(Read Isaiah 64:1-9)
Note: This blog post is split up into sections for ease of reading.
Isaiah 64:1-2
Faith turns to the Lord in prayer. Even when God appears barricaded in heaven, ignoring the suffering of his people, faith prays. Consider the example of King Hezekiah. When King Hezekiah peered out from behind Jerusalem’s walls to see the Assyrian army massed around his city, all appeared to be lost. No nation had been able to resist the military power of Assyria. Although Hezekiah “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done” (2 Chronicles 29:2), the Assyrian forces appeared to be irresistible and the destruction of Jerusalem inevitable. Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, had led his forces against several other cities of Judah and had overcome every defense. The Assyrian commander taunted Hezekiah and the people of Jerusalem. In his arrogant speech before the walls of Jerusalem, the enemy commander offered to give King Hezekiah two thousand horses if he could only put riders on them (Isaiah 36). It was a desperate time. Isaiah recorded the response of Hezekiah to these circumstances: “When King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went into the temple of the Lord” (37:1). The writer of Chronicles recorded, “King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz cried out in prayer to heaven about this” (2 Chronicles 32:20).
In such ominous times, God’s believers always turn to the Lord in prayer. This prayer serves as another example. All appeared hopeless. God remained silent. Yet faith held to the promises of God. The one praying utters a desperate plea to the God of heaven: “Our Father, our Redeemer from of old” (63:16). “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!” These are the words of a believer facing difficult troubles and yet clinging to God’s promises of power and grace. For this believer, all seems to be out of balance. Evil seems to triumph. Good retreats in the face of persecution. God’s enemies smugly defy God, and no one can restrain them. The prophet turns to God and asks him to step in and correct the imbalance: “O Lord, come. Assert your power. Protect and deliver your people. Destroy your enemies and the enemies of your people.”
Isaiah 64:3-5a
The prayer began with a recitation of “the many good things [the Lord] has done for the house of Israel” (63:7). Here the praying prophet pins his prayer onto the grace God had demonstrated to his people in the past. God had done awesome things no one could have expected. The Exodus was one such example. Before God called Moses, who ever would have imagined an entire nation leaving their bondage? Who could have thought God would deliver his people by separating the sea and leading them safely to the other side? Who could have predicted that the pride of Pharaoh’s army would be drowned in the Red Sea? If we need an example of the mountains trembling, consider Mount Sinai. When the Lord descended, “the whole mountain trembled violently” (Exodus 19:18). This prayer attaches its hope of future deliverance upon the past grace of God.
What would that deliverance be? How would it come? Just as no one in the past could have imagined the Exodus, so no human could ever imagine the deliverance God has provided for his people. God’s entire plan of salvation lay outside the scope of human thought and imagination. Who could imagine that God would send his one and only Son as a substitute to redeem the world from sin and deliver all humanity from death? Who would have ever imagined that God would accomplish this by sacrificing his own Son? What human mind could have anticipated the empty tomb? Would any single human imagine that by faith in God’s Servant, Jesus Christ, a man or woman could become an adopted child of God? God reveals these truths to humanity. God proclaimed his plan through the prophets and then recorded the fulfillment of his plan through the evangelists of the New Testament. The wisdom of God’s gracious plan lies beyond the imagination and thought of the most gifted human mind. If anyone is to understand God’s grace, God himself must impart that understanding to the human mind. The apostle Paul understood. After citing verse 4 of this chapter, he reminded his readers, “God has revealed it to us by his Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:10).
God’s deliverance always goes beyond what the human intellect can imagine by itself. While God’s people were captive in Babylon, the faithful turned to the Lord in prayer and asked for deliverance. Without the promises of God through the prophets, including Isaiah, not one of them could have imagined that God would break the power of imperial Babylon and free his people. Those who tenaciously held on to the promises God had spoken knew God’s deliverance was to come. Isaiah had even foretold that Cyrus would be their deliverer. But even they did not know exactly how it would happen. The edict by the Persian king, Cyrus, was the answer to their prayers and the fulfillment of God’s promises.
In this prayer, Isaiah held fast to the principle that God would act “on behalf of those who wait for him.” That principle lies at the base of all Christian prayer. Believers turn to God in prayer, hoping and trusting that God will act to help. All religions teach people to offer prayers to their gods. Yet only the prayers addressed to the Lord Jehovah in faith reach the throne of grace and receive the answer and action of the Lord. All other prayers are only placebos for fear, guilt, and trouble. Isaiah reminds us that God comes “to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember [his] ways.”
Who are those who “do right” and “remember [his] ways”? They are the faithful believers who cling to the promises of God—those in whose hearts the Holy Spirit has created faith through the gospel. Such a person becomes happy in the righteousness of the Lord and gladly does as God desires. A believer understands that he or she has been declared righteous by the Lord and then joyfully responds with a life that conforms to God’s will. A faithful believer remembers the ways of God. But the ways of God are not only his laws for love and justice in human behavior but also his wonderful principle of undeserved grace for sinners. Such are God’s ways. So believers pray and have the promise of God’s action on their behalf.
Isaiah 64:5b-7
Why should God respond to this prayer or to any prayer spoken by any human? When we considered the time of the Exodus, we noted God’s dramatic and unexpected deliverance of his people. God unexpectedly and graciously acted to provide deliverance for his people. Why should God act in this way? Only a few months after such a dramatic deliverance, the people worshiped a golden image in the wilderness. God in anger told Moses: “I have seen these people, . . . and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation” (Exodus 32:9,10). Throughout their history, such perversity and rebellion dogged the people God had claimed from Egypt. In view of all their sins, how could they expect God to deliver them? Isaiah had thundered God’s condemnation upon the disobedience and rebellion of God’s people of his day. By what right could any of them expect God’s help and aid?
Isaiah included himself among the rebellious and sinful. “All of us . . .” he confessed. In those words God’s prophet proclaimed a principle that extends to all humanity of all time. He included us as well. “All of us have become like one who is unclean.” The word unclean means “polluted and defiled.” The Levitical laws described many things, such as certain animals, as “unclean.” Isaiah confessed that the people themselves were “unclean” and placed himself among the polluted and defiled. Isaiah then emphasized the disgusting and revolting character of sin. The righteous acts of any human are nothing but filthy rags. The translation does not offend our sensitivities, but the original calls these righteous acts menstrual rags. How can we be saved when we are as unclean as such in God’s eyes? Why should God deliver us when even our best—“all our righteous acts”—are nothing more than dirty, bloody menstrual rags? Because of sin, we are disgusting in God’s eyes. The words convey the true nature of human sinfulness. Why indeed should the Holy One of Israel save anyone?
Isaiah goes on to describe what sin has done to every human. Sin makes us lifeless and dead like dry leaves that skitter and scrape across the ground in the autumn wind. By ourselves we have no life and can produce nothing of value in God’s eyes. Paul wrote, “You were dead in your transgressions and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Because of sin no human can call upon the Lord. We are helpless. God’s anger burns against all who sin. Isaiah describes God as hiding his face from the sinner. The picture grows more severe when he also says that God makes sinners waste away because of their sins. What a sad state of affairs for the sinner! God hides his face and turns the sinner over to his or her own sins. As sinners persist in their sins, God abandons them to their own imaginations. He withdraws himself and his grace and mercy. So Jesus, at times, remained silent in the face of opposition and told parables that persistent unbelievers could not understand. Each sin carries the sinner, step by step, farther away from God and closer to destruction and judgment. By nature, sin chains every human in its bondage and dooms everyone to destruction. By nature, sinners cannot rescue themselves from the inevitable consequences of their sins.
Isaiah 64:8-9
This wonderful prayer turns to the Lord once more and clings to his undeserved grace—“yet,” that is, in spite of our sins and in spite of the fact that even our best amounts to nothing but dirty menstrual rags. In spite of the disgusting stains of sin, the prayer expresses faith in the Lord. We find two names for God here: Lord and Father. Lord is the name for the God of free and faithful grace, the God of the covenant who revealed his name to Moses:
The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 34:6,7).
The second name, Father, recalls verse 16 of the previous chapter. This God is “our Father.” This cry of faith claims God as its dearest treasure.
Such faith also recognizes its relationship with this powerful and gracious God. The description of God as the potter certainly fits the history of God’s people. He called Abraham and then shaped and molded his descendants into a nation. God made them what they were. But the description also aptly describes God’s people individually. God shapes and molds every believer. We are the clay, and God molds us to the shape and for the use that he deems appropriate. We are the work of his hands. The apostle Paul declared that the Ephesians were dead in their sins, but he went on to assure them that God’s grace had saved them: “For we are God’s workmanship” (2:10).
Our disgusting sins separate us from God, yet faith turns to God and depends on his gracious promises. This turning to God in spite of sin finds power to pray trusting in the promises of God. As believers we have been taught to pray “in Jesus’ name.” God has no reason to listen to our prayers. Yet, when we come to him, we do not come to him on our own. We come to him in the name of Jesus, who has shed his blood to wash away our sins. God invites us to pray to him as dear children ask their dear Father. We can pray with confidence and boldness because, in Jesus, God is our dear Father. This prayer boldly erupts from the heart of a believer who trusts in the gracious promises of the Lord.
This blog post is an excerpt from The People’s Bible: Isaiah 40-66. You can check out the whole book here. The People’s Bible series is a Bible commentary for everyone. The authors of the series have served as pastors, college teachers, or seminary professors. Each author began with the original Hebrew or Greek text and then worked to bring the message of God’s Word to Christians who are looking to dive deeper into their study of the Bible. Two important truths guide all the commentaries: First, the Bible is God’s inspired Word and is therefore true and reliable. Second, the central message of the entire Bible is Jesus Christ.