Bible Commentaries
Isaiah 63

Verses 1-6

The Judgment of the Nations ( 63 : 1 - 6 )

This brief passage has its closest parallel in chapter 34. The picture is a terrible one of a great warrior returning from bloody battle with stained garments, red as though he had been trampling the juice from grapes in a winepress (vs. 3). The prophet asks the identity of the warrior (vs. 1 ), and the answer comes back from God himself: “It is I, announcing vindication [victory], mighty to save.” Verse 4 continues with the identification of the occasion. It is “the day of vengeance,” and God’s “year of redemption.” The setting is the country of Edom, southeast of the Dead Sea, and one of its chief cities, Bozrah (see also 34:6). When Nebuchadnezzar’s army destroyed Judah and Jerusalem in two campaigns in 597 and 587 (or 586) B.c., the people of Edom took advantage of the weakness of the Judeans and took over the whole southern part of the country, including Hebron, the natural center of the area. Thus in eschatological passages from the period of the fall of Judah and from exilic times there is repeated reference to this event, and an expression of the certainty that God in his righteousness will punish the offender. In Isaiah 63:1-6, however, the treatment is generalized, and actually the subject is the judgment of all the peoples of the world, as verses 3 and 6 seem to make clear. Verse 5 repeats the theme introduced in 59:18, where the context is the judgment of Israel.

This passage, like chapter 34, belongs with the literature of apocalyptic judgment (see especially, for example, Ezekiel 38-39; Joel 3:9-16; Zechariah 14). Behind such warlike and bloody pictures there is a profound realization of the power of evil and its influence in the world. Biblical man did not see it as possible that society could gradually evolve into God’s Kingdom without a radical revolution in the human heart, and without an equally radical revolution in social and national structures within which human life is set. The mystery of this evil is indeed great; it is an evil that impels mankind to fight against its own best good—or, as Christians have interpreted the Crucifixion in the New Testament, to crucify even its Savior. The hope of man is based upon the power of God to curb this infection within all human life and its institutions. So difficult is the removal of evil from history that the Bible, in both the Old and the New Testaments, portrays the process as a warfare between God and all the forces aligned against him. In the Old Testament this warfare is against enemies on earth; in the New Testament the battle is given more cosmic dimensions in the picture of God’s struggle against Satan or against the principalities and powers of darkness (for example, Ephesians 6:12 and the more figurative presentation in Revelation 12-18).

The portrayal of this future in Isaiah 63 can be called apocalyptic because it is unrelated to any specified historical event. Instead, it has to do with the final war in the age to come against the peoples in the world who are alienated from God, a war which must be fought and won by God before the era of peace can be finally established. It has been frequently pointed out that Karl Marx took this biblical picture of the necessity of revolution, secularized it, and used it at the center of his interpretation of history: before the classless society can be achieved, there must be a revolution in which the capitalist classes are destroyed. The biblical faith in the power of God to control this virulence means that in this world mankind can place his faith firmly only in God himself. The Marxist faith in dialectical materialism, an overly simplified view of human evil as belonging only to the heart and structures of bourgeois society and not to those of the proletariat, has meant the prolonged dictatorship of the Communist party and the gradual modification of the views of Marx in practice if not in theory.

Verses 7-12

A Prophetic Intercessory Prayer ( 63 : 7 — 64 : 12 )

Following the terrible picture of the judgment of the nations (vss. 1 - 6 ), there is inserted a long and beautiful intercessory prayer on the part of the prophet. (See also the earlier intercession in 59:9-15, inserted following the description of the sin of the newly revived postexilic community.) The date and authorship of the passage are difficult to fix. To judge from the implication of 64:10-11, Jerusalem is still a desolation and the Temple has not been rebuilt. Thus the intercessory prayer is probably earlier than 520 b.c. and could be of the same date as or earlier than the prophetic poems in chapters 40-55. Whether the author is Second Isaiah himself or another member of his school cannot be determined with certainty. The mood, the style, and the themes all differ considerably from those that are characteristic of Second Isaiah himself. It has been suggested that the poem is a liturgy composed for a particular occasion. This may indeed be the case, but it is impossible for us now to reconstruct what that occasion was.

The intercession begins after the manner of a confessional hymn of praise in which the worshiper recounts the glorious deeds of God for the salvation of his people (vs. 7; see Pss. 89:1-2; 111; 145-1461. The Hebrew term which is here translated “steadfast love” is one of the greatest words in the Old Testament; it refers to the unlimited grace of God which led him to visit Israel with his saving action and to create of them a people for himself and to maintain them as his people by deed and promise, in spite of their rebellion against him.

Verses 8-9 continue with a moving statement of how God had related himself to his people. He made them his people by becoming their Savior: “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.” Unfortunately, the text of verse 9 is by no means certain. While the translation quoted is a possibility, it is equally possible that the Greek translation is correct when it takes the first words of the verse, “in all their affliction,” as the completion of the previous poetic line. Also, instead of “he was afflicted” the translation has a noun meaning “messenger.” The passage thus was rendered as follows: “And he became their Savior in all their afflictions. Neither ambassador nor angel but the Lord himself saved them by loving them and sparing them. He himself redeemed them and lifted them up and held them high all the days of old.” The basic thought of the two different translations is the same: God has been his people’s Savior and Redeemer throughout their history.

Verses 10-14 of chapter 63 are an interpretation of Israel’s past history. The people rebelled, with the result that God himself had to turn against them and appear as their enemy. The subject of the sentence, “Then he remembered the days of old, of Moses his servant,” is Israel. When the people were in trouble they remembered the Exodus from Egypt, the work of Moses and the power of God when Israel had been saved in a time of critical danger. The reference to God’s giving his people “rest” (63:14) has rich overtones in the original language. It is not only a matter of resting from overexertion; it is also a matter of peace, quiet, and the absence of danger.

The prophet’s petition now begins in 63:15 and continues through the middle of 64:5. On behalf of the people he beseeches God to remember that he is “our Father, our Redeemer from of old.” That Israel, as the children of Abraham, “does not know us,” “does not acknowledge us,” presumably refers to the poverty in condition and numbers of the survivors of the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem as compared with the Israel of the former days. Thus the words mean that the Israel of old would not recognize the current small community as the heirs of God’s promises of old.

Since all things ultimately have their origin in God, the intercessor can pray: “O Lord, why dost thou make us err from thy ways . . . ?” It is not that God is being blamed for the sins of his people. Instead, the thought is that God alone has the power to save them from themselves and their own sin. Their theocentric manner of speaking enables the biblical writers to ascribe all things to God without in the least removing the people’s responsibility for their own acts. Thus Exodus 7:3 can refer to God’s hardening the heart of Pharaoh whereas Exodus 8:15; Exodus 8:19; Exodus 8:32 can refer to Pharaoh’s hardening his own heart. God in his all-seeing providence and foreknowledge could employ the sin of Pharaoh for his own larger uses. So here in the prophet’s intercession, while it is Israel who is responsible for her own ways, the source of the sin can be traced to God himself in the sense that he has power to use it for his own purposes and to overrule it. What appears from the standpoint of logic to be a contradiction was not apparent to biblical man nor to biblical theism generally.

In 64:1-3 there is an allusion to the disturbing events that were commonly associated with a theophany or appearance of God (see Exodus 19:16; Judges 5:5). The prophet’s prayer is that God might again make himself and his power known in the earth among a people who badly need him.

The final section (from the middle of 64:5 through 64:12) constitutes the heart of the prophet’s intercession. Here the speaker uses the first person plural, “we,” in order to emphasize the corporate nature of the petition. We are all sinners, and yet we are also “the work of thy hand.” We are all thy people, but our land is desolate. The prophet can only appeal to the mercy of God. He cannot point to any merit within his people themselves as a ground for God’s saving action. But knowing that it is the nature of God to show mercy, he appeals on behalf of his people for God to show that mercy. As in all the great biblical prayers sin, understood as rebellion against God, is taken with ultimate seriousness, a seriousness with which people normally do not regard their own evil actions. The Israelite knows, however, that sin and judgment go together. There is no “cheap grace.” Sin is costly, as is also redemption. The remarkable thing is that God is willing to do so much in assuming the cost of that redemption.