This is a message about Egypt:
The LORD comes to Egypt,
riding swiftly on a cloud.
The people are weak from fear.
Their idols tremble
as he approaches and says,
“I will punish Egypt
with civil war—
neighbors, cities, and kingdoms
will fight each other.
“Egypt will be discouraged
when I confuse their plans.
They will try to get advice
from their idols,
from the spirits of the dead,
and from fortunetellers.
I will put the Egyptians
under the power of a cruel,
heartless king.
I, the LORD All-Powerful,
have promised this.” (Isaiah 19:1-4)
Lies can live for a long time. For thousands of years Egypt had endured as a major world power, independent and wealthy. They had worshiped their gods, performed their rituals with little change for those same thousands of years, never feeling the need for change, never knowing that the foundation of their civilization was like the sand beyond the Nile.
But God told them the time would come when their civilization would come crashing down. A few hundred years after Isaiah, the Macedonian general, Alexander the Great, conquered Egypt completely. He took its wealth for his own, and crowned himself Pharaoh. When he died, one of his generals, Ptolemy, took the Egyptian throne in his place. That general’s descendents ruled Egypt thereafter, known as the Ptolemies. The last of Ptolemy’s descendants was a woman named Cleopatra. When she killed herself with an asp’s bite, the Egyptian nation was absorbed by the Roman Empire.
The idols, fortune tellers, the mediums—those the Egyptians had depended upon for thousands of years—ultimately failed them. In the end, the Egyptians came to realize they had put their trust in empty lies.
We need to be careful about who and what we put our trust in. Only God can really be counted on.
