April 20, 2022: Day 85 – Isaiah 11-15 and Psalm 145

While we  begin with some familiar verses in chapter 11, we end with chapters that seem a little confusing and out of place.  Let me try to put some perspective on these chapters because they are important to the rest of Isaiah.  So 11 gives us those wonderful verses in vss.6-9 where we see this idyllic pastoral scene with all of the most ferocious animals hanging out and playing with the most docile of animals while a child leads them.  This is a depiction of the kingdom of God that will be installed by the Messiah, the one who comes from the branch of Jesse. Remember who Jesse was?  He was the father of David and so it is from here that we know that the Messiah will come from King David’s lineage.  This is no small thing.  In both of Jesus’ genealogies we see that he descends from David and this is not by chance.

So with the promise of the kingdom established coming through the house of David we then transition to what Israel was currently facing in the time of Isaiah.  They had been taken into exile by both the Babylonians and the Assyrians.  Now, just to be clear, the Babylonian exile was first and it happened in the same time that Isaiah was prophesying.  So while he speaks out against the Assyrians in these verses, they are not pointing to the Assyrian exile, but rather to the Babylonian exile.  

We begin chapter 13 with words against Babylon which culminates in vs.16 with a picture of the children of Babylon being dashed against the rocks.  Isaiah is probably describing a tit-for-tat scenario where he had witnesses the Hebrew children being dashed against the rocks.  You see this echoed in Psalm 137:9 which is a lament while they were in the hands of Babylon.  This Psalm speaks specifically of “happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us – he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”  Yeah, pretty intense, but that is what captivity leads to, your children being dashed against the rocks.

We then get whiplash and read Psalm 145 which is quite the praise Psalm and one that we should know from a common song that was pretty popular.