Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

While Isaiah is primarily concerned with warning God's people about their sins,

today he launches into the first of 15 chapters of prophetic speeches or oracles to a bunch of pagan nations and we'll find out why.

He starts out with Babylon which is one of the ruling powers of the ancient world.

They're the ones who will take the people of Judah into captivity when

Jerusalem falls in about a hundred years. And in today's reading, God

pronounces a prophetic judgment on them for the thing they haven't done yet.

God's sovereignty shows up right off the bat in this scenario.

In 13-3, he refers to Babylon as my consecrated ones.

As far as they are concerned, they have not consecrated themselves to

yawe, no sir. But the point of this terminology is to show that God has

consecrated them or set them apart for his own purposes.

He has a plan to use them and their sinful ways

to work out his long-term plans to bless his people,

initially through discipline,

but then through restoration. Babylon will... initially through out more than a hundred years in advance serves as evidence that the idea didn't

originate with them. Then even though God is using their sin to accomplish his

will as he does with all sin, he still punishes it as he does with all sin.

So he tells them how they will eventually be overtaken in return for what they did to his people.

This is the kind of big picture sovereignty that it's hard to wrap our minds

around sometimes. It's the kind of thing that can feel threatening to our ideas of self-sovereignty, and

it's okay to wrestle with that. But what I always come back to is that

...