Isaiah’s prophecies address two kinds of end-time Israel: first, people like the Jews, who have more or less maintained their ethnic integrity through centuries of exile; second, people who have assimilated into the nations, who are now identified as Gentiles. We might refer to these as “ethnic Israel,” on the one hand, and “assimilated Israel,” on the other.
When Isaiah puts Israel’s apostasy and rebellion first in the sequence of end-time events patterned after ancient events, therefore, he is speaking of people who have become alienated from God—who break the terms of their covenant with the God of Israel—in the end-time, not in Isaiah’s day. Still, that new event closely resembles Israel’s ancient apostasy in the kinds of evils God’s people commit, providing us with an important historical type.
We see this alienation from God expressed in the marriage imagery the Hebrew prophets use to describe Israel’s relationship to her God. When Israel breaks her covenant, God casts her off, but not forever. He seeks to reclaim her as soon as she ceases her adulteries and returns to him.
Isaiah adapts this marriage imagery into the idea of two women. One symbolizes “ethnic Israel”—the Lord’s people who were cast off in the past whom he now remarries. The other symbolizes “assimilated Israel”—those whom the Lord married in their place but who now turn adulterous. Both women have known Jehovah, the God of Israel, as their husband. The first represents those who rejected him anciently but whom he now receives back. The second represents those who have recently been the people of God but who now reject him.
The latter group, not the former, are the adulterous wife who is the subject of Israel’s end-time apostasy. Although both peoples of God exist throughout the world, it is the second wife who rejects God in the end-time. In short, the adulterous wife consists of the assimilated lineages of Israel—those who are identified with the Gentiles—whom God had married in place of the ethnic lineages he had cast off.
According to Isaiah, two main sins cause Israel’s apostasy: injustice and idolatry. The poor among God’s people are oppressed and many suffer want. Their whole society has reached a breaking point. Payoffs and murder are commonplace. Isaiah denounces his people’s political leaders as guilty of committing gross crimes; they have become as the leaders of Sodom. God’s people have turned flagrantly immoral, becoming as the inhabitants of Gomorrah. According to Isaiah, the people’s religious leaders flatter them and feed them lies, leaving their hungry souls empty. Money and the things money buys have become his people’s gods.
These false gods cannot save them in the “Day of Jehovah”—God’s Day of Judgment that is coming upon the world. All who remain in Babylon and cling to their idols will be destroyed as was Babylon of old. God will raze end-time Babylon and its idols to the ground. God will erase the wicked and sinners from the face of the earth just as he destroyed the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
(Taken from The End from the Beginning: the Apocalyptic Vision of Isaiah with Isaiah Translation, pp 36–38)
