Isaiah 26-27, "New Life for Exiles"
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In helping to prepare the residential program at the Transformation Project, I was introduced to Restorative Justice. This is an approach to criminal justice that places more emphasis on restoration of a criminal offender to a fruitful life in their community rather than retributive justice that can often result in repeat offenses and a lifetime cycle of incarceration, homelessness, and recidivism. Restorative justice is turning exile into restoration.
As Christians, we believe that God created us to live fruitful lives. Wherever possible, we should seek the restoration of people society would exile. How does restoration happen? Exile is easy. Restoration is hard. There are obstacles to overcome. Offenses must be addressed, through either forgiveness or retribution, or some other way. Trust has been broken, and that takes time to restore. But the offender must change as well. How does someone who has made a wasteland of their life become a fruitful member of society again?
Our passage today is about God doing things that we can’t. We cannot save anyone from their sins. In Isaiah 26, we see God setting up salvation like a city with strong walls of refuge for exiles.
Isaiah 26:1 (ESV)
In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:
“We have a strong city;
he sets up salvation
as walls and bulwarks.
We cannot establish true justice in the earth. In this section, we see God resurrecting the dead who will sing for joy. God can do what we can’t.
Isaiah writes to a nation that was about to enter exile for their sins. They were going to be exiled to Babylon. Babylon was an empire, built around greed, a lust for power, control, conformity to a corrupt system. The empire was based in the city that had been built as a monument to mankind, in direct opposition to God. In the Bible, Babylon is the symbol of the world system that keeps us all in exile, built on corruption, greed, and injustice.
In the beginning, God created the world and made it fruitful. His Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos and He brought things into order. He planted a garden as a home for the human beings created in His image. God made them partners in His dominion over creation, caring for the garden. His first commandment to them was to be fruitful. To be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and share in God’s dominion, His kingdom on earth.
But the serpent came to the first man and woman and told them they didn’t have to obey God. They could choose their own path. And they chose to listen to the voice of the serpent and did what seemed right to their eyes. And as a consequence, God exiled them from the garden.
But there was also a promise, that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, and restore what was lost.
We have all been living in exile ever since. The world is a big, beautiful place, but it isn’t as it should be. Happiness comes but doesn’t last. The more we have, the less satisfied we are. The world tells us we just need more. We have a sense that we were made for more, but we can’t get it here. Why is that?
The world system, like Babylon, is not built for fruitfulness. It is built for centralizing power and control. It turns people who should be fruitful, filled with the fullness of God, at rest in Him, and turns them into machines to produce more and more. There is no rest, there is only conformity or exile.
But what mankind cannot do, God does.
Isaiah has told us that Babylon is doomed to fall because it is corrupt. The nation of Israel and the tribe of Judah might be sent into exile in Babylon, the “lofty city”, as Isaiah puts it in verse 5, but God will lay it low, cast it to the dust, make it a waste.
God is building His own city. It is a city of refuge and salvation for exiles from Babylon. The injustice of Babylon will be punished, and peace will be established for all people. Peace comes through righteousness, and exiles that make peace with God receive new life and will become fruitful.
In exile in a Babylon world, the righteous, the poor, and the needy all cry in distress. It feels like all of our attempts to fix things, to bring justice and help to the needy, are like planting seeds that don’t bear fruit - nothing seems to really change. Isaiah says in verses 17-18, it’s like being pregnant, but only giving birth to wind. All the pain, and no payoff.
Isaiah says in verse 18,
Isaiah 26:18 (ESV)
we were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind.
We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the inhabitants of the world have not fallen.
But what we cannot do, God can do. In fact, in verse 12, we read,
Isaiah 26:12 (ESV)
O Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works.
So, in this passage we see God doing all kinds of things we cannot do.
God is building a city of salvation
Isaiah 26:1 (ESV)
In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:
“We have a strong city;
he sets up salvation
as walls and bulwarks.
We build cities for refuge too. But somehow they always end up like Babylon instead of Jerusalem. We intend to bring the best people together to build something good, but it always gets corrupted by sin and ends up with injustice and oppression. The poor get poorer and the powerful game the system. But the city God builds is salvation, and even the poor and the needy have a place there (verse 6).
2. The city of salvation that God is building is entered by righteous people, verse 2
Isaiah 26:2 (ESV)
Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.
But then in verses 7-9, we see that it is God who provides the righteousness through His judgments.
Isaiah 26:9 (ESV)
For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.
3. There is a promise of perfect peace, but it isn’t a peace established by a human institution,
Isaiah 26:3 (ESV)
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
And in verse 12, it is God who establishes our peace
Isaiah 26:12 (ESV)
O Lord, you will ordain (establish) peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works.
In fact, by the end of chapter 26, the LORD God has not only defeated all the enemies and overlords of His people, He has saved them from exile, made them righteous, Isaiah says God has done what absolutely no one else could do, He has raised them from death to life,
Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.
You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a dew of light,
and the earth will give birth to the dead.
This promise is that even though we live in a world ruled by Babylon on the human level, and even though we are in exile because of our sin, you are never beyond God’s reach, and His love. You might turn your life into a wasteland. But God can raise the dead, He can do that for you.
So by the end of chapter 26, God invites His people to rest while He takes care of all the injustice that we haven’t been able to fix. As chapter 27 begins, the image Isaiah uses to describe the victory God is winning for His people is the overthrow of the serpent that we met way back in the garden of Eden.
In Genesis, God took the waters of chaos and gave them order and created human beings to be fruitful. Then the serpent deceived us into going our own way, which led to exile. He turned the order of the Garden back into the waters of chaos, like a stormy sea. So when Isaiah wants to describe the way God can restore people, he says,
In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.
Satan is our spiritual enemy from the beginning of time, who, like a gigantic sea serpent, has been rushing around twisting and turning to churn up the seas of chaos in this world and keep people deceived, fearful, enslaved, and exiled away from God. But he will not win. Every time God grants salvation to an exile, He is punishing Satan.
Isaiah tells us what happens next. The exiles whose lives were a waste, God makes fruitful again.
Isaiah 27:2–3 (ESV)
In that day, “A pleasant vineyard, sing of it!
I, the Lord, am its keeper; every moment I water it. Lest anyone punish it, I keep it night and day;
Isaiah 27:6 (ESV)
In days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots and fill the whole world with fruit.
Jacob, the other name for the nation of Israel, had made a waste of their blessings, of the promised land, of their lives. In Isaiah 5, God said Israel was like a vineyard that bore bad fruit, and He would let it be destroyed. He would send them into exile. But God will restore them and make them fruitful again.
But the promise is not just for Jewish people. All the nations that oppressed them and attacked them, and in doing so made themselves enemies of God, God offers them peace too.
Isaiah 27:4–5 (ESV)
I have no wrath.
Would that I had thorns and briers to battle!
I would march against them,
I would burn them up together.
Or let them lay hold of my protection,
let them make peace with me,
let them make peace with me.”
Think about all the people this world has written off because they seem beyond hope. They have wasted their life, and they have hurt others in the process. Think about all the people you and I have written off, have built walls to keep out, have used the weapons of this world to fight. They are not beyond God’s offer of peace.
How is it possible that God has no wrath any more? What happened? It is the way that God used His hard and great and strong sword to punish Leviathan the serpent. He didn’t plunge it into Leviathan. God poured out His wrath on His Son, Jesus, as an atonement for all of the sins of the enemies of God. And now, God offers His enemies peace, salvation, and an opportunity to live fruitful lives.
Because of our sin, God exiles us into a Babylon world, just like Israel,
Isaiah 27:8 (ESV)
Measure by measure, by exile you contended with them;
he removed them with his fierce breath in the day of the east wind.
But, the end of everything is a harvest of people.
Isaiah 27:12 (ESV)
In that day from the river Euphrates to the Brook of Egypt the Lord will thresh out the grain, and you will be gleaned one by one, O people of Israel.
and the exiles coming to worship the LORD on the holy mountain at Jerusalem.
Isaiah 27:13 (ESV)
And in that day a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were lost in the land of Assyria and those who were driven out to the land of Egypt will come and worship the Lord on the holy mountain at Jerusalem.
The great trumpet was blown in the year of Jubilee, the year of forgiveness of debts, deliverance for slaves, and a clean start for everyone. Those who lived far off were restored to their home. This is what God is offering all of us in Jesus Christ. Come home, be restored. You don’t have to live in exile any more.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility
The chaos doesn’t last forever. God will make something beautiful of your life when you trust in Him.