Isaiah describes God’s people who descend spiritually as a “whore” or harlot. That imagery identifies them with Greater Babylon, also called a “whore” or harlot. In effect, God’s rebellious people do all that Babylon does and thus suffer the same fate. They regard evil as good and good as evil. They devise schemes to exploit and defraud the needy. They rob and commit murder to get power and gain. They acquit the guilty for a bribe and deny justice to the innocent. They hurl insults and false accusations. They rely on one another instead of on God. They indulge in liquor and amusements and linger at night parties. They commit perverse and immoral acts. Isaiah therefore calls them “Sodom” and “Gomorrah.”
God’s wicked people include corrupt political leaders who dupe and mislead the masses. They draft and enforce oppressive legislation, depriving the poor of God’s people of their rights. They include religious leaders who misuse their ecclesiastical authority, who ostracize believers for being zealous for God. They practice hypocrisy and preach misleading things about God, leaving the hungry soul empty, the thirsty soul deprived. They include cultists who engage in sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of children. They delight in despicable acts, in committing abominations, deliberately desecrating what is sacred. By putting God out of their lives, they extinguish the divine spark within them.
Isaiah’s Seven-Part Structure, therefore, contrasts two opposite groups of people as two Cities, two Women, and as Babylon and Zion. And it contrasts two covenants affiliated with them that express each entity’s ideology. One is a “Covenant with Death,” an inherently self-destructive mechanism. The other is a Covenant of Life, God’s promise of eternal life. One consists of reliance on man’s counsels and schemes, on human agreements—on the “arm of flesh.” The other consists of adherence to God’s law and word as contained in scriptures and as his servant reveals it. At some point everyone makes a choice for or against God. When the world enters a countdown no comfort zone remains.
Those who willfully choose evil over good precipitate God’s end-time judgment. By rejecting God’s word, relying instead on their own ideas, they bring about their own damnation. The law people keep or fail to keep determines their imminent fate. Instead of choosing life—deliverance from destruction and a millennial peace—many choose death at the hands of the archtyrant. God’s servant acts as the catalyst of this end-time division of people throughout the world. They either respond to the servant’s message by complying with God’s law—thus qualifying for deliverance—or by rebelling against God and all that he represents. Like those who responded to Isaiah, humanity divides in two.
Making wrong choices causes people to regress spiritually, to move down the ladder. It causes a lack of cognitive awareness so that they can’t see clearly but lose the light they once had. Culturally based choices bind people to cultural constraints designed to preserve the system, most often Babylon’s status quo. They serve the establishment; the establishment doesn’t serve them. Over time they grow ignorant of anything but Babylon. By choosing poorly—by aborting life’s tests—they forfeit being reborn on higher levels. Isaiah characterizes Babylon this way: “I exist, and other than me there is nothing!” (Isaiah 47:10). In the minds of its self-serving citizens, there is only Babylon, nothing more.
Like Lot’s wife, who died with the wicked in the holocaust of Sodom and Gomorrah, people in the Babylon category cannot or will not make a paradigm shift. Heedless to new, emerging realities, they can’t imagine that the end of their world draws near—the end of Babylon. Losing touch with the source of their salvation, they position themselves out of reach of deliverance. By rejecting the true God, who offers all the ability to choose for themselves, they fall into the hands of a false god, the king of Assyria/Babylon. Like an abuser who won’t nurture or protect his children, the archtyrant cruelly slays them. Like the depraved leader of a satanic cult, he perversely sacrifices his own.
(From Isaiah Decoded: Ascending the Ladder to Heaven, pp 104–106)
