God's Inheritance Is Never Abandoned

In today's first reading, Isaiah 10: 5-7, 13b-16, Assyria is a "rod in anger" and God's "staff in wrath". Through the prophet  Isaiah, God says: "Against an impious nation I send him, and against a people under my wrath I order him to seize plunder, carry off loot, and tread them down like the mud of the streets. But this is not what he [the empire of Assyria] intends, nor does he have this in mind: rather,  it is in his heart to destroy, to make an end of  nations not a few. For he says: 'By my own power I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am shrewd. I have moved the boundaries of peoples, their treasures I have pillaged, and, like a giant, I have put down the enthroned. My hand has seized like a nest the riches of nations; as one takes eggs left alone, so I took in all the earth; no one fluttered a wing, or opened a mouth, or chirped!'"

God is furious at Assyria's claim and will to destroy other nations. Clearly, though, Assyria will suffer consequences for its fury toward other nations, including God's chosen people.  Did God use Assyria to chastise His people, to bring them back to the fold, to bring them to repentance? We can say "yes" in the sense that God uses the evil which any nation or any person encounters as a means to chastise us and bring us to repentance, to turn us from idolatrous ways. However, to those bringing harm and tragedy to another country or persons, in this case the empire of Assyria, God says the following, as noted in this passage from Isaiah: "Therefore the Lord, the Lord of hosts, will send among his fat ones leanness, and instead of  his glory there will be kindling like the kindling of fire."

In the responsorial psalm of today's liturgy, Psalm 94, we cry out on behalf of victims of violence:  "Your people, O Lord, they trample down, your inheritance they afflict. Widow and stranger they slay, the fatherless they murder. And they [those raging war and committing acts of violence] say, 'The Lord sees not; the God of Jacob perceives not.' Understand you senseless ones among the people; and, you fools, when will you be wise? Shall he who shaped the ear not hear or he who formed the eyes not see? Shall he who instructs nations not chastise, he who teaches men knowledge? For the Lord will not cast off his people, nor abandon his inheritance."

We are God's inheritance and, as such, we will be chastised when we do wrong but never abandoned. The psalmist reminds us  that God's "judgment shall...be with justice, and all the upright of heart shall follow it."