The Honest Wreckage: A Covenant Confession Text: Isaiah 64:6-7
Introduction: The Necessity of a True Mirror
We live in an age of flattery. The world, and sadly, much of the church, is in the business of manufacturing bigger and better mirrors that are designed to lie to us. They are carnival mirrors, designed to make us look taller, thinner, and altogether more righteous than we actually are. Modern man is desperate to believe that he is, at his core, basically good. He may have his foibles, his missteps, his occasional lapses in judgment, but he is fundamentally sound. He is captain of his own ship, master of his own destiny, and the problems of the world are always "out there," never "in here."
This is the primordial lie of the serpent, whispered again into the ears of every generation: "You shall be as gods." You get to define yourself. You get to determine what is good and what is evil. You are the center of your own story. And so, when we perform our good deeds, we expect a round of applause from Heaven. We bring our little moral resume to God, pointing out our community service, our polite demeanor, our refusal to kick kittens, and we expect Him to be impressed. We think our righteousness is a clean, white tunic, suitable for presentation in the courts of the King.
Into this self-congratulatory festival, the prophet Isaiah throws a bucket of ice-cold, filthy water. This passage is not a gentle suggestion or a mild critique. It is a wrecking ball. It is God holding up a true mirror to His covenant people, and the reflection is not pretty. This is not the testimony of a pagan, an outsider looking in. This is the corporate confession of Israel, the people of God, who have come to the end of themselves. They have tried to build their own righteousness, stitch together their own fig leaves, and the result is a pile of stinking, leprous rags.
This passage is essential for us because it demolishes the very foundation of all false religion, which is the belief that man can, through his own efforts, make himself acceptable to God. Until we see the utter ruin of our own righteousness, we will never flee to the righteousness of another. Until we smell the stench of our own good works, we will never appreciate the fragrant aroma of Christ's perfect sacrifice. This is the honest wreckage that must precede any true rebuilding. This is the necessary death that comes before resurrection.
The Text
For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, carry us away. There is no one who calls on Your name, Who awakens himself to take hold of You, For You have hidden Your face from us And have melted us into the hand of our iniquities.
(Isaiah 64:6-7 LSB)
Universal Contamination (v. 6a)
Isaiah begins this corporate confession with a sweeping, all-inclusive diagnosis.
"For all of us have become like one who is unclean..." (Isaiah 64:6a)
The "all of us" is crucial. This is not Isaiah pointing his finger at the reprobates down the street. This is the prophet including himself in the confession. There are no exceptions, no special carve-outs for the spiritually elite. The pastor, the elder, the Sunday school teacher, the most devout woman in the congregation, all are included. "All we like sheep have gone astray," as Isaiah says elsewhere (Is. 53:6). This is the doctrine that our modern sensibilities hate most, the doctrine of total depravity. It doesn't mean we are all as wicked as we could possibly be, but it does mean that sin has corrupted every part of who we are. Our minds, our wills, our affections, our bodies, every part is stained.
The comparison is to one who is "unclean." In the ceremonial law of Moses, this was a potent concept. To be unclean was to be ceremonially disqualified from worship. A person with leprosy, a woman with a discharge of blood, someone who had touched a dead body, they were all excluded from the assembly of God's people. They were contagious. To touch them was to become unclean yourself. This is what sin does. It makes us spiritual lepers. It isolates us from the holy presence of God. We are not just people who do bad things; we have become unclean things. The contamination is not just on our hands; it is in our nature.
The Filthy Rags of Righteousness (v. 6b)
This next clause is perhaps one of the most devastating statements in all of Scripture concerning human effort.
"And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment..." (Isaiah 64:6b LSB)
Notice what is being condemned. It is not our sins, our failures, our rebellions. Isaiah has already dealt with those. Here, he takes aim at the very best we have to offer. He is talking about "our righteous deeds." This is our charity work, our church attendance, our Bible reading, our prayers, our attempts at moral improvement. This is the peak of human virtue, the stuff we put on our spiritual mantelpiece. And what does God call it? "A filthy garment."
The Hebrew here is even more graphic. The phrase refers to a menstrual cloth. It is a garment that is not just dirty, but ceremonially and repulsively unclean. It is something to be discarded, burned, and never brought into the presence of a holy God. Why? Because even our best deeds are shot through with mixed motives, pride, self-interest, and a desire for the applause of men. We give to the poor, but we want the tax receipt and the pat on the back. We serve in the church, but we grumble when we are not recognized. We pray, but our minds wander, and our hearts are often cold. Our righteousness is not pure; it is polluted at the source. It is the fruit of a poisoned tree.
This is the fundamental error of every works-based religion, from the Pharisees to the modern moralist. They believe they can clean up their rags enough to make them presentable. But you cannot clean a filthy garment by washing it in a muddy puddle. The only solution is to have the garment taken away and to be clothed in a righteousness that is not your own, a righteousness that is perfect, spotless, and alien to you. This is the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ.
Inevitable Decay and Helplessness (v. 6c-d)
The consequences of this condition are described with two powerful metaphors: decay and powerlessness.
"And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, carry us away." (Isaiah 64:6c-d LSB)
First, we "wither like a leaf." A leaf severed from the branch, cut off from the life-giving sap of the tree, has only one future: to become brown, dry, brittle, and dead. This is the state of man cut off from God, the true vine. There is an internal principle of decay at work. Left to ourselves, we do not get better and better. We wither. Our strength fails, our resolve weakens, and our spiritual vitality evaporates. This is the opposite of the man who delights in the law of the Lord, whose "leaf also shall not wither" (Psalm 1:3).
Second, our iniquities are like a powerful force outside of us. They are a "wind" that carries us away. This speaks of our bondage to sin. The sinner is not a free man who simply makes poor choices. He is a slave. He is carried along by the currents of his lusts, his habits, and his fallen nature. He is like a dead leaf caught in a gale, tossed about with no ability to resist. He thinks he is steering, but he is being driven. This is why Jesus said, "Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin" (John 8:34). We are not just unclean; we are helpless in our uncleanness.
Spiritual Apathy and Divine Abandonment (v. 7)
Verse 7 describes the tragic result of this condition: a complete breakdown in the relationship between God and His people.
"There is no one who calls on Your name, Who awakens himself to take hold of You, For You have hidden Your face from us And have melted us into the hand of our iniquities." (Isaiah 64:7 LSB)
The first part of the verse describes human inability and unwillingness. "There is no one who calls on Your name." This is a shocking statement. Of course, people were still going through the motions of religion. They were still offering sacrifices and saying prayers. But no one was truly calling on Him. Their hearts were far from Him. There was no spiritual urgency, no desperation. No one "awakens himself to take hold" of God. The picture is of a man sleeping in a burning house, who cannot even muster the will to get up and save himself. This is spiritual lethargy, the deadening effect of sin. The natural man does not seek God (Romans 3:11). He must be sought.
The second part gives the terrifying reason for this state of affairs. It is an act of divine judgment. "For You have hidden Your face from us." When God hides His face, it is the greatest of all calamities. It means the withdrawal of His favor, His blessing, and His sustaining presence. And what happens when God withdraws? He has "melted us into the hand of our iniquities." The Hebrew word for "melted" can also mean "delivered us over." God's judgment here is not an active infusion of more evil, but a passive act of giving us over to what we have chosen. He lets sin have its way with us. This is the principle Paul lays out in Romans 1. When men refuse to honor God, "God gave them up" to their lusts and their depraved minds. This is one of the most fearful judgments in all of Scripture: for God to give you exactly what you want.
The Gospel in the Rubble
Now, a confession like this could lead to utter despair, and if this were the end of the story, it should. If we are unclean, our best works are filthy, we are withering and helpless, spiritually asleep, and abandoned by God to our own sin, then what hope is there? The hope is found in the very next verse, which begins with that glorious, covenantal word: "But now, O LORD, You are our Father" (Isaiah 64:8).
This entire, brutal confession is not the cry of the damned. It is the cry of the son who has come to his senses in the pigsty. It is the prayer of a people who, in the midst of the rubble, remember that they have a Father. The point of recognizing the complete inadequacy of our own righteousness is to drive us out of ourselves and onto the mercy of God in Christ.
God does not show us the filthiness of our garments so that we will despair. He does it so that we will gladly exchange them for the robe of righteousness He offers freely. Jesus Christ did not come for the healthy, but for the sick. He did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. He takes our filthy garments upon Himself at the cross, and He clothes us in His perfect, seamless robe of righteousness. "For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Where we wither like a leaf, He is the True Vine, and grafted into Him, we bear fruit. Where our iniquities carry us away like the wind, His Spirit is a mightier wind that blows us into the harbor of salvation. Where no one awakens himself to take hold of God, God takes hold of us. He does not hide His face from us in Christ; rather, we see "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6).
This confession is not the end of the road; it is the beginning. It is the only door through which a sinner can enter into grace. We must come to God with nothing in our hands, acknowledging our uncleanness, confessing the bankruptcy of our own goodness, and pleading for the mercy that is found only in the finished work of His Son. For it is only when we are honest about the wreckage that God, our Father and the Potter, can begin to make us new.