“Gods” You Must Carry versus a God Who Carries You

Isaiah 46

I will be the same until your old age, and I will bear you up when you turn gray. I have made you, and I will carry you; I will bear and rescue you. (Isa 46:4)

Main Idea: Idols are crushing burdens that sinners carry, to their own destruction, but the living God carries his children from their birth to their old age, even to their glorious salvation.

1. The “Gods” of Babylon Are a Crushing Burden, Crushed in the End (46:1-2).
   1. Bel and Nebo are crushing burdens, unable to save.
   2. Bel and Nebo will go into captivity.
2. The Incomparable God Carries His People from Birth to Old Age (46:3-5).
   1. God has carried Israel from birth to old age.
   2. Who then is like God? Certainly no idol!
3. The Idols Cannot Move, Neither Can They Save (46:6-7).
   1. Hiring a goldsmith to make a god
   2. A motionless god cannot save.
4. Remember the God Who Plans and Orchestrates History (46:8-10).
   1. God calls Israel to remember and repent.
   2. God declares the end from the beginning.
   3. God’s purpose will stand to the last detail.
5. God’s Plan Is to Bring Salvation Near to Those Far Away (46:11-13).
   1. God summons a “bird of prey” (Cyrus) to achieve his plan.
   2. God’s plan is to bring salvation near to those far away.
   3. God’s ultimate aim is his glory in Zion.

The “Gods” of Babylon Are a Crushing Burden, Crushed in the End

Isaiah 46:1-2

God directly contrasts “gods” that must be carried with the true God, who carries his people. This chapter compares motionless gods made from silver and gold to a powerful God who plans all of human history and then orchestrates his plan to the minutest detail. The direct application to Israel, and indeed to all who trust in the Lord, is to understand how idols will always be a burden that leads to destruction and how the true Lord is a living God who daily carries his people through every experience of their lives.

In Isaiah 46 the Lord grants Isaiah the prophetic eye to see the history of the Babylonian Empire through to its demise before the first of its days had begun. In Isaiah’s time people believed there was a strong connection between the gods of a nation and that nation’s military success. If one nation conquered another, their “gods” (idols) were carried off in triumphant procession by the conquerors, a clear indication of the weakness of those gods (36:18-20). In this prophecy God ridicules the idols of Bel and Nebo long before the military conquests of the Babylonians vaulted Bel and Nebo to the head of the pantheon in the estimation of the people of the ancient Near East. Bel was the chief god of the Babylonians, often called Marduk. Nebo was Bel’s son (Pfeiffer, Old Testament History, 344–45). (We see them reflected in the names Nebu chadnezzar, Bel shazzar, and Bel teshazzar in the book of Daniel.)

The chapter opens with Bel and Nebo depicted as terrible burdens carried by beasts who are weary of bearing them. The image is one of a triumphal procession in which the conquerors carry off the vanquished Bel and Nebo. Impotent, mute, motionless, and lifeless, they have been shown to be unable to save their people. As a result, they go off into captivity. More than a century before Nebuchadnezzar built an empire to the glory of Bel and Nebo, Isaiah the prophet predicted the total humiliation of Bel and Nebo through the conquest of Babylon. The story will be completed in the next chapter, Isaiah 47.

The Incomparable God Carries His People from Birth to Old Age

Isaiah 46:3-5

By direct contrast to Bel and Nebo, however, the living God carries his people. He is not some heavy idol that is a crushing burden to his people that must be put on an oxcart and the team of oxen lashed to pull the weight. The God of Israel has carried his people from their mothers’ wombs, and he will continue to carry his people until their dying day. Even strong Christians underestimate how actively God is sustaining them every moment, how it is that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). So it was for Israel—from the day God called Abram from Ur of the Chaldees and from the day he delivered Jacob’s countless descendants from Pharaoh at the Red Sea. Even when the exile would come, there would be a remnant of Israel, those whom God had chosen to allow to live after all his judgments. God continued to carry that nation. And he pledged to continue to carry them through all their trials.

To what idol, then, can we compare such a God (v. 5)? No man-made statue of gold or silver or wood can be compared with almighty God. There is nothing on earth—in the seas, in the air, or in the heavens—that is remotely like this infinite God. Again and again the Lord is making this same claim, saying that he is the incomparable God (Isa 40:18,25; 44:7).

The Idols Cannot Move, Neither Can They Save

Isaiah 46:6-7

Here we have a vignette, a tragic little drama of a wealthy man who comes into the workshop of an idol maker. He weighs out the amounts of silver and gold that he wants the craftsman to use to make him his idol. When the idol is ready, he immediately bows down and worships it! He didn’t worship the raw silver and gold in his bag, but now that the craftsman has shaped it, he thinks it is worthy of his worship!

He takes the idol into his house, perhaps grunting with some of his servants and maybe the craftsman as well. They set up the idol in the shrine he has made for it. Wherever he sets it, there it will stay. Isaac Newton would later teach the human race, “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest” (Berlinski, Newton’s Gift, 98). This is true of this gold and silver object: it will not move until something moves it. Yet despite its motionless performance, the idolater cannot stop crying out to it to save him. When Cyrus the Great comes at the head of his Medo-Persian army, the idols of Bel and Nebo will do nothing to save those who trusted in them.

Remember the God Who Plans and Orchestrates History

Isaiah 46:8-10

Based on this repeated exposure of the folly of idolatry, Isaiah calls to his readers to remember the God who alone can save, the living God. He calls on them to remember the lessons of God’s mighty activity in the past—certainly the Red Sea crossing but also his deliverance of Noah in the ark and his mighty works through godly men like Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, David, and others. God calls on the “transgressors,” the rebels who will read these words, to turn from their idolatries in heartbroken repentance and be “brave” in their faith.

God again points to the ability he alone has to ordain the future, predict the future, and then orchestrate human history to bring about everything he has planned, even down to the smallest detail. What idol has ever done anything like that? God makes a powerful statement for the whole world to hear: “My plan will take place, and I will do all my will” (v. 10). The word will in verse 10 is frequently translated “pleasure.” It is the same word as in Psalm 115:3: “Our God is in heaven and does whatever he pleases” (emphasis added). God delights in his plan, even though it involves great suffering and destruction, because in the end it will bring about an indescribably glorious world. So God has woven in his eternal mind a magnificent tapestry of redemptive history, with multicolored threads of agony and celebration in wise proportion. The whole tapestry delights him, and he will most certainly bring about each detail in his good time.

God’s Plan Is to Bring Salvation Near to Those Far Away

Isaiah 46:11-13

In verses 11-13 God touches again on the immediate detail that he has in mind: the coming of Cyrus the Great to destroy the Babylonian Empire and crush the idols of Bel and Nebo. But he also expands beyond this to encompass his final end: the glorious salvation of his chosen people. The coming of Cyrus is not God’s final end. His ultimate purpose is a host of redeemed from every nation on earth standing pure and holy in the new heaven and new earth.

So he states again emphatically that he will call a “bird of prey” from the east (Cyrus), whose swift conquest of that part of the world could be likened to a peregrine falcon swooping like a blur down on its hapless quarry. Cyrus will allow the remnant of Israel to return to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and reestablish the sacrificial system at a rebuilt temple. But this merely sets the stage for the real drama: the substitutionary death and life-giving resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

So in verses 12-13 God calls on hard-hearted rebels who are far from righteousness to listen to the gospel message. This could be idolatrous Judahites, vanquished Babylonians, or any sinner in any generation to the ends of the earth. He calls on rebellious sinners to the only activity that can save them: “Listen to me!” Sinners are justified by faith alone, and faith comes from hearing the message about Christ (see Rom 10:17). So comes the good news: “I am bringing my justice near.” Justification is that activity by which a sovereign God makes the unrighteous to be perfectly righteous in his sight. The good news of the gospel is that God is bringing his righteousness near you, you who are naturally far away from justice. He does this by the proclamation of the gospel:

The message is near you, in your mouth and in your heart. This is the message of faith that we proclaim: if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation. (Rom 10:8-10)

In Isaiah 46:13 God promises to bring his justice near, a salvation that will not delay. The immediate fulfillment of Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon is just a step on the way; the final destination is the salvation Christ brings.

Applications

We cannot excuse ourselves. Though we may not go to a goldsmith with a bag of gold and ask him to melt it into a golden statue that we worship, our covetousness and materialism are every bit as idolatrous as that (Col 3:5). Anything we put ultimate value on other than Christ is a “functional savior” and an idol. This chapter reveals that idols are burdens that we carry around, burdens that will crush us someday if we do not cast them off. God has systematically exposed and destroyed all his rivals in every generation. No one worships Bel and Nebo right now, nor Baal, nor Molech, nor Asherah, nor Chemosh. That should warn us that someday our generation’s idols will also be exposed and crushed by judgment. Best to throw them off now in repentance. Ask God to search your heart and expose your idols. Don’t assume glibly that you have none.

Instead, delight in a God who carries you. Ponder deeply and richly how God has sustained you since he knit you together in your mother’s womb. One of the most popular Christian poems of our generation is titled “Footprints in the Sand” (authorship disputed, claimed by Stevenson, Powers, Carty, and Webb). It depicts a dream in which a person saw the course of his life in a set of two footprints side by side on the sand. As various scenes from the person’s life flashed across the sky, the person noticed that every time there was an extreme trial or some sorrow or burden, there was only one set of footprints. The person was deeply troubled by this and brought a charge to the Lord, reminding the Lord that he promised never to abandon him, yet when he was needed the most, he was absent. The Lord replied that when there was only one set of footprints, the Lord was in fact carrying the person in his arms. The poem is quite touching, of course. But according to Isaiah 46, it doesn’t go far enough. To be faithful to the doctrine of this chapter, there should only ever be one set of footprints! There is not a single moment in our lives that the Lord does not carry us. He sustains our existence and gives us everything we need for life and godliness at every moment of our lives.

Reflect and Discuss

1. Bel and Nebo were Babylon’s gods. How does this chapter show what a burden these idols were to those who had to carry them from place to place?
2. Modern-day idols include money, material possessions, career ambitions, sex, pleasure, entertainment, addictive drugs, and spectator sports. How are these idols a terrible burden for those who live for them?
3. How does the defeat of Babylon in history expose the impotence of their gods?
4. How is it vital for all modern-day idolaters to ponder the final end of all idols on judgment day?
5. In this chapter, how is the living God contrasted with these burdensome idols?
6. God says he is the one who made us and carries us from the day of our birth to the day of our death. How is this a surpassing comfort to us?
7. How does God declare his sovereign foreknowledge and control over events in this chapter? How is this a great encouragement and strength for us in our age?
8. In this chapter God challenges rebels to remember and submit to him. How should such a challenge humble us?
9. How should this chapter cause us to search our hearts to expose our own idols?
10. How should it cause us to grow in our trust in Christ, our Savior, who died and rose again and who always lives to intercede for us (Heb 7:25)?