This segment presents Yahweh as the transcendent God who controls the destiny of nations. He creates history just as He created the cosmos. The victory of the Assyrians did not prove the superiority of her gods nor did Judah's defeat mean that Yahweh was inferior. The whole passage contrasts sovereignties: Assyria's and Yahweh's.
Assyria was simply an unwitting tool in Yahweh's hand that He would use to accomplish His purposes (cf. Hab. 1:12-17). This pericope is one of the greatest revelations of the relation between heaven and earth in the Bible.127
10:5-6 Assyria was like a rod in God's hand; He controlled her actions. He would send her to discipline godless Judah against whom God's fury burned, "to capture booty and to seize plunder"(v. 6, the meaning of Maher-shalal-hash-baz's name, 8:1, 3). However, Assyria was in for woe herself (cf. v. 1) because she failed to acknowledge that she was under the sovereign authority of Yahweh.
10:7 Assyria did not consciously serve God. She planned to pursue her own selfish purposes and to destroy many nations to expand her own empire. She mistakenly thought she was sovereign.
10:8-11 Assyria, in her unrealistic pride, boasted, in the person of her king, that her princes were the equivalent of kings, so great was their authority. She assumed that the cities of Judah were the same as the cities of other nations, namely, without Yahweh's special concern. She mistakenly thought that Judah's God was just another god (cf. 2 Kings 18:33-35). Therefore she planned to do to Judah and Jerusalem just as she had done to other nations and their great cities. In each of the three pairs of cities listed (v. 9), the first is farther southwest than the second. The prophet portrayed the Assyrian king as thinking, "I took that one, so I can take this one."
10:12 When God finished using Assyria as His rod to punish Mt. Zion and Jerusalem, He would punish Assyria too for her arrogance and haughtiness (not for her ignorance of God's sovereignty). The prose form of this verse, which serves as a climax in a long section of poetry, makes this major point stand out all the more clearly.
"God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are always in perfect balance in the Word of God. Even though we are not able to reconcile these paradoxical facts, we can believe both because the Bible teaches both. God is sovereign in His universe; and at the same time man is fully accountable to God for all his acts."128
10:13-14 Assyria, again personified (cf. vv. 8-11), manifested arrogance and haughtiness by boasting that all her victories were the result of her own strength and intelligence (cf. Rom. 1:19-21). She felt, as many nations have, including Nazi Germany, that she was superior and therefore had the right to determine the fates of inferiors. She had a right to steal from others who could not or would not defend themselves.
10:15 It is illogical, the prophet pointed out, for the impersonal instrument of judgment to exalt itself over the person who wields it.
10:16 Because of Assyria's pride, sovereign Yahweh of armies would defeat this mighty foe. Isaiah described her fall as resulting from a wasting disease and a consuming fire.129
10:17-18 The Assyrians were jumping into a fire by invading Jerusalem. The fire would come from the light of Israel, namely, her holy God (cf. 8:12-15). This fire would consume the small and the great in Assyria, from the lowly thorns to the beautiful garden plants to the mighty trees of the forest.
10:19 The remaining trees (leaders) would be so few that a small child would be able to count them.
In 701 B.C. the Assyrians besieged Jerusalem and God slew 185,000 of them in one night (37:36-37). The Babylonians felled the Assyrian Empire in 609 B.C.130
The focus of the prophecy shifts from Assyria to Israel.
10:20 In some future day, the remnant (cf. 6:13; 7:3) who escaped annihilation by the Assyrians would no longer trust in man for deliverance, as Ahaz and Judah did before the Assyrian takeover. They would learn this most important lesson and truly trust in Yahweh, the holy one of Israel. Thus Israel would be the really wise and strong nation, not Assyria (cf. v. 13). Israel, as well as Assyria (v. 19), would have a remnant left over after the Lord's destruction of both nations.
10:21 A remnant would return (Shearjashub, 7:3) to the genuinely mighty God. It would be a remnant of the whole house of Jacob, all the Israelites. The reference to the mighty God (cf. 9:5) along with the sincere change of attitude in Israel, one that has not yet taken place, points to a time of fulfillment in Messiah's reign. "That day"(v. 20), as elsewhere, is a millennial reference.
10:22-23 God had promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the sand of the sea (Gen. 22:17; 32:12). This did not mean, as the Israelites in Isaiah's day apparently concluded, that they would always be a large people. No, God would so thoroughly destroy them because of their sin that only a small number would survive (cf. Rom. 9:27-28). The sovereign Yahweh of armies would destroy them throughout the whole Promised Land, not just in the Northern Kingdom.
10:24-27 The Lord used reminders of two previous deliverances to encourage the residents of Jerusalem to believe that they would survive the attack of a stronger and larger foe. He had delivered their forefathers from Egypt and the Midianites, and He had destroyed the Egyptians and the Midianites (Judg. 7:25).131The Assyrian oppression would not last long (cf. 9:4), and God would then discipline the disciplinarian of His people. God's blessing on His people would be responsible for the breaking of the yoke of bondage on them.
10:28-32 Isaiah foresaw the Assyrian army descending on Jerusalem from the north passing through various towns and finally arriving at Nob just north of Jerusalem. From that location, probably Mt. Scopus, which was somewhat higher in elevation than Mt. Zion, the enemy looked down on Jerusalem and shook his fist menacingly.
10:33-34 The prophet now changed his perspective as well as his figure. Even though Assyria would menace and, indeed, destroy Jerusalem, Yahweh of armies would cut the enemy down to size as a lumberjack trimmed branches off a tree and finally felled it. God's irresistible instrument would cut back Assyria's many lofty leaders. This would be a felling as colossal as the harvesting of Lebanon's vast forests (cf. Ezek. 31:3).
