Isaiah 51:1

“Hearken to me” opens the chapter (Isaiah 51) with a summons, and God names the people he means: “ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD.” These are the faithful among his people, who keep pursuing what is right and keep looking for God while the nation around them lies in ruin. The verb seek, bâqash, means to search out, to seek or to require, and it is used especially of seeking God in worship and prayer. The two phrases describe one group of people, and God answers their seeking by speaking to them himself.

These words belong to the chapters of comfort that begin with Isaiah 40, where God has already shown that he rules over every power on earth. Here he speaks to his people in the ruin and exile that Babylon brought on them. Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed, the people were carried to a foreign land, and many asked whether God’s promises to Abraham and to David could still stand. Into that discouragement God says, in effect, look back.

The New Testament shows where such seeking ends. Paul longed to be found in Christ, having “the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Philippians 3:9). Those who follow after righteousness find it in him, as God’s gift.

The picture comes from stone-cutting: “look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.” The rock, tsûwr, is a rock or cliff. The verb hewn, châtsab, means to cut or carve stone or wood, to hew or to quarry, and it is the work of a mason. The “hole of the pit” joins two words, maqqebeth, a hole or quarry, and bôwr, a pit or cistern, a word also used of a dungeon. The verb digged, nâqar, means to bore, to dig or to quarry. A block of stone owes its being to the place it was cut from, and Israel owed its being to the place God had taken it from and to the God who did the cutting.

The two halves of the verse say one thing in two ways, as Hebrew poetry often does, and together they press home that this people was made by God’s deliberate work from a small and humble beginning. The command “look”, nâbaṭ, is the ordinary verb for looking or gazing, and it can also mean to consider. Here God asks his people to consider their beginning and the hand that shaped them.

“For I called him alone” gives the reason for looking back. The verb called, qârâʼ, means to call out to someone or to address him by name. When God called him, Abraham was one man, his wife was barren, and he had nothing to make a nation from. The call and its promise are in Genesis 12:1–3, where God promises to make of him a great nation and to bless him. Everything that followed began with God’s choice and God’s word.

“And blessed him” takes in the favour God showed Abraham in every part of his life. “And increased him” uses râbâh, which in its causative forms means to make many or to multiply. God had promised Abraham descendants as many as the stars (Genesis 15:5), and later confirmed it with an oath to multiply his seed (Genesis 22:17). That increase came through a son born to an old man and a woman long past bearing. Hebrews says that Sarah received strength by faith to conceive, and that from one man, “and him as good as dead”, came a people as many as the stars (Hebrews 11:11–12). Paul says that Abraham hoped against hope and was fully persuaded that God could do what he had promised (Romans 4:18–21), for God gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were (Romans 4:17).

Verse 3 opens with “For”, and gives the reason the faithful can take heart: “the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places.” The LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, is the covenant God who called Abraham. Zion is Jerusalem, its temple and its land, and with them the people who belong to it, because in the prophets the city and its people share one future. A psalm remembers how the captives sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept when they remembered Zion (Psalm 137:1). The promise of comfort covers both the rebuilding of the city and the renewal of the people.

The verb “comfort” stands twice in this verse, and both times it is nâcham. Its root picture is breathing deeply, a sigh, and from there it means to be sorry, to pity and to console. God’s comfort changes Zion’s condition, which is why the rest of the verse describes a ruined land made new. “All her waste places” takes in every ruin. The word chorbâh comes from a root meaning drought, and it means a desolation, a ruin or a waste place, which is what the invasions had made of Jerusalem and Judah. The promise echoes the opening of these chapters, where God’s first word for his people is comfort (Isaiah 40:1–2).

“And he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD.” Wilderness, midbâr, means wilderness or desert. Desert, ʻărâbâh, means a plain, a steppe or dry country, and the same word names the Arabah. The two lines say one thing twice: the land that lies barren will become as fruitful as the best place God ever made.

Eden, ʻÊden, is the region where God planted the first garden and set Adam there (Genesis 2). A garden, gan, was a cultivated place, precious in a dry land, and “the garden of the LORD”, gan Yᵉhôvâh, is that garden of Eden, where man lived in plenty and in open fellowship with God. So the promise reaches back past the exile and past every ruin to the world as God first made it, and it looks ahead to the undoing of the curse and to the new creation.

The prophets give this hope more than once. Isaiah has already said that the desert will rejoice and blossom (Isaiah 35:1–2), and Ezekiel promises that the land that was desolate will become like the garden of Eden (Ezekiel 36:35).

The verse ends with what will be heard in the renewed land: “joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.” Joy, sâsôwn, and gladness, simchâh, stand side by side. Simchâh means joy, gladness or mirth, the delight people feel and show. Thanksgiving, tôwdâh, is praise that confesses what God has done, and the same word is used for a thanksgiving choir and for the thank offering. “The voice of melody” joins qôwl, a voice or sound, with zimrâh, a song or melody.

So the place of lament becomes a place of worship. The LORD comforts, the land is made new, and his people answer with thanks and song, as Isaiah promised everlasting joy to those the LORD redeems (Isaiah 35:10).

Paul calls Abraham the father of all who believe (Romans 4:11), and he says that the promised seed of Abraham is Christ (Galatians 3:16). So the call to “look unto Abraham your father” reaches every believer. Gentiles are grafted into the olive tree of God’s people and share its root (Romans 11:17–24), and the one man God called alone has become a great multitude from every nation (Revelation 7:9). That increase comes through Christ, the mediator of a better covenant (Hebrews 8:6).

The picture of stone cut from a rock comes into the New Testament as well. Believers are living stones built up into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5), on Christ the chief cornerstone, chosen of God and precious, whom the builders rejected (1 Peter 2:6–8). As Israel was hewn from Abraham, believers are made by God into a new people in Christ, and anyone in Christ is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17). All God’s promises find their yes and their Amen in him (2 Corinthians 1:20).

The comfort of Zion comes to its fullness in Christ too. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and by his death and resurrection he reconciles people to God, so that a heart that was a wilderness bears the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23). The last pages of Scripture show a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1), where God dwells with his people and wipes away all tears from their eyes (Revelation 21:4). There the joy, thanksgiving and song of this verse go on for ever.

These three verses turn the eyes of grieving people from their ruins to their beginning. Everything Israel was came from God’s call to one man and from a son given to a barren woman, so their hope was always measured by his power. The God who hewed them from that rock is the LORD who promises to comfort Zion, and his comfort makes a desert into a garden. He speaks this to those who seek him, and he grounds their hope in what he has already done. The same God has made Abraham’s family a multitude in Christ, and the joy and thanksgiving promised here belong to all of them.