Isaiah 59:1-21 Confession and Closure

Recap
Last week we entered into Part 3 of God’s Highway Project. Part 2 focused on the Servant’s work to reconcile the spiritual conflict between Israel and God—at least from God’s end. He accomplished the pardon for sin with His death. Part 2 ended in Isaiah 57 with the picture of a kingdom of peace and a discussion of what makes for peace in the kingdom. That topic of making peace leads us into Part 3. God has made a way for Israel to escape the crooked place she is in, but the focus now shifts to Israel. The restoration project cannot commence until she does something on her part. God has made peace with her. Now she needs to make peace with Him.

Isaiah 58, which started Part 3, opened with God’s grievance with Israel over her continuing sin. Israel cried out that she has humbled herself, she is contrite, she is fasting and afflicting herself, and yet He is still angry with her.


Israel had been operating under the misconception that her redemption and restoration would happen automatically when the Kingdom was realized. She thought that her sins would be reckoned to her past and the LORD would now grant her grace simply on the merit of having endured the furnace of affliction in Babylon. This can be a misconception that many victims carry. Just because they have gone through an ordeal, they think they merit preferential treatment without their own sins being held account.

Israel got the idea that the LORD would simply overlook her sins on the merit of her suffering from the LORD’s promises in Isaiah 57.


These promises in Isaiah 57 ended on that vision of the kingdom, and yet we know from history that the kingdom was not realized immediately for Israel. It was not realized when they returned to the Land after the Babylonian captivity. Not all of the exiles returned to their inheritance in the land and much of the land remained desolate and unrestored. It was not realized after the Jesus’ death in Roman days, either. Even today, Israel’s kingdom has not been fully restored to her.

In Part 1 of this study, God proved that He is fully able to save His people. In Part 2, He provided a way for grace to be extended to them through the death of the Suffering Servant. Israel’s restoration hinged on that pinnacle act of the Servant’s death. Now, in Part 3, the kingdom that should have come about immediately after the Servant’s death appears to be delayed. Israel has fasted and prayed for restoration, but the LORD isn’t listening or acting.

He is delaying because Israel is still sinning, and He cannot let her sinful thinking and behavior come into His kingdom of peace until she has understood it, acknowledged it, and turned from it. Last week, He took her to task for inappropriate fasting, which opened the topic of all the other carnal cravings of which she still hadn’t let go. She was still grasping after earthly pleasures and hoarding these things. She was going through the motions of what she thought would be pleasing to God but completely missed the point.

Today, the prophet explains to Israel that it is not that God is unable to save her or that He does not hear. What is delaying the restoration project is her continued sin and lack of repentance. God isn’t just going to pretend that the past is over and grant her grace going forward because her inward motivations haven’t changed. She has made a show of contrition the way an alcoholic would, begging and pleading for forgiveness and grace, while still in bondage to the inner cravings of the flesh. Today will be a candid discussion of Israel’s need for spiritual rehab.

Isaiah 59 is divided into a three-part dialogue:

• The prophet’s rebuke of Israel
• Israel’s national confession
• Her final reconciliation when the Redeemer returns to Zion

I say “returns” to Zion because this is, as yet, a future event. While individual Jews have come to a personal acknowledgment of the Suffering Servant’s death on their behalf, the nation as a whole has not. Israel is still in exile today because of it. This passage is very much addressed to unrepentant, unrestored Israel today, and yet, even we as believers understand that repentance and confession are very much an ongoing part of our sanctification journey. These are not conditions for salvation, but outworking of it.

Isaiah 59:1-8 (The Rebuke)
These are the sins that have earned Israel this rebuke (v3-4):

• Israel has blood on her hands. She has not kept her hand from evil. She has not kept her lips from evil, either. She has spoken lies and perversities. Perversities describe doing someone an injustice in how you speak about them. You don’t speak about them justly or rightly. You skew your words to paint them in a false light for your own purpose.

• Israel has abandoned truth and, with it, justice. There is no justice without truth. She trusts in empty words and lies. What she conceives in her heart she then gives birth to in her actions. God gives a wincing analogy to hatching vipers’ eggs. When people consume the lies and puffed-up words, they die by them, and when those eggs are crushed and the deadly lies revealed, more viperous tongues break out.
  
  In the same way, she cloaks the truth with lies like a spider spinning a web of deceit. The word for garments here is the Hebrew word, beged. These are the underclothes worn beneath the outer wrapping—things that are worn close to the man and his heart. Thus, they describe the character or condition of the person who wears them. When a person is mourning, they tear their beged, that which is close to the heart, as a way of illustrating that their heart is rent. A priest changes into a new beged before he enters the LORD’s tabernacle to serve. Beged can be used as a disguise, particularly in war, and these garments are often taken among the spoils of war (things taken by force, treachery, or pillaging).

Israel begs to enter the kingdom of peace, and yet her thoughts and ways are in complete conflict with the way of peace and justice that makes for peace. They have made themselves crooked paths.

Isaiah 59:9-15 (The Confession)
Notice that the speaker changes. The rebuke was phrased in the third person (your iniquities, your sins, your hands, your feet). The confession is phrased in the first person and plural (we look, we grope, our sins, our transgressions). It also begins with the word, therefore, meaning it is in response to the verses before it. This is Israel’s response to the rebuke.


She agrees that she has so twisted and profaned the cause of justice that it is far from her now. Righteousness doesn’t reach her. When you are this far off the road, how do you get back?

Notice the light and dark theme. This theme carries into the next chapter where she comes into the light, but at this point, she is in darkness. She gropes like a blind person  for something solid to guide her and stumbles because she cannot see. She growls—the Hebrew word describes the noise of crying aloud in frustration or railing in an uproar. Imagine a trapped animal banging at its prison bars and roaring in desperation and despair. She mourns pitifully like a dove. She looks for someone to plead her case, but there is none. She is the victim of her own twisted justice system. Salvation (yeshua) is far from her.
She agrees that she has sinned, that the charges God brought against her are true. She lists them, beginning with her sins against the LORD Himself. She has rebelled and faithlessly denied Him and turned away from Him. To that she adds her sins against others—oppressing them and inciting revolt. Inciting revolt carries the sense of encouraging people to turn aside from legality and morality, or in the religious application, inciting apostasy. She conceives and utters lies and falsehoods. Notice, these are premeditated acts. She thought about them before she said them, and she said them deliberately, knowing they were wrong. Under the Old Covenant laws, there is no sacrifice prescribed for premeditated sin, only unintentional sin. These are grievous sins Israel is confessing, sins of worthy of death.

She then acknowledges the consequences of these sins. Her lies have circumvented the truth, which has fallen away, and there is no equity. Equity, in the Hebrew, doesn’t have anything to do with inclusiveness. It simply means a straight way—having uprightness or integrity.


Integrity is gone in Israel, and there is no straight way out of the mess into which her sins have gotten her. Where there is no integrity, truth fails. And when a person decides that they are going to turn around and start doing what is right, they become prey for wicked and victims of a broken justice system.

The lack of justice displeases the LORD. Displease is a pretty tame translation of the Hebrew. It means to be evil in His eye and put Him into a rage to the point where He begins to deliver some eye-for-an-eye, evil-for-evil justice. God is not evil, but He is not above bringing calamity on people in order to right things.

Isaiah 59:16-21 (The Redeemer’s Return)
The final part of the chapter gives us a picture of the Redeemer returning to Zion. The LORD saw that there was no intercessor. To intercede, in this case, means to go out to meet someone. We’ve all seen movies where a king and his army are approaching a city, and the king of the city sends out a greeting party to represent him and find out what the approaching king’s intentions are. The greeting party is the intercessor or go-between. The greeting party can go to that meeting with different goals or attitudes. They can go with goodwill and greet the approaching king with peace. They can go out with an attitude of supplication—an appeal for mercy and peace. Or they can meet the king with hostility and the intention to declare war. Thus, the nature of these intercessory encounters is either to strike a covenant of peace or to strike with the sword.

The Great King is coming, and He expects someone, a representative or envoy, to come out to meet Him but there are none. No one greets Him with welcome and goodwill. No one comes to beg his mercy out of a desire for peace. And so, He falls upon them with the sword. He sends His arm against them in hostility and vengeance.

We talked about the arm of the LORD back in Isaiah 52-53.


That was Isaiah 52. Isaiah 53 then followed with a picture of the Suffering Servant. The arm of the LORD, who was representative of the LORD’s strength, gave up His strength to become an offering for sin. He became Yeshua, the salvation, and died on the cross in order to make peace between the world and God. He was the intercessor who faced the sword of the King’s hostility in order to make peace between the parties in conflict. That was the first picture.

We now have a second picture of Him. This is the same arm of the LORD who brought salvation, but now He is in a different role. This time He comes to make war and take vengeance. He clothes Himself as a warrior. He comes to deliver a recompense or a reward.


This time it is not against Israel. Having ended the conflict between Israel and God, He comes now to end the conflict between Israel and her enemies. This accomplishes the last of God’s goals that He expressed in Isaiah 40—to end her warfare. This recompensing of her enemies is the final comfort.

The Recompense (Reward)
We have been talking about straightening out crooked places and crooked understandings  of how the LORD thinks and works, so let’s consider how the LORD deals out recompense or reward.


Reward and recompense are used somewhat interchangeably in Scripture. They are both about being awarded something as a consequence for our actions. A reward, to us, is a good thing, but in the Scripture it can be good or bad thing. It simply means that you receive what is due for your effort. You reap what you sow, figuratively speaking. For example:

• “. . . those who plow iniquity and sow trouble, reap the same.” (Job 4:8)
• “Those who sow in tears, shall reap joy.” (Psalm 126:5)
• “Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap in mercy . . .” (Hosea 10:12)
• “For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.” (Galatians 6:8)

So we have this idea of compensation or reward that comes from works. It is works based. Good works can be repaid with a good reward, but good can also be repaid with evil, in which case, the evil is judged and recompense is made for it. Evil works can be repaid with evil or they can be repaid with good, that is, grace. Grace is a way of repaying evil with good—freely granting something that is not deserved or earned.

Here in Isaiah 59:18, God says of His adversaries and enemies, “According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay.” Tit for tat. He rewards them, but it isn’t a good reward. It is, however, a necessary act to bring peace to His repentant people. Notice that Israel's repentance as a nation happens first. This is part of her reward for her return to the LORD, that her enemies would be put beneath her.

The Hebrew word for recompense in verse 18 is shalam, which is the root verb from which we get the noun, shalom. Shalam is the act of making peace by making restitution or compensation. This word shows up throughout the books of the Law when it talks about things being stolen from a person or damages done to his property. There were rules under the Law as to how that loss was to be paid back, usually be replacing the item and adding an additional amount (like being reimbursed for the cost of a damaged car, with an additional award to compensate for pain and suffering). It is the understanding that there is more lost to the person than simply the physical thing. There is a cost to their peace that must be reconciled.

The Law was only concerned with compensation for physical things—bulls, fields, property, servants—but there are other things people can take from us that affect our well-being and peace. Someone who has been victimized or suffered loss needs closure in order to be whole and at peace again. It is more than just returning what was stolen. It’s about being given a recompense for the pain and suffering. Shalam is about getting closure, bringing some conflict to an end, both externally or internally, which was God’s goal at the onset of this highway project. The comfort that He offers is an end to the internal conflict between Himself and His people (pardon for iniquity) but also the end of the external conflict caused by His enemies against His people which also drove the internal conflict to an extent.

When the LORD shalams, takes recompense from His enemies, it is vengeance at its most brutal. He is impartial in His way of dealing. As it was for Israel, so it is for her enemies. Moses warned the children of Israel of this when they were getting ready to come into the Land

“Therefore know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; and He repays [shalam] those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay [shalam] him to his face. Therefore you shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today, to observe them.” - Deuteronomy 7:9-11 NKJV

Having achieved peace, the LORD establishes a new covenant with a Spirit-filled presence within the nation of Israel. This is for the nation as a whole, not individuals, and it reflects a specific event on the historical timeline.

The Timeline
Keep in mind where we are in the unfolding pictures of the prophetic timeline. Israel has been through the Babylonian exile. God has promised her a Savior. That Savior first appeared as the Suffering Servant who died and then arose (Isaiah 53). He promised to share that kingdom with the strong, and we saw the picture of the kingdom laid out before us (Isaiah 54-56). The full realization of the kingdom should have happened immediately, but there was a delay of restoration for Israel because of her sin and lack of repentance. Then, there was the veiled picture of a rapture of the righteous who are spared from future calamity (Isaiah 57:1), and then the picture of a kingdom without righteousness (Isaiah 57:3-13). The prophet has stood in her streets, proclaiming her need for redemption, and now Israel has repented as a nation—at least the remnant who are preserved through that tribulation (Isaiah 58-59). In response, the Redeemer returns to Zion, specifically to those who have turned from their transgressions, to exact a shalam recompense from their enemies (Isaiah 59:16-21). He has already brought the conflict between God and His people to an end in the spiritual sense. Now He puts an end to the physical conflict between Israel and God’s enemies and restores Israel to a kingdom of peace. This goal of restoration is where God’s Highway Project has been leading. This is God’s idea of closure.

So, we have this final picture of the Arm of the LORD, the Messiah, conquering the LORD’s enemies.


Depending on which English translation you are using, you will get different renderings of verse 19. The actual words in the Hebrew go something like this:


The differences in the English translations stem from the use of the pronoun, "he." "He" will come. Who is he? Is "he" the enemy or the conqueror? Whoever "he" is, he comes with the force of a flood, like water being driven by wind. The driving aspect is what the Spirit of the LORD does. It blows on the water to drive it along, to impel it backward and cause it to flee. Thus, the KJV and NKJV translate this as the enemy coming in like a flood and the Spirit withstanding and pushing back against an them, that is, lifting a standard against them in battle. This Spirit is also the driving force behind the conqueror as He goes out to wreak vengeance against Israel's enemies. Thus, the rest of the English translations say "He," the conqueror, comes in like a flood. Regardless of the translation, there is a consistent picture being described, both here in Isaiah but also in the book of Revelation. The enemy does come in like a flood, and the Spirit-driven Conqueror drives them back in a flood. That is the intended picture here in Isaiah.

The Spirit is very much a part of the battle against the enemy as the arm of the LORD takes vengeance against the LORD’s enemies. The Spirit also remains after the battle (v21). The indwelling Spirit becomes part of the new covenant that the LORD makes with the faithful remnant of the nation of Israel when they come into the kingdom.

God’s Highway Project
So, we have the culmination of the God’s Highway Project. The next few chapter will present pictures of glorified Israel in the fully realized kingdom. But let’s talk a little about the battle mentioned here. There will be a final, literal battle that is waged at the end of Israel’s historical timeline, and yet there is spiritual warfare going on even during the sanctification part of the journey. Even though we as believers have an indwelling Spirit, we still grapple with the darkness that is part of our human experience, and it is in that battle that confession becomes a way of defeating an enemy.

This description of the Savior arming Himself for battle is echoed in Ephesians 6, where we as His followers are exhorted to put on similar armor. Read Ephesians 6:10-20.


The prophet’s warning to Israel to repent is much like the prophetic warning to repent given to the churches in the book of Revelation. Read Revelation 2-3.