Isaiah On The Doomed Culture War: As Politician Embraces The Great Whore In Zion (Part 2)
“And Hezekiah was glad of them (Babylon), and shewed them the house of his precious things, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, and all that was found in his treasures: there was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, that Hezekiah shewed them not. Then came Isaiah the prophet unto king Hezekiah, and said unto him, What said these men” (Is.39?
‘For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world’ (1 John 2:16).
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What was the sin in welcoming the Babylonians? Likely “the pitch” of his heart. Hezekiah knew the history. He knew what Babel meant. He knew what people meant when they talked about the “fleshpots of Egypt.” He knew what “the enmity” in the First Gospel (Gen. 3:15) represented. In short, he knew perfectly well that there was a realm which the saints of old would have called “the World.” Babylon stood for everything that “World” represented: “spiritual wickedness in high places.” “The pieces of silver, the wedge of gold, the babylonish garment”--it was too much for Aachan. Is there any virtue going around in gunnysacks? Hezekiah was able to rise to the very top. Why would he not? What was he supposed to do, waste his life sitting in a tent in the desert waiting to see if God will come along? Most kings are basket cases of paranoia and loneliness. Only a king can understand a king. His underlings are condemned to flattery. He knows this. But here now were men of the first water when it came to judging the worth of fine things. And then the heavy footsteps of the prophet. This is the prophet of Isaiah 53, where God deals with the sins of the world. Hezekiah would have made sure his visitors did not run into him. Giddy courtiers, basking in the glow of their departed guests, would have run for the exits. You would have been able to cut the sense of doom with a knife the minute Isaiah entered the room. “Why do you think God called Abraham to come out of Babylon,” he might have asked? “And here you are, laughing it up with the godless enemies of Zion.” Those smooth customers were spies, Hezekiah was told, and they will destroy both your kingdom and family. “Oh, well,” says Isaiah, “as long as none of this comes in my own lifetime.” The Babylonians had taken his recent recovery as an occasion to visit. Instead of being “thankful” for his deliverance, he basks in his own worldly glory. When David was told of the consequences of his sin, he fell on his face and interceded for his son. It may be that Hezekiah did not have a son at this point, since Manasseh was only 12 when his father died.
Isaiah knew that Israel had reached the point of no return. If this could happen to one of Israel’s best kings, the situation was hopeless. If Babylon feels at home in Zion, it is because Zion had become like Babylon. What would Isaiah have Hezekiah do, draft laws to keep babylonish culture at bay? The “smooth” preachers would have been the first to complain. How do you keep Babylon out, if you spend your days imitating it, which is what Hezekiah did? “Gouge out your right eye,” Jesus said. “Cut off your right hand.” “Why would anyone do that?” Cain did not want “to rule over what was in his heart.” And a washed sow is still, in the end, the same sow. Binding the maniac only made him worse. Cain loved the world. How then could he possibly hate it? You see here the “hard speeches” Enoch had to endure 5500 years ago and what made Lamech long for “rest from his labors.” Worse, a good king like Hezekiah was giddy that he had made the grade. “The World” (today we call it the Culture) is so dangerous because it looks so good and innocent to people like Lot and Hezekiah. “Preach unto us smooth things,” the people told Isaiah. What’s wrong with having nice things, and if you can afford them, expensive things. Did the Devil create the gold?
Lot was vexed in Sodom, because he likely would have felt at home in Babylon. Hezekiah was not wicked, but to surround himself with such riches, and consort with world class celebrities like the Babylonians was to court spiritual disaster and make provision for “temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful lusts” (1 Tim. 6:9). The next chapter begins with “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God (Is. 40). As in the days of Noah, his words would likely have been met with an eyeroll. Israel was at its peak, rich, and at peace. You know you have arrived when brand Babylon comes calling. This was no place for doomsday cranks like Isaiah. “Preach unto us smooth things,” they told the prophets (Is. 30:10). And this under one of the greatest Gospel preachers ever,
How many Jews were saved throughout history? Very few. Likely, the number who became Christians during the life of Christ and His Apostles is representative: a handful. The rest either perished in the destruction of Jerusalem or were sold into slavery. This was forty years after the Resurrection of Christ. Josephus was on the spot in the thick of things. In his writings Christianity is about as relevant as Elisha among the lepers, or as noteworthy as Naaman’s captive little maid. Jonah never saw the worm that killed his comforts. But if the trappings of Babylon serve as “observation” that Israel had arrived, admiring Babylon was here to confirm it. If this was the true religion, Babylon might well be interested. “The prophet besides,” Isaiah must have felt like Elisha when he saw lepers passing by. He could even create a leper who could never be healed. The Flood yielded eight, the destruction of Sodom, 4 minus 1. Could Isaiah have come up with 7000 believers? Most of the believers at Pentecost were Gentile converts (what “devout” means) visiting Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s wealth was likely the result of industry and good management. Why should they not enjoy the fruits of their labors? Was Abraham an ascetic who lived a hermetic life in the desert by choice? To each his own. Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom, and then pitched the tent for a house. Elisha ate wild vegetables and had to borrow an ax while refusing the rewards of divinity that would have made life much easier. Gehazi saw no need to forgo creature comforts. Hezekiah was not even vexed like Lot. He had perfect freedom of conscience. Was he ever as glad to see Isaiah as he was the Babylonians? But what would Isaiah have Hezekiah do? Pray more, meditate “in His law day and night” as the Psalmist? How do you pray in a treasure house? When Babylon feels at home in Zion, it is likely that Zion is little different than Babylon. So what was the point of Abraham? How does Hezekiah choose not to be rich? What would he have said if Jesus had addressed him as He did the rich young ruler?
Abraham would have felt at home with Samuel, with Elisha, and with Isaiah. Babylon would have turned up its nose at these strange creatures. This is what the kingdom of God was like in the days of the Judges. The Tabernacle was the seat of government, the priests were to teach the Law and settle disputes, the heathen were God’s chastening whip, and the preacher-judges had authority only as long as they retained the respect of the people. The mercy seat in the midst of the Tabernacle was the throne on which God sat. That’s the Government, the Babylonians would have been told. And no one was allowed (except the High Priest once a year) to see if anyone actually sat on the mercy seat. This is what Hezekiah was supposed to go back to? The Babylonians would have laughed all the way back to Babylon. They were not laughing now. They had made Hezekiah a member of the most exclusive club in the world and he “was glad.” He doesn’t seem glad to see the prophet.
If “gain is godliness,” Hezekiah had it. Now that, the Babylonians would have said, is religion they could agree on. Elisha stuck to his wild vegetables because he wanted Naaman to take back with him the thought that the kingdom of God marches to victory “without form or comeliness”: “the base things of the world, the things that are despised.” Were there 7000 believers in Judah at this point? “Have you considered my servant Job,” God asked when Satan bragged that he had the whole world under his control. Satan knew him because he was left to prowl around his threefold hedge. One person. This is the smallest of the smallest of the “day of small things.” God is not embarrassed by the fact that He has to make do with the “things that are not,” because strive as He may, the “the noble, the wise, the high born,” refuse to repent. This, Augustine said, is to give victory to the Devil, so he devised the Inquisition to compel the heathen to convert. Luther and Calvin understood that to leave the Church outside the control of Caesar is to reduce it to a Remnant and expose themselves to the Roman Catholic Inquisition. They chose to fight fire with fire and turned the governments of the West into theocracies: “under God.” “Christian nations,” they called themselves. They took over the Inquisition, because in a theocracy, heresy is state crime, and punished as such. Its extreme form is burning heretics (Calvin) and hanging witches (the Puritans). Trumpianism is the reverse of taking the nation back to God. It is the dawning realization that the nation has become un-theocratic, as benign secularism threw off its mask and revealed itself as religious Secularism. Cain was a priest before he was a politician, and invented the religion of manocracy because he was ejected from the theocracy once presided over by Abel. Politics is the domain of fugitives (Nod means fugitives), the realm of the unregenerate (“those without''--”Cain went out from the presence of God”) the unfruitful workers of iniquity who cannot “do well to be accepted.” Hypocrisy is the tribute “what’s legal” pays to “what’s right.” Cain would not “do well” so he invented “what’s legal” as a substitute. Cain was both priest and politician. The Antichrist will seek to gain legitimacy by removing the stain of “without” by demanding worship as God (666 will bring you into the presence of god). There is a straight line from the Mark of Cain to the Mark of the Beast, between the worship of God and the worship of the image on “unrighteous Mammon,” which will be converted into 666 as the only means of exchange. Nothing so speaks of State ownership as the coin of the realm. It stands for everything “that belongs to Caesar.” 666 on the forehead signifies “worship.” As in Daniel, those who fail to worship the Beast will be executed (Rev. 13:15), or starved to death as all markets will be closed to them.
Isaiah saw something in these Babylonians that Hezekiah was too careless to observe. He had devoted much of his life imitating them. Where does Isaiah start preaching here? This was not vexed Lot in Sodom, but a wilful admirer of Babylon. He begins to prepare the people for the worst with his message of “Comfort ye” in the next chapter.
2 Chron. 32 goes on and on about his incredible wealth. But why would merely showing hospitality to Babylonians be such a grievous sin. We are not told. We are told that he “was lifted up with pride and therefore wrath came upon him.” Yet his sin was “the business of the ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent unto him to inquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.” Isaiah proceeds to rebuke Hezekiah as if he should have known what Babylon stood for. These were not just visitors, and Hezekiah was “glad” because he knew he had been made a member of the Club. Abraham came out of that club. Hezekiah would not have wanted Isaiah around when he schmoozed with Broadway. But what was the sin? That’s like asking why Abraham would not take as much as a shoelatchet from Sodom, or why Elisha refused payment. Or why Isaiah, one of the greatest Gospel preachers ever (Is. 54), likely did not have a large audience in Jerusalem (Is. 55). He was not a “smooth” preacher. Had Hezekiah asked for a true estimate of his riches, he would have read him the opinion of Solomon: “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.” Yet Hezekiah couldn’t stop accumulating. He could have asked, Wonder why Abraham chose the desert insead of the “well watered plain.” The sin was that he “was glad” to see the Babylonians, “the lust of the eyes, the pride of life…” The Culture War is not a war at all. It is pure seduction.
Why the Culture War is doomed:
Colonial guilt–the Left is using Third World exploitation, slavery, and supremacist race theories to discredit, shame, and conflict Conservative doctrine. They themselves are willing to admit guilt in order to build solidarity with the oppressed in order to buy moral credits with which to advance their own agendas. Civil Rights is the only moral category left standing, and if you can attach your cause to it, you will prevail. These are strange bedfellows. The rich white male disease (as Africans call “the Matter”) is imbedded in the Fashion industry, which is entirely Nordic while pawning itself as an oppressed minority akin to black slavery. Critical Race Theory does not even begin to scratch the surface on the evil suffered by black people for no other reason than that God used a black, instead of white, canvas to reveal the image of His Glory. The chief architects of this evil were Protestant preachers and theologians. By the time the #MeChurch movement is done with the SBC, little will be left of it. What terrifies the Right is that the Secularocracy will now do what they as a theocracy did since the time of Augustine; use the violence of the State to punish and compensate: the Woke Inquisition. The chief instrument will be publicly funded education to frame the discussion which will then be made tangible in reparations (this will include reparations to Third World Nations for all sorts of ill, including Climate Change. In essence, the purpose of education will no longer be to acquire knowledge, but to indoctrinate in order to achieve a desired outcome: education will be little more than activism after the manner of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “Hitherto historians have interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” The toppling of statues was but the tip of the iceberg. The guilt is of that magnitude. The reckoning has genuine traction and is unavoidable. But “the Matter” has attached itself to it. And you know what’s in those children’s books. Withdrawing from public school will be a costly decision, and most will stay. Eventually, the Government will decide that a universal education requires the teaching of all subjects, and will criminalize censorship of certain books. Germany does not allow homeschooling. Colonial guilt will thus bring “the Matter” into Kindergarten.
Conscience—”psychological terror,” German Cardinal Muller calls it. Vice President Pence was made to administer the oath of office (on a Bible) to the abomination. The Left was mesmerized. They understood that Hell was at full bay as they watched a professing Christian commit spiritual suicide.
Culture–so boring down there, the Devil yawns in the book of Job. Men are born in Babylon, and are by nature inclined to it. “You’ve got a button,” the Left sneered when the Right tried to clean up TV, “just turn it off.” They stopped trying to clean up the Universities by creating Christian colleges, which are even worldlier than the churches. And to get government funding they have to bend over backwards to demonstrate that they respect “the dignity” of “the Matter.” “I wouldn’t take a shoestring from you, “Abraham said. Puff. You talk like that today and you’ll be teaching math on a shoestring budget. Abraham had wealth, but what good is it in a tent? Cities, civilization, culture. Abraham had none of these. A pilgrim will confess his guilt and be done with it. Conscience? I wouldn’t take a shoestring from you? Done. Culture? “If your right eye offend….” Done, Done, Done. If you can’t turn it off, “cut off your right hand.”