The Isaiah Project: Chapter 60, or, Sons of Ishamel

I can't remember if I've said this already once before, but I think this chapter might be my favorite in the entire prophecy. Enjoy.

The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 60

1. Get up. Catch the light — your light: it’s here, and God’s majesty has dawned above you.

2. Look how the pitch dark is veiling earth, gloom lowering over every people. But above you is dawning God, and his majesty, above you coming into sight.

3. Then nations come to your light, and kings to your shining dawn.

4. Lift up your eyes; look around you and see — they’re all gathered, they’ve come to you: Sons of yours from far away. They’re coming, and your daughters too, snug against the hip that carries them.

5. Then you’ll see, and pour forth radiance, and your heart will quiver and swell, Because the ocean’s teeming abundance will be shifting towards you; the wealth of mighty nations coming to you.

6. Camels in droves will cover you, with dromedaries from Midian and Ephah. Everyone from Sheba will come. They’ll be carrying incense and gold. They will let the world hear their hymns praising God.

7. Every lamb from Kedar will be gathered to you. Rams from Nebaioth will wait on you. They’ll climb up into the gracious welcome of my altar, and with glory upon glory, I will adorn the house of my splendour.

8. Who are these? Like clouds they’ve taken wing — just like doves to their nests.

9. The islands will put their high hopes in me, and the ships of Tarshish first and foremost — to bring your sons from far away, their gold and silver with them, to the name of God, your god and Israel’s Sacred One, because he has adorned you.

10. Foreign sons will fortify your walls, and foreign kings will wait on you. Because in my fury I bludgeoned you, but in my mercy I welcomed you into my spacious heart.

11. Your city gates are opened without interruption, night and day; they will never close — so the might of nations can come into you, with their kings in tow.

12. Those nations will dry up — dry up and decay and be desolate.

13. Lebanon’s majesty will come to you: firs and juniper and cedars all together to adorn my sacred place. I will give majesty to the place where my feet rest.

14. Then bowing low before you come the sons of those who abased you. Those who once despised you will grovel at the soles of your feet and call you City of God, Zion of Israel’s Sacred One.

15. Instead of being abandoned and despised, with no one passing through you, I will set you forever the pride, the delight of generation after generation.

16. You’ll suckle the nations’ milk, and suckle at royal breasts. You’ll know that I am God who saves you, who redeems you, Jacob’s juggernaut.

17. I’ll bring gold to replace your brass, bring silver to replace your iron; steel in place of wood and iron in place of stone. I’ll appoint peace as your officer and righteousness as your magistrate.

18. Violence will never be heard in your territory again, nor demolition and vandalism within your borders. You will call your walls salvation, and your city gates will be called hymns of praise.

19. The sun won’t be your light by day anymore; the radiance of the moon won’t light you up — God will be your light always, and your god will be your adornment.

20. Your sun will never set again, and your moon won’t go back down, because God will be your light forever. Your days of grief will reach their end.

21. Then your people will be righteous, all of them, forever. They’ll take possession of the land — the branch I planted, the work of my hand, to adorn myself.

22. Even little ones will become thousands, and even tiny troops will become warrior nations. I am God: I hurry it towards its appointed time.

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Not all the sons of Abraham inherited his promise. Ishmael, first son of the first chosen man, child of the bondswoman Hagar, was cast out when his half-brother Isaac was born to the matriarch Sarah in Abraham’s old age. Isaac: the miracle boy, the son of God’s own giving, the covenant made flesh. Ishmael: the dispossessed.

Ishmael fathered sons in his own right and saw God’s favor in his own way, his twelve boys growing to chiefly stature throughout the regions east of Israel. There were others, too: Midian, son of Abraham and the concubine Keturah, and his son Ephah. These sons of Abraham were lords in fertile and wealthy lands. They warred and traded like the rest, with Israel and with others. But whatever else they came to possess, they did not inherit membership among the chosen people of the Jews.

There is a poignancy and pain implicit in the presence of these shadow-sons, these remnants of Abraham’s old life before divine intervention changed everything forever. Who among us can say how or why we found faith when others didn’t, why the grace of belief fell upon us and not our brothers, our parents, our friends? Any adult convert knows the ache of that chasm that opens up, that sword which Christ brings to divide believers from their uncomprehending relatives. You love them, you live alongside them, but how can you account for the difference between them and you? Why can’t they see the truth you see at the heart of things? For that matter, why can you see it?

There is a mystery in this that I don’t pretend to understand, and I am at least not foolish enough to try and explain it. But I notice in this chapter of Isaiah that however much we may long to bring the ones we love into God’s covenant, God longs for it more. Tribes born of Abraham and his bondswomen—Kedar and Nebaioth, Midian and Ephah—are described here as lost children, and Jerusalem as their grieving mother.

But at the moment of her deepest bereavement, when it seems as if they could never be hers again, in the despair before the Last Days, then: her city gates are suddenly thrown open and her lost children come flooding back. “Lift up your eyes; look around you and see — they’re all gathered, they’ve come to you: Sons of yours from far away. They’re coming, and your daughters too, snug against the hip that carries them” (Verse 4).

There will be a moment of incomprehension—“who are these?”—but “then you’ll see, and pour forth radiance, and your heart will quiver and swell, Because the ocean’s teeming abundance will be shifting towards you; the wealth of mighty nations coming to you” (verse 5).

The sons of Ishmael were not lost: they were wandering. In all their years of war and commerce, all their worldly fascinations and pursuits, they were—unbeknownst even to them—gathering wealth and offerings to bring back and lay at the feet of their mother, of their city, of their God.

The sheer variety of the gifts they bring will be staggering; the panoply of what they offer will dazzle in the hot Israeli sun. Spices, camels, songs, languages, food, wine. There is an appointed time for this, a moment like the flip of a switch when the things which seemed to belong to the secular world are turned to the glory of God. Like gemstones, they will catch the light and show their true colors.

In everything—in every culture whose works are degraded and every person of your acquaintance whose life looks to you like empty hedonism—there is a lost divine potential waiting to be reclaimed. Perhaps in some people it is easy for you to see that potential; perhaps in others it is not—God does not make such distinctions. Your job—your commandment—is not to give up on any of it. None of it is lost until that day and that hour which no one knows but the father, when all that was once his shall be his again.

Rejoice evermore
Spencer