Friday in the Third Week of Advent

"Shall the axe vaunt itself over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it?"

This is the question the Lord poses through Isaiah in an oracle against the Assyria Empire (10:5-19). Once again the reader is confronted by a God who refuses to keep neat and clean categories. This is a God who will not remain safely tucked away inside the Temple precincts. This is not a God who deals primarily in personal favors and religious feelings. No, this is the God who is at work on the international stage -- freely impinging upon nations' "sovereignty". 

Assyria has been the tool of God's judgment -- nothing special, as common as an axe or a saw. But this empire, flush with its own success and glutted by its own overblown self-importance, is oblivious to its bit-player role in a drama beyond itself. The Assyrian king and his princes arrogantly assume that their military prowess has carried the day. Their arrogance will be their undoing -- in God's own time.

Isaiah sees something that the governments of his day, with their fixation on strategy and espionage, fail to see. God is on the loose in the world! 

The Assyrian Empire eventually crumbles under its own weight. Empires are altogether predictable. Empires always overreach. Their insatiable desire for more power, more control, more territory, more money and more of everything eventually becomes their undoing. 

Empires, no matter how long they last, come to an end. Empires measure their longevity in years, decades and centuries. But against the backdrop of eternity, they are vapors. Eventually axes lose their edge. Eventually saws become rusty. 

Eventually, God's time overtakes the machinations of politicians. What Isaiah knows (and perhaps we would do well to learn) is that God can afford to be patient. God can afford to allow human arrogance to run its course. God has all the time in the world -- and then some.

In God's own time, "The light of Israel will become a fire, and God's Holy One a flame".

O come, O come, Emmanuel!