Isaiah 49:25

Verse 24 voices the hopelessness of a people held by a power far stronger than they are. Chapter 49 belongs to the second half of Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55), which is full of comfort for Israel as she faces and endures the Babylonian exile, and the chapter speaks of the Servant’s mission to Israel and the nations and of God’s commitment to his people (Isaiah 49). Zion has complained that she is forgotten, and the LORD has answered that a mother may forget her nursing child, “yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:15–16). He has spoken of the nations carrying her sons and daughters home (Isaiah 49:22–23), and Zion has wondered where such children could come from, “seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive” (Isaiah 49:21). Verse 24 is the doubt that remains.

The word for prey, malqôwach, can mean the jaws, as what takes food, or what is taken, the spoil and the captives. Israel is pictured as something seized and held fast, like a victim in a predator’s jaws or plunder carried off in war. The mighty, gibbôwr, is a powerful man, a warrior or a tyrant, and here it means Babylon, the leading power of that day. Babylon conquered nation after nation and deported the leading and skilled people of those it conquered so that they could not rebel. To be its prey meant complete subjection with no human hope of escape, because a strong victor keeps what he has taken.

The question is a rhetorical one, and everyone who heard it expected the answer “No.” That expected answer is what makes the next verse so striking. The same God who brings out the stars by number and calls them all by name, “by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth” (Isaiah 40:26), is about to say what he will do with the mighty.

“But thus saith the LORD” turns the passage. The speaker is Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of God, the self-existent and eternal One who has bound himself to Israel, and his word settles what Zion could only doubt. He takes up both halves of her question: “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered.” The two lines say the same thing twice, with captives matched to prey and the mighty to the terrible, and together they promise a complete rescue of what seemed lost for good.

The terrible, ʻârîyts, are the fearsome and violent ones, the oppressors who held Judah, and like gibbôwr in the same verse the word points first to Babylon. Isaiah had already given Israel words to take up against Babylon’s king: “How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!” (Isaiah 14:4–6). Beyond Babylon, the promise reaches every power, political, spiritual or personal, that sets itself to hold God’s people in bondage.

Then comes the reason: “for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee.” The verb rîyb is used both for a legal dispute and for a fight, and the LORD makes himself Israel’s advocate and her warrior at once. In that world a powerful advocate would take up the cause of someone wronged against the one who wronged him, and the nations around Israel each spoke of their own god fighting for them. Isaiah declares that the LORD, the one true God, can overthrow the greatest empire on earth. He takes Israel’s quarrel as his own, as he did at the Red Sea, when Moses told the people, “The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace” (Exodus 14:14).

“And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine.” These are hard words, and they complete the promise of verse 25. The oppressors who devoured Israel will be made to devour themselves. The word for flesh, bâsâr, means flesh or body, and it can also mean kin or a mortal creature. The picture is of oppressors brought down by their own violence, turning on one another and ruined by the consequences of what they did to God’s people, so that the source of their strength becomes the means of their downfall. Wine belongs to feasting and joy, and comparing their blood to sweet wine turns the cup of celebration into a cup of judgment, so their fall is as bitter as it is complete.

The language comes from the covenant’s warnings of the most extreme judgment. In a siege, hunger could drive people to eat their own children, and the law warned Israel of exactly this: “ye shall eat the flesh of your sons” (Leviticus 26:29), and “thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters ... in the siege” (Deuteronomy 28:53–57). Here that same language is turned against Israel’s oppressors. Revelation draws on the same imagery of wine and blood for the final judgment, when the vine of the earth is cast “into the great winepress of the wrath of God” (Revelation 14:19–20).

The last words of the passage give the purpose of all that comes before: “and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.” Here bâsâr means all mankind, every mortal creature, and the verb yâdaʻ, to know, is the knowing that recognises and acknowledges. When the LORD acts, his identity will be beyond doubt to every nation. Isaiah says the same elsewhere: “unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23).

The LORD gives himself three titles. As Saviour he is the one who delivers from danger. As Redeemer, gâʼal, he takes the part of the kinsman-redeemer, who in Israel had the right and the duty to buy back a relative sold into slavery, to recover family property that had been lost, and to avenge a relative’s blood. God claims that role for himself, and it shows how close he holds his people and how fully he takes up their cause, as his promises in Exodus had already shown (Exodus 6). As the mighty One of Jacob he is the powerful and faithful God of the covenant with Israel. The captor in verse 24 was called the mighty, and in the last line the LORD names himself the mighty One of Jacob, whose strength is far beyond any captor’s.

These verses reach their fullest meaning in Jesus Christ. The promise first concerned Israel’s release from Babylon, and its question also describes all mankind. We were prey held by the mighty powers of sin, death and the devil, and we were lawful captives, justly held, because “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). No self-effort or human strength could break that hold. Christ, the Servant whom Isaiah foretold (“Behold my servant, whom I uphold,” Isaiah 42:1), came to do exactly what verse 24 thought impossible. Isaiah says of him that he would “proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound” (Isaiah 61:1), and Jesus read those words in the synagogue at Nazareth as his own (Luke 4:18).

He contended with the great adversary and overcame him. On the cross and in his resurrection he “spoiled principalities and powers” and made “a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). He gave “his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), paying the debt that made us lawful captives. He triumphed over death itself, so that “Death is swallowed up in victory,” and “thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:54–57). Those who were servants of sin are “made free from sin” (Romans 6:17–18), and “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). The promise “I will save thy children” is fulfilled as he gathers his people into God’s family and keeps them: “neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28–29).

Verse 26 looks ahead as well. Our deepest struggle is against spiritual powers, “not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12), and at his first coming Christ came as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), bearing judgment himself. God has highly exalted him, so that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess “that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:9–11). When he comes again, the final judgment of all that opposes God will be carried out, and all flesh will know him as the mighty One of Jacob and “the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14).

The question of verse 24 is one God’s people still ask when a habit, an injustice, a spiritual stronghold or a broken relationship holds them fast. These verses answer that what looks impossible to us is the very thing God has promised to do, because “with God nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37). The strength of what holds you and the apparent rightness of its claim set no limit on him. The LORD makes your quarrel his own and contends with whatever contends with you, so you can bring the hardest situations to him in prayer. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). He who answered Zion’s doubt with “I will save thy children” has shown in Christ that he keeps his word, and his care for his people reaches to their children and to the generations after them.