Giving Birth to Wind Text: Isaiah 26:16-18
Introduction: The Agony of Self-Salvation
There is a kind of pain that is productive, and there is a kind of pain that is utterly futile. A woman in labor experiences an agony that the rest of us can only imagine, but at the end of it, a child is born. The pain had a point. The groaning produced a person. But there is another kind of groaning, a groaning that ends in nothing. It is the groaning of a man trying to lift a mountain. It is the straining of a sinner trying to save himself. It is the death rattle of a culture that has decided it can be its own god. This is the kind of pain our generation knows all too well. We are a people writhing in a self-inflicted agony, and we have nothing to show for it but the wind.
We live in an age of frantic, fruitless effort. Our political messiahs promise us salvation, and after all the writhing and screaming of an election cycle, we give birth to more debt, more tyranny, and more absurdity. Our therapeutic gurus promise us inner peace, and after years of navel-gazing and expensive therapy sessions, we give birth to more anxiety and confusion. Our educational establishments promise enlightenment, and after decades of indoctrination and astronomical tuition, we give birth to a generation of articulate fools who cannot change a tire but can deconstruct your gender.
This is not a new problem. This is the ancient problem of man trying to accomplish for himself what only God can do. The prophet Isaiah, in this passage, gives us a vivid, almost gruesome, picture of this futility. He is describing the experience of Israel under God's chastening hand. They are in distress, they are crying out, they are in labor, but their labor produces nothing. It is a phantom pregnancy. It is a false birth. They give birth to wind. This passage is a stark and necessary reminder of a central biblical truth: apart from God, you can do nothing. And not just some things, but nothing of any eternal significance. All your best efforts, all your most sincere strivings, all your sweat and tears to fix yourself or to fix the world, are nothing more than giving birth to wind.
But this is not a message of despair. It is the necessary preparation for the gospel. You must first see the utter bankruptcy of your own efforts before you will ever turn to the one who can actually accomplish salvation. You have to know that you are a spiritual quadriplegic before you will look to the Great Physician. This passage diagnoses the disease, the disease of self-reliance, so that we might look to the only cure: the sovereign grace of God in Jesus Christ.
The Text
O Yahweh, they visited You in distress;
They could only whisper a prayer;
Your chastening was upon them.
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.
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.
(Isaiah 26:16-18 LSB)
Distress, Discipline, and a Whisper (v. 16)
The passage begins by describing the condition of God's people. They are in trouble, and they know it.
"O Yahweh, they visited You in distress; They could only whisper a prayer; Your chastening was upon them." (Isaiah 26:16 LSB)
Notice the first thing that drives them to God: distress. It is a sad commentary on our fallen nature that we often only seek God when our own little kingdoms are crumbling. When the money is flowing and the kids are healthy and the nation is at peace, God is a distant thought. But when the diagnosis comes back, when the pink slip arrives, when the enemy is at the gates, suddenly we become very religious. God in His wisdom knows this about us, and so He lovingly sends distress. He introduces trouble into our lives to get our attention.
And what is the source of this distress? The text is explicit: "Your chastening was upon them." This was not random misfortune. This was not bad luck. This was the deliberate, disciplinary hand of a loving Father. The author of Hebrews tells us that the Lord chastens every son whom He receives (Heb. 12:6). If you are a Christian and you are not experiencing discipline, you have cause to wonder if you are a legitimate child. God's discipline is not punitive in the ultimate sense; for the believer, all the punishment for our sin was exhausted at the cross. Rather, His discipline is corrective. It is formative. It is designed to train us in righteousness, to wean us from our idols, and to drive us back to Him.
And their response is telling. "They could only whisper a prayer." The Hebrew here suggests a constrained, quiet cry, like a magic incantation whispered under pressure. It is not the robust prayer of confident faith. It is the desperate, foxhole prayer of a people who have exhausted all other options. Their own strength is gone. Their political alliances have failed. Their idols are silent. All they have left is a whisper. But even a whisper, born of desperation and directed toward the true God, is a starting point. God can work with that. He can hear a whisper. He is not hard of hearing.
The Agony of Fruitless Labor (v. 17)
Isaiah then employs a powerful and common biblical metaphor to describe the intensity of their suffering.
"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." (Isaiah 26:17 LSB)
This is the pain of travail. It is an all-consuming, overwhelming agony. It is a pain with a purpose, or at least, it is supposed to have a purpose. The entire created order groans in travail, Paul tells us in Romans 8, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. The pain of this fallen world is like birth pangs, pointing to a coming renewal, a new creation.
And so it was for Israel. "Thus were we before You, O Yahweh." Their suffering under God's hand was not a dull ache; it was a sharp, intense, writhing pain. This is what our sin earns us. This is the consequence of rebellion. When we fight against the grain of God's created order, the result is pain. When we try to build our lives on a foundation of sand, the collapse is not gentle. It is a violent and painful crash.
This is a picture of a people at the very end of their rope. They are crying out. They are helpless. They are in the throes of an agony that seems like it must produce something. A pain this intense must have a point. A struggle this severe must result in a birth. That is the natural expectation. But the next verse delivers a shocking and devastating conclusion.
The Phantom Birth (v. 18)
Here we come to the heart of the passage, the punchline of this grim diagnosis.
"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." (Isaiah 26:18 LSB)
After all the expectation, all the groaning, all the pain, the result is... nothing. Emptiness. Wind. This is one of the most potent images of futility in all of Scripture. All their national reforms, all their religious exertions, all their military strategies, all their desperate attempts to fix their situation amounted to a false pregnancy. They went through all the motions of labor, but there was no baby. It was all a painful illusion.
This is the verdict on every human attempt at self-salvation. This is the result of every political utopia, every five-step plan for self-improvement, every religious system based on human effort. You can writhe and strive and sweat and bleed, but if you are operating in your own strength, you will give birth to wind. You cannot save yourself. You cannot fix yourself. As the text says, "We could not accomplish salvation for the earth."
This was Israel's calling. They were to be a light to the nations, a kingdom of priests, the vehicle through whom God would bring salvation to the earth (Gen. 12:3). But in their own strength, they failed utterly. Instead of bringing forth new life, new converts, new "inhabitants of the world" for God's kingdom, their womb was barren. Their efforts were sterile. This is the state of man left to himself. He is spiritually impotent. He is dead in his trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1). A corpse cannot give birth. It can only decay.
The Gospel Contrast
This bleak confession of human inability in verse 18 is set in stark contrast to the glorious divine promise that immediately follows in the very next verse. Isaiah doesn't leave us in the despair of our own futility. After the people confess, "We gave birth to wind," God responds. And what a response it is.
"Your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to its dead." (Isaiah 26:19 LSB)
Do you see the glorious reversal? "We could not... the inhabitants of the world were not born." And God says, "Your dead will live... the earth will give birth to its dead." Where human effort produces only wind, God's power produces resurrection. Where our labor is barren, God's Word is creative. He speaks, and life comes from death. He gives the command, and the dust of the grave gives birth to shouting saints.
This is the gospel in miniature. Our condition is one of helpless, hopeless, spiritual death. We are not just sick; we are dead. We cannot cooperate with our own resurrection any more than Lazarus could. We are in the tomb, and the stone is rolled across the entrance. All our religious and moral strivings are just rearranging the grave clothes. It is giving birth to wind.
But then God acts. He does for us what we could never, ever do for ourselves. He sends His Son, Jesus Christ, into our dead world. Christ lived the perfect life we could not live. He died the death our sins deserved, absorbing the full chastening of God on our behalf. And then, on the third day, God the Father, by the power of the Spirit, raised Him from the dead. He gave birth to life from the tomb.
And now, through faith in this risen Christ, God does the same for us. He speaks His life-giving word into our dead hearts, and we are born again (1 Peter 1:23). It is not a phantom pregnancy; it is a true birth. It is not wind; it is the regenerating wind of the Holy Spirit (John 3:8). The salvation we could not accomplish for the earth, Christ accomplished for the world on the cross. The new inhabitants we could not bring forth are born, not of the will of the flesh, but of God.
So, do you feel the labor pains? Are you writhing under the conviction of your sin, the futility of your own efforts? Do you see that all your striving has produced nothing but wind? Good. That is the ministry of the law. That is the chastening of a gracious God, preparing you for the gospel. Stop trying to give birth. Stop trusting in your own agony. Look away from your fruitless labor and look to the one whose labor on the cross was perfectly fruitful. Confess your bankruptcy, and receive His riches. Admit your death, and receive His resurrection life. For only when we stop trying to deliver ourselves can we be delivered by Him.