Isaiah 63
Isaiah 63 opens like a scene watched from a city wall. A lone figure is coming up out of the south - from Edom, from its stronghold city Bozrah - striding forward in the greatness of his strength. A watcher cries out, Who is this? And the figure answers in His own voice: I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save (v. 1). But His apparel is stained a deep red, and the watcher presses the strange detail: Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? (v. 2). The answer is one of the most arresting self-descriptions in all the prophets: I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me (v. 3). This is the language of judgment - and Isaiah handles it with both gravity and a refusal to let it be the whole story.3
For the same verse that names the wrath names, in its second half, the rescue: the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come (v. 4). The day God answers every unanswered wrong is the very day He delivers the people who have waited for Him - one act, not two. Then, at verse 7, the chapter turns and becomes a prayer of remembrance: I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD… according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses (v. 7). The one who prays reaches back over the whole history of God's dealings and finds it crowded with mercy - including the astonishing line that He was no distant spectator of their pain: In all their affliction he was afflicted… he bare them, and carried them all the days of old (v. 9).
The remembering grows honest as it goes. The people recall that they wounded the very God who carried them: But they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit (v. 10). They recall the great deliverance through the sea, when He led them by the right hand of Moses and brought them through the deep so that they should not stumble (vv. 11-13). And then the prayer lifts its eyes and pleads for Him to act again: Look down from heaven… where is thy zeal and thy strength…? are they restrained? (v. 15). It ends by reaching past every earthly tie to the only one who finally holds them: thou, O LORD, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting (v. 16).2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Isaiah 63:1-6I Have Trodden the Winepress Alone
1Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save. 2Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? 3I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment. 4For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come. 5And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and my fury, it upheld me. 6And I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.
The chapter opens like a scene watched from a city wall. Someone is coming up out of the south, and a watcher cannot make him out: Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? (v. 1). Edom was Israel's old hostile neighbor to the southeast, and Bozrah its chief stronghold; in the prophets they often stand as a shorthand for the nations that set themselves against God and His people. So the figure approaching from that direction is coming back from where judgment was done. He is unmistakably royal - glorious in his apparel, advancing in the greatness of his strength - and yet alone, a single striding form against the desert. The watcher's question hangs in the air until the figure answers in His own voice: I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save. Mark those two words held together at the very threshold of the chapter: righteousness and save. Before a word is said about wrath, the One approaching names Himself as the one who speaks what is right and is mighty to save. Whatever follows about treading and fury must be read in the light of that self-naming. This is not blind rage on the march; it is righteousness that is also rescue, coming home.3
The watcher presses the one detail that does not fit a returning king: Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? (v. 2). The image is drawn straight from the harvest. In an ancient vineyard the grapes were piled in a stone trough and a man climbed in and crushed them underfoot, and the juice would spray and soak his clothes a deep red to the knee and beyond. So the question is concrete and a little horrified: why do You look like someone who has been stomping grapes? The answer turns the harvest picture into a picture of judgment: I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment (v. 3). This must be read with gravity; the prophets do not soften it and neither should we. The treading of the winepress is one of Scripture's recurring images for the moment God finally answers cruelty and oppression that have gone unanswered - the day when what is owed comes due. What the grapes are to the press, those who have set themselves against God and crushed the helpless are to that day. The red on the garments is the cost of justice actually being done, not merely promised.
Two words in verse 3 carry an enormous weight, and the chapter says them twice over: alone and none. I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me. Then verse 5 says it again from the other side: And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and my fury, it upheld me. Twice the lone figure scans the horizon for an ally and finds no one. This is not a complaint that no one volunteered to swing the sword. It is a statement that the work is His and His alone to do - that no created hand could share it, and that mine own arm - God's own strength, needing no reinforcement - accomplishes the salvation. There is something solemn and solitary in the picture: a deliverance so great that there was no one able to stand alongside and help bring it about. The same aloneness will reappear, transfigured, at the end of the chapter and in the New Testament, where another lone figure does a work no one else could do and faces it with no one beside Him. Here the loneliness is the loneliness of unshared power. Later it will become the loneliness of unshared suffering - and the two will turn out to be the same arm at work.
The single most important verse in this section is the one that keeps the judgment from being the whole story: For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come (v. 4). Read the two halves slowly, because they belong to one sentence and one heart. The day of vengeance is not vindictiveness; the Hebrew word carries the sense of a wrong finally set right, an account at last balanced - what we mean when we say justice is done. And in the very same breath, held in the very same heart, is the year of my redeemed. Notice the proportion, too: a day of vengeance, a year of redemption. The settling of accounts is the brief, necessary thing; the rescue of the redeemed is the long, spacious thing it opens onto. These are not two separate acts - one for enemies, one for the faithful - that happen to fall on the same calendar. They are a single act seen from two sides. The same arm that brings down oppression is the arm that lifts up the oppressed; you cannot have the rescue without the reckoning. For those who have ground others into the dust, verse 6 is terrible: I will bring down their strength to the earth. But for those who have waited, bruised and overlooked, the same day is the year they have longed for - the year of the redeemed come at last.
Isaiah 63:7-9In All Their Affliction He Was Afflicted
7I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD, and the praises of the LORD, according to all that the LORD hath bestowed on us, and the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which he hath bestowed on them according to his mercies, and according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses. 8For he said, Surely they are my people, children that will not lie: so he was their Saviour. 9In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.
At verse 7 the chapter turns. The lone figure striding from Edom gives way to a voice at prayer, and the prayer begins where every honest prayer can begin - with memory: I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD, and the praises of the LORD, according to all that the LORD hath bestowed on us, and the great goodness toward the house of Israel (v. 7). The word mention is quietly deliberate. The one praying chooses to call God's mercies to mind, to recite them aloud, the way a person steadies a shaking heart by saying true things out loud. And notice how the verse heaps the words up - lovingkindnesses, praises, great goodness, mercies, and again the multitude of his lovingkindnesses. One word will not hold it; the mercy keeps overflowing the sentence. This is the discipline that the rest of the prayer will lean on. Before it dares to ask its hard questions - where is thy zeal? why hast thou made us to err? - it first fills its mouth with what it already knows to be true of God. The order matters. Remembrance comes first; the questions come after, and stand on it.
Verse 9 holds one of the most tender lines in all the prophets, and it deserves to be read slowly: In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old. The center of it is staggering. It does not say God merely saw their affliction, or noticed it from somewhere safe. It says in all their affliction he was afflicted - their distress was felt as His own distress; when they hurt, He hurt. This is a God who does not hold Himself at a clean distance from His people's pain but enters into it, so that their suffering becomes, in some real way, His. And the rescue is no cold transaction. It comes in his love and in his pity - not because they had earned it, but because He could not bear their distress and not move. The angel of his presence - the manifestation of God's own nearness that went with them - saved them. Salvation here is not God acting from far off; it is God's own presence, come close, doing the saving. The verse insists on a nearness most religion is afraid to claim: that the high and holy One is, of all things, with His people in the worst of what they go through.
The verse ends with an image of unhurried tenderness: he bare them, and carried them all the days of old (v. 9). The two verbs are gentle and physical. To bear is to lift a weight onto oneself; to carry is to keep on bearing it through the long road. It is the picture of a parent gathering up a child who can no longer walk - not for an hour, but all the days of old, the whole length of the wilderness years and beyond. The same prophet says it elsewhere with the white hair showing: God will carry His people even to hoar hairs, having made them and bound Himself to bear and deliver them. So the deliverance from Egypt and the long crossing of the desert are remembered here not first as displays of power but as acts of carrying - God stooping under the weight of a people who could not make the journey on their own. This is the God the prayer is reminding itself of before it asks Him to act again. The one who treads the winepress alone (v. 3) is the same one who bore His people on His own shoulders the whole way home. Strength and tenderness are not at war in Him; the arm strong enough to tread down the proud is the arm gentle enough to carry the weak.
Isaiah 63:10-14They Vexed His Holy Spirit
10But they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit: therefore he was turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them. 11Then he remembered the days of old, Moses, and his people, saying, Where is he that brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of his flock? where is he that put his holy Spirit within him? 12That led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm, dividing the water before them, to make himself an everlasting name? 13That led them through the deep, as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble? 14As a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of the LORD caused him to rest: so didst thou lead thy people, to make thyself a glorious name.
The prayer has just remembered a God who carried His people in His own arms - and now, with painful honesty, it remembers how they answered that love: But they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit: therefore he was turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them (v. 10). The little word but turns the whole movement. Set against he bare them, and carried them (v. 9), it lays the people's failure bare without excuse: He carried, but they rebelled. And the way their rebellion is described is striking. It is not first called law-breaking or idolatry, though it was those things; it is called vexing his holy Spirit - wounding, grieving, provoking the Spirit of God who was present among them. The language is relational, almost intimate. You cannot grieve a force or a principle; you can only grieve a Someone who loves you. To say the people vexed his holy Spirit is to say there was a living, caring presence in their midst that their sin actually hurt. The consequence is sobering and stated plainly: he was turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them. The God who had fought for them now, because of their hardness, stood on the other side. This is the dark hinge of the prayer - the honest admission that the estrangement they now feel is not God's coldness but the fruit of a grief they themselves caused.
Even in the middle of confessing failure, the prayer cannot help reaching back to the great rescue, and verses 11 through 14 retell it with longing: Then he remembered the days of old, Moses, and his people, saying, Where is he that brought them up out of the sea…? The questions are not skeptical; they are aching. Where is he who divided the water, who put his holy Spirit within them, who led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm? The crossing of the sea is remembered in vivid, gentle pictures. He led them through the deep, as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble (v. 13) - sure-footed, kept from falling on terrible ground. And then the quietest image of all: As a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of the LORD caused him to rest (v. 14) - like cattle led down from the bare heights into a green and watered valley to lie down, so the Spirit brought the people into rest. Twice in these verses the purpose is named the same way: God did it to make himself an everlasting name, to make thyself a glorious name (vv. 12, 14). The deliverance was for the people's sake and for the sake of God's own name in the earth - so that what He is would be known. The prayer rehearses all this because it wants God to do it again. The unspoken plea under every remembered mercy is: You were that God once. Be that God now.
Isaiah 63:15-19Thou, O LORD, Art Our Father, Our Redeemer
15Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy strength, the sounding of thy bowels and of thy mercies toward me? are they restrained? 16Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: thou, O LORD, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting. 17O LORD, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of thine inheritance. 18The people of thy holiness have possessed it but a little while: our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary. 19We are thine: thou never barest rule over them; they were not called by thy name.
Now the prayer lifts its head and speaks directly to God, and the asking begins in earnest: Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy strength, the sounding of thy bowels and of thy mercies toward me? are they restrained? (v. 15). This is the prayer of someone who has remembered all that mercy - and now feels its absence keenly. Look down… behold: come and see what has become of us. And then the searching question: where is thy zeal and thy strength? Where is the God of the divided sea, the God who was afflicted in our affliction? The phrase the sounding of thy bowels sounds strange to a modern ear, but it is one of the most physical descriptions of compassion in the Bible. In Hebrew the deep inward parts were the seat of feeling; to speak of God's bowels sounding or yearning is to speak of His tenderness moved, His heart stirred with pity, the way a parent's whole inside aches over a hurting child. So the question is achingly intimate: has that tenderness toward me been shut off? Are they restrained? - are the floodgates of Your mercy somehow closed? It is the cry of faith in the dark: not denying that God is merciful, but asking why the mercy it knows is real seems, for now, held back. That the prayer can ask this of God at all is itself a kind of faith - you do not plead this way with a God you have given up on.
Then the prayer reaches for the deepest name it knows, and clings to it: Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: thou, O LORD, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting (v. 16). It is a remarkable thing to say. Abraham was the great ancestor, Israel (Jacob) the father of the tribes - and the prayer says that even if those fathers no longer knew them, even if every earthly tie failed, one tie holds: thou art our father. God's fatherhood is named as older and surer than the fatherhood of the patriarchs themselves - thy name is from everlasting. And bound right to father is redeemer. In Israel the redeemer was the close kinsman whose duty and love it was to step in and buy back a relative who had fallen into debt or slavery or danger - the family member responsible to rescue. To call God our redeemer in the same breath as our father is to say He is not a distant deity but the nearest of kin, the one bound by love to come and get His own. So at the lowest point of the prayer - cut off, confused, the sanctuary in ruins - the people do not let go of the relationship; they reach past everything that has failed and lay hold of the one bond that cannot: thou, O LORD, art our father. When every other certainty is stripped away, this is what faith grips in the dark - not an argument, but a name.
The prayer ends raw and unresolved, and Scripture lets it. O LORD, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of thine inheritance (v. 17). The question is wrenching, and it is honest in a way polite prayers seldom are: the people feel so far from God that they wonder whether their very wandering is somehow bound up with His withdrawal. Scripture elsewhere is clear that God tempts no one to evil - but here it preserves the cry exactly as the heart prays it under long hardship, where the sufferer can no longer untangle their own sin from God's mysterious permitting of it, and simply lays the whole knot before Him. What the prayer does not do is walk away. Its plea is Return - come back - and its argument is not the people's worthiness but God's own ownership of them: thy servants, thy inheritance, thy sanctuary (v. 18), and at the last, simply, we are thine (v. 19). The sanctuary lies trampled, the adversaries have overrun the holy place, and the people feel as though God has never ruled over them at all. Yet the prayer's whole leverage is that they belong to Him. This is faith at its barest and most stubborn: stripped of every comfort, it holds up the one fact it cannot be talked out of - we are thine - and waits for the Father and Redeemer to act on it. The chapter does not tie the bow; the very next verse (into chapter 64) is still pleading, Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down. The prayer of faith in the dark is allowed to stay a prayer.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Isaiah 63 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for purah and gath (vv. 2-3, the “winefat” and “winepress”), for chesed in its plural chasdei (v. 7, the “lovingkindnesses”), and for the much-discussed reading of verse 9 (“in all their affliction he was afflicted”).
- Isaiah 63 ↔ Revelation 19 · Hebrews 4 · Ephesians 4Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Isaiah 63 to the rest of Scripture - the lone treader whose garments are stained (vv. 1-3) read beside the Rider clothed with a vesture dipped in blood who treadeth the winepress of God (Rev. 19:13-15), the God afflicted in His people's affliction (v. 9) read beside the One touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Heb. 4:15), and the grieved Spirit of verse 10 read beside grieve not the holy Spirit of God (Eph. 4:30).
- Isaiah 63 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Isaiah 63 - the imagery of Edom and Bozrah and the lone treader of the winepress in verses 1-6, the difficult and beautiful reading of verse 9, the grieving of the holy Spirit in verse 10, and the appeal to God as father and redeemer in verse 16.
Where this echoes in Scripture
I Have Trodden the Winepress Alone
- Revelation 19:13-15he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God... and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.The same lone treader as verses 1-3 - the Word of God, robe stained red, treading the winepress.
- Isaiah 59:16he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him.The same words as verse 5 - no one to uphold, so His own arm brings salvation.
- Lamentations 1:15the Lord hath trodden the virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a winepress.The winepress as an image of judgment, as in verse 3 - here over a fallen city.
- Isaiah 61:2To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.The same pairing as verse 4 - the day of vengeance and the year of favor held together.
- Joel 3:13Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full.The harvest-and-winepress picture of judgment that verses 2-3 draw upon.
In All Their Affliction He Was Afflicted
- Hebrews 4:15we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.The God afflicted in His people’s affliction (v. 9) come near - one who feels what we feel.
- Isaiah 53:3-4a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief... Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.The same verbs as verse 9, <em>bare</em> and <em>carried</em> - now bearing our sorrows themselves.
- Isaiah 46:3-4which are borne by me from the belly... even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you... I will bear, and will deliver you.The carrying of verse 9 spelled out - God bearing His people the whole length of their days.
- Exodus 19:4how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.The deliverance verse 9 remembers - God carrying His people out of Egypt.
- Lamentations 3:22-23It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed... great is thy faithfulness.The <em>multitude of his lovingkindnesses</em> (v. 7) - mercies new every morning.
They Vexed His Holy Spirit
- Ephesians 4:30And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.The same grieving of the Spirit as verse 10 - now warned against in those the Spirit indwells.
- Psalm 78:40How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and grieve him in the desert!The rebellion verse 10 remembers - a people grieving God through the wilderness years.
- Acts 7:51ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.The pattern of verse 10 named outright - resisting the Spirit of God across the generations.
- Exodus 14:21-22and the LORD caused the sea to go back... and the waters were divided... and the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground.The dividing of the water that verses 11-13 remember - the deliverance through the sea.
- Nehemiah 9:20Thou gavest also thy good spirit to instruct them, and withheldest not thy manna from their mouth.The Spirit put within them (v. 11) - God’s good Spirit given to lead His people.
Thou, O LORD, Art Our Father, Our Redeemer
- Isaiah 64:1Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence.The prayer continues unbroken from verse 17 - the plea for God to return and come down.
- Matthew 6:9After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.The name the prayer grasps in verse 16, <em>our father</em> - given as the first word of every prayer.
- 1 Peter 1:18-19ye were not redeemed with corruptible things... But with the precious blood of Christ.The redeemer of verse 16 - the kinsman who buys back his own, at the cost of his own blood.
- John 1:12But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.The fatherhood claimed in verse 16 - opened to all who receive the Son.
- Galatians 4:4-5God sent forth his Son... to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.Father and redeemer (v. 16) joined in one act - redemption that makes us children.