Tomorrow’s Nightly News Predicted 3,000 Years Ago - Isaiah 56-61

 Is the following from the Bible, spoke by a prophet some 3,000 years ago, or is it from last nights news reports about the country we now live in?

Isaiah 59:2-8 (ESV)

... but your iniquities have made a separation

between you and your God,

and your sins have hidden his face from you

so that he does not hear.

For your hands are defiled with blood

and your fingers with iniquity;

your lips have spoken lies;

your tongue mutters wickedness.

No one enters suit justly;

no one goes to law honestly;

they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies,

they conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity.

They hatch adders' eggs;

they weave the spider's web;

he who eats their eggs dies,

and from one that is crushed a viper is hatched.

Their webs will not serve as clothing;

men will not cover themselves with what they make.

Their works are works of iniquity,

and deeds of violence are in their hands.

Their feet run to evil,

and they are swift to shed innocent blood;

their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity;

desolation and destruction are in their highways.

The way of peace they do not know,

and there is no justice in their paths;

they have made their roads crooked;

no one who treads on them knows peace.

Those words were spoken by Isaiah the prophet around 750-700 BC.    He is telling us about the wickedness both in Judah (Israel) and the world around them.   The poetic metaphors of the “adder’s eggs” and “spider’s webs” indicate both the poison and futility of man’s corrupt nature.  Maybe Sir Walter Scott (1808) was reading this when he wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”   Mankind, well after Isaiah’s prophecy is still practicing what God condemned in the Old Testament.   The lack of truth and integrity is throughout all generations.    Notice the next verse Isaiah writes, after the above:

Isaiah 59:9-10 (ESV)

Therefore justice is far from us,

and righteousness does not overtake us;

we hope for light, and behold, darkness,

and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.

We grope for the wall like the blind;

we grope like those who have no eyes;

we stumble at noon as in the twilight,

among those in full vigor we are like dead men.

Mankind grouped for truth and finds only darkness.  This is why man needs Christ and His light and His salvation.  Mankind, left to himself, will distort truth.   Only God can bring the light of the Gospel to save man from his constant bent toward evil.