Isaiah 40:30

Isaiah 40 opens a new part of the book with a tender command: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God” (Isaiah 40:1). The prophecies before it are full of judgment, and from here the message turns to hope and restoration. These chapters speak ahead of time to the Jewish people who would be carried into exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C. They would lose their land, their Temple and their king. They would feel abandoned, defeated and spiritually exhausted, with the power of Babylon standing over them like an unbeatable force, and some would question God’s faithfulness and wonder whether they had a future at all.

Before our verses the chapter sets out who God is. All human strength is frail and passing (Isaiah 40:6–8), and idols are powerless before him (Isaiah 40:18–20). He is the God “that bringeth the princes to nothing” (Isaiah 40:23–24), and he calls out the stars by name “by the greatness of his might” (Isaiah 40:26). Then verse 28 asks, “Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.”

Everything in verses 29 to 31 rests on this. The gods of Babylon would themselves be carried off, “gone into captivity” (Isaiah 46:1–2), while Israel’s God stayed sovereign over all that had happened to his people and able to give them strength. The God who rules the stars and the nations is the same God who stoops to the weary.

Verse 29 names God as the one who acts: “He giveth power to the faint.” The verb nâthan is the ordinary Hebrew word for giving, used very widely, and here it places the whole of the strength on God’s side. Power comes to the faint as his gift. The word for faint, yâʻêph, comes from a root meaning to be fatigued, and it describes people who are worn out and spent, whose resources of body, mind or spirit are drained. God’s care goes to exactly these people, and he meets their weakness with grace.

The second line says the same thing again and carries it further, in the way Hebrew poetry pairs its lines: “and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.” Literally this is “those to whom there is no might”, ʼên ʼôwnîym, with the word for might in the plural. That word, ʼôwn, means ability, power, force and strength, and it can even mean wealth or substance, all that a person has to draw on. It is the same word Isaiah used three verses earlier for “the greatness of his might” by which the LORD calls out the stars. The might that keeps the heavens in order is given to people who have none of their own.

The verb râbâh means to make many or to increase, so God makes strength grow in those who began with none. He is the giver to the weak, as he tells his people in the next chapter: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee” (Isaiah 41:10). A psalm says the same: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1).

Paul learned this in his own weakness, when the Lord told him, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). Our limits, and the places where we are exhausted, are where God’s power is seen most clearly. Paul prays that believers would be “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ephesians 3:16), and he says of himself, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).

Verse 30 sets human strength at its very best beside God’s: “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall.” The two verbs of the first line are the two words verse 28 used of God, who “fainteth not, neither is weary”. Yâʻaph means to be faint or tired, and yâgaʻ properly means to gasp, and so to be exhausted, to tire or to toil. Together they picture someone used up by labour and effort. God is free of both, and the strongest young people come to both soon enough.

The second line goes further. The verb kâshal means to totter, waver, stumble or fall, as when the legs give way beneath a person. Hebrew says it twice here, kashol yikkashelu, a way of stating a verb with emphasis, and the KJV gives it as “utterly fall”. The young man who set out strong ends up stumbling and going down.

Verse 31 opens with “But”, and the whole passage turns on that word. The young men fall, and those who wait upon the LORD rise. Here the chapter reaches its height, as everything Isaiah has said about God’s greatness is brought to bear on the life of his weary people.

The renewed strength is pictured in three ways. First, “they shall mount up with wings as eagles.” The nesher is the eagle or another large bird of prey, known in Scripture for its strength, for its flight to great heights, and for renewed vigour: “thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Psalm 103:5). An eagle climbs by riding rising currents of warm air, lifted by a power outside itself, and so the picture is of people raised above what would otherwise overwhelm them and given a higher view of their troubles. For exiles brought low in a foreign land, the eagle was a vivid picture of strength, majesty and endurance.

Then “they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Running is the hard, demanding stretch of effort. Walking is the steady pace of daily life, the long haul of keeping on under daily pressures, disappointments and long trials. The order moves from soaring to running to walking, so God’s strength reaches every kind of day, from the rare heights to the most ordinary and persistent demands.

The two verbs here are the very words of verses 28 and 30. The youths “faint and be weary”, the LORD “fainteth not, neither is weary”, and those who wait on him “run, and not be weary” and “walk, and not faint”. Those who wait on the LORD are given a share in what is true of him.

These verses find their fullness in Jesus Christ. Though he was God, he took on human weakness, and John tells us he was “wearied with his journey” (John 4:6). He went about his work “in the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14) and kept to his mission to the end. As the Lamb of God (John 1:29) he bore the weight of our sin on the cross, and he had power to lay down his life and power to take it again (John 10:18). So we have a high priest who is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” and “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). We are told to “consider him that endured”, “lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds” (Hebrews 12:3).

He calls the weary to himself: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28–30). He promised his followers power when the Holy Spirit came upon them (Acts 1:8), and at Pentecost he poured out that Spirit on his church (Acts 2:1–4). In him each of us is “a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The faithful of Israel waited for the promised Messiah and the restoration he would bring. We wait upon the Lord by trusting Christ, whose saving work on the cross is finished, and in his strength we “run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1–2).

The God who gave this promise to exiles is our God, and he still “fainteth not, neither is weary”. The end of our own strength is the very place his gift is meant for, because he gives power to the faint. The strong give out sooner or later, and so do we, and that is a reason to hope in him. Waiting on him means bringing him our weariness, our anxieties and our wish to be in control, and looking to him with expectation. He renews strength for the rare moments when we are lifted high, for the hard stretches when we must run, and for the long ordinary days when we simply keep walking.