64. Isaiah Chapter Sixty-Four

Isaiah Chapter 64 This chapter continues the prophet’s prayer. He cries to God to manifest His power against His adversaries so that the Gentile powers might tremble at His presence. The language recalls the way in which the Lord manifested His presence and power at Sinai. There the mountain quaked (r.v. margin) at His presence. He descended upon the mount in fire; smoke ascended as out of a furnace (Exodus 19:16-19). Thus revealing His Name to His people, He made them tremble. Would He not now manifest His power and judgment against the foe? (Isaiah 64:1-3). The prayer is based upon the fact of the absoluteness and uniqueness of God and His attributes, and of His ways of grace toward those who walk in His fear, having Him in remembrance and seeking to please Him: “For from of old men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen a God beside Thee, which worketh for him that waiteth for Him. Thou meetest [that is, coming forth to shew favor; cp. Genesis 32:1] him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember Thee in Thy ways” (Isaiah 64:4-5). The threefold combination of joy and righteousness and the remembrance of God has a special significance. It is possible to walk in righteousness in strict adherence to religion, without delighting ourselves in the Lord. It is possible to do what is morally right and virtuous without actually having God Himself in remembrance. The enjoyment of the secret of His presence is the key to the manifestation of His power in effective service for Him. The Lord delights in those who know in practical experience what fellowship with Him is. His eye is upon them that fear Him. The apostle Paul precedes his desire for the realization of the power of His resurrection by the desire “that I may know Him.” Enoch walked with God, and so had this testimony that he pleased God. He “delighted himself in the Lord” and his life of witness in a godless world issued in his translation to the very presence of God. In the latter part of the verse Isaiah acknowledges the guilt of his people both past and present, and, calling to mind the long continued state of their apostasy, he asks the question “shall we be saved?” (r.v.). This, his rhetorical question, makes acknowledgment that they have no claim to be delivered. They had “all become as one that is unclean,” and all their righteousnesses were “as a polluted garment.” Consequently they all faded as a leaf and their iniquities like the wind had taken them away.

All this provides a warning as to the effects of persistent departure from the ways of God. Willful apostasy leads to forgetfulness of God. So it was in Israel. There was none that called upon His Name, that stirred up himself to take hold of God. Insensibility to sin produces insensibility to God’s claims and to His mercies. The consequence was that God withdrew His mercies from them, hid His face from them, and consumed them by means of their iniquities (Isaiah 64:7, r.v.). In the reality and power of this confession the prophet calls to remembrance the alienable relationship which the Lord had established between Himself and His people, and the way in which He had formed them according to His own counsel. “But now,” he says, “O Lord Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou our potter: and we all are the work of Thy hand” (Isaiah 64:8). This implies the possibility of the remaking of the marred national vessel. Certainly that will be the case when the Redeemer comes to Zion. The national foe had been permitted under the retributive hand of God to make the cities of the land a wilderness and Jerusalem a desolation. The very dwelling place of God in Zion, which in days gone by had rung with the praises of the Lord, had been burned down. By God’s appointment it had been indeed “a beautiful house” but it was so no longer (Isaiah 64:10-11). And now the prophet makes his closing appeal for deliverance and restoration: “Wilt Thou refrain [i.e., restrain] Thyself for these things, O Lord? Wilt Thou hold Thy peace and afflict us very sore?” (Isaiah 64:12).