Commentary - Isaiah 40:12-17

Bird's-eye view

This magnificent section of Isaiah serves as a corrective lens for our myopic vision of God. Having just announced comfort to His people, God, through the prophet, immediately anticipates the objection: "How can you comfort us? Look at our circumstances! Look at the power of Babylon!" The answer is not a pep talk; it is a theology lesson. The entire passage is a series of rhetorical questions designed to demonstrate the absolute, unbridgeable chasm between the Creator and His creation. God's power is not just greater than the nations; it is in an entirely different category. His wisdom is not just smarter than ours; it is the uncreated source of all knowledge. The point is to recalibrate our understanding of reality. We are tempted to measure God by our problems; Isaiah insists that we measure our problems, the nations, and the entire created order by God. He is the fixed point. Everything else is contingent, fleeting, and, in comparison to Him, virtually nothing. This is the foundation of all true comfort: the God who has promised to save us is the same God who holds the oceans in the palm of His hand.

Isaiah systematically dismantles any basis for human pride or creaturely comparison. He moves from God's effortless power over the physical creation (v. 12) to His unsearchable, self-sufficient wisdom (vv. 13-14), and finally to the utter insignificance of human political and military power in His sight (vv. 15-17). The passage functions as a polemic against all forms of idolatry, which at its heart is the foolish attempt to shrink God down to a manageable size. Isaiah will have none of it. The God of Israel cannot be measured, counseled, or challenged. He is the transcendent Lord of all, and the comfort He offers is as immense as He is.

Outline

Context In Isaiah

Isaiah 40 marks a major turning point in the book. Chapters 1-39 are largely focused on the impending judgment upon Judah and the nations, culminating in the announcement of the Babylonian exile. But with chapter 40, the theme shifts dramatically from judgment to comfort and restoration. The famous opening, "Comfort, comfort my people," sets the tone for the rest of the book. This passage, vv. 12-17, immediately follows the proclamation of the gospel that a highway will be prepared for the Lord and that His glory will be revealed. It provides the theological bedrock for that promise. The promise of salvation is believable only if the God who makes the promise is infinitely capable of keeping it. Therefore, before detailing the work of the Servant of the Lord, Isaiah first establishes the absolute sovereignty and transcendent majesty of the Lord Himself. This section serves to answer the exiles' despair by reminding them just who it is that has promised to redeem them. It is not a tribal deity in a contest with the gods of Babylon; it is the Creator of heaven and earth, before whom Babylon is less than a speck of dust.

Key Issues

The Great Calibrator

We live in a world that is constantly trying to cut God down to size. Our pride demands it. If God is truly as big as Isaiah says He is, then we must be as small as Isaiah says we are, and our rebellious hearts hate that conclusion. So we fashion gods we can manage. Sometimes these are literal idols of wood and stone, but more often they are intellectual idols. We create a god who is bound by our logic, who shares our political priorities, who is surprised by events, and who needs our help to get his plans off the ground. We create a god who is, essentially, a slightly larger version of ourselves.

Isaiah comes to us here as the great calibrator. He grabs our tiny frame of reference and shatters it. He forces us to look up from our circumstances and behold our God. The series of questions he asks are not for information. God is not looking for a fact-checker. They are designed to overwhelm us with the sheer scale of God's being. They are meant to produce awe, to silence our complaints, and to humble our pride. True worship, and therefore true comfort, begins when we stop trying to fit God into our world and realize that our world fits into the palm of His hand. This is the necessary foundation for the gospel. The God who is this big is the only one who could possibly save sinners like us.

Verse by Verse Commentary

12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, And encompassed the heavens by the span, And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, And weighed the mountains in a balance And the hills in a pair of scales?

The prophet opens with a barrage of questions that all point to the same reality: God's effortless, intimate, and absolute sovereignty over the entire created order. The imagery is anthropomorphic, but the point is to show transcendence. Think of the vastness of the oceans, all the waters of the earth. For God, they are a small pool that fits in the cupped palm of His hand. Think of the immensity of the cosmos, the heavens that our most powerful telescopes cannot fully map. For God, it is a small distance He can measure with the span of His hand, from the tip of His thumb to the tip of His little finger. The very dust of the earth, every particle, is known and accounted for, as if calculated in a measuring cup. The most massive and immovable objects we know, the mountains and hills, are to Him like fine powder on a jeweler's scale. He weighs them with perfect precision. The point is not just that God created these things, but that He sustains and governs them with a casual, intimate ease. He is not overwhelmed by His creation; He masters it completely.

13 Who has encompassed the Spirit of Yahweh, Or as His counselor has informed Him?

Having established God's mastery over the physical world, Isaiah now moves to the realm of the mind, to God's infinite wisdom. The question "Who has encompassed the Spirit of Yahweh?" can also be rendered "Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord?" or "Who has measured His mind?" The idea is the same. Just as no one can measure the heavens, no one can get their mind around the mind of God. His wisdom is uncreated, underived, and self-sufficient. This leads to the second question, which is a direct assault on human pride. Who has ever been God's counselor? Who has ever given Him a piece of information He did not already possess? The apostle Paul picks up this very text in Romans 11 to make the same point about the unsearchable wisdom of God in salvation. The idea that God needs our advice is the height of absurdity.

14 With whom did He take counsel and who gave Him understanding? And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge And made Him know the way of understanding?

Isaiah piles on the questions, driving the point home. Where did God go to school? Who was His tutor? When God established the foundations of justice, who was His consultant? When He laid out the path of knowledge, who drew the map for Him? The answer to all these questions is a resounding "no one." All wisdom, knowledge, justice, and understanding reside in Him originally. He is the source, the fountainhead. We learn; He simply knows. We discover justice; He is justice. This is crucial because it means His plans are not subject to our review or critique. He does not need a committee to approve His decrees. His wisdom is perfect and complete within the eternal counsel of the Trinity. To question His plan is like a single letter on this page questioning the author of the book.

15 Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, And are counted as a speck of dust on the scales; Behold, He lifts up the coastlands like fine dust.

Now the prophet applies this theology of God's transcendent power to the thing that most terrified the Israelites: the geopolitical power of the nations. Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, these were the superpowers of their day. Their armies were vast, their kings were tyrants, and their might seemed irresistible. But from God's perspective, what are they? A drop falling from a bucket, so insignificant it does not even affect the total volume of water. They are a speck of dust on a scale, so light it does not affect the measurement. The word "behold" is a call to see things as they really are. God "lifts up the coastlands," or islands, as though they were nothing more than fine dust. The most stable and formidable human institutions are, before Him, utterly weightless and inconsequential. This is not to say they are outside His plan; it is to say they are nothing more than instruments within it.

16 Even Lebanon is not enough to burn, Nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering.

This is a staggering statement about the worship due to such a God. If a man wanted to construct a sacrifice worthy of this God, where would he begin? Isaiah says you could take the entire, magnificent forest of Lebanon, famous for its massive cedars, and use it as the firewood. Then you could take all the animals that live in that vast forest and place them on the altar. And this colossal offering, the greatest imaginable sacrifice drawn from creation, would still be utterly insufficient. It would not be enough fuel, and it would not be enough of a sacrifice. Why? Because the gulf between the Creator and the creature is infinite. No created thing, no matter how grand, can adequately honor the uncreated God. This verse utterly demolishes all attempts at self-righteousness. If the forests of Lebanon are not enough, your good deeds certainly are not.

17 All the nations are as nothing before Him; They are counted by Him as non-existent and utterly formless.

Isaiah brings his argument to its devastating conclusion. He has already said the nations are like a drop and a speck of dust. Now he goes further. Before God, they are "as nothing." He considers them "non-existent and utterly formless." The Hebrew words here are tohu and bohu, the very words used in Genesis 1:2 to describe the earth before God brought His creative order to it, "formless and void." This is the ultimate statement of creaturely contingency. Apart from God's sustaining, creative will, the nations, with all their pomp, power, and pride, would simply revert to chaos and nothingness. They have no independent existence. Their being is derived, dependent, and utterly fragile. This is the God who comforts His people. The powers that threaten you are, before your God, a cosmic zero.

Application

The first and most obvious application is that we must repent of our small thoughts of God. Our anxieties, our fears, and our pride all stem from a failure to see God as He is presented here. When we are consumed with worry about politics, the economy, or our personal problems, it is because we have allowed those things to become large in our eyes, and God to become small. This passage is a divine summons to get the proportions right. God is the one who weighs the mountains; our problems do not even register on His scale. To fear the "nations" when our God counts them as nothing is a form of practical atheism.

Second, this passage must lead us to humility. If all the nations are as nothing, then what am I? What is my opinion, my resume, my list of accomplishments? It is less than nothing. All our boasting is excluded. We have no standing to bring a case against God or to question His wisdom. He needs no counselors, and we are not qualified for the position. True sanity begins with the humble admission of our creaturely status. We are dust, and He is the potter.

Finally, this profound vision of God's majesty is the only true source of gospel comfort. The fact that the forests of Lebanon are not a sufficient offering points us to our desperate need for a perfect sacrifice. God Himself must provide it. And He did. The God who holds the oceans in His hand is the same God who, in the person of the Son, was held in the arms of Mary. The one whose wisdom is unsearchable is the one who became for us wisdom from God. The Lord before whom the nations are nothing is the one who, for our sake, was counted as nothing and crucified by the nations. The sheer magnitude of the God described in Isaiah 40 is what shows us the breathtaking condescension of the incarnation and the infinite value of the cross. Our comfort is not that our problems are small, but that our God is immeasurably great, and He has stooped to save us.