Commentary on Isaiah 64:1-9

Isaiah 64:1–9 ponders the agonizing experience of an absent and angry God. Speaking from the harsh crucible of the sixth-century Jewish exile, the poet mournfully reflects on what it is like to live a reality devoid of divine blessing, presence, and goodness. These verses are part of a much larger unit, marked by lament, accusation, and painful questioning (63:7–64:11).¹ Ultimately, these lines of lament find a hopeful answer in Isaiah 65–66, where we first encounter the language of “new heavens and a new earth” (65:17). But the path to that hopeful future winds through a harsh landscape of despair, defeat, and pain.

The poem mournfully describes the deep sense of separation from YHWH—Israel’s redeemer, source of blessing, and covenantal partner. So vast is the divide that the poet asks YHWH to “tear open the heavens” and to “come down” (verse 1). YHWH is “up there” in some distant cosmic realm, and the poet is “down here,” drowning in the harsh reality of exile and suffering under the oppression of “adversaries” (verse 2). Something dramatic would need to happen to close the gap between the mourner and the Maker.

For Isaiah 64, the distance between YHWH and his people is not the kind that comes from two parties drifting apart over time. Instead, the poet describes a dramatic relational rupture, in which YHWH actively hides himself from the covenant people out of anger (verses 5, 7).

YHWH has fled so far from the daily lives of people that no one even attempts to reach out for him (verse 7). YHWH is a distant and inaccessible presence—beyond reach and beyond effort. For Isaiah 64, this distance is a form of judgment—a sort of divine “cold shoulder.”

YHWH’s “cold shoulder” comes with devastating results for the people, who now “fade like a leaf” and are taken away (verse 6). As YHWH recedes from view, so do life, well-being, and security.

Woven into this fabric of despair, however, are threads of hope. For Isaiah 64, hope lives on for those who remember the past.

When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down; the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right,
those who remember you in your ways. (verses 3–5)

In a striking move, the last line in this poem equates obedience with memory: “You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.” Memory is the one place where hope lives in this poem, and it forms the basis for the author’s beliefs that the light of the future will outshine the darkness of the present.

And what is the church but a sacred custodian of memory and story—among so many other things?

The final verses are plaintive, appealing to the fatherly relationship Judah shares with YHWH, and begging that YHWH’s anger would finally and mercifully come to an end. For those who have experienced the violence of an unwell adult, these verses may strike a sensitive nerve.

Although not part of the reading, the remaining three verses of the chapter are important and appeal to YHWH’s pity by describing the extent of the devastation to YHWH’s holy city, Jerusalem (verses 10–11). The poem ends with a devastating if desperate question: “After all this, will you restrain yourself, O LORD? Will you keep silent and punish us so severely?” (verse 12).

This is not an easy poem to preach, because it does not resolve the tension of YHWH’s remembered presence with YHWH’s absence. Presence and absence live in dialectical tension—a literary and theological effect that Hebrew poetry is uniquely suited to.

The poem does acknowledge what so many people experience: the potent presence of despair and the painful absence of God from this world. This is what makes faith so hard. In the words of Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is … assurance about what we do not see.” But why trust what cannot be seen when there is so much concrete evidence to the contrary?

This is not a uniquely modern phenomenon. It is the very snare in which Isaiah 64’s audience was caught. Whether for exiles in Babylon or survivors left in Jerusalem, the concrete signs of abandonment, defeat and domination were everywhere.

Isaiah 64 offers a different kind of evidence—one grounded in Israel’s ancient memory. The poem proposes that memory is faith’s bridge to the land of hope.

Some in your congregations may find this convincing, and others may not. Some might read this poem and find in it a gospel word that plucks them from the depths. Others may never get beyond the haunting absence of God in this world. This is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be acknowledged and tenderly held.

Notes

1. Michael J. Chan, “Isaiah 65–66 and the Genesis of Reorienting Speech.” CBQ 72:3 (2010): 445–463.