Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Isaiah Predicts the Future | Historical Books | Isaiah 44:24-48

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Did Isaiah predict the future? Is God in control? Is God working for your good? In today's episode, Patrick shares how Isaiah 44:24-48 reminds us that God is the Creator of the universe who brings everything to pass. Read the Bible with us in 2026! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Isaiah 44:24-48

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Somewhere around 720 BC, the prophet Isaiah began to see visions about what must have seemed like an impossible future. Jerusalem would be destroyed. God's people would be sent into exile in Babylon. And I say that it must have sounded impossible to the people living around him because Assyria was the ascendant superpowers. because Assyria was the ascendant superpower in the ancient Near East. Babylon, it was once a great

power, but now that Isaiah was prophesying, it was just a small power. It represented a lost past. The Israelites might have thought about Babylon the way that we think about Rome today, as a place from long ago, but not something with a bright future in front of it. And yet, Isaiah foresaw the rise of the Neo-Babolonian Empire and even more impossibly the destruction of of God's city, Jerusalem. But perhaps his most inexplicable prediction comes in Isaiah 44. I want to read this short passage in its entirety because in context, it's clear that Isaiah wants to show that God is not just a creator. He's going to hit that point. He's also a creator who is in control of time and history. He is the one who is sovereign over reality itself and he proves it by knowing what will

happen and then making what he knows to happen happen in the future. Let's pick up in a moment. Let's pick up in verse 24. This is what the Lord says. Your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb. I am the Lord, the maker of all things, who stretches out the heavens, who spreads out the earth by myself. So let's pause here. First, Isaiah wants us to see that God is a creator, but not just a creator who launched creation and then left it behind. Isaiah wants us to see that he is intimately involved with the very processes of creation. He forms every human in the womb. And even more importantly than that, this passage isn't actually about an individual human. He's talking about the nation of Israel. He's saying that he formed the nation of Israel. He brought about their history

in time and existence. But Isaiah goes on because he's not just a creator. He's a creator in control of time and history. Check this out in verse 25. He is the God who, who foils the signs of false prophets and makes fools of diviners, who overthrows the learning of the wise and turns it into nonsense, who carries out the words of his servants and fulfills the predictions of his messengers. God is saying that he holds the direction of history in his hands down to the finest minutia. He sees, God sees to it, that the predictions of false prophets fail. He wants to show they're not real. They don't see the future. But again, even more importantly,

he also wants to show that when his spirit inspires one of his servants, to speak about the future, to speak about the truth, God ensures that that prediction comes to pass because it came from him. So let's just ask the question, what precisely is in view here? What's the thing that God is predicting will happen through his servant, Isaiah? Let's pick up in verse 26, where it says that he is the God who says to Jerusalem, it shall be inhabited. Remember, in the vision, Jerusalem has been torn down. It's been left behind. The people have been exiled. But here, God says, no, a day is coming after exile. It shall be inhabited. Of the towns of Judah, they shall be rebuilt. And of their ruins, I will restore them. Who says to the watery deep, be dry, and I will dry up your streams.

God's servant predicts the inversion of reality. He uses a metaphor of a ruin. and the deep waters. When God says to the ruin, be rebuilt, it's like the ruin goes backwards. It returns to its former glory. And when Isaiah speaks of the deep, he's talking about a place of chaos, a place that seems to be outside of God's control, but it's inside of God's control, because when he says to the deeps, be dry, they disappear. The chaos is gone. God is in charge. So let's get even more specific, because Isaiah is predicting that Jerusalem itself will be rebuilt. Now, Again, imagine hearing this in 700 BC. At this point, Jerusalem hasn't even fallen.

Its destruction feels impossible. God would never destroy his city. The idea that God would allow his people to go in exile, that seemed impossible. And yet, it would happen. And even more impossible than the city being destroyed, it would seem impossible that it could ever be rebuilt. Because the people know what happens. When you go to Assyria or Babylon, when you're exiled to one of those places, you are

assimilated into the culture. You become like the people that you live amongst. And so there would be no rebuilding. What Jerusalem was, wouldn't be remembered. Now, of course, the question people would want to ask is, how is God going to do this? And now we're finally to where I started, to one of the most remarkable predictions in all of the Old Testament. Let's read verse 28. He is the God who says of Cyrus.

He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please. He will say of Jerusalem, let it be rebuilt. and of the temple let its foundations be laid. Of course, the question people would ask at this point is, who is Cyrus? Who's this person through whom God is going to bring about the restoration of his holy city? That's the question everyone in 700 BC would be asking. And even more than that, they would have remarked about the strangeness of this man's name. You see, his name's not Hebrew.

His name's not Acadian, which was the language of the Assyrians. It's not Aramaic, the language of the Babylonians. No, this is a name from a country that they've never even heard of. This is the name from a place that has never had serious imperial aspirations. It's a Persian name from the region of Persis, which is almost all the way in India. And so everyone hearing this must have laughed. I mean, how fanciful is this whole thing? Babylon will rise again.

Jerusalem will fall. Jerusalem will be rebuilt. And all this will happen by the hands of a man who came from an impossibly distant land that could never defeat Assyria or Babylon or any nation like that. that. And for almost 200 years, this passage probably did seem laughable. Until the impossible happened, the Babylonians defeat the Assyrians before the turn of that century. A few decades later, they do destroy Jerusalem and exile the people. And then in 520 BC, almost 200 years after Isaiah's prophecy, a ruler named Cyrus comes to power in Persia. He conquered the Medes, he took Babylon

and all of its imperial holdings, and Persia became one of the largest empires in history. And Isaiah knew it 200 years ahead of time. The only reason to believe that is because God told him, and God's a creator who's in control and guides history. Here's what gets even more wild. Cyrus is the one who sent some of the people of Judah back to rebuild Jerusalem. And we know this from biblical history, but it also turns out that we know this from outside of biblical history, because it was Cyrus' policy for many ethnic groups that were exiled to Babylon. We still have extant documents that describes Cyrus sending people back to their motherlands the same way the Bible describes him doing it for the Israelites.

So what's the point of all this? I want to show you one fundamental truth. A prophet living in a backwater nation pincered between Assyria and Egypt had a vision of the future that would have been impossible to predict and yet it came to pass. Why? Because the prophet's source. the Creator God, who is in control of time and history. He is the sovereign of reality. And what's that mean for us? Put yourself into the shoes of Israel. During the time of the exile in Babylon,

it must have felt like that was the end of everything. But in truth, it was a time of purification, a time of sanctification. They were experiencing the penalty for their sin. And yet, God didn't give up on them. God was gracious to them. He removed the penalty. And by grace, he was, sent them back to their homes and in sending them back he ultimately made the path for jesus himself to come god was always working for their good he was willing to turn the wheels of time to favor them and if that's true of them how much more so of us if we know that those wheels continued to turn until they found their final destination in jesus how much more so should we be confident that our final destination with him is assured he's in control

How much more so should we know that our times of exile and suffering are but for a moment? He's in control. He'll see things through. How much more so should we rest assured that we worship a creator who controls history and time for the good of his creation and for the good of you?