Isaiah 49:15

Isaiah 49 opens with the Servant of the LORD, whom God gives “for a light to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:6), and these chapters of the book began with God’s command to comfort his people (Isaiah 40:1–2). Verse 14 breaks in with “But”. After all those promises, Zion answers with a complaint. Tsîyôwn is the fortified hill of Jerusalem, and the name often stands for the whole city, its people and the place where God dwells. Here Zion speaks as a woman, and her voice is the voice of the whole covenant people.

The setting is the exile. Jerusalem had been destroyed, the temple lay in ruins, and the people lived in a foreign land, as the psalm sung by the rivers of Babylon remembers (Psalm 137). Among the nations, a fallen capital and a ruined temple were taken to mean that the god of that people had been beaten or had walked away. So Zion’s grief carries a question about the LORD himself: whether he still has the power and the will to keep his covenant. Other laments of God’s people speak the same way after defeat (Psalm 44), and David asks how long the LORD will forget him, with the very verb Zion uses here (Psalm 13:1).

The two lines of the complaint say the same thing twice, and the second presses it harder. The verb ʻâzab, “forsaken”, means to loosen, let go and leave behind. The verb shâkach, “forgotten”, means to forget, to lose someone from mind and attention. The two names of God make the complaint as personal as it can be. “The LORD” is Yᵉhôvâh, God’s covenant name, the name of the God who bound himself to Israel. “My Lord” is ʼĂdônây, the title of a master and sovereign, and Zion says it with “my”. Her covenant God and her own master, she says, have both left her.

Grief speaks in absolutes, and the verses that follow show that Zion is mistaken. Even so, God lets her speak, keeps her words in Scripture, and begins his reply in the very next verse. He had promised Israel that he would go with them and stay with them (Deuteronomy 31:6), and the letter to the Hebrews gives believers the same word: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). Zion’s feelings say one thing and his promise says another, and the rest of this passage is God’s answer to that gap.

God answers with a question drawn from the closest bond people know. The ʼishshâh, the woman, is a mother here, and her ʻûwl, the “sucking child”, is a baby still at the breast, wholly dependent on her for life. “The son of her womb” uses beṭen, the belly and especially the womb: the child came from her own body. The word for compassion, râcham, means to love and to show tender mercy, and it is related to rechem, another Hebrew word for the womb, so the word itself carries the feeling of a mother for the child she bore. When Scripture uses it of God, it speaks of his tender care for his people.

Everyone knows the answer the question expects: a mother keeps her nursing child in mind every hour of the day. Then God says something startling: “yea, they may forget.” He grants that even this love can fail, rare and unnatural as that is, so that his own promise stands out all the more: “yet will I not forget thee.” The verb shâkach from Zion’s complaint comes back in God’s answer. The “I” is emphatic, and God sets his own word against the worst a human heart can do.

“Behold” calls Zion to look at something. The verb châqaq, “graven”, means to cut, engrave or inscribe, the word for cutting letters into a hard surface so that they last. The kaph is the hollow of the hand, the palm, and the same word can mean the sole of the foot or an animal’s paw. God says he has cut Zion herself into the palms of his hands. Hands are always in sight and always at work, so whatever is engraved there is before a person’s eyes in everything they do. Zion said she had slipped from God’s mind, and God answers that she is cut into the very hands he works with.

“Thy walls are continually before me.” The word is chôwmâh, a wall, especially the defensive wall of a city. A city’s walls were its safety and its standing, and Jerusalem’s lay broken down. God says those broken walls are always before him. He sees the ruin, he has the rebuilt city in view, and her safety and her future stay on his mind. The psalmist says that “he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). Scripture also speaks of God’s book, where his people are written (Exodus 32:32) and where all our days were set down before any of them came (Psalm 139:16). The palms of God’s hands carry the same truth in a more personal picture.

From verse 17 God turns from his own faithfulness to what it will do for Zion. Each promise answers something she has lost: her children, her walls, her land, her honour.

“Thus saith the Lord GOD.” The two names of verse 14 stand together here: ʼĂdônây, “Lord”, and the covenant name in the form Yᵉhôvih, which the KJV prints as “GOD”. The Lord whom Zion said had forgotten her now speaks. “I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles”: the verb is nâsâʼ again, the same verb as “Lift up thine eyes” in verse 18, and yâd is the hand. A raised hand can be a signal, a summons or the sign of an oath, and here God signals to the nations. “And set up my standard to the people”: rûwm means to raise high, and nêç is a flag, banner or signal pole, the rallying point an army gathered to. The word gôwy is a nation, a people other than Israel, and ʻam is a people. God raises his banner, and the nations come to it.

“And they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.” The words bên and bath are son and daughter, and Strong’s takes bath as the feminine of bên, so the pair covers all Zion’s children. The word chôtsen is the bosom or the arms, where a child is held close, and kâthêph is the shoulder, which Strong’s traces to a root meaning to clothe, the shoulder being where garments hang. The picture is tender. The nations that once dragged Israel away now carry her children home with care and honour, as a parent carries a little one.

This happened first when the Persian king Cyrus, a Gentile ruler, sent the exiles home (Ezra 1). Isaiah has already spoken of the root of Jesse standing as a banner to which the Gentiles would come (Isaiah 11:10), and of all nations flowing to the mountain of the LORD’s house (Isaiah 2:2–4). Paul gathers promises like these when he shows that the Gentiles were always meant to glorify God for his mercy (Romans 15:9–12).

“And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers.” “Nursing fathers” translates ʼâman, which in this form means to support, nourish and foster, as a foster-parent or nurse does. The rulers who once crushed Zion will look after her children. Then the picture turns to homage: “they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet.” The verb lâchak means simply to lick. To lie with one’s face in the dust at someone’s feet was the lowest bow a person could make, the gesture of conquered peoples before a king, and here the kings of the earth make it before Zion.

They were first kept when the exiles came home from Babylon. Cyrus let them go, Ezra and Nehemiah record the families and numbers of those who returned (Ezra 2, Nehemiah 7), and Jerusalem was rebuilt and filled again. And the promise is larger still: a land too small for its people, kings bowing in the dust, nations carrying Zion’s children home.

The Servant of this chapter was sent to bring Israel back to God and to be a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49:1–7), and Simeon called the infant Jesus a light to the Gentiles and the glory of Israel (Luke 2:32). Through Christ the gathering spread across the world. Thousands were added to the church in its first days (Acts 2:41, Acts 4:4), Jesus sent his disciples to teach all nations (Matthew 28:19–20), and heaven sings of people redeemed out of “every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Revelation 5:9), a multitude too great to count (Revelation 7:9–10). All who belong to Christ by faith are Abraham’s seed (Galatians 3:26–29), the children of the promise are counted as his seed (Romans 9:6–8), and Gentiles who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ and built together into God’s household (Ephesians 2:11–22). Zion’s question, “these, where had they been?”, has its fullest answer here.

Believers differ on whether these verses still hold a promise for the Jewish people as a nation. Some believers hold that the church, Jew and Gentile together in Christ, is the Zion these verses speak of, and that the promises are being kept as the gospel gathers God’s children from every nation. Others hold that, alongside the gathering of the church, God will yet bring the Jewish people back to their land and to faith in the Messiah, when “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:25–27). On either reading the promise rests on the God who remembers Zion, and he will keep every word of it.

The promise reaches its end in the new heaven and the new earth, when God wipes away every tear and the holy city comes down “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:1–4), and the nations walk in its light and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it (Revelation 21:23–24). Then every knee will bow at the name of Jesus (Philippians 2:9–11), to whom all power in heaven and in earth is given (Matthew 28:18), the King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16), whose kingdom lasts for ever (Daniel 7:14, Luke 1:33).

Zion felt forsaken. On the cross Jesus was forsaken, crying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). He bore the sin of his people as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), the Servant despised and rejected of men (Isaiah 53:3). Because he was forsaken, God can say to his people what he said to Zion. Under the new covenant the one thing God promises to forget is their sins: “their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more” (Hebrews 8:12). His forgetting is his choice to forgive, and his remembering of his people stands for ever. God showed his love in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8), and Paul is persuaded that nothing in all creation can separate us from that love (Romans 8:38–39).

When we read of Zion graven on the palms of God’s hands, we think of the hands of Christ, which bore the marks of the nails for us. Those scars are the deepest engraving of all, the lasting sign of what our redemption cost. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who calls his own sheep by name (John 10:3) and lays down his life for them (John 10:11), and he says of them, “no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:28–29). He ever lives to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25), and those who believe are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Ephesians 1:13–14). Paul calls him the chief corner stone of the household God is building, and its walls are always before him.

Christ also deals with Zion’s destroyers. On the cross he spoiled principalities and powers and triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15), and through death he destroyed the one who had the power of death and set free those held in fear of it (Hebrews 2:14–15). To all who receive him he gives power to become the sons of God, born of God (John 1:12–13), begotten again to a lively hope (1 Peter 1:3). These are the children Zion wondered at, born and raised by God’s own hand, and they come because Christ, lifted up from the earth, draws all men to himself (John 12:32). The church is his bride, whom he loved and gave himself for (Ephesians 5:25). Through the Son we come to know the Father (Matthew 11:27), and so we learn that he is the LORD.

This passage gives God’s people words for their darkest hours, and God’s answer to them. Zion’s complaint stands in Scripture, so we may bring the same honest cry to God, and his reply shows how he meets it: with a mother’s tenderness, with a promise sworn on his own life, and with a picture of the future large enough to fill an empty heart. He remembers his people because he has bound himself to them, and they are cut into his hands.

The passage also shows the size of God’s purposes. Zion counted her losses, and God counted children beyond her reckoning, gathered from far places and carried home by the very nations that had been her enemies. When the church grows among the nations, this is what we are watching. And the last line belongs to everyone who is still waiting: “they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.”