Commentary - Isaiah 64:1-5

Bird's-eye view

This passage is a raw, desperate, and magnificent prayer. It is the cry of a people who know two things with absolute certainty: first, that their God is a God of earth-shattering power, and second, that they are in a world of trouble because of their own sin. Isaiah, speaking for the covenant people, is not asking for a gentle nudge or a subtle sign. He is pleading for a theophany, a full-blown, heavens-ripped-open appearance of God. The prayer is born out of a deep historical memory of what God has done in the past, particularly at Sinai, and a profound sense of present abandonment. The central tension of the passage, and indeed of the entire Bible, is laid bare here. How can a holy God, who melts mountains with His presence, deal with a people who are themselves unclean and mired in their iniquities? The prayer begins with a glorious appeal to God's power and ends with a cliff-hanger of a question: given who God is and who we are, "And shall we be saved?" This sets the stage perfectly for the gospel. The only way the heavens can be rent and God can come down without consuming His people is through the Mediator who is both God and man.

The structure of the prayer is a beautiful progression. It moves from a desperate wish for God's intervention (v. 1-2), to a remembrance of God's past awesome deeds (v. 3), to a theological confession of God's utter uniqueness (v. 4), and finally to a gut-wrenching confession of the people's sinfulness and their precarious position before a holy God (v. 5). It is a model of biblical prayer: high theology married to heartfelt petition, grounded in history and culminating in a candid self-assessment before the throne of grace.

Outline

Context In Isaiah

This prayer in chapter 64 is a continuation of the lament that begins in Isaiah 63:7. The prophet is looking back at the glorious history of Israel, God's mighty acts of deliverance in the Exodus, and contrasting it with the present state of desolation. The temple is destroyed, the people are in exile, and God seems distant and silent. This section of Isaiah (chapters 40-66) is largely focused on the comfort God will bring to His people after the judgment of the exile. But here, in the midst of promises of restoration, is this profound expression of corporate confession and longing. It serves as a necessary reality check. The new heavens and new earth promised by Isaiah cannot be entered into lightly. The people must first reckon with the sin that caused the desolation in the first place. This prayer, therefore, is the proper posture of a people awaiting restoration. It is a recognition that salvation is not something they can achieve or deserve; it must be a raw act of divine power, a God who rends the heavens and comes down to save those who cannot save themselves.

Key Issues

A Prayer for a Torn Sky

There are prayers, and then there are prayers. Some prayers are like polite knocks on a distant door. This prayer is a man pounding on the door with both fists, shouting for the owner of the house to kick the door off its hinges. The imagery is violent, cosmic, and glorious. Isaiah is not asking for a feeling in his heart or a gentle breeze. He is asking for God to rip the very fabric of the cosmos apart to make His presence known. This is the kind of prayer that arises when the people of God are at the end of their rope. When all human solutions have failed, when the situation is dire, the only recourse is to appeal to the God who made the heavens and ask Him to tear them open for the sake of His name and His people. This is not a lack of faith, but the very essence of it. It is a faith that knows God is big enough to handle such a request, and that our situation is desperate enough to require it. It is a prayer that understands that when God truly shows up, the world is never the same again.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down, That the mountains might quake at Your presence,

The prayer begins with an impassioned plea. The word "rend" is a violent one. It means to tear apart, to rip open. Isaiah is asking God to do away with all distance and subtlety. He wants a direct, unmistakable, and terrifying manifestation of God's presence on earth. The second line shows us the expected result: the created order itself would be undone. Mountains are symbols of stability, permanence, and strength. But before the presence of the living God, they would "quake," or more literally, flow down like melted wax. This is Sinai language. When God descended on Sinai, the mountain smoked and trembled violently (Ex. 19:18). Isaiah is asking for a repeat performance, a display of divine power so overwhelming that the most stable things on earth would dissolve.

2 As fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil, To make Your name known to Your adversaries, That the nations may tremble at Your presence!

The prophet here provides two similes to describe the desired effect of God's coming. God's presence would be like a fire that instantly ignites dry brushwood, an unstoppable, all-consuming force. Or, it would be like a fire that makes water boil, a power that transforms the very nature of what it touches. The purpose of this display is not for the private encouragement of the saints alone. It is evangelistic in the Old Testament sense. It is "to make Your name known to Your adversaries." God's reputation is on the line. The nations, the adversaries of Israel, have seen God's people defeated and exiled, and they have concluded that Israel's God is weak. Isaiah prays for a demonstration of power that would set the record straight, causing the nations to "tremble at Your presence." True fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and this is a prayer for God to reveal Himself in such a way that the nations are brought to that starting point, even if it is through terror.

3 When You did awesome things for which we did not hope, You came down; the mountains quaked at Your presence.

The prayer now grounds itself in history. The plea of verse 1 is not a wild fantasy; it is based on God's established track record. Isaiah recalls the Exodus and the giving of the Law at Sinai as a time when God "did awesome things for which we did not hope." The deliverance from Egypt and the manifestation at Sinai were beyond anything Israel could have expected or engineered. They were pure, unadulterated acts of God. And the central feature of that event was that God "came down" and the "mountains quaked." The prayer is essentially this: "Lord, do it again. What you did for our fathers, do for us now." This is how biblical faith operates. It looks back at God's faithfulness in the past as the foundation for trusting Him for the future.

4 For from ancient times they have not heard or given ear, Nor has the eye seen a God besides You, Who acts in behalf of the one who waits for Him.

From the historical precedent, Isaiah moves to a profound theological statement about the uniqueness of Yahweh. This is a piece of solid, biblical apologetics embedded in a prayer. No one in all of human history, from the beginning of time, has ever heard of or seen any other god who is like the God of Israel. What is it that sets Him apart? The pagan gods are stationary; they must be served, placated, and carried about by their worshipers. But the God of Israel is a God who "acts in behalf of the one who waits for Him." He is not passive. He is a God of action, a God who intervenes, a God who works for His people. The condition for receiving this divine action is simple: one must wait for Him. This is not a passive, lazy waiting. It is an active, expectant trust, a confident reliance on God to act in His time and in His way. This is the very heart of faith.

5 You meet him who rejoices and does righteousness, Who remembers You in Your ways. Behold, You were angry; indeed we have sinned, We continued in them a long time, And shall we be saved?

This verse marks a sharp, painful turn in the prayer. The first part describes the ideal relationship. God meets, or intersects with, the person who joyfully walks in righteousness, the one who actively remembers God's ways and lives accordingly. This is the path of blessing. But then comes the devastating reality check: "Behold, You were angry; indeed we have sinned." The ideal has not been met. The reason God seems distant is not because He has changed, but because His people have sinned. The prophet confesses this corporately. This wasn't a one-time slip-up; "We continued in them a long time." The sin was persistent, habitual. This confession leads to the agonizing, ultimate question. Given God's character, which is to meet with the righteous, and given our character, which is to persist in sin, what hope is there? "And shall we be saved?" This is the cry of the Old Covenant. It sees the glory of God and the depth of human sin, and it does not know how the two can be reconciled. The question hangs in the air, waiting for the answer that will come only in the person and work of Jesus Christ, who is both the righteousness of God and the savior of sinners.

Application

This prayer from Isaiah is a bracing tonic for the often tepid and self-centered prayers of the modern church. It teaches us, first, to pray with a high view of God. We are to ask for big things, for heaven-rending things, because we serve a mountain-melting God. Our prayers should be concerned with the glory of His name among the nations, not just our personal comfort and convenience. When the world mocks the church and the name of Christ is blasphemed, our response should be to plead with God to show up in power and vindicate His own name.

Second, this passage models for us the necessity of honest, corporate confession. The prophet does not point fingers or make excuses. He says "we have sinned." We as a church, as a nation, as a people, have fallen short. We must recover this practice of confessing our corporate and generational sins, acknowledging that we are part of a larger story of covenant unfaithfulness. We cannot simply blame the culture "out there" without recognizing the worldliness "in here."

Finally, this prayer drives us to the gospel. The question, "And shall we be saved?" is the question every honest sinner must ask. The Old Testament leaves the question hanging, but the New Testament answers it with a resounding "Yes!" How can a holy God meet with sinful people? He does it in the person of His Son. In Jesus, God did rend the heavens and come down. He did not come to make the mountains quake, but to be broken Himself upon a mountain called Calvary. He is the one who did righteousness perfectly, and He is the one who waited on God perfectly. And because we are united to Him by faith, God meets with us. He is no longer angry, because His anger was exhausted on the cross. The answer to Isaiah's desperate question is grace. We shall be saved, not because we have ceased from our sinning, but because Christ has died for our sins and has been raised for our justification.