Isaiah 27-28

Living Bible

27 In that day the Lord will take his terrible, swift sword and punish leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent, the coiling, writhing serpent, the dragon of the sea.

² In that day of Israel’s freedom^[a] let this anthem be their song:

³ Israel^[b] is my vineyard; I, the Lord, will tend the fruitful vines; every day I’ll water them, and day and night I’ll watch to keep all enemies away. ^4-5 My anger against Israel is gone. If I find thorns and briars bothering her, I will burn them up, unless these enemies of mine surrender and beg for peace and my protection. ⁶ The time will come when Israel will take root and bud and blossom and fill the whole earth with her fruit!

^7-8 Has God punished Israel as much as he has punished her enemies? No, for he has devastated her enemies,^[c] while he has punished Israel but a little, exiling her far from her own land as though blown away in a storm from the east. ⁹ And why did God do it? It was to purge away^[d] her sins, to rid her of all her idol altars and her idols. They will never be worshiped again. ¹⁰ Her walled cities will be silent and empty, houses abandoned, streets grown up with grass, cows grazing through the city munching on twigs and branches.

¹¹ My people are like the dead branches of a tree, broken off and used to burn beneath the pots. They are a foolish nation, a witless, stupid people, for they turn away from God. Therefore, he who made them will not have pity on them or show them his mercy. ¹² Yet the time will come when the Lord will gather them together one by one like hand-picked grain, selecting them here and there from his great threshing floor that reaches all the way from the Euphrates River to the Egyptian boundary. ¹³ In that day the great trumpet will be blown, and many about to perish among their enemies, Assyria and Egypt, will be rescued and brought back to Jerusalem to worship the Lord in his holy mountain.

28 Woe to the city of Samaria, surrounded by her rich valley—Samaria, the pride and delight of the drunkards of Israel! Woe to her fading beauty, the crowning glory of a nation of men lying drunk in the streets! ² For the Lord will send a mighty army (the Assyrians) against you; like a mighty hailstorm he will burst upon you and dash you to the ground. ³ The proud city of Samaria—yes, the joy and delight of the drunkards of Israel—will be hurled to the ground and trampled beneath the enemies’ feet. ⁴ Once glorious, her fading beauty surrounded by a fertile valley will suddenly be gone, greedily snatched away as an early fig is hungrily snatched and gobbled up!

⁵ Then at last the Lord Almighty himself will be their crowning glory, the diadem of beauty to his people who are left. ⁶ He will give a longing for justice to your judges and great courage to your soldiers who are battling to the last before your gates. ⁷ But Jerusalem is now led by drunks! Her priests and prophets reel and stagger, making stupid errors and mistakes. ⁸ Their tables are covered with vomit; filth is everywhere.

⁹ “Who does Isaiah think he is,” the people say, “to speak to us like this! Are we little children, barely old enough to talk? ¹⁰ He tells us everything over and over again, a line at a time and in such simple words!”

¹¹ But they won’t listen; the only language they can understand is punishment! So God will punish them by sending against them foreigners who speak strange gibberish! Only then will they listen to him! ¹² They could have rest in their own land if they would obey him, if they were kind and good. He told them that, but they wouldn’t listen to him. ¹³ So the Lord will spell it out for them again, repeating it over and over in simple words whenever he can; yet over this simple, straightforward message they will stumble and fall and be broken, trapped and captured.

¹⁴ Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffing rulers in Jerusalem:

¹⁵ You have struck a bargain with death, you say, and sold yourselves to the devil^[e] in exchange for his protection against the Assyrians. “They can never touch us,” you say, “for we are under the care of one who will deceive and fool them.”

¹⁶ But the Lord God says, “See, I am placing a Foundation Stone in Zion—a firm, tested, precious Cornerstone that is safe to build on. He who believes need never run away again. ¹⁷ I will take the line and plummet of justice to check the foundation wall you built; it looks so fine, but it is so weak a storm of hail will knock it down! The enemy will come like a flood and sweep it away, and you will be drowned. ¹⁸ I will cancel your agreement of compromise with death and the devil, so when the terrible enemy floods in, you will be trampled into the ground. ¹⁹ Again and again that flood will come and carry you off, until at last the unmixed horror of the truth of my warnings will finally dawn on you.”

²⁰ The bed you have made is far too short to lie on; the blankets are too narrow to cover you. ²¹ The Lord will come suddenly and in anger, as at Mount Perazim and Gibeon, to do a strange, unusual thing—to destroy his own people! ²² So scoff no more, lest your punishment be made even greater, for the Lord God has plainly told me that he is determined to crush you.

^23-24 Listen to me, listen as I plead: Does a farmer always plow and never sow? Is he forever harrowing the soil and never planting it? ²⁵ Does he not finally plant his many kinds of grain, each in its own section of his land? ²⁶ He knows just what to do, for God has made him see and understand. ²⁷ He doesn’t thresh all grains the same. A sledge is never used on dill, but it is beaten with a stick. A threshing wheel is never rolled on cummin, but it is beaten softly with a flail. ²⁸ Bread grain is easily crushed, so he doesn’t keep on pounding it. ²⁹ The Lord Almighty is a wonderful teacher and gives the farmer wisdom.