Isaiah 46:4

These verses belong to the part of Isaiah often called the Book of Comfort, chapters 40 to 55, where God speaks to his people about their coming rescue from Babylon. The chapter opens with the fall of Babylon’s chief gods: “Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle” (Isaiah 46:1–2). Their images are loaded onto animals as a heavy burden, and the gods themselves go into captivity, helpless to save themselves or the people who trusted them. In Babylon idols were carried through the streets in public processions as a show of their power, and when a city fell its idols were carried away as spoils of war.

Then the LORD turns to Israel with “Hearken unto me”, and the picture is reversed. The idols are carried by their worshippers. The LORD carries his. A false god is a weight on the backs of those who serve it, and the living God is the one who bears the weight of his people.

This mattered to the exiles. They had been torn from their land and their temple and lived among the grand temples and crowded worship of Babylon, where it was tempting to doubt the LORD’s power or to drift into the worship around them. Throughout chapters 40 to 48 (Isaiah 40–48) God challenges the idols to prove themselves (Isaiah 41:21–24), and in this same chapter he names himself as the only God, “Declaring the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:9–10). Verses 3 and 4 give that claim a tender form. The God who alone rules history is the God who has held his people all their lives.

The verb shâmaʻ, “hearken”, means to hear with understanding, and it often carries the sense of paying attention and obeying. God is calling his people to listen closely, to pick out his voice amid the noise of Babylon’s worship, and to answer with trust.

He addresses them as the “house of Jacob”, the descendants of Jacob, which recalls the covenant he made with their fathers. He adds “all the remnant of the house of Israel”, the people who had survived judgment and would be kept through the exile. Even when his people were scattered and few, God kept his chosen line alive so that his promises to them would be fulfilled.

The word behind “borne”, ʻâmaç, means to load something or to put a burden on it. Here it is passive: Israel is the load, and God is the one who has lifted it. The two lines “borne by me from the belly” and “carried from the womb” say the same thing twice in the way Hebrew poetry often does, and the repetition presses the point home. The words “by me” make the speaker plain in English, and the KJV translators supplied them.

The word for womb, racham, comes from a root meaning compassion, and it can carry the sense of tender love and mercy. So the picture is of a mother and her child. “The belly” and “the womb” point back to the very start of Israel’s life as a nation, when God formed a people from Abraham and Jacob. Like a child carried before it is born, Israel was in God’s care before it could do anything at all, and that care has never stopped since. Isaiah uses the same picture two chapters earlier: “Thus saith the LORD that made thee, and formed thee from the womb, which will help thee” (Isaiah 44:2). The psalmist says the same of each person: “thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13–16).

This care began with God’s own choice. Moses told Israel that the LORD set his love on them and chose them because he loved them and kept the oath he had sworn to their fathers (Deuteronomy 7:6–8). He carried them out of Egypt and through the wilderness: “how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself” (Exodus 19:4). Moses pictured the LORD as an eagle that “spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings” (Deuteronomy 32:11). And a psalm praises him as the Lord “who daily loadeth us with benefits” (Psalm 68:19). God’s people are the objects of his tender care, and he speaks of carrying them as a parent speaks of carrying a child.

Verse 4 carries the promise to the other end of life. The word for old age, ziqnâh, comes from the word for an old man and describes the years when strength fails and a person comes to depend on others. “Hoar hairs” are gray hairs, a poetic way of saying very old age, near the end of life’s road. In Israel gray hair was a sign of wisdom and honour, and it also meant growing weakness and reliance on family and neighbours. For exiles in a foreign land, the fear of being left alone in weakness was real, and God answers it directly. Those who are carried at birth will still be carried when they are old.

“I am he” in Hebrew is Ani Hu. It is God’s declaration of who he is, a God who stays the same through every age of his people’s life. It echoes the name he gave to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14), and Isaiah has God say it more than once in these chapters to set him apart as the only true God. Because he is the same, his people’s years can change everything about them while his care for them stays the same. A psalmist prays in this very hope: “Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not” (Psalm 71:18).

The rest of the verse is a chain of promises, each with God as the one who acts: “I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.”

“I have made” uses ʻâsâh, the broad Hebrew word for doing or making. God grounds everything that follows in his work as Maker. He brought his people into being, and so he takes charge of their life and welfare. What he did in the past is the guarantee of what he will do.

“I will bear” uses nâsâʼ, to lift up and carry, to hold up and support. “I will carry” uses çâbal, which God has already used for carrying his people to hoar hairs, and here it comes a second time. It means to carry a heavy load, and it can also be used of a woman heavy with child and of being strong for hard work. When God uses it of himself, he is taking up the full weight of his people. In verse 1 the idols are a burden to the weary beast. In verse 4 the LORD shoulders the burden himself.

“And will deliver you” uses mâlaṭ, which in this form means to let escape, to rescue, to deliver and to save a life. God promises to bring his people out of danger and safely to the end.

These verses come to their fullest meaning in Jesus Christ. In him God came to be with his people, as Immanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). The Son took on our flesh and our weakness, and on the cross he carried our sins: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). Isaiah himself says of the Servant, “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4).

He goes on carrying his people now. As our High Priest he feels our weaknesses with us, so we come boldly to the throne of grace for help (Hebrews 4:15–16). 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), and he offers his easy yoke and light burden in its place (Matthew 11:28–30). By his death he destroyed the power of death and set free those who lived in fear of it (Hebrews 2:14–15), which is deliverance in its fullest sense.

The “I am he” of verse 4 is heard again in Jesus’ words, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11), and of them he says, “neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28). Isaiah had already pictured the LORD this way: “he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom” (Isaiah 40:11). His promise holds for a whole life: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5), for “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8).

Every life is a long stretch between a womb and old age, and these verses put the whole of it in God’s hands. He carried you before you knew him, he is carrying you now, and he has promised to carry you when your strength is gone. Your worth to him rests on his having made you, so it holds in youth and in age, in strength and in weakness, and the frailest people around us are just as precious to him. That is a reason to treat them with the same care he shows.

The idols of Babylon were heavy things that had to be carried. Anything we lean on in God’s place ends up as a load on our own backs. The LORD asks to carry us, and Isaiah tells those who wait on him that “they shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:28–31). So you can bring him what you have been trying to carry alone, listen to his voice as he told Israel to, and trust the God who made you to bear you and to bring you safely home.