Isaiah 64:1,6,7,8,12

Isaiah is pleading for Israel. When you think about it, this is slightly unexpected. Because Israel is the nation that is sinning, the nation that doesn’t hear or believe Isaiah’s words, and yet here is Isaiah, pleading wholeheartedly for that very nation. Indeed, the very first verse shows us his heart (by the way, the first verse of the chapter is not the first verse of the prayer):

‘Oh, that You would rend the heavens!
That You would come down!
That the mountains might shake at Your presence’ (Isaiah 64:1)

Isaiah is firstly pleading for God to come down and make Himself known to Israel’s enemies. To come down and relieve them of their oppression. To do a mighty work. Isaiah’s reasoning is simple: since the beginning of the world there has been no other god that could ever do such works, there is none who blesses righteousness. Therefore God is the only One able to do such things. But Isaiah concludes that God is indeed angry (vs. 5), for Israel has sinned, and in these ways continue, and they need to be saved. So his second plea is for salvation of a moral or inward kind (as opposed to relief from physical oppression).

Then we have the famous verse:

‘But we are all like an unclean thing,
And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags;
We all fade as a leaf,
And our iniquities, like the wind,
Have taken us away.’ (Isaiah 64:6)

Notice the word ‘all’ in here – referring to all Israelites (and indeed all humanity). ‘All’ of us are like an unclean thing, and ‘all’ the right things we do are merely filthy rags in God’s eyes. This statement shows God’s incredible standard of righteousness, and our own incredible poverty. This is one reason to never get proud about all the good things you do! But still, Isaiah pleads for salvation, He calls for mercy for Israel. The next verse carries on with some reasons:

‘And there is no one who calls on Your name,
Who stirs himself up to take hold of You;
For You have hidden Your face from us,
And have consumed us because of our iniquities’ (Isaiah 64:7)

In all of Israel, there was no one who stirred himself up to take hold of Him. No one was filled with passion so much for God, that he defied the situation around him and took hold of God and God only. No one would wrestle with God (like Jacob in Genesis), no one would take hold of the prize. No one grasped with all their might on the Truth. A sad sad state for a nation, but look at our own. How many people can you truly say have taken hold of God, grasped the Truth? Who can be stirred up from the deep slumber that is over the West and rely on God?

‘But now, O Lord,
You are our Father;
We are the clay, and You our potter;
And all we are the work of our hand’ (Isaiah 64:8)

This is the contra positive of the verse before. Instead of us taking hold of God, God takes hold of us, shapes us and molds us, like we are clay and He is the potter. As clay, we do not have any say over what the Potter shapes us as – but surely the Potter knows the clay, what consistency it is and what it best will form. We do not have to worry about figuring out the best thing for us, the best career path, the best ministry, what we are best at. We don’t have to tell God what we want to do with our lives. Let Him form you. Let Him do with you as He pleases. But surely He will not waste His clay. And surely He is a good potter, one who knows the best way to form the clay He is working with.

So on the one hand we have the exhortation to ‘hold on to God!’, and on the other we have the knowledge that it is God that holds us, and forms us, and that we are merely bits of clay in His hands. Both are equally and simultaneously true. One seems to deal with our direct relation to God – that indeed we merely let Him shape us, and we don’t presume to tell Him what to do. The other seems to refer to the relationship with God we have in society – that we hold fast to God, and let nothing else shape us, that we stir ourselves up from the dead sleep we have in the world and hold fast with all our might to the Truth of God.

And so Isaiah continues his prayer of penitence, pleading for the sake of Israel, until the final verse, after mentioning the tragedies that had occurred to special things in Israel (such as the temple):

‘Will You restrain Yourself because of these things, O LORD?
Will You hold Your peace, and afflict us very severely?’ (Isaiah 64:12)

Isaiah’s final plea is for God to intervene because His special things are being destroyed and laid waste. Isaiah asks how God can restrain Himself. He implies that if God does not intervene, it would be a severe affliction for Israel. That God would hold His peace (which we often think of as a good thing), would be a severe affliction for the Israelites.

Thus Isaiah finishes his pleading, and God answers in the next chapter!