64
📚Oh,that you would rend the heavens!
That you would come down!
That the mountains might tremble 📖
at your presence,
2 📚As fire makes the brushwood burn,
as fire causes water to boil,
to make your name 📖 known
to your adversaries,
that the nations may tremble
at your presence!
64:1-2 He prays that God will come suddenly, powerfully, shaking the earth and the nations, blazing like fire against His enemies. This prayer has yet to be fully answered (Isa 24:18-20; 30:27-28; 2 Thess 1:7; Heb 12:26-29; Rev 19:11-12).⚜
3 📚When you did awesome 📖 things
for which we did not look,
you came down,
the mountains trembled
at your presence.
4 📚For since the beginning of the world
people have not heard
or perceived with the ear,
nor has the eye seen a God besides you
who acts on behalf of the one
who waits for him.
5 📚You meet him who rejoices
and works righteousness 📖,
those who remember you
in your ways.
See, you have been angry,
for we have sinned 📖.
We have long continued
in them.
And we need to be saved.
6 📚But we are all like an unclean thing, 📖
and all our righteous deeds
are like filthy rags,
and we all fade like a leaf 📖,
and our iniquities, like the wind,
have taken us away 📖.
7 📚And there is no one
who calls on your name,
who stirs himself up to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
and have consumed us 📖 because
of our iniquities.
64:7 Men call on their many gods, but none by nature call on the name of the true God. If we call on Him it is because He has stirred us up to do so.⚜
8 📚But now, O LORD,
you are our father 📖;
we are the clay,
and you are our potter 📖,
and we all are the work of your hands 📖.
9 📚Do not be very angry 📖,
O LORD, or remember iniquity 📖 forever.
Look and see, we beg you,
we are all your people 📖.
64:9 These requests are based on what God had revealed – as our requests must always be, if we want our prayer answered.⚜
10 📚Your holy cities 📖 are a wilderness,
Zion is a wilderness,
Jerusalem a desolation.
64:10 Notice “Your holy cities” – an appeal to God to look with concern on His own property as well as on His own people (v 8,9).⚜
11 📚Our holy and our beautiful house,
where our fathers praised you,
is burned up with fire,
and all our pleasant things are laid waste.
64:11 Isaiah was a prophet looking into the future and describing things that had not yet happened as though they had. Note at 55:10-11. The temple was not destroyed for another hundred years. Another temple erected in its place was not destroyed for some hundreds of years after Isaiah’s day.⚜
12 📚Will you restrain yourself
for these things, O LORD?
Will you keep silent 📖,
and afflict us very severely 📖?
64:1-12 He continues his prayer which begins at Isa 63:15, a marvelous prayer of confession of sin and of pleading that God might come again in mighty power, and forgive and restore his people.⚜
64:8-12 Reasons why God should hear this prayer.⚜