Let us go to Isaiah 24. I believe this is one of those places. We start in verse 19 and read all the way through the end of the chapter, and then we will pick it up in chapter 25, verse 6. By the way, this section from 24 through 25 is often called by scholars Isaiah's Apocalypse because it has a lot of similarities to the book of Revelation.
This is all stuff that the Lord of hosts does. And under this title, He is here shown as the Lord of judgment. He is also the Lord of royal dignity. He is also the Lord of blessing and abundance, and of course, He is the Lord of salvation.
Again, this title, while it has connotations of being a divine warrior, also stresses His sovereignty over His creation, and this is very important for arguments about why He appears as a warrior because He is sovereign over His creation. He is sovereign; He is the One who makes God's purpose work. He makes it go. He is, to use language we just used, supreme Commander over all things. He has that prerogative to do all these things: to rule, to bless, to judge, to save, and to make war. Everything proceeds at His word. He is like the great general of God's plan. And He gives the commands; He is the Word. Words go out of His mouth and things are accomplished.
So we have got to unhitch a little bit this idea of the Lord of hosts or the divine warrior from just warfare. We need to understand that He commands everything in every aspect, and only one aspect is that He is Commander of the armies of the Lord who make war. Now, we are reminded of this a little bit in Matthew 28:18, where in His last words to His disciples, He says that God had given Him all authority in heaven and on earth, so they should go forth and make disciples, preach the gospel, baptize, teach all nations.
Now He is not the Commander of the armies of the church; He is actually the Commander or, as we look at it, the Head of the church, preaching the gospel, moving that part of the plan forward. There was a lot more war that had to take place under physical Israel because they were a nation of this world. Now He is doing the same things, but He is doing it with the church, and all His commands, all His warfare, if you will, is of a spiritual nature. But that does not mean that He will not come back and do the war again when necessary.
