“The Lord will extend his hand again to gather the remnant of his people that remains from Assyria and Egypt. … He will raise a signal to the nations, and he will collect the outcasts of Israel; the dispersed of Judah he will gather from the four corners of the earth.” (11:11-12 Quinn-Miscall p. 73)
The banner is raised again in Isaiah 11:12, and this time we’re given more detail about who responds. In short: everyone who chooses. The “four corners of the earth” refers all the way back to the four rivers that flow through Eden in Genesis 2, and to the four names of the child given to us in Isaiah 9:6, and to the four types of spirit that rests on the Shoot in Isaiah 11:2. It even refers forward to the four gospels that open the New Testament. Four is the number of prophetic completion (Quinn-Miscall p. 181).
Our modern symbol of completion no longer extends to corners of the earth, but to the moon that rules the night. Worship has taken place even in that distant location. On the Apollo 11 mission, a Presbyterian elder, Buzz Aldrin, flew up to the moon with consecrated wine and bread. There he worshiped: “the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
Aldrin’s mission brought back a two-pound moon rock, a speck of which was set in a nitrogen capsule and embedded in glass. This window now admits light to the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Not just distant nations, but celestial bodies have been brought into a position of worship.
Isaiah 11:11-13 describes a homecoming of worship, in which the remnant streams to God’s holy mountain, Zion. These people are low as the dust of the earth, those cast out like the Servant and dispersed by their participation in God’s wrath. Late in Isaiah, the Lord even expands the definition of “his people” to include the oppressive nations on which His wrath was poured out:
“The Lord strikes Egypt, striking and healing; they return to the Lord; he hears their prayers and heals them. On that day there is a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and Assyria goes to Egypt and Egypt to Assyria. Egypt worships with Assyria. On that day Israel is a third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of Hosts has blessed, ‘Blessed is my people Egypt; the work of my hands Assyria; and my heritage Israel.’” (19:22-25 Quinn-Miscall p.64)
(My own hands didn’t want to accept this passage. I accidentally typed “the work of my hands Israel” even as I was looking at “Assyria”!)
These nations are still the nations, but their worship has been transformed, to take place in spirit and in truth. They have dropped their idols and have turned to the YHWH, and when they do so, they are included in the streams of people flowing upward to Zion. In Romans 9-11, Paul works out what this means for the church, using the image of the branches of foreign nations grafted into Jesse’s root.
The nations stream together and grow together in peace. You can’t fight when you are worshiping the same One. In verse 11:13, Isaiah moves from external divisions (nations) to internal divisions (tribes of Israel). He says that houses will no longer be divided, but will stand.
The Northern and Southern Kingdoms will no longer “envy” each other. This word appears as both noun and verb, and the verb is common in Genesis. When Rachel can’t get pregnant, she envies her sister Leah for her children (30:1); later, when Rachel’s son Joseph dreams that his brothers would bow down to him, his brothers envy him (37:11).
Envy is not the end. The end of the book of Genesis shows how the brothers are reconciled with Joseph. This pattern will be followed again and again, as nations are brought into God’s own people, purified and healed. At the other end of the Bible, the beginning of the book of Acts and Paul’s letters show how people across the Roman Empire were welcomed to worship together.
Paul writes letters to help the early church work out how they are to live together, now that they have all gathered at the foot of the cross, their banner. Reading these today, sometimes Paul’s advice seems contradictory. Why does Paul’s advice about eating meat sacrifices to idols seem to differ between Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8? What about the passages concerning women in the church? Why does Paul’s advice about divorce appear to differ from Jesus’s in Matthew 19?
Each of these specific questions would require at least its own blog (TLDR: context matters, because each letter is written to a specific set of congregants). But the more general question driving each of these is, “How do all these different people in all these different places worship one God together?”
When Paul offers rules, he also expects his readers to think the rules through, in theological terms – and one of Paul’s favorite terms is freedom. Paul always insists that Jesus on the cross reconciled us to God, and to each other. In this we have freedom of conscience in complex and contingent situations.
The psychologist and writer Richard Beck recently concluded a series on Paul with a summary of how he saw reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in the church:
“In my estimation, what characterized Paul’s vision here was freedom. As he says in 2 Corinthians, ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.’ This was a freedom to follow the law and a freedom to let some of those things go. The crucial issue for Paul was treating each other respectfully in light of how we make these different discernments. You see Paul discussing this in Romans 14.” (https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2023/12/pauls-gospel-part-5-where-spirit-of.html)
Paul says transformation starts with looking to God: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 3:18) His light fills us and purifies us, and we are changed into the “same image,” colored by our own histories and personalities.
The God-given freedom of this new creation makes us shine with our own God-given colors, like pieces of stained glass set side by side in a rose window. Even a dead moon rock might find its place. Gentiles stay Gentiles and Jews stay Jews in the new kingdom, but they are both new creations joined together when illuminated with the one Light of the World, in Whom there is no Jew or Gentile.
Beyond the specific answers, which will always be somehow contextual, notice what kinds of questions are being asked in the first place. The early church is the only group of people asking questions like this in the entire Empire. They ask these questions because they have already been saved and justified, having come to Jesus, who stands as a banner on a mountain.
Paul’s letters are a record of what Jesus has already accomplished in making people stand before God, as Isaiah said He would. When they all get up there and look around, there are some very different people next to them, and they are tempted to envy or fight. But all who turn from idols to the living God join the fulfillment of Isaiah 11 and 19, as described in Romans 14 and 15, and when God is the focus, they live in freedom and in peace.
Turn from sidelong glances and worship God alone. After the purifying fire, He gives illuminating light. God says “Blessed is my people Egypt; the work of my hands Assyria; and my heritage Israel” — then he turns to you and adds your name to the list.
(Image: The Space Window in the National Cathedral, https://earthsky.org/human-world/moon-rock-washington-national-cathedral-stained-glass-window/ )
