November 10, Isaiah 64
From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him. - Isaiah 64:4
Do you ever write your prayers? Did you grow up hearing extemporaneous prayers instead of written ones? Does it seem odd or somehow less than spiritual to you that some people read prayers that they or others have written to help them express themselves to God?
I have learned the value of studying carefully composed prayers in more recent years. The Bible contains many prayer texts, from David in the Psalms, from Paul in his epistles and from Isaiah and other prophets who cried out to God on behalf of their people. Luke recorded what we call "The Lord's Prayer" as Jesus answered the disciples' request to Jesus to teach them to pray. When we study these prayers, we learn a vocabulary to help us express our own hearts' worship, confession, thanksgiving and requests before God.
Isaiah 64 is an unusual prayer in the fact that it was written more than 100 years before the people of Israel were born who would pray it. Isaiah taught them to confess their sins and plead with God for mercy long before they became captives in Babylon. He saw and described the city of Jerusalem in ruins and their beloved temple burned more than a century before those events occurred.
Isaiah recalled the awesome things God did for Israel to bring them out of Egypt. He rehearsed how Mt. Sinai quaked when the LORD came down to meet Moses and Israel there. In the text verse, he asked God to come down and do mighty works, awesome things beyond what anyone had ever seen or heard of, again as he had done for their ancestors centuries before. Isaiah looked back on those things God had already done. When Paul used these words from Isaiah in 1 Corinthians, he pointed not back but ahead to what unseen and unimagined things God would do for those who love him.
Isaiah confessed their wickedness. Their sins had so polluted them that even their righteous deeds were like filthy rags. He acknowledged that their wickedness had taken them away, with no one among them to rescue them from their plight.
Isaiah again called on God as "our Father" for the third time in a dozen verses. In addition to the idea of God's people being his children, he also described God as the potter and the people as the clay. It was a humble plea for him to love them like a father loves his children, and a humble admission that they were in God's hand for him to do whatever he chose to do with them. And he pleaded with God to restrain his anger toward them and remember how Jerusalem and the temple had already been destroyed.
Isaiah pleaded with the Lord to be merciful because they were "all your people." Well, they were his people in one sense. But in reality, the great majority of the Israelites were no longer living as or recognized by God as his people. The Lord was the father of their nation racially through Abraham and the covenant God made with him. But spiritually, they had abandoned God to worship idols and been unfaithful to their God, failing to honor and keep his covenant laws. God was truly the Father of the righteous remnant who continued to worship and serve the Lord faithfully.
God had been faithful to his word about letting his people suffer and go away into captivity to punish them for their wicked rebellion against him. Isaiah prayed to the Lord to also be faithful to the promise to relieve and deliver his people from bondage when they turned back to him. Isaiah's prophetic prayer for the remnant in captivity is a great model prayer for us, many centuries after those captives learned from the prophet how to pray. He praised and magnified the great power of God. He mourned and confessed their sinfulness and unworthiness. He pleaded for God's mercy on them, and asked their great God to deliver them. Doesn't that sound like the same themes our prayers should contain?
Copyright © 2023 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Today in God's Word—November 2023
East Tallassee Church of Christ
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