Isaiah 41

The chapter opens not with a sermon but with a summons to court: Keep silence before me, O islands; and let the people renew their strength: let them come near; then let them speak: let us come near together to judgment (v. 1). The LORD calls the coastlands - the far-off nations at the edges of the known world - to gather, gird themselves, and make their case. He welcomes the contest. The question He puts to the assembled world is about history itself: Who raised up the righteous man from the east, called him to his foot, gave the nations before him, and made him rule over kings? (v. 2).

Someone has been stirred up in the east, a conqueror before whom kingdoms fall as the dust and driven stubble, who sweeps through lands so fast it is as if his feet never touched the road (v. 3). The nations see only a rising warlord and tremble. But the chapter is pressing a deeper question than who is this conqueror? It is asking who raised him up? - who is the hand behind the rise and fall of empires.

That is the case the court has been called to settle.

The LORD answers His own question, and the answer is the foundation of everything the chapter will say to the afraid: Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he (v. 4). He does not merely claim to have raised up one conqueror; He claims to have been calling the generations from the beginning - summoning each age of human history onto the stage in its turn, from the first until now.

And He gives Himself a name that stretches across the whole of time: He is the first, there before anything began, and He is with the last, present still when all things come to their end. I am he - the One who was, and is, and continues. This is the answer to every terror the nations feel watching empires rise. History is not a runaway thing, careening forward with no one at the helm. The same God stands at its head and at its close, and at every point between.

The conqueror from the east is not the master of the age; he is an instrument in the hand of the One who is first and last. Everything the chapter goes on to promise - fear not, I will help thee, I will hold thy hand - rests on this: the God making the promise is the God who owns both ends of time.

Watch what the frightened nations do in response: The isles saw it, and feared; the ends of the earth were afraid, drew near, and came. They helped every one his neighbour; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage (vv. 5-6). Faced with a conqueror they cannot stop, the peoples band together and try to talk one another into bravery. And then comes one of Isaiah's quietly devastating pictures: So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smote the anvil, saying, It is ready for the sodering: and he fastened it with nails, that it should not be moved (v. 7).

In their fear, what do they make? An idol. Craftsman cheers on craftsman; they overlay it, hammer it smooth, solder the joints - and then the final, telling touch: they nail it down that it should not be moved. The god they have built cannot even keep itself upright; it must be fastened to the wall so it will not fall over. The irony is merciless. They are terrified of a real movement of history, and their remedy is to manufacture a god that has to be tacked in place to keep from toppling.

The whole scene sets up the great contrast of the chapter: a God who moves the generations, against gods who cannot move at all.

The voice turns, and everything softens. Away from the trembling nations, the LORD addresses one people directly: But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend (v. 8). The little word but does enormous work - over against the panicked idol-makers stands a people who belong to the living God. Three names are piled up to make the belonging unmistakable: my servant, the one I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend. That last phrase is striking; Abraham is called the friend of God, and his children inherit the friendship.

Then the LORD presses the point against the very fear exile breeds - the fear of having been discarded: Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth… and said unto thee, Thou art my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away (v. 9). This is the lie that suffering whispers: you have been thrown out, forgotten, dropped. The LORD meets it head-on. I have not cast thee away. The choosing still stands.

Before a single comfort is spoken, the relationship is reaffirmed - because the comfort that follows only means anything if the belonging is sure.

Now comes the verse that has carried more frightened people through more dark nights than almost any other in the book: Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness (v. 10). Notice how it is built. Two commands - fear not, be not dismayed - each immediately answered with a reason rooted in the presence of a Person: for I am with thee… for I am thy God. Then three promises stack up, each introduced by an emphatic yea, climbing higher: I will strengthen thee - I will put strength into you where you have none; I will help thee - I will come to your aid in the trouble itself; I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness - I will hold you up, and the hand that holds you is the hand of my own faithfulness.

The right hand in Scripture is the hand of strength and of saving action. To be upheld by the right hand of his righteousness is to be steadied by His grip on you, and to be steadied by something as unshakable as His own commitment to do right. Over against every real fear and danger is set the strong, righteous, sustaining hand of God.

The promises grow even more personal. Against all who rage at His people, the LORD declares they will come to nothing: all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded… they that strive with thee shall perish (v. 11); the day will come when Israel looks for its enemies and cannot even find them (v. 12). And then, in the middle of that assurance, the most tender image in the chapter: For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee (v. 13).

Now the LORD reaches down and takes hold of a hand - the way a parent takes the hand of a frightened child crossing a dark road. And as He holds the hand, He keeps speaking the same word over the fear: Fear not; I will help thee. The God who commands the generations, who stands first and last over all of history, stoops to clasp the hand of one small, shaking people and walk beside them.

The greatness of verse 4 and the tenderness of verse 13 are the same God. Precisely because He is the first and the last, His hand is worth holding.

Then the LORD calls His people by a startling name: Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the LORD, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel (v. 14). Worm sounds at first like contempt, but it is the opposite - it is the most honest possible reckoning of how small and crushable this people feels. A worm has no strength, no defense, nothing to bargain with; it can be trodden underfoot by anyone.

The LORD does not flatter Israel into courage by pretending they are mighty. He names their littleness exactly - worm Jacob - and then, in the same breath, answers it: I will help thee. The strength will not come from the worm; it will come from the Helper. And He seals it with two names that tower over the smallness: He is their redeemer, the one who buys back what was lost, and He is the Holy One of Israel, Isaiah's great title for the LORD - the infinitely high and pure God who has bound Himself to this lowly people.

The astonishing thing is the pairing. The Holy One of Israel is the redeemer of worm Jacob. The verses that follow turn the picture entirely around: the helpless worm becomes a new sharp threshing instrument that threshes mountains and scatters hills like chaff (vv. 15-16) - not by its own might, but because the One who holds its hand has made it so.

Before the trial of the idols resumes, the LORD turns once more to His people and makes a promise aimed at their deepest helplessness: When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the LORD will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them (v. 17). This is the picture of people at the very end of their resources - not merely poor but poor and needy, searching for water in a dry land, tongues cracking with thirst, nothing to be found.

And the LORD's answer is a flood of provision: I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys: I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water (v. 18). He will put rivers where rivers do not belong - on the bare hilltops - and turn parched desert into pools. He goes further still, planting a whole forest where nothing grew: cedar and myrtle and pine and fir set together in the wasteland (v. 19).

The transformation is total - from a place where the thirsty die to a watered, shaded garden. The God who said I will help thee is the God who can open springs in a desert; no situation is too dry for Him to bring life to it.

The point of all that provision is named plainly: That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the LORD hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it (v. 20). The miracle in the wilderness is meant to teach. Four verbs pile up - see, know, consider, understand - tracing the slow movement from noticing a thing to grasping what it means. And what they are meant to understand is the source: the hand of the LORD hath done this. The same hand that upholds worm Jacob (v. 10) and takes hold of his (v. 13) is the hand that opens rivers in the desert.

The word created is deliberate - it is the language of Genesis, of God bringing into being what was not there. Turning a wasteland into a watered forest is an act of the same creative power that made the world. This matters for the trial about to resume. The contrast Isaiah is building is between a God whose hand visibly does and creates, and gods who cannot lift a finger. When the people look at the impossible rivers and trace them back to the LORD's hand, they are being trained to tell the living God from the dead ones.

Now the courtroom reconvenes, and the LORD turns to address the idols directly: Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob (v. 21). He demands they make their case - and He sets the test that will decide it: knowledge of time. Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be… or declare us things for to come (v. 22).

Can the idols explain the past - tell us what the former things were and how they came out? Better yet, can they tell the future - declare us things for to come? This is the decisive challenge, repeated in the next verse with the stakes named: Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods (v. 23). The test of true deity is the command of history - the very thing the LORD claimed for Himself in verse 4 when He named Himself the One calling the generations from the beginning. A real God knows the end from the beginning and can announce it before it comes.

He even taunts them: do good, or do evil - do anything, stir us to fear or wonder, simply act. The challenge exposes the emptiness. The idols cannot tell the future, cannot recount the past, cannot move at all.

The verdict on the idols falls like a hammer: Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought: an abomination is he that chooseth you (v. 24). The challenge has been issued - declare the future, recount the past, do good or evil, do anything - and the silence that follows is the whole argument. The idols say nothing because there is nothing there to speak. Ye are of nothing: they have no being, no substance, no reality behind the carved wood and soldered metal.

Your work of nought: whatever they seem to accomplish amounts to zero. And then the sharpest line - an abomination is he that chooseth you. The indictment lands not only on the idols but on the worshipper. To choose a nothing as your god, to stake your life and trust on a thing that cannot hear, speak, or act, is a corruption of the soul, because we become like what we worship. Empty gods make empty people.

The contrast with verses 17-20 could not be starker: there the LORD's hand opens rivers in a desert and creates a forest where there was none; here the idols cannot manage a single word. One God acts and creates; the others are of nothing.

The LORD presses His case with a fresh claim: I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come: from the rising of the sun shall he call upon my name: and he shall come upon princes as upon morter, and as the potter treadeth clay (v. 25). Earlier the conqueror was from the east (v. 2); here he comes from the north and from the rising of the sun - the directions converge on a single deliverer whom the LORD has stirred up to tread down the proud as a potter treads soft clay underfoot.

The crucial words are I have raised up. The mover behind the conqueror is the LORD, doing again exactly what He claimed in verse 4 - calling the agents of history onto the stage in their season. The phrase he shall call upon my name shows that even a ruler who does not know the LORD is, in the end, accomplishing the LORD's purpose. The whole point of naming this in advance is the point the chapter keeps returning to: the LORD announces what He will do before He does it, so that when it comes to pass, everyone will know whose hand was at work.

That is precisely the test the idols just failed.

The LORD drives the verdict home by asking, of all the gods and counsellors of the nations, a simple question: did any of you call this? Who hath declared from the beginning, that we may know? and beforetime, that we may say, He is righteous? (v. 26). If any idol had foretold the conqueror's rise, we could credit it - he is righteous, his word proved true. But the answer is a threefold silence, hammered home: there is none that sheweth, yea, there is none that declareth, yea, there is none that heareth your words. No idol announced it.

No idol explained it. Not one of them so much as hears the words spoken to it. The repetition is the rhetoric of an open-and-shut case - none… none… none. The contrast with the LORD is absolute: He has been declaring His purposes from the beginning, and the events confirm Him. This is the bedrock of biblical confidence: the God of Israel is the God who tells you beforehand. Fulfilled word is the signature that marks the living God off from every counterfeit, and it is the reason His fear not in verse 10 is something a person can actually lean their weight on.

Against the silence of the idols, the LORD sets His own speaking, and it takes the form of good news: The first shall say to Zion, Behold, behold them: and I will give to Jerusalem one that bringeth good tidings (v. 27). Where the idols cannot say a word, the LORD - the first, the One who was there at the beginning - sends a herald to Zion. The phrase good tidings is the language of the messenger who runs ahead of an army to announce a victory, the bringer of glad news that the war is won and the exiles may go home.

It is the same note Isaiah sounds elsewhere - How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings… that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth! (Isa. 52:7). And it stands in pointed contrast to verse 28: I beheld, and there was no man… no counsellor, that, when I asked of them, could answer a word. Among all the idols and their priests there is no one who can speak; so the LORD will provide a speaker of His own - one who brings, to a people who have heard nothing but silence from their false gods, the announcement of deliverance.

The God who is not mute will not leave His people without a word of good news.

The chapter ends with its final verdict on the idols, and it is total: Behold, they are all vanity; their works are nothing: their molten images are wind and confusion (v. 29). Three words sum up everything the trial has proven. Vanity - emptiness, a puff of breath, nothing to grasp. Their works are nothing - whatever they appear to do amounts to zero. And then the most evocative phrase: wind and confusion. The idols are as substantial as a gust of air, and the word rendered confusion is the Hebrew tohu - the formless, empty waste of the world before God ordered it.

To trust an idol is to lean on a breath and to step back into chaos, into the un-creation that the LORD's hand had pushed back. This is the great either-or the chapter has been building toward. On one side stands the LORD - the first and the last, whose hand opens rivers in the desert and creates a forest from nothing, who declares the end from the beginning and sends a herald of good tidings.

On the other side stand the idols - wind and confusion. Between them the reader must choose; and to every soul tempted to fear, the chapter's verdict is also its comfort: the only One worth fearing is the only One who said, fear not.