Isaiah 50:3

“Thus saith the LORD” puts the full weight of God’s own word behind what follows. The covenant name, Yᵉhôvâh, comes from the root meaning “to be”. It names the self-existent, unchanging God who keeps his promises, and that faithfulness is the very thing his people were calling into question.

Scripture often pictures the LORD as Israel’s husband and the nation as his wife, in Hosea and Jeremiah especially, and God takes up that picture here. A “bill of divorcement” (sepher kerithuth) was the written document the law of Moses required to end a marriage (Deuteronomy 24:1–4). It made the end of the marriage formal and settled the woman’s status. The word for divorcement, kᵉrîythûwth, literally means a cutting, the cutting off of the marriage bond.

So the LORD asks, “Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away?” His people are acting as though he had legally and finally cut them off, and he asks them to show him the paper. The question expects silence, because he has written none for them. Their mother has been put away, sent out of the house, and that separation is real. The covenant itself remains unbroken from his side.

The second question draws on another custom Israel knew well. A person deep in debt could be sold, or could sell himself or his children, into servitude to pay what he owed. The verb mâkar means to sell, to hand over in exchange, and figuratively to surrender. God asks which of his creditors he sold his people to, as though he had owed someone and paid with them. The question answers itself, since the LORD is in debt to nobody and lacks nothing that he would need to pay with them.

“Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves” answers both questions at once. Israel’s bondage came from its own sin, while God’s power and faithfulness stood firm the whole time. The word for iniquities, ʻâvôn, means perversity, crookedness, moral wrong, and it often carries the guilt and the punishment that go with the wrong as well. Transgressions are acts of revolt against God’s law. Together the two words cover the deep corruption of the heart and the open rebellion that brought Israel down. God’s judgments always answer to real sin, and the exile and subjection to foreign powers were his just discipline under the terms of his covenant, which promised blessing for obedience and judgment for rebellion.

The New Testament speaks of sin as slavery in the same way. Jesus said, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin” (John 8:34), and Paul asks, “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?” (Romans 6:16). Israel sold itself in just this way, into the hands of its conquerors and into the bondage of sin.

Verse 2 turns from God’s faithfulness to his people’s answer to it. “Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there none to answer?” The verb for came, bôw, is the ordinary word for going or coming, and here it is God coming to his people again and again through his prophets, his law and his acts on their behalf. Called is qârâ, the word for calling out to someone, and God’s call was a summons to repentance, obedience and faithfulness to the covenant. ‘îysh is the common word for a man, and “no man” means that not one person responded.

The questions carry God’s grief and astonishment. He came and called, and his people stayed silent and unmoved. Jeremiah heard the same lament from God, who rose up early and spoke and called to his people while they turned a deaf ear (Jeremiah 7:13).

The next questions go to the doubt beneath the silence. After Jerusalem and the temple had fallen and the people had been carried away, many wondered whether God had abandoned them or was too weak to rescue them from the nations that held them. “Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver?”

The hand, yâd, stands for power, means and action, and God speaks of his own hand in human terms so that we can grasp his strength. qâtsar means to be short or to cut short, so a shortened hand is a hand too short to reach the one it would save. Behind redeem stands pᵉdûwth, which speaks here of buying back, rescuing and restoring his people, whether from captivity or from sin. Power is kôach, strength, and to deliver, nâtsal, is to rescue someone, taking them out of the hand of whatever holds them.

The answer to every one of these questions is that God’s hand is as long and as strong as it ever was. He asked Moses the same thing in the wilderness, “Is the LORD’S hand waxed short?” (Numbers 11:23), and later in this book Isaiah says, “Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save” (Isaiah 59:1). When Israel doubted him, it limited the Holy One of Israel (Psalm 78:41) in its own mind, as though its weakness were his. Our sense that God is limited comes from the smallness of our faith, while his strength stays what it always was.

God answers his own question by pointing to what he does. “Behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness”. A rebuke, gᵉʻârâh, is a stern word of reproof or command, from a root meaning to chide, and a single word from God is enough to empty the sea. chârab means to dry up, and in its other sense to lie waste and in ruins. yâm is the sea or any great body of water. With the verb sûwm, to put or make, he turns the rivers, nâhâr, into midbâr, wilderness or desert.

Every Israelite would hear in this the night God parted the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21), the great deliverance at the foundation of their history, when he brought his people out of bondage by a way that looked impossible. The rivers made dry may also recall the crossing of the Jordan. The God who did those things can bring his people home.

Then comes a stark picture of what his word does: “their fish stinketh, because there is no water, and dieth for thirst.” The fish, dâgâh, rot and stink (bâ’ash) for lack of water, mayim, and die (mûwth) of thirst (tsâmâ). When God acts, the effect is complete, and the dead fish on the dry riverbed put his power beyond doubt.

Verse 3 rises from the waters to the sky. “I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering.” God speaks of dressing the heavens as a person dresses. lâbash means to wrap around, to put on a garment or to clothe someone else, and qadrûwth is duskiness or blackness, a deep darkness. The second line says the same thing again, more strongly: he makes (sûwm) sackcloth, saq, their covering (kᵉçûwth).

Sackcloth was coarse, rough cloth, the kind also used for sacks, and it was the dress of mourning, grief, humbling and repentance. Jacob put it on when he believed Joseph was dead (Genesis 37:34), and the people of Nineveh and their king put it on when they repented (Jonah 3:5–6). Darkness goes with judgment and distress, as in the plague of darkness over Egypt (Exodus 10:21–23). So when God dresses the sky in black sackcloth, the whole heaven is pictured in mourning. It is a sign of judgment, of grief, or of an act of God so solemn that the sky itself reflects it.

The point in this chapter is the same as in verse 2. The God who can darken the whole sky is the God his doubting people are dealing with, and he is able both to discipline them and to redeem them. It is the same power that stands behind the comfort of Isaiah 40, where the message of chapters 40 to 55 begins.

These verses lead straight into the Servant who speaks in Isaiah 50:4–9, and he is everything the people of verse 2 failed to be. When God called, his people stayed silent, while the Servant listens and answers with perfect obedience and trust. That Servant is Jesus, who gave the obedience Israel withheld, and the iniquities that sold Israel in verse 1 are the iniquities the Servant bears in Isaiah 53.

God’s coming in verse 2 reached its fullest point when the Son of God came: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). Jesus wept over Jerusalem as he drew near to it (Luke 19:41–44). Christ is also the full answer to “Is my hand shortened?” God’s hand reached all the way to the cross, where Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). His resurrection displays the exceeding greatness of God’s power (Ephesians 1:19–20), stronger than the grave itself. So Jesus is both the man who answered when God called and God’s own hand stretched out to save.

Verse 1 points to him as well. The debt in this story was always ours, and Christ paid it. He came to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45), he redeemed us from the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13), and we were redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18–19). Those who belong to him are held by the love of God in Christ Jesus, from which no power in heaven or earth can separate them (Romans 8:38–39).

Verse 3 finds its deepest echo at the cross: “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour” (Matthew 27:45). The heavens were clothed in blackness while the Lamb of God (John 1:36) bore the judgment due for sin, for God “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). In Isaiah the darkened sky speaks first of God’s power in judgment, and at the cross that same power darkened the sky over the greatest act of redemption.

These verses give God’s people an honest account of their trouble and firm ground for hope at the same time. The exile was real, and it came from their own iniquities. Hardship and a sense of distance from God can have that cause in our lives too, because our choices carry real weight in our walk with him. Scripture also knows of suffering that comes from other causes, so this passage is a call to honesty before God, and it gives no warrant for tracing every grief to a particular sin.

The same verses show who God is. He keeps his covenant when his people break theirs, and he has written no bill of divorce against them. He owes no one, and his hand reaches as far as it ever did. The God who dries up the sea with a word and dresses the heavens in sackcloth is able to redeem, and in Christ he has done it. The one who came and called in Isaiah’s day is still calling, and the way back to him stays open.