Has the Prophecy in Isaiah 19:25 Happened Yet?

QUESTION: 

Isaiah 19:25 The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.”

Hi Rick, I'm reading the book of Isaiah...in chapter 19:24-25 it sounds like part of this prophecy already occurred but verse 25 in particular - that has never happened? Is what was called Assyria...isn't that now where Iran/Iraq are? 

RESPONSE: 

Great question.  Yes, Assyria then basically covered what is today eastern Syria and Northern Iraq.

Finding the historical location of fulfillment for these prophesies is more difficult than the geographical location, however.  There’s been some general consensus that the judgment part of the prophecy of chapter 19 has some historical fulfillment.  Looking into Isaiah’s context, Egypt at this point (750 BC) was a shell of its glorious former self under the Pharaohs.  It was mostly ruled by Ethiopians, which explains the connection to chapter 18’s prophesy. 

After Isaiah’s time we could say that his vision (19:4) to see them “delivered into the hands of harsh masters, and a strong king to rule” was fulfilled many times over:  in many kings in the succeeding centuries.  

• Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal (Assyrians), 
• Nebuchadnezzar (Babylonian), 
• Cambyses and Alexander the Great (Greek) 
• all these ruled Egypt as fierce tyrants. 

So Egypt’s judgment as described here has definitely been fulfilled.

More context:  the temptation in Isaiah’s day was to see Egypt as a potential ally against Assyria.  So God is saying here DO NOT TRUST Egypt – she will be unreliable, God is going to crush her.  And do not be worried about her either, she will fall and fail you – and eventually adopt OUR ways, not the other way around.  Unfortunately, Israel would struggle all the way through to king Josiah and his sons with trusting Egypt when they shouldn’t.

So the judgement piece really came true, but what about the salvation piece of this prophesy, from 19:16-25?  Were there ever five cities in Egypt that "swore allegiance to Israel’s God"?  Was there ever a "Jewish altar in Egypt" for worship, did God miraculously "send a Savior" to deliver the Egyptians, and was there ever a "highway connecting Jerusalem, Egypt, and Assyria"?

Some suggest that the prophecy was fulfilled after the exile when a group of Hebrews fled to Egypt, settled in four Egyptian cities (Jer 44:1) and later built a temple in Leontopolis around 170 BC.  The problem with locating the salvation parts in that part of history is that all the Jewish settlements in Egypt were mostly by Jewish apostates who rejected the Lord or worshiped Him along with pagan deities.  Also, there was no highway connecting Egypt with Assyria during this period, unless we mean a highway of destruction!  

The prophesy is clearly envisioning a future where Egypt not merely has some outposts of true religion, but rather pervasively KNOWS the Lord in a real way, speaks the same language as God’s people, are faithful to Him and a good ally and fellow worshipers of the One True God (vs 22). This is more than we could say ever happened before Christ.

So another approach sees these words fulfilled after the spread of Christianity to Egypt.  And that makes better sense that Isaiah sees a “savior to rescue them” (vs 20).  This sounds like Messiah, and in the late Roman period and into the Byzantine era, most of Egypt was heavily Christianized.  But honestly, I don't anything that has happened in Egypt in the Christian era comes close to matching the lofty and quite shocking beauty of this vision of the fertile crescent: all One, all adopted as God's people, totally at peace and unified under Israel’s God from the Nile to the Euphrates (Iraq)?  Hasn't happened yet.

So I would settle on a third view:  the salvation part of the prophecy awaits fulfillment during the future period of peace brought in by Christ in the 2nd coming.  Read Isaiah 2:1-4… this is the grand picture of the future peace which the prophet sees coming to ALL the earth.  And Isaiah begins that vision with same words as the prophecies in 19: "in that day".  I think then chp. 19 is supposed to fit into this grander vision as a specific sort of microcosm of the whole picture.  Inside the future where “ALL the nations will come to the mountain of the Lord” and “walk in the paths of the God of Jacob” (2:3), will be this specific peace between Egypt, Israel and Assyria (19:23.24).

To even imagine it in Isaiah’s day was scandalous.  It would be very similar if I said that one day, Jesus Christ will be acknowledged everywhere, but then went on to say, “even in the Levant and Syria Jesus will be claimed as Lord and worshiped as God in the heart of Mecca!”  Christians believe that will happen when Christ comes again - but to non-Christian ears it's shocking to even imagine it!  It feels weird to print it!  That’s how this prophesy likely hit Isaiah’s countrymen’s ears.  A highway of peace between our dreaded enemies to the north to our enemies/unreliable allies to the south?  Co-adoption as God's people with Assyrians and Egyptians?  Unthinkable!  But that’s what’s coming, says Isaiah.

Yet not through some great negotiator or leader - only through the “Lord Himself” making himself known to the Egyptians (21) so that again implies 2nd coming.

That's why I would say this is for the future, because of its size and scope.

Did Jesus Condone Slavery?

No, Jesus never condoned slavery.  He doesn’t really mention it, except that he talks about slaves in his stories and it’s mentioned as a frequent part of the culture he’s in.  But to not mention it, is not approval.  Such arguments from silence are really flimsy.  We can make Jesus condone child abuse, spousal abuse, and incest, if we insist that what he never commented on, he must have approved.  

But clearly, slavery is a part of his world and the world of the the Law and Apostles who DO comment on slavery. Now, we do well to note the slavery of that time is not what we assume since it was very different from American slavery.  The American slave trade was built on racist premises.  The black man was considered inferior to the white man and so it was his lot, his nature to serve.

Biblical slavery even from Moses time, was mostly economic.  You became a slave if your people were conquered in war, so as an alternative to killing all the conquered who lost the war, a person would often become the property of the victor.  This was considered (by both sides) just “booty”, reward for winning a conflict.  But a much more common form of slavery was indentured servitude which was when you sold yourself into slavery to pay unpayable debts.  As an alternative to death or prison, you could give the only thing you had left – your labor, permanently.

Now, because slavery in Bible times was a tool of economic "justice" mostly, you could buy your way out of it, or a relative could free you.  And in Israel, for Jewish slaves, there was this startling develop:  God said slave status would never last for more than 7 years, because in the Sabbath year all slaves were freed.

For this reason we shouldn’t be too aghast that the Bible doesn’t come forward with stronger condemnations of slavery.

• First, it was not built on the horror of racist ideology.  
• Second it wasn’t a life sentence, as it was for every black in America, who no matter what they gave to their masters, could never be free (laws were instituted that if a slave escaped to the North, they had to be returned, and if a Northern black came to the south, his free status was not honored).  
• Third, slavery was checked by putting an upper limit on the value of slave labor – instead of saying a debtor must sell himself in perpetuity, the Sabbath and Jubilee years said, no debt is worth a lifetime of servitude.  Essentially then, human value got elevated in the Law since a person was too valuable to keep in slave status forever.  No debt was worth that much.

Thus the Mosaic law always seems to be taming slavery, putting limits on masters which essentially gave slaves rights (Ex 21:8-11)!!  That God would even give laws about slavery seems that he’s condoning it.  In actually, he’s beginning the process of ending it!  Slavery isn’t invented in the Law, remember – it pre-exists the Law.  So the law is containing it, limiting its abuses, even if it doesn’t abolish it in one move.

Then, Jesus shows up and he doesn’t teach anything about it specifically, but he declares that his kingdom is for the poor and oppressed to set them free.  This was first understood in a spiritual sense, and slaves flocked to the early church.  There they were taught that while they were someone else’s slave, in Christ they were free.  Their future was the kingdom of heaven.  They were blessed, not cursed.  So they were told to obey their master’s because they worked for God, not men, and the God who loved them would reward them.  If they could get their freedom, they should, of course, but don’t be too anxious if they can’t, God was on their side (1 Cor 7). 

Masters also were in the church and they were told to love their slaves, not treat them harshly but fairly and like brothers.  And to remember that they were Christ's slave.  In fact, in one case, a Master (Philemon) is told to forgive and we may presume also free a runaway slave (Onesimus) because this slave is a brother.  This is incredible!  How could Masters and Slaves be brothers in the same churches?  This teaching forecast that the institution of slavery could not long endure, with such radical ideas like the Gospel at the center of the New Community. 

You could say the apostles should have been more direct in their condemnation of slavery.  But I would say their approach was much shrewder, and therefore more effective.  They attacked the values upon which slavery was based.  So without imposing a ban on slavery from a position of ecclesiastical authority, a ban which may have hopelessly divided a very young church and derailed her from her primary mission in the world, Paul undermines the whole institution with his words, “there is no longer slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ... Masters, serve your slaves as brothers, ETC.” (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 6:7-9, Philemon)

So in fact, slavery did die out first in the Church and then in all of Europe as the Church expanded.  Nowhere else on planet earth did this happen.  Not in China, not in the Middle East under Islam, not in Africa (where blacks enslaved blacks for millennia).  During the so called Dark Ages, slavery became almost unheard of in Europe, except of course, for the millions of slaves the Muslim hordes carried off to Arabia.  In fact, we get our word, "slave" from those millions, mostly Slavs - taken from Slovakia and other places in Eastern Europe.

Not until the other races of Africa and America were discovered, does slavery rise up again in Christendom.  But it was voices in the Church that railed against it.  You hear about Christian military men and governors and explorers who were avid slave traders.  But most of these were as Christian as your very nominal Christian neighbor is today.  EVERYONE in Europe was baptized Christian, but only a percentage were truly devout.  Meanwhile, the really devoted Christians, the Dominican monks, the Jesuits, and the papacy through repeated edicts railed against Slavery.  It advanced in spite of real Christians not because of them.

So the economy of Europe quickly became dependent on the slave trade and all sorts of Christian justifications ensued.  But these reasons were ridiculous.  For example, using the prophesy against Ham in Genesis.  Or the New Testament rules for slaves.  The hypocrisy and deliberate blindness of these lines of reasoning were self-evident, for any who took Scripture sincerely.  If it truly was the Bible, clearly understood and applied, that gave backing and justification for American slavery, why were the Scriptural rules allowing for the freeing of slaves, never invoked for the black man?

There is only one REAL reason, which has been repeatedly exposed in the laws and writings of the time:  It wasn't the Bible, it was the evil of racist ideology.  Black men were assumed inferior.  Whites of the time (even some emancipation fighters from the North) had a hard time believing the African was in any way his equal.  This particularly odious idea could have never come from a Bible which declares repeatedly that humans are all genetically linked to exact same first parents, establishing our fraternity and equality forever.

So finally, it was the church again, by Papal Bull in the South Americas, and under names of devout Christians like Wilberforce and Lincoln in the North, who understood the full force of God’s Word regarding human dignity and value and equality, who lead the way to abolish the slave trade and eventually emancipate all slaves.  Every historian acknowledges the debt the world owes to the Evangelical church in England and the Northern states for leading the way for abolition.

Read again Lincoln’s second inaugural address and see all the Bible verses he quotes and alludes to, and ask if he thought that Jesus (or Scripture overall) condoned slavery.  Not a chance!

What do you Think Behemoth and Leviathan are in Job 40/41?

QUESTION:  What do you think Leviathan is in Job 41... At first I thought crocodile maybe... But the more I read the more it sounded like a dragon, or maybe dinosaur? I’m curious about it and wonder what you think.

RESPONSE:  Yes, most Bibles will say in the footnotes that Leviathan is the crocodile and Behemoth is the hippo.  I've always resisted that description because it doesn't seem to fit the size and majesty of the creatures being described. And in some places the description simply doesn’t fit at all.  For example, what Hippo have you seen with a "tail like a Cedar" (Job 40:17)?  It's a poetic description, granted, but the Hippo's tail is the LEAST impressive thing about it!  Like a tree, really?

I know that the Hippo tail does stand up straight (like a tree) when threatened, and they are very aggressive, so I’m open to this being the animal that God is referring to.  But Behemoth and Leviathan seem to be much bigger and more impressive than that (41:22-34), and when I was a young earth creationist this was especially compelling evidence that maybe people and dinosaurs must have co-existed.  But the problems with that whole creation model are various so I no longer hold to it.

But then I realized that not even young earth creationists believe that Job lived before Noah and YEC doesn't believe dinosaurs lived past the flood.  So almost NO Bible scholar believes Job (who lived around the time of Abraham) ever actually SAW or LIVED WITH dinosaurs.

So I felt forced by the evidence to disbelieve God could be referring to dinosaurs since from neither an old earth perspective OR a young earth perspective did Job see these creatures. 

Yet, I hold out a possible way to retain the dinosaur idea.  Perhaps while Job never saw a dinosaur he did still KNOW ABOUT them.  How?  Well, perhaps in the exact same way we today know about dinosaurs even though we've never seen them – from the rocks.  We tend to think that no one knew about dinosaurs until the 1700's because that's when paleontologists first started cataloging them.  

But these scientists didn’t make the bones!  In some cases the remains of these enormous "monsters" of the past were found right out in the open.  So surely they could have been known about in ancient times. (They could even have been uncovered by deep digging - since Job 28:1-4 shows Job's time is familiar with mining.  This would have easily uncovered dinosaur bones as happens readily today in mining sites around the world.)

If this is true, then perhaps these huge bones became the basis for the relatively common dragon stories that you see in very different, very diverse and completely isolated people groups around the world.  Add to that the common belief in the ancient world that the ocean contained "monsters" (sailors reporting on whales etc.) and these might just be the enormous water and land creatures which Job was familiar with, and to which Behemoth and Leviathan refers.  God of course, might have been referring to extinct beasts which Job had no knowledge of.  Then the descriptions fit AND we aren’t committed to a model that Job coexisted with dinosaurs.  But I assume that Job had to know what these creatures were, since it would make no sense for God to reference them if he didn't.

Brachiosaurus Statue

I say again, it's possible because of the poetic language that these are "merely" a hippo and a crocodile.  The point for Job would still be the same:  God’s creatures represent the fact that His power and purposes are beyond Job's ability to contain or comprehend.  However, because we do know about dinosaurs, we also know that this very point would be so much MORE powerfully made with a Brachiosaurus and a Plesiosaur!

Am I letting that knowledge influence how I look at the text?  Perhaps.  But I think a fair reading does show that Behemoth and Leviathan transcend the size and power of any currently living animals we know (except maybe whales).  And since all the other animals referenced are real animals (the ostrich, the horse) it makes no sense that Behemoth and Leviathan aren’t also real animals – IE these can’t be mythical creatures God invents to make a point.

Without much digging (pun not intended), I can't find a lot of hard evidence that ancient men ever did find dinosaur bones.  Still. I can't believe this never happened, since in recent times, in fossil rich areas (like Montana and Alberta), the bones of very large dinosaurs were found literally staring at us without any excavation in some cases.  And no one has a better explanation for the universality of dragon myths which so closely resemble the basic look of the largest dinosaurs.  It seems at least possible that Job could have had some image of a "thunder lizard" in his head.

So I retain the somewhat whimsical (yet reasonable) notion that God may have been referring to dinosaurs in Job, even though I’ve long ago rejected the Young Earth Creation model that insists humans coexisted with them. Could God not use knowledge of extinct beasts to make the point he's making in his speech to Job?  I think it's possible, and it fits the epic descriptions better than hippos and crocodiles... unless we're talking about this bad boy:

Extinct 40 ft. Crocodile: Sarcosuchus

In Luke 1:10-11, Why Does Gabriel Appear on the Right?

First, let me review the setting.  

Zechariah is a priest, and he’s fulfilling his Temple duty, as chosen by lot.  Basically, they would draw straws, and each eligible priest would get to serve one of many duties in the Temple on a rotation (there being more priests than duties).  This was held to be a great honor.

The Bible says he was  serving during the “hour of incense” which refers to the time of the lighting of the incense in the holy place.  If you look at a diagram of the Temple, 

that was just outside the “MOST” holy place, which no one ever went into except the high priest (only one of those) and that once a year.  So he’s in that outer room, and with the larger crowd being gathered outside when the incense is lit, it means likely a Sabbath day, and they’re all there for service.  The priest goes in to light the incense on the Altar of Incense as a symbol of the prayers of God’s people.

So that's the physical setting.

Zechariah's in there and no one can see him because he’s in the Temple alone in front of the altar.  The bread table is on the right of the altar, and the menorah (the seven branched lamp stand) is on the left.  

Luke then says, Gabriel is revealed, between the altar and the bread table.  Why there, on the right side of the Altar?  Well, the text doesn’t say, but in Jewish thought the right side is always the side of favor; of blessing.  Consider Matthew 25:33, when Jesus separates the human race on Judgment day.  The blessed go on “his right”, the cursed, to the left.  

This is just a carryover from the symbolism of the Psalms that talk about God’s mighty “right hand” (Ps 20:6; 89:13).  In a world where most people are right handed, the right hand came to symbolize power.  As most people favor their right hand, so the right became naturally associated with favor. (They were not politically correct enough to consider how this might offend "other handed" people!)  Gabriel's message is clearly one of blessing and favor not only for Zechariah but for all of Israel, so this fits. 

Now, since the text doesn’t actually say why Gabriel showed up there, this is one of those little details in Scripture that gives it the ring of an eye witness account.  I mean, truly, why exactly IS Gabriel mentioned as appearing on the right of the Altar?  Luke doesn’t answer the question.

Well, it’s likely that this is simply how Zechariah remembers it happening; a little firsthand nugget of detail that Luke found as he researched the story carefully (Luke 1:1-4).  It’s the same way with other weird details that are unexplained, like John 21:11 that mentions the exact number and size of fish caught (153/large) with no explanation why!  The point of such detail may have some symbolic significance, but where one is not explicitly given, the most obvious impact of such details is to tell us:  this really happened because real eye witness memories often contain seemingly minor details of things that hit us.

Who Were The Sons of God From Genesis 6?

QUESTION:  What is your take on the "sons of God" mentioned in Genesis 6:2?

ANSWER:  Thanks, for the question.  There’s been a ton of speculation about this cryptic little passage.  Basically there’s three viable answers to the identity of the “Sons of God”:

• Sons of Seth
• Sons of Mighty Rulers
• Fallen Angels

Some scholars think that the reference to the “sons of God” means the descendants of Seth. He was the father of the “good” line of descendants from Adam.  These scholars assume that a reference is being made to this “good line” (Semites) by calling them “sons of God”.  And so the author is saying that the Semites polluted their progeny by intermarriage with women of Cain’s tribes outside of Seth’s line.  The children of these unions were great, but their alliance with the "daughters of men" were clearly unholy.  Support for this view comes from the story in the children of Israel, when similarly many of their men were seduced by the women of Moab, which brings God's swift judgment. (Numbers 25:1-4)

Other scholars don’t accept the Seth interpretation because no mention is made of Seth in the passage… and so they opt for a “Mighty Rulers” view.  This theory says great rulers, or kings married commoners and perhaps acquired large harems to demonstrate their power.  These intermarries corrupted them, even though their progeny were great princes of renown.

Both of these views have the advantage of not requiring us to accept the difficult idea that angels actually copulated with human beings.  But their weakness is that neither deals well with the text. 

For example, “sons of God” is never a euphemism for people in Scripture – except when David is one time called “God’s son” Psalm 2:7 – a passage that has big messianic overtones.  It is rather used almost exclusively as a euphemism for angels.  (Job 1:6, 2:1, Ps 82:6 etc). 

There are a few places where the word “God” in the Old Testament is used loosely to refer to rulers/judges, but these are rare and never include the “Son of” piece which uniquely refers to angelic beings in all other cases.  And what makes this case stronger is that “sons of GOD” are juxtaposed with “daughters of MEN” in this passage – to draw a contrast and to underline the unnaturalness of the union and the reason why the offspring of these unions are clearly not normal people (6:4).

Some reject this interpretation because Jesus said “angels are not given in marriage” (Matt 22:30) so angels, they say, must be sexless.  You can probably dismiss this objection, however, for two reasons.  First, because Jesus is talking about unfallen angels in their natural state, whereas Genesis is clearly taking about fallen angels in their “unnatural” state – that is, they’ve fallen from their position of authority and goodness (Jude 6) even though they keep much of their delegated power.  Secondly, Jesus point is probably not about the gender or sexuality of people or angels at all… it’s about the institution of marriage being obsolete in heaven. 

So the most natural interpretation, despite the “weirdness” of it’s conclusion, is that “sons of God” refers to mighty spirit beings, angels.

Almost ALL ancient Jewish and Christian commentators throughout history thought this way about the passage.  What you’ll note is that this is a very sober and unadorned version of similar ideas in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, where the gods do copulate with men and produce heroic offspring who are famous and do great deeds (Hercules, Achilles etc.)   Perhaps such a thing really happened in a different time – some hideous interplay between the physical and spiritual.  The difference is that the Bible’s record has no “once upon a time” feel to it, thus has a ring of authenticity, unadorned and straight forward.

If we accept the angel interpretation, we can’t know how this was possible.  We do know angels appear in human form in other places – sometimes people don’t even know the interaction is angelic until after the fact (Judges 6:12 & 22, Heb 13:2).  The Genesis text seems to open up the possibility that this ability extends past "visionary human appearance" to the angels adopting human genetics, since copulation happened and the human genome was clearly altered in their not-normal progeny.

Unquestionably this is strange!  But let's remember that today we are quickly coming to a place of being able to tinker with the human genome ourselves.  If mighty powers exist beyond us, they surely also possess this knowledge.  If you think such interference in our genetic destiny (if possible) seems proud and dangerous (as is our current forays into human genetic engineering), God seems to have agreed, as it coincided with his swift judgment.  And from that time on, it seems, the interplay between "the Powers" and humans was greatly curtailed.

So while we can't know how this happened, what we can know is that the result of these unholy unions is not just a curious oddity for the author.  The crossing of this line by the angels was something unspeakably evil – as it lead directly to the devastating judgment of the flood.