Isaiah 55
After chapters heavy with the suffering and triumph of the LORD's Servant, Isaiah 55 throws the gates wide. It opens not with a lecture but with a shout - the cry of a vendor in a crowded market, except that nothing here costs anything: Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price (v. 1). The summons is for every one, and the only qualification named is need. Those who have run dry, those who have nothing to bring, are precisely the ones invited. What is held out - water, bread, wine, milk - is the very picture of abundance and life, and it is offered as a gift.3
The invitation turns at once into a question that exposes us: Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? (v. 2). We exhaust our resources on things that leave us empty. Against that emptiness Isaiah sets a feast and a covenant: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David (v. 3). The faithful love once pledged to David is now thrown open to all who come. And because the door will not stand open forever, the prophet presses for an answer: Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near (v. 6). To the one who turns, the promise is lavish - he will abundantly pardon (v. 7).
Then the chapter lifts our eyes. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways (vv. 8-9). The distance is not coldness but height - a mercy larger than our reckoning. And the word that carries this mercy is sure: as rain and snow soak the earth and make it bring forth, so shall my word be… it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please (v. 11). The chapter ends in a world made new - ye shall go out with joy… instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree (vv. 12-13) - the curse itself reversed, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Isaiah 55:1-5Ho, Every One That Thirsteth
1Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. 3Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. 4Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people. 5Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the LORD thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee.
The chapter opens with a single sharp syllable - Ho! - the call of a herald or a street-vendor flagging down the crowd, demanding to be heard above the noise. But the cry inverts everything a market cry usually means: Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat (v. 1). The summons goes out to every one, and the only qualification it names is thirst. Then comes the line that turns the whole scene upside down: he that hath no money; come ye, buy. In any real market, having no money ends the transaction. Here it is the very thing that opens it. The verbs heap up - come, buy, eat… come, buy - an urgent, repeated pressing, as if the speaker can hardly get the invitation out fast enough. And what is offered is not bare survival but abundance: not only waters but wine and milk, the drink of gladness and the food of nourishment together. This is the gospel's own shape, set down centuries early: a feast spread for people who cannot pay, pressed on them by a host who only asks that they be hungry enough to come.3
No sooner is the feast spread than the prophet turns and asks the question that exposes us: Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? (v. 2). It is a piercing diagnosis of the human heart. We do spend - money, effort, years - and so much of it goes to things that cannot feed a soul. The Hebrew is sharper still: that which is not bread. We pay the price of real bread for what is not bread at all, and rise from the table still empty. The cure is not to spend harder but to listen: hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. The word rendered fatness is, in that world, the language of feasting and plenty - the rich portion, the best of the meal. And the path to it is simply to hearken, to incline the ear and come. The deepest hunger we carry is not in the stomach; it is in the soul, and it is met not by acquiring more but by receiving what God freely gives.
The invitation now deepens from a meal into a bond: Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David (v. 3). To come and listen is not merely to be fed for a day; it is to live - the soul itself revived. And what God pledges to the one who comes is an everlasting covenant, bound up with the sure mercies of David. Long before, the LORD had promised David a throne and a faithful love that would not be taken away - a covenant of steadfast, reliable mercy. Here that promise is flung open: the faithful love once spoken over one king is offered to you, to every one who will come and hear. What was a royal pledge becomes a public gift. The verse that follows gestures toward the One who anchors it: I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people (v. 4) - a figure in David's line whose witness and rule reach beyond Israel to nations who never knew Him. The free meal of verse 1 turns out to be entry into a covenant that does not expire.
The horizon widens past Israel's borders: Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the LORD thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee (v. 5). Notice the movement. Nations that had no prior knowledge of God - strangers, outsiders, peoples with no claim - come running. And they come not because of any greatness in Israel itself but because of the LORD thy God… for he hath glorified thee. The drawing power is God's glory shining through His people, not the people's own renown. This is the same widening that ran through the invitation of verse 1, now stretched to its full reach: the call that begins with every one that thirsteth does not stop at one nation's edge. It runs out to peoples who did not know His name and brings them running to the waters. The free feast was never meant to feed a few; it was always a table set for the world.
Isaiah 55:6-9Seek Ye the LORD While He May Be Found
6Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: 7Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. 9For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The free invitation now comes with an urgency about timing: Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near (v. 6). The grace is wide, but it is not to be presumed upon. There is a while - a season when He may be found, a nearness that asks to be answered now rather than later. The verse does not threaten; it pleads. It is the tone of someone holding a door open and saying, gently but in earnest, come through now. Two verbs carry the appeal: seek and call. To seek is to turn the whole self toward Him; to call is to cry out, to ask. Neither is complicated, neither is costly - they are simply the response of a thirsty person to an open invitation. And the assurance folded into the command is itself a comfort: He may be found; He is near. The seeking is not a search for someone hiding. It is the turning of a face toward One who is already close, already waiting to be found.
What seeking the LORD looks like in practice is spelled out next, and so is what it meets: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon (v. 7). The turning is real - not a feeling but a forsaking. The way is abandoned; even the thoughts, the inner habits of mind that ran toward wrong, are left behind. The word return is the great prophetic word for repentance: a turning-around, a coming home. And waiting at the end of that turn is not a grudging acceptance but a flood. He will have mercy; He will abundantly pardon. The word rendered abundantly means to multiply, to do much, to pardon lavishly and beyond measure. This is the heart of the whole chapter laid bare. The God who spread a free feast does not then dole out forgiveness in careful portions. To the one who turns and comes, pardon is not rationed - it is poured out without stint, abundant past all our calculating.
Lest the lavishness of that pardon seem too much to credit, the LORD explains it by lifting our eyes: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts (vv. 8-9). It is tempting to read these famous lines only as a statement about mystery - that God is unknowable, His logic beyond us. But notice why they are spoken here. They come right after the promise of abundant pardon, as the explanation of it. We measure forgiveness by our own narrow accounting; we assume God keeps score the way we do, that some debts are surely too large to cancel. And God answers: my ways are not so cramped as yours. The distance between heaven and earth is the distance between your stingy reckoning of mercy and mine. So the “higher ways” are not first a wall shutting us out; they are a window onto a generosity we would never have dared invent. His thoughts run higher than ours precisely at the point of grace - He pardons more freely, loves more widely, welcomes more readily than we can bring ourselves to believe.
Isaiah 55:10-13My Word Shall Not Return Void
10For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: 11So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. 12For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 13Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
To anchor the promise of His word, the LORD reaches for the most dependable thing in an agricultural world - the cycle of rain and harvest: For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater (v. 10). The picture is patient and sure. Rain falls; it does not evaporate uselessly back into the sky before its work is done. It soaks in, it waters, it makes the earth bring forth and bud. And the result is traced all the way to its end - seed to the sower, and bread to the eater. The water that fell as a gift from above becomes, by the time its work is finished, food on a table. Nothing is wasted; the whole arc runs from heaven to harvest to bread. This is the chapter's own opening image returning in a new key: the bread of verse 1, freely given, traced back to the water that comes down freely from above. What God sends from heaven does not return empty-handed; it accomplishes the feeding it was sent to do.
Now comes the great application: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (v. 11). As surely as rain does its work before returning to the sky, so surely does God's spoken word do its work before returning to Him. The word rendered void means empty, fruitless, having failed of its purpose - and God says His word is never that. It always accomplishes that which I please; it always prospers in the thing whereto I sent it. This is one of the firmest assurances in all of Scripture, and it stands behind everything the chapter has promised. The invitation of verse 1, the covenant of verse 3, the pardon of verse 7 - none of these is a hopeful wish that may or may not come to pass. They are spoken, gone forth from the mouth of God, and therefore certain. His word is not like our words, which so often fall to the ground. It carries within it the power to do what it says. When God speaks mercy, mercy happens. When He promises a feast, the feast is sure. The word that called this whole chapter into being will not return to Him empty.
The chapter that began with thirsty people in a market ends with the whole creation in song: For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands (v. 12). To go out is the language of release - of captives leaving exile, of a people led home. And they are led forth with peace, by a hand that goes before them. The joy is so large it spills past the people into the land itself: mountains and hills break forth… into singing, trees clap their hands. Then the climax, where the curse itself is undone: Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree (v. 13). Thorns and briars are the very signs of a world gone wrong, the ground's resistance under judgment. Here they are replaced - the fir and the myrtle, trees of life and fragrance and beauty, rising where only thorns had been. And it stands forever: it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. The free invitation of verse 1 leads, in the end, to a world made new and a sign that will never be erased.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Isaiah 55 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Radak, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the phrase belo' khesef (v. 1, “without money”), for chasdei David (v. 3, the “sure mercies of David”), and for davar (v. 11, the “word” that goes forth and does not return empty).
- Isaiah 55 ↔ John 4 & 6 · Acts 13 · Revelation 22Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Isaiah 55 to the rest of Scripture - the free water of verse 1 read beside let him take the water of life freely (Rev. 22:17) and the One who said if any man thirst, let him come unto me (John 7:37); the sure mercies of David of verse 3 read beside Paul's use of the very phrase for the risen Christ (Acts 13:34).
- Isaiah 55 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Isaiah 55 - the herald's cry that opens verse 1, the covenant language of verse 3 and its link to David, the much-discussed comparison of God's ways to the heavens in verses 8-9, and the rain-and-word figure of verses 10-11.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Ho, Every One That Thirsteth
- Revelation 22:17let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.The last invitation of the Bible, echoing the first words of verse 1 - the thirsty called to take the water freely.
- John 7:37Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.The very cry of verse 1 on His own lips - a voice raised to the thirsty in a crowd.
- Matthew 5:6Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.The promise behind verse 1 - the hungry and thirsty, not the satisfied, are the ones who are filled.
- 2 Samuel 7:15-16But my mercy shall not depart away from him... thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever.The faithful love once pledged to David that verse 3 throws open to all - the “sure mercies of David.”
- Isaiah 25:6And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things... a feast of wines on the lees.The same feast as verses 1-2 - a table of abundance spread by God for all peoples.
Seek Ye the LORD While He May Be Found
- Matthew 7:7-8Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you... he that seeketh findeth.The promise of verse 6 echoed - the LORD found by all who truly seek Him.
- 2 Corinthians 6:2behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.The urgency of verse 6 - <em>while he may be found</em> - named as the present moment of grace.
- Luke 15:20when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran.The return and abundant mercy of verse 7 pictured - the turning sinner met by a father who runs.
- Psalm 103:11-12For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy... as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.The same heaven-and-earth measure as verse 9 - applied directly to the vastness of God’s mercy.
- Romans 11:33O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!The higher ways of verses 8-9 - the thoughts of God beyond our reckoning.
My Word Shall Not Return Void
- Acts 13:34now no more to return to corruption, he said on this wise, I will give you the sure mercies of David.The covenant of verse 3 named - the sure mercies of David applied by the apostle to the risen Christ.
- Hebrews 4:12For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword.The living, working word of verse 11 - God’s word that does not return void.
- 1 Peter 1:23-25the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever... And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.The enduring, effectual word of verse 11 - the word of the gospel that abides for ever.
- Revelation 22:3And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it.The reversed curse of verse 13 - thorn giving way to fir tree - brought to its end in the new creation.
- Isaiah 35:1-2The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.The same singing creation as verses 12-13 - the land itself rejoicing as the curse is undone.