Canter Bridge

Upon occasion, the prophets relax the Hebrew Bible’s notable silence regarding what we might call ‘the unseen world’. The texts of the Old Testament do not spend any time denying that there might be a flurry of activity out there beyond what we can see and hear by conventional means.

Simply put, the texts remain agnostic and suggestive on that point, providing only the briefest glimpses of an unseen world that is at war as we are so often at war here below. Deuteronomy 29.29 seems to capture this posture, which is at the same time self-aware, disciplined, and sustained.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (Deuteronomy 29:29 ESV)

Spiritual passion in our day quite regularly coincides with a penchant for speculation about the unseen ‘spiritual world’ that is at odds with this approach. Yet we may feel some sympathy for a spirituality that pushes back against the suffocating materialism that has been our official ideology for a century or two.

Over against this cautionary preamble, we encounter at a break in one of the prophet Isaiah’s ‘oracles against the nations’ this fascinating glimpse into his presumed split-level creation.

On that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth. (Isaiah 24:21 ESV)

This Isaiah text is not alone in identifying a certain correlation between what ‘the nations’ do in the world we know, on the one hand, and the rebellion and sometimes intra-celestial warfare of—what shall we call them?—heavenly powers, on the other.

The verse’s unique and bifold repetition—’the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on earth’—appears to underscore a prophetic insistence that reality comes in two flavors and that the activities in the two spheres do in fact correlate.

The book of Isaiah is at least as insistent as any other portion of the Old Testament literature on the point that YHWH is incomparable, and therefore unique. His authority is not the only authority, yet it is unlike any other.

Here, the prophet’s assurance to little Judah unassumingly speaks to a latent fear in national or existential underdogs: that rescue or redemption might come, but be only partial.

No, says the prophet, laying hand upon the all-inclusive poles called ‘heaven and earth’. On that day, all shall be touched, all made subject, all brought to heel.