NOTES for Isa 14:3

Is there a connection between personal or national independence and spiritual life? Sometimes it may seem that there is, and a very direct one. It is no accident that the first commandment of the Decalogue begins with the words "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery". And the return to the land of the fathers from the Babylonian captivity was also perceived by the repatriates as a sign that God had forgiven them, as a people, all the sins once committed by their ancestors.

But on the other hand, Paul, for example, says nothing in his letters about the necessity of legal freedom for slaves as an indispensable condition of their full Christian life, though he does not advise them to miss the chance to be freed from slavery if it presents itself. And the Babylonian captivity, for example, was in a spiritual sense a very rich time for the Jewish people, when the Torah was written and the Synagogue was formed. Why then do all the prophets, including Isaiah of Jerusalem, speak of liberation as an event not so much political as spiritual?

Perhaps the point here is not only liberation as such, but something else as well. Indeed, captivity, enslavement, and the loss of national independence become, both in the Torah and in prophetic preaching, the consequence of spiritual failures connected first of all with apostasy, as well as with other violations of the commandments given by God. Deliverance from captivity in that case becomes a sign that the spiritual condition of the people has again become normal, normal enough that the land God once gave their fathers can be returned to their administration without fear that they will defile it. And then liberation really does become a spiritual event: it means that God restores His union with the people, the covenant-union to which He remained faithful even when the people forgot it.