[1] Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye
people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things
that come forth of it. [2] For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations,
and his fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath
delivered them to the slaughter. [3] Their slain also shall be cast out, and their
stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted
with their blood. [4] And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the
heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall
down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig
tree. [5] For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down
upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment. There can be little doubt that Isaiah is speaking
about one of the events of the latter portion of the Tribulation Period. He speaks of the great slaughter of the
nations that will come against the nation of Israel and her great city
Jerusalem at the final battle of Armageddon.
He further testifies to a heavenly picture of the chaos previously
described in many Birth Pang chapters.
And then, in verse five, Isaiah gives us a specific location where the
great sword of God will streak down from Heaven to cleave asunder the land of
Idumea. This country of Idumea is also
called Edom in the Scriptures, and any reliable dictionary or commentary
locates it between the southern end of the Dead Sea and the northern tip of the
Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba (See figure 23).
This section of the earth’s crust will suddenly be torn apart by God’s
power in the latter portion of the Tribulation Period. It is not by accident that the great north-south
crack in the mid-Atlantic, shown in figure 3, continues around the southern tip
of Africa, through the Indian Ocean, down the Gulf of Aden, up the Red Sea
floor, along both sides of the Gulf of Aqaba, northward across the Araba
Desert, along both sides of the Dead Sea and Jordan River Valley, and finally
through Lebanon to intersect another east-west fault in Turkey. God will be using this great geological rift
fault to fulfill many of His Tribulation Period prophecies. By observing figure 25, you can visualize how God is
rapidly spreading apart the Red Sea fault faster than any other geological
fault in eastern Africa or the Middle East. God has been bringing an unbelievable tonnage of red hot, flowing
rock called magma upward through this Red Sea crack for a very long period of
time. As the liquid rock makes contact
with the watercooled Red Sea floor it solidifies into new basaltic crust. This new crust is pushing apart two large
tectonic plates: the African and Arabian plates. The crack in the crust of the earth through Idumea is kept locked
together by horizontal pressure applied by God in the distant past and,
consequently, the hot liquid rock beneath Idumea is kept locked deep beneath
the surface. However, the rapid
spreading of the crust (to the south of Idumea in the Red Sea) will continue to
induce more and more horizontal pressure in the opposite direction of the force
that now locks the Idumean section of the fault. In the latter portion of the Tribulation Period the splitting
force of the south will exceed the locking force of the north,
and the the center of the land of Idumea will suddenly rip apart as if a great
sword from heaven had swept down to slash it.
When this occurs along a line from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba,
the land will suddenly become what geologists call a flood basalt plain. It will be a valley filled with flowing
blood-red lava at temperatures initially in excess of 2100 degrees Fahrenheit
(1200 degrees Celsius), and will be accompanied by all the horrors of a flood
basalt plain. There were no Hebrew words in Isaiah’s day for magma
pikes, lava intrusions, pyroclastic avalanche clouds, flood basalt plains,
etc. So when Isaiah received this
vision from God, he used the most descriptive words of his language to fit what
he saw. We began this chapter with the
terrifying picture of the judgment of God on the nations of the world and
Idumea as outlined in Isaiah 34:1-5.
Now, bearing in mind that Isaiah did not have our geological jargon of
today, let us discover what geologic horror is created in Idumea when God’s
sword comes down by examining Isaiah 34:8 & 9. Isaiah 34:8,9 [8] For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance, and
the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion. [9] And the streams
thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and
the land thereof shall become burning pitch. The rift in the earth’s crust will remain
volcanically active from generation to generation throughout the millennial
reign of Christ, but the deep opening itself will be cooled by the waters of
the Dead Sea as they move southward to dump their high salt content into the
Gulf of Aqaba. This drainage of the
Dead Sea will be covered with many Scriptures in great detail in later Birth
Pang chapters. BIRTH PANG NUMBER 15
CHAPTER 17 – THE IDUMEAN WINEPRESS
Isaiah 34:1-5