Does an ax take over from the one who swings it? Does a saw act more important than the sawyer? As if a shovel did its shoveling by using a ditch digger! As if a hammer used the carpenter to pound nails! Therefore the Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, will send a debilitating disease on his robust Assyrian fighters. Under the canopy of God’s bright glory a fierce fire will break out. Israel’s Light will burst into a conflagration. The Holy will explode into a firestorm, And in one day burn to cinders every last Assyrian thornbush. God will destroy the splendid trees and lush gardens. The Assyrian body and soul will waste away to nothing like a disease-ridden invalid. A child could count what’s left of the trees on the fingers of his two hands. * * *
2 Kings 19:25The MessageDid it never occur to you that I’m behind all this? Long, long ago I drew up the plans, and now I’ve gone into action, Using you as a doomsday weapon, reducing proud cities to piles of rubble, See the chapter |
11 Cross References
“Open up, heavens, and rain. Clouds, pour out buckets of my goodness! Loosen up, earth, and bloom salvation; sprout right living. I, God, generate all this. But doom to you who fight your Maker— you’re a pot at odds with the potter! Does clay talk back to the potter: ‘What are you doing? What clumsy fingers!’ Would a sperm say to a father, ‘Who gave you permission to use me to make a baby?’ Or a fetus to a mother, ‘Why have you cooped me up in this belly?’”
“I’m turning Samaria into a heap of rubble, a vacant lot littered with garbage. I’ll dump the stones from her buildings in the valley and leave her abandoned foundations exposed. All her carved and cast gods and goddesses will be sold for stove wood and scrap metal, All her sacred fertility groves burned to the ground, All the sticks and stones she worshiped as gods, destroyed. These were her earnings from her life as a whore. This is what happens to the fees of a whore.” * * *