Isaiah 17:9-11
Forgetting God makes even the most diligent labor fruitless.
9 In that day, their strong cities will be like the forsaken places in the woods and on the mountain top, which were forsaken from before the children of Israel; and it will be a desolation.
10 For you have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not remembered the rock of your strength. Therefore you plant pleasant plants, and set out foreign seedlings.
11 In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make your seed blossom, but the harvest flees away in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.
Forgetting God makes even the most diligent labor fruitless.
To explain the cause of desolation in Israel’s fortified cities and expose the futility of human planting apart from remembering God.
During Isaiah's time the northern kingdom of Israel sought security through alliances and economic strategies rather than reliance on the LORD.
The Oracle Against Damascus, the Fading Glory of Jacob, and the Rebuke of the Raging Nations
Isaiah 17 declares that Damascus and Ephraim fall because false reliance and forgetting God cannot stand, yet judgment leaves a remnant who look to the Maker and shows that the LORD can rebuke raging nations into nothing.