Isaiah 27:1

In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27:1 belongs to the first division of the book, chapters 1 through 39, given during Isaiah's active public work as God's messenger to the rulers and the people of the nation. It stands as one of distinct single prophecies given at different times and on different occasions and afterward gathered into one collection, rather than belonging to the later wholly future-focused contemplation of chapters 40 to 66. The prophecy containing it began around 760 B.C. and was spoken during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, a stormy time for God's people.

It belongs to prophecies that look forward to the last days and God's judgments upon the earth. More particularly it concerns the earth's destruction and desolation because of sin and the deliverance of God's children. It also sets forth visions of the last days in which the conditions, false prophets, and sins of Isaiah's own time resemble those of the last days, so the warnings given then apply now, and the same God who was mighty to save then is mighty to save now.

The Hebrew word for Leviathan the piercing and crooked serpent is nachash, picturing the fallen Eden serpent. That same nachash before the curse was a bright, glowing, fascinating, flying, seraphic creature, was degraded to low groveling habits by the curse, and appears in Isaiah as Leviathan, the fallen nachash. The sea dragon, leviathan, and crooked serpent are symbols of Satan, who controls the restless peoples of earth alienated from God.

By naming Satan as Leviathan, the crooked serpent and dragon, the verse presents him as an actual, individual being rather than an abstraction of evil or a figure for sinful principles. It is included among God's promises to his people in the final conflict, where the Lord's punishment of Leviathan is part of his victory over the foe who opposes heaven. It portrays Leviathan, the piercing and crooked serpent and dragon in the sea, as doomed to everlasting downfall, and its words about his final destruction are a prophecy of Satan's end.

The image of the enemy as a crooked serpent whose course is devious and whose forms change illustrates the many changing errors that seek to destroy God's people and blind human minds. Those who held that the Lord smites the papacy with his hard, great, and strong sword understood the smiting as the stripping of papal power and support. That stripping included the withdrawal of the French army from Rome, the taking of Rome by Victor Emanuel, the abandonment of the pope by kings and governments despite their fine phrases, hostile legislation in Italy to extinguish religious congregations and confiscate and auction church goods, and resistance and conflict over civil versus church law in Germany and the Swiss cantons. Pius IX himself confessed that the Lord had truly so smitten the church, that nothing was to be expected from human aid, that all was lost except by miracle, and that the divine anger must be appeased in the acceptable time of the advent of the Lord.

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