What are you to me, O Tyre and Sidon, and all the regions of Philistia? Are you paying me back for something? If you are paying me back, I will turn your deeds back upon your own heads swiftly and speedily. For you have taken my silver and my gold, and have carried my rich treasures into your temples. You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border. But now I will rouse them to leave the places to which you have sold them, and I will turn your deeds back upon your own heads. I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the people of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabeans, to a nation far away; for the LORD has spoken.

Proclaim this among the nations:

Prepare war,
stir up the warriors.
Let all the soldiers draw near,
let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords,
and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.”
Come quickly,
all you nations all around,
gather yourselves there.
Bring down your warriors, O LORD.
Let the nations rouse themselves,
and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat;
for there I will sit to judge
all the neighboring nations. (Joel 3:4-12)

The call to arms preceded the call to peace. When Isaiah spoke of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, he was taking a common phrase and twisting it in a new way. Ordinarily in an agricultural society, when enemies came, the farmers had to take their tools of life and turn them into instruments of death.

God told Israel’s neighbors that had profited from the destruction and captivity of his people, that they would be paid back in kind. Just as the Jewish people had been sold northwest to the Greeks, so the people of Tyre and Sidon would be sold to the Sabeans living in the southeast, on the edge of the Arabian peninsula—as far from their homeland as they had sent the Israelites.

Jehoshaphat was a king of Judah who had faced an overwhelming Assyrian army. God had destroyed that army without Jehoshaphat having to fight. Tyre and Sidon’s fate would be the same as that of the Assyrians of Jehoshaphat’s day. Those assembled against them would not have to raise arms against them. They’d only have to bend over to pick up the spoils.

God has ways of solving problems that are beyond us. The exciting thing about an insurmountable problem, if we only turn our eyes to God, is seeing what God will do about it.

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