Isaiah, Prophet of Salvation, Book 6, part 12

The promises of God to restore Israel was to come only at the end of a long captivity. Thus, God portrays Himself as having to restrain Himself until the great Day of Delivery.

Isaiah 42:14, 15 says,

¹⁴ I have kept silent for a long time. I have kept still and restrained Myself. Now like a woman in labor I will groan, I will both gasp and pant. ¹⁵ I will lay waste the mountains and hills and wither all their vegetation; I will make the rivers into coastlands and dry up the ponds.

When He says “now,” God was referring to the Day of Delivery after the time of judgment ends. It speaks of the present time after the beast empires have run their course and when one age gives way to another. Then God pictures Himself as a woman in travail who, having great pain in childbirth, thrashes around, destroying everything around Him. The “mountains and hills” are metaphors for large and small nations. God is giving birth to His own Kingdom.

Guiding the Blind Servant

Isaiah 42:16, 17 says,

¹⁶ I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, in paths they do not know I will guide them. I will make darkness into light before them and rugged places into plains. These are the things I will do, and I will not leave them undone. ¹⁷ They will be turned back and be utterly put to shame, who trust in idols, who say to molten images, “You are our gods.”

Blind men cannot find the right path in the vast wilderness, but God assures Israel that He has taken the responsibility upon Himself to “guide them” by the Holy Spirit and to “make darkness into light before them.” This is, of course, the nature of the New Covenant, where God has vowed to save all mankind and is responsible to fulfill His own vows and promises.

Hence, “they will be turned back,” meaning the idolaters will repent and return to God. It will surely happen because God has vowed to turn our hearts to Him, whether in their lifetime or at the Great White Throne, where “every tongue will swear allegiance” to Christ (Isaiah 45:23). Though Isaiah does not tell us here the scope of this promise, we are told in other places that God has promised “to reconcile all things to Himself” (Colossians 1:20), though not all at once.

The main force of Isaiah’s prophecy here is to show that the blind are helpless to find their way back to God. If God does not lead them and guide them, they would wander forever. Hence, this is another assertion of God’s sovereignty. Though a blind man might think himself to be lucky to find the right path, God, in fact, was guiding him to his ultimate destiny, whether he was aware of it or not.

Isaiah 42:18-20 continues,

¹⁸ Hear, you deaf! And look, you blind, that you may see. ¹⁹ Who is blind but My servant, or so deaf as My messenger whom I send? Who is so blind as he that is at peace with Me [shalam, plural of shalom, “peace”], or so blind as the servant of the Lord? ²⁰ You have seen many things, but you do not observe them; your ears are open, but none hears.

This blind and deaf servant is not the Messiah but Israel, for we have already shown how there are multiple layers of fulfillment in most prophecies. Jesus is the perfect Servant, the One who does nothing on His own initiative (John 5:30) but does only the will of the Father who sent Him. Others, however, are like servants in training, who will eventually be like Christ, doing all that they hear their Father say and seeing clearly the path that they must take.

The time of judgment and exile was a time of blindness and deafness for all except the remnant of grace among them. At the other end of history, we now expect to see a major historical shift as God no longer needs to restrain Himself patiently. As James 5:7, 8 tells us,

⁷ Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer [Husbandman] waits for the precious produce of the soil, being patient about it, until it gets the early and late rains. ⁸ You too be patient; strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.

Those who have turned back to God through Christ are reminded that God Himself is patient and that they too must learn patience. Too many want to see the promises of God fulfilled in them immediately, but God has ordained Time to discipline us so that we may be like Him in this matter of patience.

Parables for the Deaf

In the age of exile and discipline, God healed only a few of their blindness and deafness. Over all, it was to be a time where God would lead and guide the vast majority in their blindness. Paul says that the remnant of grace are those whose eyes and ears have been opened, while “the rest were blinded” (Romans 11:7 KJV).

Whenever Jesus healed the blind or the deaf, He proved that He alone was the One who could heal their spiritual eyes and ears. At the same time, He showed that a remnant of grace would continue to exist in every generation, because God required a witness to bring light to the exiles.

So Jesus encountered many who were physically blind and deaf, but the deeper problem was spiritual blindness and deafness. Jesus knew that God was still restraining Himself until the time of the end, and so He did not attempt to remove the blindness and deafness from the general population. This was why He spoke in parables. We read in Matthew 13:34, 35,

³⁴ All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak to them without a parable. ³⁵ This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: “I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.”

We read again in Matthew 13:10, 11,

¹⁰ And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” ¹¹ Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.”

The sentence against both Israel and Judah was that they should be blind and deaf for a season, because their forefathers had refused to hear the word of the Lord at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:19). God had confirmed this at the start of his prophetic ministry (Isaiah 6:9, 10).

However, it goes deeper than that, for we can trace the origins of blindness back to Adam himself. Adam’s sin brought a sentence of six “days” (i.e., 6,000 years) of labor, during which time he and his children were sold into bondage to sin (Romans 7:14). The Israelites had not been healed of this blindness even though they had been redeemed from Egypt (Deuteronomy 29:4). The bondage cycle from Adam still took precedence, even though Israel was redeemed on a secondary level.

Gradual Healing

It is difficult for most people to understand the multiple layers of divine judgment. For this reason, some today think that they can overcome the sentence of God upon Adam before it has fully run its course. Others think that all believers have been healed of blindness and are thus part of the remnant of grace.

But neither is true. No man can heal his own blindness by the power of his own will or by the sincerity of his own vow to God. We are subject to God’s sovereignty alone, and only when He reveals to us the divine plan and shows us the mind of God will we be healed of blindness.

The blindness theme is one of the most important themes in Isaiah’s revelation. Time after time, he refers to it, emphasizing the persistence of the problem and the fact that only God Himself can give us eyes to see and ears to hear. Hence, we must appeal to Him as our great Healer.

I have found that He heals blindness in stages, much like what we see in Mark 8:22, 23, 24, 25, where the blind man first saw men walking around “like trees” (i.e., indistinctly), and only later did he see clearly. It is not that Jesus failed in any way; instead, this occurred to show us that blindness is removed in multiple stages as we are given spiritual insights in our daily walk.

Misunderstanding the Captivity

Isaiah 42:21, 22 says,

²¹ The Lord was pleased for His righteousness’ sake to make the law great and glorious. ²² But this is a people plundered and despoiled; all of them are trapped in caves or are hidden away in prisons; they have become a prey with none to deliver them and a spoil with none to say, “Give them back!”

The captivity is a judgment of the law. God’s intent is “to make the law great and glorious” by upholding its judgments. The law promised to judge the people for their persistent sin, and that is why Israel was exiled. God was upholding His law.

Isaiah 42:23, 24 continues,

²³ Who among you will give ear to this? Who will give heed and listen hereafter? ²⁴ Who gave Jacob up for spoil and Israel to plunderers? Was it not the Lord, against whom we have sinned, and in whose ways they were not willing to walk, and whose law they did not obey?

Who understands the judgments of God? Who understands the correlation between the sin of Israel and the judgment of God? Even today, Christians often have difficulty understanding that their captivity to the beast empires was due to putting away the law. Many do not realize that when they give themselves the right to sin against any law that they think does not apply to them or which they think is unjust, they confirm that they are still worthy of captivity.

Sin is still the violation of the law (1 John 3:4). Sin still puts men “under the law,” that is, under judgment. What then will God do with those whose sin has been covered by the grace of the blood of Jesus but who then “continue in sin [violating the law] so that grace may increase” (Romans 6:1)? Such beliefs are evidence of blindness.

Isaiah 42:25 concludes,

²⁵ So He poured out on him the heat of His anger and the fierceness of battle; and it set him aflame all around, yet he did not recognize it; and it burned him, but he paid no attention.

God used the Assyrians to destroy Samaria and exile the Israelites, even as the “fiery law” prophesied in the law of tribulation (Deuteronomy 28). But the people as a whole did not recognize the cause of their calamity. They were “burned” but they “paid no attention.”

Such is the nature of blindness. Fortunately, God has vowed to turn the hearts of the people. He not only gives them the opportunity to repent but will also cause them to repent. This will be accomplished by the power of His own will, which alone can open blind eyes and deaf ears.