The ink was thick and black on the parchment, but the words felt heavier. I, Isaiah, son of Amoz, set the reed pen down and rubbed my eyes. The oil lamp guttered, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to mimic the armies on the move far to the north. A dry wind sighed through the window, carrying the scent of dust and distant fires.

The word had come, a burden not just for Israel, but for the instrument of her chastisement. It began with a lament for my own people—a people who decreed iniquitous decrees, who wrote oppression into law, who turned aside the needy from justice. The Lord saw the heap of spoil they were building in Jerusalem, the palaces expanded with stolen timber and stone. “What will you do on the day of punishment?” the word echoed in my chamber. The answer was a haunting, hollow silence.

But the vision shifted, northward, to the swift river Tigris, to the city of Nineveh, a festering jewel in the Assyrian plain. The Lord showed me the heart of its king. He was a proud man, Sennacherib, though I did not know his name then. I saw him in my spirit, striding through halls of alabaster, his voice a low rumble of conquest. He did not see himself as a man, but as a force of nature. His thoughts were plain to the Spirit: *By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I have understanding. I have removed the boundaries of peoples, and have plundered their treasures; like a mighty bull I have brought down those who sat on thrones.*

This was the rod of God’s anger, the staff of His fury. Assyria, a sharp, polished axe in the hand of the Holy One of Israel. But the axe does not glory over the one who swings it. The rod does not lift itself up as if it were not wood. And here was the terrible, glorious paradox: the Lord would send him against a godless nation, against the people of His wrath, to take spoil and seize plunder. He would come upon Judah like a flood, his confidence vast, his purpose singular: to destroy.

I could see it, the descriptions flowing like the invaders’ columns: the boots of warriors trampling the Galilean hills, the glint of spearpoints like a field of poisoned barley, the siege engines—groaning, foreign things—rolled up to the walls of Lachish, of Jerusalem herself. The king of Assyria would boast, “Are not my commanders all kings? Is not Calno like Carchemish? Has not Samaria become as Damascus? Just as my hand has found the kingdoms of the idols, whose carved images were greater than those of Jerusalem and Samaria, shall I not do to Jerusalem and her idols as I have done to Samaria?”

He would speak of God as a local deity, one to be added to a long list of conquered gods. He would not understand. He was a tool, a cutting instrument, employed for a moment and then to be examined, judged, and cast aside.

And here the word of the Lord burned brightest. “When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, he will punish the speech of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the boastful look in his eyes.” The vision was terrifying in its clarity. The forest of his army, vast and dense, would be felled. The Lord of Hosts would wield a wasting sickness among his stout warriors; under his glory, a fire would be kindled, burning and devouring thorns and briers in a single day. The Light of Israel would become a fire, his Holy One a flame.

It would not be by sword, not ultimately. A spirit of wasting would descend upon his fatness. It would be like the slaughter of Midian at the rock of Oreb. His yoke, that heavy beam of wood upon our necks, would be broken because of the oil of anointing—a remnant, a small, faithful few, would return.

I picked up the pen again, my hand trembling not with fear, but with the awful weight of the balance. Judgment upon my people for their injustice. Greater judgment upon the proud instrument that exceeded its commission. The Assyrian would be like a man who swings an axe in a thick forest, and when his arm grows tired, he burns the rest. So would the Lord consume the glory of his forest and his fruitful garden, both soul and body. The remnant of the trees in his forest would be so few a child could write them down.

The lamp flame steadied. The wind died. In the quiet, the truth settled, stark and comforting and dreadful all at once. The storm would come from the north. It would be brutal, and it would feel like the end. But it was not autonomous. It moved at the permission of a sovereign hand. And that same hand, having used the axe, would then shatter its handle and cast its blade into the fire.

I wrote the final words: “The Lord of hosts will wield the whip against him, as when Midian was struck at the rock of Oreb; and his staff will be over the sea, and he will lift it as he did in Egypt.” A return to the ancient stories, to the foundational acts of deliverance. The story was not ending. It was being written in a fiercer, more mysterious script.

Rolling the scroll, I felt the grit of the drying ink. The night was cold. Somewhere, an Assyrian scribe was likely also writing, detailing the invincible might of his king, believing his words to be the final ones on the matter. He did not know, he could not know, that his story was a subordinate clause in a longer, deeper sentence, being penned by a prophet in a small, lamplit room in Jerusalem. The sentence of the Holy One, whose justice is a refining fire, and whose mercy is a stubborn, surviving ember in the ashes.