Questions From Readers

● Please explain the application of Isaiah 14:12:14. Does it have any application to Satan the Devil?

Isaiah 14:12-14 reads: “‘O how you have fallen from heaven, you shining one, son of the dawn! How you have been cut down to the earth, you who were disabling the nations! As for you, you have said in your heart, ‘To the heavens I shall go up. Above the stars of God I shall lift up my throne, and I shall sit down upon the mountain of meeting, in the remotest parts of the north. I shall go up above the high places of the clouds; I shall make myself resemble the Most High.’”

The first application of Isaiah 14:12-14 is not to Satan the Devil, but is to the ruling dynasty of Babylonian kings beginning with Nebuchadnezzar and ending with Nabonidus and Belshazzar. This dynasty, referred to in Isa 14 verse 4 as the “king of Babylon,” exalted itself highly and shone brightly in the ancient world. Especially so did it desire to be superior to the line of kings that sat on the throne at Jerusalem. In Bible prophecy the kings of the royal line of David were likened to stars; and as these sat on the throne at Jerusalem called “Jehovah’s throne,” they had a brilliance, a royal glory. So, by desiring to make the Israelite kings mere vassals and by finally dethroning them and thus setting himself up above these royal “stars of God,” Babylon’s king was saying in his heart that his ambition was to go up to the heavens of Jehovah, lift his pagan throne up above the symbolic “stars of God” and seat himself on the northerly mountain where Israelites met with their God. In this way Babylon’s king would appear to put himself up above the God of Israel, whom he thus defied, challenged. When Nebuchadnezzar dethroned the “stars of God” at Jerusalem and over turned “Jehovah’s throne,” he may have appeared to himself and to the pagan world to have lifted himself heaven-high. (Compare Matthew 11:23.) So it was the “king of Babylon” who, by what he did to Zion or Jerusalem, had become the “shining one, son of the dawn.” But as ancient Babylon’s fall in 539 B.C.E. this ruling dynasty of Babylonian kings was dethroned, cut down. So rightly could Isaiah say of them: “How you have been cut down to the earth!”

However, the second application of Isaiah 14:12-14 is to Satan the Devil as the king of modern Babylon the Great, that world empire of false religion. Satan the Devil planned to exalt his throne above even the throne being given to God’s Son, Jesus Christ, in 1914. But in the conflict fought in the heavens from 1914 to 1918 the enthroned King Jesus Christ cast Satan out of the heavens down to the vicinity of the earth, debasing him. So of him Isaiah could prophetically state: “How you have been cut down to the earth!” Babylon the Great also had suffered a fall. This was proved by the fact that in 1919 the captive remnant of spiritual Israel was set free, no longer in bondage to religious Babylon the Great and her king, Satan the Devil.

So while the first application of Isaiah 14:12-14 was to the literal, visible king of ancient Babylon, the modern-day application is to the invisible king of modern Babylon the Great, Satan the Devil, as symbolized by the ancient king of Babylon.