Bird's-eye view
This short passage is a raw and honest confession of national failure, set within a song of future triumph. The people of God, looking back, acknowledge that God's discipline drove them to prayer, but a weak and desperate prayer. They compare their history of suffering and striving to the intense pangs of a woman in labor, full of agony and expectation. The devastating conclusion, however, is that all their writhing and effort produced nothing but wind. It was a phantom pregnancy. This confession of utter human impotence is the black velvet on which the diamond of God's grace will shine. Their inability to accomplish salvation for the earth sets the stage perfectly for the glorious announcement of resurrection life that immediately follows in verse 19, where God does for them what they could never, ever do for themselves.
In essence, this is the testimony of the Old Covenant. It was a period of intense labor, of striving under the law, of suffering under God's fatherly hand. It was meant to produce a holy people and salvation for the world, but in and of itself, it could not. The law could reveal sin and chasten the sinner, but it could not give life. Israel's confession here is that all their best efforts were stillborn. This is not a cry of despair, but rather the necessary prelude to true faith, which looks away from self-effort and looks to the God who alone can bring life from death.
Outline
- 1. The Confession of Futile Labor (Isa 26:16-18)
- a. Prayer Born from Pain (v. 16)
- b. The Agony of a Barren Labor (v. 17)
- c. The Verdict: Birthing the Wind (v. 18)
Context In Isaiah
These verses are part of what is often called the "Little Apocalypse" in Isaiah, chapters 24 through 27. This section is a series of prophecies and songs concerning God's final judgment on the rebellious world-city and the ultimate salvation of His people in the city of God. Chapter 26 is a song of trust and praise, sung by the redeemed in that future day. Our passage, verses 16-18, functions as a crucial moment of reflection within this song. Before celebrating the final victory, the people must acknowledge their own past weakness and inability. It is a corporate confession of sin and failure. This humble acknowledgment of their own bankruptcy is what makes the triumphant declaration of God's power in verse 19 ("Your dead will live...") so potent. The passage serves as a hinge, swinging from the memory of human failure to the certainty of divine deliverance.
Key Issues
- The Purpose of Divine Chastening
- The Metaphor of Childbirth for Suffering
- Human Inability to Achieve Salvation
- The Failure of Self-Righteousness
- The Necessary Prelude to Resurrection Faith
Birthing the Wind
There are few things more anticipated than the birth of a child. The months of waiting, the pains of labor, the final push, all of it is directed toward that one great end: new life. Now imagine if a woman went through all of that, the writhing and the crying out, and in the end, after all that travail, she gave birth to nothing but a gust of wind. The anticlimax would be devastating. The emptiness would be crushing. This is the image that the people of God use to describe their own efforts to save themselves. All their religious activity, all their suffering, all their striving under the covenant, when relied upon as the engine of their salvation, produced nothing. This passage is a graphic depiction of the spiritual truth that Paul would later articulate in his epistles: by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. It is a confession of absolute spiritual bankruptcy, and it is the only place from which true salvation can be seen and appreciated.
Verse by Verse Commentary
16 O Yahweh, they visited You in distress; They could only whisper a prayer; Your chastening was upon them.
The confession begins by acknowledging the source of their religious activity. Why did they seek God? They did so in distress. It was trouble that drove them to prayer. This is not the highest form of devotion, but it is an honest one. And God, in His mercy, often uses distress as His messenger to call us back to Himself. Notice the nature of their prayer. It was not a bold, confident cry. They could only "whisper" it. The phrase in Hebrew is obscure, but it suggests a constrained, muffled utterance, like a magic incantation whispered under pressure. Their prayer was not the free and open speech of beloved sons, but the desperate, constricted plea of a people under judgment. And why? Because God's chastening was upon them. This was not random misfortune; it was the heavy, disciplinary hand of their covenant Lord. God was pressing them, and under that pressure, all they could manage was a whisper.
17 As the woman with child draws near to the time to give birth, She writhes and cries out in her pangs of labor, Thus were we before You, O Yahweh.
The metaphor is now introduced, and it is a powerful one. Israel's entire national experience of suffering and striving is compared to a woman in the final, agonizing stages of labor. The image captures two things perfectly: the intensity of the pain and the expectation of the outcome. Labor pains are not pointless; they are productive. They are the necessary agony that leads to new life. This is how Israel saw their history of turmoil, exile, and oppression. They believed all this writhing and crying out before God was meant to produce something. They were pregnant with hope, expecting that their faithfulness, their covenant-keeping, their suffering, would give birth to the promised messianic age. They were in travail, and they were expecting a baby.
18 We were with child, we writhed in labor; We gave birth, as it seems, only to wind. We could not accomplish salvation for the earth, And the inhabitants of the world were not born.
Here is the punchline, and it is a gut punch. After all the agony, the result was nothing. A phantom pregnancy. They gave birth to wind. All their efforts, all their pain, all their religious works were utterly futile. This is a radical confession of creaturely incompetence. They state the result in two starkly negative clauses. First, We could not accomplish salvation for the earth. Israel was called to be a blessing to the nations, a light to the Gentiles. But they failed. Their own efforts could not even save themselves, let alone the planet. Salvation is not a human work product. Second, the inhabitants of the world were not born. The new creation, the regeneration of the world, the peopling of the new heavens and new earth, did not result from their labor. Their womb was barren. This is the final testimony of all man-centered religion. It is a long, painful, agonizing labor that produces nothing but air.
Application
The application of this passage is a direct assault on every form of self-righteousness. Every time we think that our moral efforts, our church attendance, our doctrinal precision, or our political activism is what will ultimately bring in the kingdom, we are setting ourselves up to birth the wind. We are like the woman in labor, writhing and crying out, only to find our arms empty. The law is good. It shows us God's standard and it disciplines us when we fall short, just as it did for Israel. But the law cannot give life. Our effort cannot produce salvation.
This confession of failure is not the end of the story; it is the necessary beginning. It is only when we admit that we have given birth to wind that we are ready to receive the Child who was given to us. It is only when we confess that we cannot accomplish salvation for the earth that we are ready to worship the One who did. The very next verse says, "Your dead will live; their corpses will rise." Salvation is not a human birth; it is a divine resurrection. God does not ask us to produce a savior from the womb of our own efforts. He provides the Savior, Jesus Christ, and raises us from the dead along with Him. The Christian life is not one of agonizing labor to produce what is not there. It is one of joyful rest in a work that is already finished.