Spiritual wickedness in high places powerless to resist God.
As Isaiah was, somehow or other, brought into contact with the dualistic doctrine of the Zoro-astrians (Isaiah 45:5-7), it was important that he should bear witness to the impotency of the powers of evil when they matched themselves against Jehovah. The Zoroastrians taught that there were two great principles, one of good, and the other of evil, whom they called respectively Ahura-mazda and Angro-mainyus, who were both of them uncreated and independent one of the other, and between whom there had been from all eternity, and always would be, a bitter contest and rivalry, each seeking to injure, baffle, and in every possible way annoy and thwart the other. Both principles were real persons, possessed of will, intelligence, power, consciousness, and other personal qualities. The struggle between them was constant and well-balanced, with certainly no marked preponderance of the good over the evil. Whatever good thing Ahura-mazda had created from the beginning of time, Angro-mainyus had corrupted and ruined it. Moral and physical evils were alike at his disposal. He could blast the earth with barrenness, or make it produce thorns, thistles, and poisonous plants; his were the earthquake, the storm, the plague of hail, the thunderbolt; he could cause disease and death, sweep off a nation's flocks and herds by murrain, or depopulate a continent by pestilence; ferocious wild beasts, serpents, toads, mice, hornets, mosquitoes, were his creation; he had invented and introduced into the world the sins of witchcraft, murder, unbelief, cannibalism; he excited wars and tumults, continually stirred up the bad against the good, and labored by every possible expedient to make vice triumph over virtue. Ahura-mazda could exercise no control over him; the utmost that he could do was to keep a perpetual watch upon his rival, and seek to baffle and defeat him. This he was not always able to; despite his best endeavors, Angro-mainyus was not infrequently victorious. It was probably to meet this doctrine, and prevent its having weight with his disciples, that Isaiah taught so explicitly the nothingness of the highest powers of evil in any contest with the Almighty. He had already stated that, at the end of the world, God would visit and punish "the host of the high ones that were on high," as well as the kings of the earth upon the earth (Isaiah 24:21). He now presents evil in a threefold personal form of the highest awfulness and grandeur, and declares its conquest in this threefold form by Jehovah. God is to "punish" the two leviathans with his sword, and actually to "slay the dragon." This might seem to go beyond the statements of the Revelation of St. John (Revelation 20:10); but it is probably to be understood, in the same sense, of a living death. The triumph is at any rate complete, final, unmistakable. Evil can do nothing against good, but is wholly overcome by it.