The Isaiah Project: Chapter 62, or, "You Promised."
Welcome back. I believe we will probably finish this journey together in the month to come. Thank you for following along with me, and enjoy.
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 62
1. For Zion’s sake I will not hold back. For the sake of Jerusalem, I will never rest until her triumph pours forth like radiance, her salvation like a blazing flame.
2. Then nations will see your triumph. All the kings will see your majesty, and they’ll call you by a new name which God’s mouth will pronounce.
3. You will be a crown, an adornment in God’s hand, a regal diadem in the palm of your god’s hand. 4. No one will call you abandoned ever again, or ever again call your land devastated. Because they’ll call you ‘My Delight is in her,’ and your territory ‘Wedded Wife’ — because the delight of God is in you, and your land is wedded. 5. Yes: as a chosen son weds a maiden girl, your sons will wed you. And with the joy of a groom in his bride, your god will rejoice in you. 6. On your walls, Jerusalem, I’ve assigned guardians to keep you: every day and every night unceasingly. They will never rest. You who commemorate God — never go silent! 7. And don’t let him have any quiet either, until he plants down firmly. Until he sets Jerusalem up as a praise-song in the Earth. 8. God committed himself. He promised by his right hand and the brawn of his arm: never again will I give your grain to your enemies to eat; never again will foreigners’ sons drink the fresh wine you’ve laboured over. 9. No, the ones that reaped it will eat it, and they’ll praise God. The ones who gathered it in will drink it in the courtyards of my sanctuary. 10. Pass through! Pass through the gates; clear the people’s way; rear up! Rear up and get the rocks out of the roadways; raise a standard above the peoples. 11. Look: God! He makes it heard at the ends of the Earth: ‘say to the daughter of Zion: look, your salvation is coming; look, his reward is with him and his payment is in sight.’ 12. Then they’ll call them ‘Sacred People, God’s Redeemed.’ And they’ll call you ‘Sought After, Undeserted City.’I love that Isaiah doesn’t care about our pieties. Maybe it’s perverse, the delight I take in his sudden refusal to play by modern church rules. But it tickles me just the same when this chosen man of God defies all our prim religious conventions—when scripture itself is far more raw than we let ourselves be in church most of the time.
In this chapter, if we’ve been following along, we are likely to be nodding politely as Isaiah describes the watchmen who will guard Jerusalem forever at the Last Day. This is a series of chapters in which the prophet looks forward to the restoration of Israel and the return of all people to God’s beloved city. “I will never rest until [Jerusalem’s] triumph pours forth like radiance, her salvation like a blazing flame” (verse 1). It’s very beautiful, but at this point we expect this sort of thing. “You who commemorate God — never go silent!” (verse 6).
Then suddenly, an unexpected twist in verse 7: “And don’t let him have any quiet either.... Until he sets Jerusalem up as a praise-song in the Earth” (emphasis added). Him? Whom? God, apparently: “God committed himself. He promised by his right hand and the brawn of his arm: never again will I give your grain to your enemies to eat; never again will foreigners’ sons drink the fresh wine you’ve laboured over” (verse 8). With none of the stern dignity we expect, with none of the pastor’s simpering deference, Isaiah practically points his finger at heaven and insists bluntly: “you promised.”
We are shy, to say the least, about holding God’s feet to the fire in this way. And to be fair, all of us have been tempted in the past to demand from God the fulfilment of promises he never made: to demand an easy life, or a life without tragedy, or a life of uninterrupted material comfort. God never promised any of those things, so the entitlement which would demand them is a sin against which we rightly guard ourselves.
But God has promised—in the most vivid terms, through this magnificent sequence of chapters which ends Isaiah’s prophecy—to swallow up death forever, to put an end at last to the suffering of this tormented world. Since this is something which has very obviously not happened yet, we should feel as entitled as favored sons to insist upon it in prayer. With gratitude, surely, as for an undeserved gift—but with no sense of impropriety or shame—we should present to God our petitions for an ending of the world that exceeds all our expectations.
Our failure to do so is often, I expect, a kind of faithlessness—a reticence to believe that God could possibly do the best kinds of things we imagine. Could really end death and bring the dead back to life. Could really save loved ones who seem hopelessly lost in addiction or meaningless pleasure. Could really bring us face-to-face with a joy that so outweighs the atrocities of history as to make them seem of no account. Yet if we can imagine all this, God can surely do it, and better. We commit no sin by expecting, as Isaiah did, that all these good things and more shall come to pass.
Rejoice evermore,Spencer