“My People Are Taken Over without Price!”

Can people disregard the relevance of Isaiah’s prophecy to our day yet suffer no consequences? Can they prepare to deal with the real hardships that lie ahead but with no foreknowledge of them? “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know,” a wise man once said. Isaiah’s use of people and events of the past as types of those that will exist in the future helps us to understand his message. God’s people of Isaiah’s day, for example, form a type of those who claim to be God’s people in the end-time. Applying to ourselves the things Isaiah says, therefore, even the unpleasant ones, will give us so much the advantage when end-time events begin to unfold.

A big part of Isaiah’s prophecy deals with the “Day of Jehovah”—God’s Day of Judgment upon a wicked world. Characterizing that phase of human history is God’s people’s subjection to bondage: “‘My people are taken over without price. Those who govern them act presumptuously,’ says Jehovah ‘and my name is constantly abused all the day’” (Isaiah 52:5). Economic distress—a covenant curse—gives his people’s leaders a chance to subjugate them. Isaiah compares the severity of that subjugation to Israel’s bondage in Egypt and servitude to Assyria (Isaiah 52:4). Things will get that bad, in other words, before Jehovah comes to reign (Isaiah 52:8–10).

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