The Prayer of a Disowned Son Text: Isaiah 63:15-19
Introduction: Wrestling with a Hidden Face
We live in an age of polite, domesticated prayer. Our prayers are often tidy, respectable, and carefully worded, as though we are addressing a sensitive monarch who might be offended by too much raw emotion. We ask for blessings that will fit neatly into our suburban lives, and we thank Him for comforts that we have come to see as entitlements. But the saints of old knew a different kind of prayer. They knew how to wrestle. They knew how to lament. They knew how to hammer on the doors of heaven with bloodied knuckles, not in a fit of unbelief, but in a desperate act of faith.
This passage in Isaiah is one of those prayers. It is a prayer from the rubble. The people of God are in a state of dereliction. Their temple is defiled, their land is occupied, and their hearts are hard. And in this state, they cry out to God. But this is no sterile, formal petition. This is the cry of a son who feels disowned, who looks up at the heavens and sees nothing but brass. It is a prayer that contains some of the most daring and theologically troubling questions in all of Scripture. And it is precisely because of this raw honesty that it is so potent, so instructive, and so full of a rugged, desperate faith.
This is a prayer for when God seems distant. It is a prayer for when your own sin feels so overwhelming that you begin to wonder if God Himself has abandoned you to it. It is a prayer that dares to appeal to God against God. It appeals to the Father of mercies against the sovereign Lord who hardens hearts. It is a prayer that refuses to let God go, even when it feels like He has already let go of you. And in this, it teaches us the bedrock of a true covenant relationship: we hold onto God not because our grip is strong, but because His name is Father and His nature is Redeemer.
The Text
Look down from heaven and see from Your holy and glorious habitation; Where are Your zeal and Your mighty deeds? The tumults within You and Your compassion are restrained toward me. For You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us And Israel does not recognize us. You, O Yahweh, are our Father, Our Redeemer from everlasting is Your name. Why, O Yahweh, do You cause us to stray from Your ways And stiffen our heart from fearing You? Return for the sake of Your slaves, the tribes of Your inheritance. Your holy people possessed Your sanctuary for a little while; Our adversaries have trodden it down. We have become like those over whom You have never ruled, Like those who were not called by Your name.
(Isaiah 63:15-19 LSB)
An Appeal to a Hidden God (v. 15)
The prayer begins with a cry for God to simply pay attention.
"Look down from heaven and see from Your holy and glorious habitation; Where are Your zeal and Your mighty deeds? The tumults within You and Your compassion are restrained toward me." (Isaiah 63:15)
The first plea is "Look down... and see." There is a vast distance implied here. God is in His "holy and glorious habitation," a place of perfection, power, and purity. The people, by contrast, are in the muck and the mire of their historical calamity. The cry is for the God of glory to condescend to look upon their squalor. This is the fundamental posture of all true prayer: recognizing the infinite qualitative distance between God and man, and yet crying out for Him to bridge that gap.
Then the prayer turns into a bold, demanding question: "Where are Your zeal and Your mighty deeds?" This is not the question of an atheist. It is the question of a bewildered son. The people know the stories. They have the chronicles of the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, the victories of David. They have a record of God's zeal, His passionate, active intervention in history on their behalf. But their current experience is one of divine silence and inaction. So they ask, "Where is that God now?" They are taking God's resume, His track record, and presenting it back to Him as the basis of their appeal. They are asking God to be consistent with His own character.
The final phrase is one of staggering theological intimacy. They accuse God of restraining His own compassion. They do not say, "You have no compassion." They say, "The tumults within You and Your compassion are restrained toward me." They have enough faith to know that God's heart is not cold. They believe His insides are churning, that He is full of fatherly compassion. But they perceive that He is actively, willfully holding it back. This is a profound insight. They see their suffering not as a result of divine apathy, but as a result of divine discipline. And so they plead with Him to stop holding back, to let His fatherly heart have its way.
The Covenantal Anchor (v. 16)
When all other supports have failed, the prayer finds its footing on the one relationship that cannot be broken.
"For You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us And Israel does not recognize us. You, O Yahweh, are our Father, Our Redeemer from everlasting is Your name." (Isaiah 63:16)
This is the anchor of the entire lament. Notice the contrast. "Though Abraham does not know us And Israel does not recognize us." The great patriarchs, the founders of their race, are dead. Their connection to their earthly forefathers is of no help to them now. In a culture built on ancestry and heritage, this is a radical statement. They are cutting away all earthly confidence. Our pedigree cannot save us. Our national identity cannot save us. Abraham is just dust in a tomb.
But their hope is not in a dead patriarch; it is in a living Father. "For You are our Father." This is the foundation. All of their pleas, all of their wrestling, is predicated on this relationship. And they state it twice for emphasis: "You, O Yahweh, are our Father." The covenant name of God, Yahweh, is identified with the intimate name of Father. This is not some abstract deity; this is family.
And what kind of Father is He? He is the "Redeemer." The Hebrew is Goel, the kinsman-redeemer. This is the family member whose duty it was to buy back a relative from slavery, to avenge his blood, and to restore the family property. By calling God their Goel, they are invoking His covenant duty to them. And this is not a new job He has taken on; it is His name "from everlasting." From all eternity, it has been His character to redeem His people. They are arguing that for God to abandon them now would be for God to deny His own name and His own eternal nature.
The Agonizing Paradox (v. 17)
Here we come to the most difficult and scandalous part of the prayer, a question that pushes the limits of pious language.
"Why, O Yahweh, do You cause us to stray from Your ways And stiffen our heart from fearing You? Return for the sake of Your slaves, the tribes of Your inheritance." (Isaiah 63:17)
This is a breathtaking accusation. "Why... do You cause us to stray... and stiffen our heart?" They are attributing their own sinfulness, their own hard-heartedness, to the sovereign hand of God. How can this be? We must be careful here. This is not the glib excuse of a rebellious teenager blaming his parents for his bad choices. This is the agonizing cry of a saint who understands the doctrine of total depravity. They are so aware of the depth of their own sin that they know they are utterly powerless to fix it. Their hearts are so hard that they cannot soften them. Their feet are so bent on straying that they cannot straighten their own path. They have come to the end of themselves.
In this place of utter helplessness, they recognize that God's sovereignty is their only hope. If their hard hearts are merely their own doing, then they are without hope. But if God, in His mysterious providence, has given them over to this hardness (as He did with Pharaoh), then He is also the only one who can reverse it. This is a cry of absolute dependence. It is saying, "O God, we are so sick that we cannot even desire the cure. You must work the desire in us. You must break the heart that You Yourself have allowed to become stone."
And so the plea is not, "We will try harder." The plea is, "Return." The solution is the return of God's manifest presence. And the basis of the appeal is, once again, God's own self-interest. "Return for the sake of Your slaves, the tribes of Your inheritance." They are God's property. They are His inheritance. For them to be in this state is a blot on His reputation. They are asking God to act to vindicate His own name and protect His own investment.
The Shame of a Ruined Inheritance (v. 18-19)
The prayer concludes by laying out the full extent of their shame and dereliction before the Lord.
"Your holy people possessed Your sanctuary for a little while; Our adversaries have trodden it down. We have become like those over whom You have never ruled, Like those who were not called by Your name." (Isaiah 63:18-19)
They look back on their history, and the glory days seem painfully brief. "Your holy people possessed Your sanctuary for a little while." The glorious temple of Solomon, the tangible sign of God's presence, now feels like a distant memory. The reality is that their "adversaries have trodden it down." The holy place has been profaned. This is the ultimate humiliation, a sign to all the world that Israel's God was either unwilling or unable to protect His own house.
This external ruin has led to an internal identity crisis. This is the final, desperate confession: "We have become like those over whom You have never ruled." The covenant has made them distinct. They were to be a holy nation, separate from all others. But now, in their sin and judgment, that distinction has been erased. They look just like the pagans. They are indistinguishable from the nations who do not know God. Their behavior, their circumstances, everything about them screams that they are a people abandoned by their God.
They are "like those who were not called by Your name." To be called by Yahweh's name was to be His representative, His possession, His people. They feel they have lost this name. They have become spiritual orphans, anonymous and disowned in the world. This is the lowest point of the prayer. It is the confession that, from all outward appearances, the covenant has failed and they are no longer God's people.
The Redeemer Who Answers
This prayer, in all its raw and desperate honesty, hangs in the air, awaiting an answer. And the entire New Testament is the answer. This prayer is ultimately fulfilled and answered in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God did "look down from heaven and see." In the incarnation, He did not merely look; He came down. He pitched His tent among us in our squalor (John 1:14). His zeal and mighty deeds were not restrained; they were perfectly displayed in the life, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The cry "You are our Father" is secured by Jesus. Through His work, we are adopted as sons and can cry out "Abba, Father" with a confidence Isaiah could only long for (Romans 8:15). Jesus is the ultimate Goel, the Kinsman-Redeemer who paid the price for His family not with silver or gold, but with His own precious blood (1 Peter 1:18-19).
And what of that terrible, agonizing question in verse 17? "Why do you cause us to stray?" On the cross, God did cause His own Son to be numbered with the transgressors. He laid on Him the iniquity of us all. God turned His face away from His Son, so that He would never have to turn His face away from us. God gave Jesus over to the ultimate darkness, so that He could call us into His marvelous light. He stiffened His heart to the cries of His Son, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" so that He could soften our hearts and welcome us home.
Because of Jesus, we are no longer "like those who were not called by Your name." We have been baptized into His name. We are the inheritance of God, the sanctuary He is building by His Spirit. And so, when we find ourselves in the rubble, when God feels distant and our hearts feel hard, we can pray this prayer. We can wrestle, we can lament, we can question. But we do it as beloved sons, anchored to the unshakable reality that our Father is our Redeemer, and He has already given the final, definitive answer to our cries in His Son.