Isaiah 64
The prayer that began in chapter 63 - remembering the LORD's old mercies and asking where His power has gone - now breaks open into its boldest petition. Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence (v. 1). The verb is violent: not open the heavens but rend them, tear them apart. The people are not asking for a quiet sign; they are asking God to split the sky and come down in person, as He came at Sinai - as when the melting fire burneth… to make thy name known to thine adversaries (v. 2). They have seen Him do terrible things which we looked not for (v. 3), and they want Him to do them again.3
Then the prayer remembers what sort of God it is addressing. From the beginning of the world no one has heard or seen any God like Him, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him (v. 4) - a line the apostle Paul will reach for to describe the things God hath prepared for them that love him. He meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness (v. 5); but here the prayer turns and looks honestly at the ones praying it. But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away (v. 6). This is not God's accusation against them - it is their own confession, the candid admission of people who have weighed their best deeds and found even those stained, and who have stopped pretending otherwise.2
Out of that honesty rises the chapter's tenderest and most famous line, and its turn from confession to trust. But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand (v. 8). The stained, fading people do not run from God; they come back to His hands as clay comes back to the potter. On that ground they make their plea - Be not wroth very sore, O LORD, neither remember iniquity for ever (v. 9) - and they spread before Him the ruin of a burned temple and a desolate city (vv. 10-11). The prayer ends not with an answer but with a question pressed in trust: Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O LORD? wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore? (v. 12).
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Isaiah 64:1-5Oh That Thou Wouldest Rend the Heavens
1Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, 2As when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence! 3When thou didst terrible things which we looked not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence. 4For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him. 5Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways: behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned: in those is continuance, and we shall be saved.
The prayer opens with one of the boldest petitions in all of Scripture: Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence (v. 1). Every word is straining upward. The verb is not a gentle open but rend - tear apart, split open - as a person tears a garment in grief. The heavens are felt here as a barrier, a closed ceiling between a hidden God and a desperate people, and the prayer asks Him to rip it open and come down. What would happen if He did? The mountains, the most solid and immovable things the eye can see, would flow down - melt like wax - at the sheer nearness of Him. This is not the language of a polite request; it is the cry of people who are finished with distance. They are not asking God for a message or a sign. They are asking for Him - His presence, here, where it can be felt and seen.3
The images that follow tell us what kind of coming-down the prayer has in mind: As when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence! (v. 2). This is the memory of Sinai, where the mountain burned with fire and the people trembled, and of every time God has come down in power. The fire that melts hard things, the water driven to a boil - these are the effects of a presence too great to stand near unmoved. And the prayer remembers that He has done exactly this before: When thou didst terrible things which we looked not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence (v. 3). The word terrible here means awe-inspiring, dreadful in the old sense - deeds so far beyond what anyone expected that they could only have come from God. The whole appeal of these verses is built on memory: You have come down before. Do it again. Faith here is not inventing a hope out of thin air; it is reaching back to what God has already shown Himself to be and asking Him to be that again.
Then the prayer pauses on the sheer uniqueness of this God: For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him (v. 4). Pile up the senses - ear, hearing, eye - and not one of them, in all of human history, has ever taken in another God like this, or grasped the good He readies for His own. Notice carefully who that good is prepared for: him that waiteth for him. Not the one who storms ahead and seizes it, but the one who waits - who keeps trusting, keeps looking up, keeps expecting God to act even while the heavens still seem shut. This is one of the great verses of the Old Testament, and the apostle Paul will lift its very words to describe the things God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor. 2:9). The next line keeps the same shape: Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways (v. 5). God meets - comes to, welcomes - the one whose life is bent gladly toward what is right and who keeps Him in mind. But the same verse turns abruptly honest: behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned. The prayer cannot finish describing the God who meets the righteous without admitting, in the same breath, that the people praying have not been righteous - and the confession of the next verses is already breaking the surface.
Isaiah 64:6-7All Our Righteousnesses Are as Filthy Rags
6But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. 7And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee: for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities.
Here the prayer turns its honesty fully upon the ones praying it, and the result is one of the most searching confessions in all of Scripture: But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away (v. 6). Read it carefully, because it is easy to mishear. This is not God's verdict pronounced over the people; it is the people's own admission, lifted up to God in prayer. And what makes it so striking is its target. They do not merely confess their sins - their failures and wrongs. They confess that even their righteousnesses, their best and most God-ward deeds, have come out stained. The honest worshipper, looking back over even the good he has done, sees motives mixed, pride threaded through, self curled at the center of acts that looked clean from the outside - and says so. Three images press the point home. They are like an unclean thing; their righteousnesses are like filthy rags; and they themselves fade as a leaf, dry and curling, until iniquities, like the wind, simply carry them off. It is the language of people who have stopped pretending they can present God a righteousness clean enough to stand in.
The confession deepens in the next verse into something even more sobering: And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee: for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities (v. 7). Two halves sit side by side, and the prayer holds them together without flinching. On the human side: no one calls; no one stirreth up himself - rouses himself, shakes off the numbness - to take hold of God, to grip Him in earnest prayer the way a drowning man grips a rope. There is a deadness here, a spiritual lethargy that the confessor names in his own people and, by implication, in himself. And on the other side: thou hast hid thy face from us. God's felt absence and the people's prayerlessness are bound up together - each feeds the other, until a hidden God and a silent people circle one another. Yet notice the quiet miracle in the very existence of this sentence. The prayer says there is none that calleth - and it is itself a calling. Even the confession that no one is taking hold of God is, in the act of being prayed, a hand reaching out to take hold of Him. The deadness is real; but something in the one praying is already stirring against it.
Isaiah 64:8-12Thou Art Our Father; We Are the Clay
8But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. 9Be not wroth very sore, O LORD, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people. 10Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. 11Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and all our pleasant things are laid waste. 12Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O LORD? wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore?
Out of the confession rises the chapter's turning point, and its tenderest line: But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand (v. 8). The little phrase but now is the hinge of the whole prayer. After the longing, after the stark admission of stained righteousness and spiritual deadness, the prayer does not collapse into despair - it turns and takes hold of two things about God that nothing has changed. First, thou art our father. The relationship is older and deeper than the failure; sin has not unmade it. Second, we are the clay, and thou our potter. Two images, and they reinforce each other. A father does not disown the child he begot; a potter does not throw away the clay he is shaping - even when a vessel is marred on the wheel, the potter's instinct is to gather the clay up and form it again. So the confession of being filthy rags and fading leaves does not end in being discarded; it ends in being handed back to the One whose hands made us in the first place. We all are the work of thy hand. The prayer's deepest plea is not overlook us but re-make us - do not abandon the work Your own hands began.
On the ground of that relationship, the prayer dares its central request: Be not wroth very sore, O LORD, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people (v. 9). Every phrase leans on belonging. It does not ask God to pretend there was no sin - it has just confessed the sin plainly. It asks Him not to be angry very sore, not to remember iniquity for ever. The appeal is to the limit of His anger and the length of His memory, set against the permanence of the bond: we are all thy people. This is exactly how a child pleads with a father - not by denying the wrong, but by appealing to the relationship that is deeper than the wrong. And then the prayer does something quietly powerful: it stops arguing and simply shows God the ruin. Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and all our pleasant things are laid waste (vv. 10-11). It spreads the devastation out before God like a child laying a broken thing in a parent's lap. And notice whose loss it is said to be: thy holy cities, the house where our fathers praised thee. The prayer makes the ruin God's own concern - it is His city, His house, His praise that lies in ashes.
The chapter ends not with an answer but with a question, and the question is itself an act of faith: Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O LORD? wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore? (v. 12). To refrain is to hold back, to restrain oneself; to hold thy peace is to stay silent. After everything the people have shown Him - the ruined city, the burned temple, the confession, the appeal to fatherhood - they ask: in the face of all this, will You really keep holding back? Will You really stay silent? It is a daring way to end a prayer, leaving the question hanging in the air unanswered. But it is the boldness of trust, not of accusation. Only someone who truly believes God is a Father, and that the clay still belongs to the Potter, would dare to press Him this way. The prayer ends, in effect, leaning its whole weight on God's character and waiting. And it is worth remembering, on this side of the story, that the question did not stay unanswered forever. The God so urgently begged to stop holding back, to tear the heavens and come down, in time did come down - and the silence the prayer dreaded was broken.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Isaiah 64 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the image of the torn heavens (v. 1), for beged iddim (v. 6, the “filthy rags”), and for the potter-and-clay pair chomer and yotser (v. 8). Note that the Hebrew versification differs by one verse: the Masoretic text joins the KJV's verse 1 to the end of chapter 63.
- Isaiah 64 ↔ 1 Corinthians 2 · Romans 9 · Mark 1Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Isaiah 64 to the rest of Scripture - the things prepared for him that waiteth for him (v. 4) read beside eye hath not seen… the things which God hath prepared for them that love him (1 Cor. 2:9), and the potter and the clay (v. 8) read alongside Paul's hath not the potter power over the clay (Rom. 9:21).
- Isaiah 64 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Isaiah 64 - the force of the verb “rend” in verse 1, the imagery of melting mountains and boiling water in verses 1-3, the difficult Hebrew of verse 5, and the stark vocabulary of the confession in verse 6.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Oh That Thou Wouldest Rend the Heavens
- Mark 1:10coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him.The cry of verse 1 answered - the heavens torn open and God come down, at Jesus’ baptism.
- Exodus 19:18mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire... and the whole mount quaked greatly.The coming-down the prayer remembers in verses 2-3 - God descending in fire, the mountain trembling.
- 1 Corinthians 2:9Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard... the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.The very words of verse 4, taken up by the apostle to describe what God readies for His own.
- Psalm 18:9He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet.The same picture as verse 1 - God bowing the heavens and coming down to deliver.
- Lamentations 3:25The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.The promise behind verse 4 - the good God prepares for the one who waits.
All Our Righteousnesses Are as Filthy Rags
- Isaiah 61:10he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments.The clean garment that answers the stained one of verse 6 - a righteousness God places upon His people.
- Philippians 3:9not having mine own righteousness... but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.The righteousness the confession of verse 6 leaves room for - not one’s own, but God’s gift.
- Romans 3:23For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.The universal need verse 6 confesses - that no one comes with a righteousness of his own that is enough.
- Luke 18:13the publican... smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.The same empty-handed honesty as verses 6-7 - the prayer that asks for mercy rather than presenting merit.
- Zechariah 3:4Take away the filthy garments from him... I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.The filthy garment of verse 6 stripped away and replaced - the unclean clothing exchanged for clean by God’s hand.
Thou Art Our Father; We Are the Clay
- Isaiah 29:16shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding?The same potter-and-clay image as verse 8 - the made thing in the hands of the One who formed it.
- Jeremiah 18:6as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.The figure of verse 8 drawn out - God as the potter free to re-form the marred vessel.
- Romans 9:20-21shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay...?The apostle’s use of the very image of verse 8 - the clay and the Potter who shapes it.
- 2 Corinthians 5:17if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.The hope behind verse 8 - the marred vessel not discarded but re-made by the Potter’s hand.
- Philippians 1:6he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.The answer to the plea of verse 8 - God will not abandon the work His own hand began.