ISAIAH - CHAPTER 47 - Latter Day Judgment for Enchantments, Sorceries, Astrologers
ISAIAH – CHAPTER 47
Latter Day Judgment for Enchantments, Sorceries, Wickedness, Astrologers
Pastor Carolyn Sissom
October 27, 2014, the Year of Our Lord
We have progressed through Isaiah under the providential time-line of the Lord. Again, I stand amazed as Chapter 47 is timely as we approach the satanic worship day of Halloween.
47: 12-13: “Stand now with your enchantments, and with the multitude of your sorceries, wherein you have labored from your youth; if so be you shall be able to profit, if so be you may prevail. You are wearied in the multitude of your counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save you from these things that shall come upon you.”
We can certainly address this unfulfilled prophecy to the year 2014 when all the counselors, pundits, politicians and prognosticators are clueless.
This is a prophecy is written as a skillful poem of the fall of Babylon. Chapter 46 prophesied of God’s judgment upon the gods of Babylon. This prophecy is now addressed to Babylon itself. The city must be destroyed because of her cruel treatment of the Jewish captives; because of her pride and wantonness; and because of her practice of various forms of magic, sorceries, witchcraft, wickedness and prognostications.
The multitude of sorceries and enchantments will be one of the greatest causes of the doom of Babylon in the day of the Lord. Babylon did fall (historically); the spirit of Babylon in the world cosmos (1st and 2nd Heaven) is doomed.
Rev. 18: 2-6: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a case of under unclean and hateful bird. All nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. ---Come out of her my people that you are not partakers of her sins, and that you do not receive her plagues…”
There are three classes listed in 47:13 of Babylonian Scientists:
- Astrologers – dividers of the heavens for the purpose of prophecy and divination or to make a horoscope. Astrology professes to discover certain connections between the position and movements of the planets and events which occur on earth. This was practiced by the Babylonians, Egyptians, Libyans, Ethiopians, Indians, Arabians, and Chinese. We can add to that list North America and South America, even the whole world. From the rising and setting of the planets, their orbits and color, they predicted storms, heat, rain, comets, eclipses, earthquakes and ordinary human affairs affecting both nations and individuals. To assist astrologers in making calculations from the planets, the heavens were divided in 12 equal parts called houses; and the various things affecting man were placed therein---marriage, life, death, religion, etc. From the position of stars in these houses the calculations were made.
- Star-gazers –those who endeavor to tell the future by the relative position of the stars.
- Monthly prognosticators – those that gave knowledge of what might occur within the month by the various positions and shapes of the moon.
Sorceries = magic
Enchantments = spells
Babylon is pictured here as a proud female accustomed to luxury and ease, suddenly made poor and brought down to the lowest condition, being compelled to be a slave. Come down from the throne or from the seat of lordship over the nations and sit in the dust (an expression of humiliation and mourning).
47: 1-3: “Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground; there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for you shall no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstones and grind meal; uncover your locks, make bare the leg. Your nakedness shall be uncovered; yea your shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will not meet you as a man.”
The Lord God of heaven and earth and creator of the cosmos declare: “I will take vengeance.” Not maybe, but “I will”. When he takes vengeance, he will not come as a “man”, but as Divine and in supernatural power.
Pope Francis spoke this week that he did not consider the Lord a “Divine being”. I pray the Lord visit the Pope and reveal Himself in the power of His Great Might and Glory.
This humiliating taunt-song is represented by the graphic image of a luxurious lady of the harem, a harlot. This strange woman parallels the Bondwoman of Gal. 4:21-31 and certainly speaks of a harlot system of religion.
Isaiah then acknowledges the true God of Israel right in the midst of the prediction of Babylon’s destruction.
47:4: “As for our redeemer, the LORD of hosts is his name, the Holy One of Israel.”
47: 5-7: “Sit silent, and get into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for you shall no more be called, the lady of kingdoms. I was angry with my people. I have polluted my inheritance given them into your hand. You did show them no mercy upon the ancient has you very heavily laid your yoke. You said, ‘I shall be a lady forever’; so that you did not lay these things to your heart, neither did you remember the latter end of it.”
Babylon is pictured as sitting in the silence of darkness in sorrow and humiliation. Sitting in darkness was a sign of mourning.
47: I consider that verse 6 gives us a key to the motivation of God’s control of history. “My inheritance”. The Babylonian captivity was ordained as the Divine punishment of Judah. Babylon will no more be God’s agent. The merciless treatment shown to the exiles merited Divine retribution.
We can certainly apply this to the terrorist group, ISIS. The Lord may indeed be using the terrorists to bring judgment on the world wide spirit of Babylon. However, the merciless beheading of innocent people will indeed be dealt with divine retribution. It must be. It has to be. For such is the way of our Lord. In him there is no variableness neither shadow of turning. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
47: 8-10: “Now, here this, you are given to pleasures (pleasure seeking generation), that dwells carelessly. You say in your heart, I am and none else beside me; I shall not sit as a widow; neither shall I know the loss of children. But these two things shall come to you. In a moment in one day, the loss of children, widowhood; they come upon you in their perfection for the multitude of your sorceries, and for the great abundance of your enchantments. You have trusted in your wickedness. You have said, ‘none see me’. Your wisdom and your knowledge has perverted you. You have said in your heart,’ I am none else beside me’.”
I want to give pause here to six things in the Holy Bible, “said in the Heart”.
- Babylon –“None like me”. (Vs. 10)
- Lucifer – “I will exalt myself to heaven and be like the Most High. (Isa. 14: 12-14)
- God – I will not again curse the ground for man’s sake, or kill all creatures as I have done”. (Gen. 8:21)
- Esau – “I will kill my brother.” (Gen. 27:41)
- Zion – “Who has begotten all these? Or how is that we are so blessed with children?” (Isa. 49:21).
- The fool – “I have much goods laid up for many years…eat, drink, and be merry.” (Lk. 12: 17-19; Ps. 14:1).
Jer. 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it.”
The Lord knows our heart – Psa. 24:43-4: “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in his holy place? He that has clean hands, and a pure heart; who has not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.”
47:11: “Therefore shall evil come upon you; you shall not know from where it rises. Mischief shall fall upon you. You shall not be able to put if off. Desolation shall come upon you, suddenly, which you shall not know.”
The suddenness of the judgment on Babylon indicates a latter-day fulfillment when God himself will destroy the spirit of Babylon in the earth under the 7th vial. It is to be done in a moment in one day. There are many latter-day references in the Holy Bible to the sudden, complete, total and eternal destruction of the spirit of Babylon. (Isa. 13: 19-22; Jer. 50:40; 41:8; Rev. 14:8; 16: 17-21; 18:8, 10, 17.)
Not only was Babylon to be destroyed suddenly and in a moment, but the destruction was to be complete, full, perfect and entire.
The fire will not be for comfort, but for burnings, and all those who had trafficked with the city will abandon her; there is none to save.
47:14: “Behold, they shall be as stubble, the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame; there shall not be a coal to warm at, nor fire to sit before it. Thus shall they be unto you with whom you have labored, even your merchants, from your youth; they shall wander every one to the quarter; none shall save you.”
Church let us come out from trafficking and compromising with the spirit of Babylon. The Church has become polluted accepting and engaging in the sins of Babylon for noses, names and nickels. We are to be “trees of righteousness whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.” People of God, we should be healing the nations, not being part of the problem.
Galatians 5:20: “The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such life; of the which I tell you before…they which do such things hall not inherit the Kingdom of God.”
We all know there are Christians in the church who have not overcome these sins of the flesh yet they are saved, because they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. However, as long as we give permission for these sins to reign in our lives, we will never walk in the power and blessing of the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Carolyn Sissom, Pastor
Eastgate Ministries Church
Scripture from K.J.V. – I entered into the labors of Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible. Comments and conclusions are my own and not meant to reflect the views of those who I entered into their labors.