hear; and pay attention, O peoples! Let the earth hear, as well as its fullness, the world and all that springs from it." (Isaiah 34:1)
Notice the scope. This is not addressed to "O Israel." It is "O nations," "O peoples." The whole earth and everything in it is being summoned to the dock. This is a radical claim. In a world of tribal deities, where Chemosh looked after the Moabites and Marduk was in charge of Babylon, the God of Israel declares that He is the judge of all of them. He is not one god among many; He is the sovereign over all. His authority is not limited to the religious sphere. He is Lord over parliaments and palaces, over armies and economies, over Washington and Moscow and Beijing.
Every political ideology that claims ultimate authority for the state, every philosophy that places man at the center of all things, every paganism that worships the creation rather than the Creator, is being called to account. God is asserting His creation rights. He made the world, He owns the world, and therefore He has the right to judge the world. There is no neutrality. There is no secular space where God's writ does not run. Every knee will bow, either in this life by grace or in the next by judgment.
The Holy Indignation (v. 2)
Verse 2 tells us the reason for the summons. This is not a negotiation; it is a sentencing.
"For the indignation of Yahweh is against all the nations, And His wrath against all their hosts; He has devoted them to destruction; He has given them over to slaughter." (Isaiah 34:2)
The wrath of God is not a celestial temper tantrum. It is not an irrational, petty rage like ours. The wrath of God is His settled, holy, and implacable opposition to evil. It is the righteous reaction of a perfectly good and just being to sin and rebellion. Because God is good, He must hate what destroys His good creation. A doctor who is not indignant at cancer is a quack. A judge who is not wrathful toward rapists and murderers is a corrupt official. A God who is not filled with indignation at idolatry, injustice, and pride is not a holy God.
The text says He has "devoted them to destruction." The Hebrew word here is herem. This is a technical term for something that is irrevocably consecrated to God for utter destruction. It is a holy quarantine. When a city was put under the herem in the Old Testament, it was because its sin had reached a terminal stage. It was a cancerous growth that had to be surgically and radically removed lest it infect everything else. God is declaring here that the rebellious nations of the world are under this ban. Their sin has reached a point where judgment is the only possible outcome. He has "given them over to slaughter," which is the language Paul picks up in Romans 1. When a culture insists on its rebellion, God's wrath is revealed in His letting them go. He gives them over to the very sin they crave, and that sin devours them from the inside out.
The Grisly Consequence (v. 3)
The prophet does not spare us the graphic details. He wants us to see, and to smell, the consequences of sin.
"So their slain will be cast out, And their corpses will give off their stench, And the mountains will be drenched with their blood." (Genesis 34:3)
This is what a world that rejects the Author of Life looks like. It is a world filled with death. When men declare their autonomy from God, they do not become free; they become corpses. The stench of the corpses is the physical manifestation of spiritual and moral rot. A culture that celebrates what God forbids begins to stink. We see it in our own day. The stench of 60 million aborted babies, the stench of sexual confusion, the stench of political corruption, the stench of rampant greed, it all rises before God.
The image of mountains drenched with blood is one of total, catastrophic judgment. This is not a minor skirmish. This is the de-creation of a rebellious world. Sin is not a small, manageable problem. It is a capital offense, and its wages are death, on a global scale. Isaiah is painting a picture of what the world looks like when God finally hands it the bill for its rebellion.
The Cosmic Unraveling (v. 4)
The judgment is not limited to the earth. It extends to the very fabric of the cosmos, to the gods the nations worship.
"And all the host of heaven will rot away, And the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; All their hosts will also wither away As a leaf withers from the vine, Or as one withers from the fig tree." (Isaiah 34:4)
The "host of heaven" refers to the stars, sun, and moon. In the ancient world, these were not just astronomical bodies; they were deities. The Babylonians worshipped the stars, the Egyptians worshipped the sun god Ra. They ordered their lives, their calendars, and their religions by these celestial powers. And God says, "I am pulling them all down." Your gods will rot. Your powers will fail. The very structure of your pagan cosmos is coming apart at the seams.
The sky will be "rolled up like a scroll." A scroll is a story. God is saying that the story of this present evil age is over. He is closing the book. This is apocalyptic language, the language of the end. Jesus Himself uses this imagery in the Olivet Discourse to describe the judgment that would fall upon Jerusalem in AD 70, which was a down payment and a type of the final judgment. The withering leaf and fig are images of utter impotence and decay. Cut off from God, the vine, all human and demonic power structures will wither and fall.
Conclusion: The Cross as Ground Zero
This is a terrifying passage. And if the story ended here, we would have no hope. We are all part of these rebellious nations. We have all contributed to the stench. We all stand under this sentence of condemnation. So where is the good news?
The good news is that this judgment, this wrath, this herem, has already fallen. There was a day when the sky did go dark in the middle of the afternoon. There was a place where a mountain was drenched in the most precious blood ever shed. There was a moment when one man bore the full, undiluted, holy indignation of Yahweh against all the nations.
The cross of Jesus Christ is the focal point of Isaiah 34. It is the place where God devoted His own Son to destruction in our place. Jesus became herem for us. He bore the curse. He endured the slaughter. He drank the cup of God's wrath down to the dregs so that we would not have to. On the cross, God judged sin with the severity that Isaiah describes, so that He could forgive sinners with the grace that the gospel proclaims.
The summons of Isaiah 34 still stands. "Draw near." You can draw near to the Judge on your own merits, in which case you will face this wrath. Or you can draw near to the Judge by hiding yourself in His Son, who absorbed that wrath for you. The sky will one day be rolled up like a scroll for good. The only safe place to be when that happens is in the arms of the one who was slain, and who now holds the scroll in His own nail-scarred hands.