Canter Bridge

The long book called Isaiah displays a complex understanding of ‘the nations’.

One one extreme, it is capable of seeing them as naked adversaries to God’s chosen Israel. On the other, they are welcomed into the center of YHWH’s redemptive purposes.

In between, one can only admire the dexterity with which their existence, their behavior, and their destiny are so deftly explored. As with everything else in this book, their definition comes via an artful layering of truth upon truth. Each fresh level does not eradicate what has gone before, but rather reframes it.

The book’s monumental fortieth chapter recognizes the existence of these nations, but entirely dismisses the idea that their power or their multitude could restrain YHWH’s hand when he sets himself to redeeming his own people.

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust. (Isaiah 40:15 ESV)

What can be said of the nations from this perspective is this: They are there, of course, but they don’t amount to anything.’

This, too, is a partial truth, for the book will have us understand in good time that these very nations share a destiny that is in some way glorious. Redeemed, purified, and brought to justice—the latter term itself is pregnant with pluriform resonance—they will bring their best cultural product with them on pilgrimage and with it beautify Zion itself.

Yet here, in chapter 40, they are seen in all their weightless impotence.

You can extrapolate a drop of water from a bucketful of the sloshing liquid if you strain at the mental task of it. But its loss won’t alter the weight of the load in any meaningful way.

If you squint carefully in just the right light, you can see the dust on a scale. But its presence won’t alter the outcome of the weighing. It is irrelevant.

So, in turbulent and threatening times, is the reader invited to consider the empires and powers of his generation’s globe. They are there, of course they are there. It is even possible to contemplate the horrors they are capable of visiting upon their neighbors.

Yet when YHWH sets about to accomplishing his purpose, the nations are best described as a drop in a bucket.

They are just dust.