Isaiah 45:22

These chapters of Isaiah were given to comfort God’s people in exile in Babylon. Chapter 45 opens with God calling the Persian king Cyrus his anointed and using him to set his people free (Isaiah 45:1–7), and the chapters around it mock the idols of Babylon again and again (Isaiah 40–48). The exiles lived among temples to Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, to Ishtar and to Nabu, and Babylon’s own accounts of creation told of conflict among the gods. Into that world God speaks, and he begins by giving his titles: “thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it”.

“The LORD” in capitals stands for Yᵉhôvâh, God’s covenant name, which Strong’s explains as the self-existent or eternal one. It is the name he revealed to his people, and it runs through this whole passage.

Isaiah gathers several verbs for God’s work. “Created” is bârâʼ, the verb of the Bible’s first line (Genesis 1:1), used here of the heavens and then of the earth. “Formed” (yatsar) and “made” (asah) add the picture of a craftsman shaping what he makes, and “he hath established it” means that God set the earth firm and keeps it so. A psalm praises him as the one “Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever” (Psalm 104:5).

“I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth.” The nations around Israel practised divination and consulted oracles, often in hidden shrines, and the answers came in riddles that left the asker unsure and needed a priest to explain them. The word for “secret”, çêther, is a covering or a hiding place. God set his word against all of that. He spoke openly through his prophets, his covenant and his mighty acts, so that his people could know what he said. Jesus said the same of his own teaching: “I spake openly to the world... and in secret have I said nothing” (John 18:20). God who spoke in time past by the prophets has now spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), the Word made flesh (John 1:14), who is the light of the world (John 8:12). “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

God does keep some things to himself, and Moses says so: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). What he has revealed, he has said plainly, so that we can live by it.

God now turns to the nations: “Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, ye that are escaped of the nations.” The word for “nations”, gôwy, means the peoples other than Israel, the Gentiles. Those who have “escaped” are most likely the survivors among them, people who came through the wars and judgments that Assyria and Babylon brought and who watched their own national gods fail. God calls them together as if into a court, to hear his case.

The charge is plain: “they have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image”. The verb behind “knowledge” is yâdaʻ, to know, to recognise, to understand. The people who carve and set up an idol do so because they lack knowledge of God and are blind to what they are doing. The wood, ʻêts, is ordinary timber, the same material as a tree. Isaiah has just described a man who burns part of a tree to warm himself and bake his bread and carves the rest into a god to bow down to (Isaiah 44:9–20). The psalm mocks such idols, “They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not” (Psalm 115:4–7), Jeremiah says they “must needs be borne, because they cannot go” (Jeremiah 10:3–5), and Paul tells the men of Athens that the Godhead is unlike “gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device”, and that God now calls all men everywhere to repent (Acts 17:29–30).

“And pray unto a god that cannot save.” The word for “god” here is ʼêl, the same word God uses of himself two verses later, “I am God”. The word for “save” is yâshaʻ, which Strong’s traces to being open, wide or free, and so safe. It means to deliver, rescue and help. People pray to an idol for exactly the thing it is powerless to give. The same verb returns in the next two verses, where God is “a Saviour” and calls the earth to “be saved”, so the passage sets the god that cannot save beside the God who saves.

God now summons the idolaters to make their case: “Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel together”. Let them consult with one another and bring their best argument. Then he asks, “who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath told it from that time? have not I the LORD?” The proof that he alone is God is that he says what will happen before it happens. In these chapters that includes the rise of Cyrus, whom God names in Isaiah 45:1–7 long before he was born, and the return of the exiles. He is the God who declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:9–10). The same is true of Christ, who “was foreordained before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20), and who spoke of his own being before all of this history when he said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

“And there is no God else beside me” restates Israel’s confession, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The God who rules history also judges the world in righteousness (Psalm 9:7–8).

The verse ends with God’s own description of himself: “a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me.” “Just” is tsaddîyq, righteous, upright, the one whose judgments are fair and whose decrees are right. “Saviour” is yâshaʻ once more, the one who delivers and rescues. Both belong to the one God, and his salvation always agrees with his righteousness.

“Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.” After the challenge comes the invitation, and it reaches as far as the earth reaches. “Look” is pânâh, to turn or to face. God calls people to turn toward him and face him, and the promise attached is salvation, yâshaʻ again, deliverance and rescue. Salvation comes by God’s own offer, received by turning to him in trust, free of any ritual or price.

The call goes to “all the ends of the earth”, to Gentiles as well as Israel. God’s Servant would be “a light to the Gentiles” and his “salvation unto the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6), and God invites everyone who thirsts to come and buy without money (Isaiah 55:1–5). “All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD” (Psalm 22:27), and John sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations” crying, “Salvation to our God” (Revelation 7:9–10). The same God made the earth and raised up Cyrus to free his captives (Isaiah 45:9–13), and he says elsewhere, “I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour” (Isaiah 43:10–11).

“For I am God” uses ʼêl, a word for God that the lexicons connect with strength and might. It is the word used of the idol in verse 20, and here God claims it for himself as the only one who answers to it.

The New Testament gives this call its full form in Jesus. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16), and “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). He is “Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matthew 1:23), the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), and there is “one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Peter says, “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12), and the believer runs the race “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus sent his disciples to “teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19), and so the call to the ends of the earth still goes out.

“I have sworn by myself” is the strongest oath there is. The verb is shâbaʻ, to swear, which Strong’s links to the number seven, as if a declaration were repeated seven times. God swears by himself because he has no one greater to swear by, as Hebrews says of his promise to Abraham: “because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself” (Hebrews 6:13). “God is not a man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19).

“The word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return.” The word for “word”, dâbâr, means word or speech, and in a separate sense a matter or thing. The word has gone out and will do what God spoke it to do, as he promises elsewhere: “it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please” (Isaiah 55:11). It goes out “in righteousness”, so it is just and true as well as certain.

“Surely, shall one say, in the LORD have I righteousness and strength”. The verb “say” is ʼâmar, the common word to say or tell, and the confession lies in the words it introduces. The KJV supplies “one” because the Hebrew verb is singular: here is one person, any person, speaking for himself. The word for “righteousness” here is tsᵉdâqâh, a noun from the root “to be right”, covering rightness, justice and right standing. Here it means a right standing before God, found “in the LORD”. Isaiah presents righteousness as a gift that God gives, and Paul says the same: “the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe” (Romans 3:21–22). He warns against “going about to establish their own righteousness”, for “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Romans 10:3–4). “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Strength is found in the LORD too. Christ is “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and Paul could say, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).

“Even to him shall men come” widens the one voice into many. People of every nation will come to the LORD, as Jesus said: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32).

“In the LORD shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall glory.” The word for “seed”, zeraʻ, means seed, and so offspring or descendants. The verb for “justified”, tsâdaq, is to be right, or to be declared right, in a moral or legal sense: to be justified is to be acquitted and accepted as righteous. Once again it happens “In the LORD”. For a people in exile for their sins, this was the promise of a full restoration, and in time Cyrus did conquer Babylon in 539 BC and let the exiles go home to rebuild the temple (Ezra 1:1–4).

The seed of Israel are first of all the descendants of Jacob. The New Testament shows who the true seed are. “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6–8), “they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham” (Galatians 3:7), and “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:26–29). So the promise belongs to all God’s people by faith, Jew and Gentile together. Paul’s teaching on justification stands on the same ground: we are “justified freely by his grace” (Romans 3:24), “a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28), and “being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1).

“And shall glory.” The verb here, hâlal, is to shine, and so to praise, to celebrate and to boast. Since their righteousness comes from the LORD, his people boast in him. Christ “of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:30–31).

This passage gives us God’s own account of who he is. He made the earth to be a home, and he spoke to his people in the open so that their seeking would reach him. He alone foretells what is coming and brings it about, he alone is both just and a Saviour, and the whole world is invited to turn to him. His oath settles how history ends, with every knee bowed to him and every tongue confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord.

It also gives us the words to say in return. The confession of verse 24 is spoken in the first person, “in the LORD have I righteousness and strength”, and anyone who turns to him may say it. The call of verse 22 is as wide as the earth, so it reaches you wherever you are. And the passage ends where the gospel ends, with God’s people justified in the LORD and glorying in him.