Tuesday, February 2
In response to the fall of Babylon (Isaiah 13), which frees God’s people (Isaiah 14:1-3), Isaiah 14:4-23 utters a figurative taunt (see also Micah 2:4, Habakkuk 2:6) against the king of Babylon. It is poetic, not meant to be literal, obviously, as it portrays dead kings greeting their new colleague in the realm of death (Isaiah 14:9, 10), where maggots and worms are his bedding (Isaiah 14:11). This is simply the Lord’s dramatic way of telling the haughty king that he shall be brought low, as other proud monarchs before him—it is not a commentary on the state of the dead!
How could Isaiah 14:12-14 apply to a king of Babylon?
Babylonian kings did not suffer from lack of self-esteem (Daniel 4, 5). But aspiring to “be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:14) would be beyond even the most inflated ego. While kings claimed strong connections with the gods, they were subservient to them. This was dramatically demonstrated every year on the fifth day of the Babylonian New Year Festival, in which the king was required to remove his royal insignia before approaching the statue of Marduk so his kingship could be reaffirmed. The idea of displacing even a lesser god would have been looked upon as crazy and suicidal.
As in Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28 identifies heaven-daring arrogance with the ruler of a city. Here also, the description goes beyond that of an earthly monarch, and God’s cross-hairs come into sharper focus: The proud potentate was in the Garden of Eden, an anointed, covering, or guardian, cherub on God’s holy mountain, perfect from the day he was created until sin was found in him, cast out by God, and who will eventually be destroyed with fire (Ezekiel 28:12-18). Applied to any human being, the specific terms of this rhetoric are so figurative as to be meaningless. But Revelation 12:7-9 does tell of a mighty being who was cast out of heaven with his angels: “Satan, which deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9), who deceived Eve in Eden (Genesis 3).
Satan has a proud imagination: “ … thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God” (Ezekiel 28:2). His death will prove he is no god. Unlike Christ, Satan will perish in the heart of a sea of fire (Revelation 20:10), never to haunt the universe again.
Compare Isaiah 14:13, 14 with Matthew 11:29, John 13:5, and Philippians 2:5-8. What does this contrast tell us about the character of God as opposed to the character of Satan? What does this contrast tell us about how the Lord views pride, arrogance, and the desire for self-supremacy?
