Today’s Scripture Reading (December
19, 2013): Isaiah 47
I don’t like
horoscopes. I know quite a few people that seem to never leave the house
without checking their stars, but it has never made a whole lot of sense to me.
I am also not big on fortune tellers – or fortune cookies for that matter. My
problem with all of this is that it feels a little too much like I am waiting
for life to happen to me. Either I have a tall, dark, and handsome stranger in
my future or not (being a guy I am not sure what I would do with one of those –
but ladies, maybe you can tell me why you are all meeting the same guy), but either
way I am just not convinced that any of it is written in the stars. My desire
is to pursue life and chase it down, not to passively wait for life to happen
to me.
The real
message of Isaiah seems to be that Babylon has become complacent. There seems
to have been a change in the way that the Empire is being run from the days of
the proactive Nebuchadnezzar. The current method of defending the empire seems
to have been to depend on the magicians of the nation to search out the stars
and predict the moves of the enemy, and then further depending on their magic
to defeat the attacking enemy. All without having to expend any other kind of
physical energy in their own defence.
But Isaiah
reminds Israel that the strategy is not going to work. Babylon’s practice of
depending on their stargazers to tell them what was going to happen in the
future and a magical defence of the empire was about to fail. All of their
chasing after astrologers, and stargazers, and all of their readings of the
monthly reports of their fortune tellers was going to accomplish nothing except
to make them tired. In the end, Babylon was still going to fall.
But all of
this might add a bit of an explanation concerning the strange night that
Babylon did fall. On that night, Belshazzar, the prince who had been left in
charge of the city, would be enjoying himself at a drunken feast with his
friends while the gates of the city were left undefended. And the reason for
the city’s lack of preparedness might simply be that the prince had placed a higher
trust in his magicians and astrologers than he had in his advisors. Even though
we know that Belshazzer had received numerous reports concerning the advancing
Persian army, he chose to ignore them placing his trust in the stars instead of
in his military.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah
48
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