Hi, this is Kerry Mulestein, and this is a special episode of my podcast, The Scriptures are Real, the podcast where we try to look at things that help the scriptures become more real so that we can gain more power from them.

In these special editions, I'm posting videos that I made for my classes in order to help them get more out of class than what we could cover in class.

And I've decided to make them available to you so that you can also get a little bit of extra more beyond what I'd be able to do in the normal podcast.

I just want to help people understand Isaiah.

So they're very video oriented frequently, not all the time, but frequently.

And my apologies to my audio audience, which is my largest audience.

But when I made these, I wasn't thinking of audio. I was just thinking of my classes, but I think you'll still get plenty out of them. If you're just on audio and you can always go to the YouTube video, if there's one that you felt like, I'd just like to see that part. And they're kind of hokey. They're just what I do for my classes, although the whole podcast is kind of hokey, so that's fine. I've just done this because I hope it's helpful for you.

All right. We don't want this to be very long, but we want to cover the material for the first part of this lesson, and a lot of it's been covered in the, well, not a lot, but some of it's been covered

in that video you already watched that introduces the first few verses of chapter 21 in

this prophecy against Babylon, where I think it's also worth noting how in this prophecy we see

how difficult this is for Isaiah. He compares seeing the destruction that comes to Babylon to the birth pains.

And that's a common biblical thing to when something is painful to compare it to the most painful

thing that they all seem to know about, which is labor pain.

So he says it's like giving birth, seeing the terrible things that happen to Babylon.

And he, in fact, doesn't even describe it for us, whereas most of the time he tries to help

us feel it. He won't even describe this. Instead, he just describes for us what it's like to have

the watchmen come and tell us that Babylon has been destroyed. Let's just continue with a couple of other things.

He then moves on in Chapter 21 to addressing a different group.

And this actually, initially, the first group is in Moa, or Eidem.

All right.

So that's just south of Moab, the area of Petra today. That's just kind of

adjacent to the southern part of Judah, all right, just to the east of it across the Jordan Rift Valley.

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