Commentary - Isaiah 29:13-14

Bird's-eye view

In this potent little passage, the prophet Isaiah, speaking for the Lord, puts his finger directly on the central spiritual disease of Israel. The diagnosis is a fatal case of heart disease. The people of God had maintained the external forms of worship, the liturgical motions, but their hearts were not in it. They were like actors on a stage, saying their lines, but with no internal reality corresponding to the words. Their religion was a rote performance, a set of commands learned from men, not a vibrant, living fear of the living God. Because of this deep-seated hypocrisy, God promises a strange and marvelous work. He is going to undo them with a wonder. He will dismantle their proud intellectual structures, revealing the bankruptcy of their so-called wisdom. This is a foundational text for understanding the nature of true worship versus dead religion, a theme picked up by our Lord Jesus Himself when He confronts the Pharisees.

This passage is a divine indictment of externalism. God is not interested in lip service. He is after the heart. And when the heart is far from Him, all the religious machinery, no matter how impressive, is just so much noise. The judgment promised is therefore perfectly fitting: since their wisdom is a sham, God will expose it as such. He will perform a work so confounding that their wise men will be struck dumb. This is a recurring pattern in Scripture. God’s greatest works often look like foolishness to the wise of this world, and He delights in tripping up the proud in their own intellectual conceits. The cross is the ultimate expression of this "wondrously marvelous" work, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to us who are being saved, it is the very power and wisdom of God.

Outline

Context In Isaiah

Isaiah 29 is part of a series of "woes" pronounced against various nations and against Judah itself. This particular chapter begins with a "woe to Ariel," a poetic name for Jerusalem. The city is spiritually asleep, drunk not with wine but with a deep stupor from the Lord (Is. 29:9-10). The prophecy is like a sealed book to them; they are spiritually illiterate, unable to read their own condition or God's warnings. It is in this context of profound spiritual blindness and deadness that the Lord delivers the specific diagnosis of verses 13 and 14. Their worship is not the cause of their stupor, but rather a symptom of it. They go through the religious motions precisely because they are asleep. The problem is not a lack of religion, but a lack of reality in their religion. This sets the stage for God's radical, surprising, and ultimately redemptive intervention.

Key Issues

Clause-by-Clause Commentary

v. 13 Then the Lord said, “Because this people draw near with their mouth And honor Me with their lips,

The charge begins here. God acknowledges that the people are, in fact, drawing near. They are in the temple, they are offering sacrifices, they are saying the prayers. Their mouths are fully engaged. Their lips are forming the words of praise and honor. From a purely external point of view, everything looks to be in order. They are active participants in the liturgical life of Israel. But God, who is not an external observer, sees the machinery but finds the engine cold. This is the essence of hypocrisy. It is not the absence of religious activity, but religious activity that is hollowed out, a performance for an audience. They say "Lord, Lord," but their hearts are staging a rebellion elsewhere. Jesus quotes this very text to the Pharisees and scribes in Matthew 15, who were masters of this kind of external, lip-service religion.

But they remove their hearts far from Me,

Here is the heart of the matter. While their mouths draw near, their hearts are beating a retreat. There is a great chasm between the words on their tongues and the affections of their souls. The heart, in biblical terms, is the seat of the will, the emotions, the intellect, the very core of a person. For their hearts to be "far from" God means that their true allegiance, their ultimate love, their foundational trust, is placed somewhere else. It might be in their own political savvy, their military alliances, their wealth, or simply in their own self-righteousness. Worship is a matter of the heart, and if the heart is not engaged, the worship is a lie. God desires truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6), and He will not be mocked with empty formalism.

And their fear of Me is in the command of men learned by rote,

This explains how their hearts got so far away. Their "fear of God" was not a genuine, awesome reverence for the living, holy God of Sinai. Rather, it was a second-hand, man-handled tradition. It was a set of rules and regulations, a catechism learned by rote memory, a "command of men." This is what happens when the vibrant, terrifying, and gracious reality of God is reduced to a manageable human system. The Pharisees were experts at this, piling tradition upon tradition, creating a fence around the law that ultimately obscured the law itself. Their religion was something they could control, something they had mastered. But the true fear of the Lord is not something we master; it is something that masters us. It is a gift from God, not a lesson learned in a classroom. When religion becomes a mere human tradition, it loses its power to transform the heart and becomes instead a tool for self-justification.

v. 14 Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous;

Because of this profound hypocrisy, God announces His response. And His response is not what we might expect. He doesn't just promise to punish them in a straightforward way. He promises to do something "marvelously," a "wondrously marvelous" work. The Hebrew words here convey a sense of astonishment, something extraordinary and supernatural. This is God's "strange work," His "alien task" (Is. 28:21). It is a work of both judgment and grace, intertwined. He is going to upend their entire system. He will act in a way that confounds all their expectations. This marvelous work will ultimately be fulfilled in the coming of Christ. What could be more wondrously marvelous than God becoming man, dying on a cross, and rising from the dead? This is the divine solution to the problem of the human heart, a solution so strange and wonderful that it leaves human wisdom speechless.

And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, And the discernment of their discerning men will be hidden.”

The effect of God's marvelous work will be the utter demolition of their intellectual pride. The "wise men," the scribes, the theologians, the policy makers, the ones who thought they had it all figured out, will be exposed as fools. Their wisdom will "perish." Their discernment will be "hidden" or covered over. They will be looking right at God's work and be completely unable to understand it. Paul picks up this very theme in 1 Corinthians 1, quoting this verse. "For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.'" The cross is God's great intellectual upset. It reveals that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. He saves us not through intricate human philosophies, but through the "foolishness" of the message preached. God's marvelous work is a checkmate to human pride, clearing the ground for a true wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord.

Application

The warning of Isaiah 29 is a perennial one for the people of God. The temptation to substitute external performance for internal reality is ever-present. We can come to church, sing the hymns, say "amen" in all the right places, and have our hearts a thousand miles away, tangled up in our business worries, our lusts, our ambitions, or our political anxieties. This passage calls us to a radical heart-check. Is our worship genuine? Is our fear of God the real thing, a trembling and glad submission to the Almighty, or is it a set of rules we picked up from our subculture?

We must guard against a religion that is merely "learned by rote." This means our faith cannot be a second-hand inheritance. It must be a personal encounter with the living God through His Son, Jesus Christ. We must ask the Spirit to search our hearts and expose the hypocrisy that lurks there. The good news is that God's solution to our hypocrisy is not to cast us off, but to do a marvelous work. He sent His Son to give us new hearts, hearts of flesh instead of stone, hearts that are capable of true worship.

And when we look at the state of our culture, and even the state of the church, and see the bankruptcy of human wisdom on full display, we should not despair. We should remember this promise. God delights in confounding the wise. His plan is to bring all human pride to nothing, so that no one may boast in His presence. Our job is to cling to the "foolishness" of the cross, for it is the only wisdom that saves, and to worship Him in spirit and in truth, with hearts that are drawn ever nearer to Him.