Isaiah 29:9 - Meaning and Application

Here, the prophet is amazed at how dull most of the Jewish nation had become. They had Levites, who taught them the good knowledge of the Lord, and King Hezekiah encouraged that work (2 Chronicles 30:22). They also had prophets, who brought messages straight from God and explained both the cause and the result of God’s displeasure. One would think that such a nation, with so much light from God, would be wise and understanding people (Deuteronomy 4:6). But it was not so.

The prophet speaks to the thoughtful few and calls them to take notice of the carelessness around them. It can be read this way: they delay repentance, so why are you surprised that they act so foolishly? They amuse themselves with their own lies, they party and live wildly, but you should cry out, grieve over their folly, and pray to God for them. The more unaware they are of God’s hand against them, the more serious the faithful should be about it. The stubborn safety of sinners is always a sad thing for serious people, who should feel responsible to pray for those who do not pray for themselves.

What is it that should make us wonder? We may rightly wonder that most of the people were so foolish and brutish, almost as if they were drunk. They were drunk, but not just with wine (though wine often made them drunk too), and they staggered because of wine (Isaiah 28:7). They were drunk with love of pleasure, with prejudice against religion, and with bad ideas they had taken in. Like drunk people, they did not know what they were doing or saying, or where they were going. They were not aware of God’s warnings. The drunkard says, “They have beaten me, and I did not feel it” (Proverbs 23:35). God spoke to them again and again, but, like drunk men, they did not notice and did not understand. They forgot God’s law. Their plans wobbled, they were unstable, and they stumbled over everything. There is such a thing as spiritual drunkenness.

It is even stranger that God himself gave them a spirit of deep sleep and closed their eyes (Isaiah 29:10). He commands them to wake up and open their eyes, yet he also lets them remain in blindness. But this was a just judgment, because they loved darkness more than light and loved sleep. When God called to them through his prophets, they kept saying, “Just a little more sleep, a little more slumber.” So he gave them over to strong delusion and said, “Sleep on now.” This was later true of the unbelieving Jews who rejected Christ’s gospel and were hardened in their unbelief until final judgment came on them (Romans 11:8). We should fear that this same sad condition belongs to many who live under the light of the gospel.

It was also very sad that this happened to their prophets, rulers, and seers, the very people who should have guided them. The leaders themselves were blindfolded, and the result was easy to predict, because the blind cannot safely lead the blind. This was fulfilled when, in the later days of the Jewish church, the chief priests, scribes, and elders became the main opponents of Christ and his gospel, and God’s judgment left them confused.

The sad result was that all the means God had given them for conviction, knowledge, and grace did them no good (Isaiah 29:11, 29:12). The vision of the prophets became like the words of a sealed book. They could not tell which visions were true and which claims were false. Or, to put it another way, every vision Isaiah had seen and preached to them became hard to understand. The message was among them, but they gained nothing from it, just as a man learns nothing from a book he can see but not open. They knew it was a prophecy, but its meaning was hidden from them. It was only words to them, and they were not moved or warned by it. It did not do what it was meant to do.

Neither the educated nor the uneducated were helped by the messages God sent through his servants. Some of the common people excused themselves by saying they were not learned, as if they were not responsible to know and obey God’s will because they lacked schooling. Others, of higher rank, claimed that the prophet used a strange way of speaking that was too hard for them, even though they were educated. Both excuses were empty. God’s prophets had not failed either the wise or the unwise (Romans 1:14). Or we may say that the book of prophecy was sealed to them as a judgment, because it had often been opened to them before, and they refused to learn its message. Then they made their ignorance an excuse. Still, the same vision that is death to some is life to others. It is not the vision itself that is dark, but their minds that have been blinded.

The prophet then speaks in God’s name against those who were formal and hypocritical in worship (Isaiah 29:13, 29:14). God, who knows the heart and cannot be fooled by outward shows, charges them with pretending before him, whether or not their own hearts accused them. He who is greater than the heart and knows all things sees that they draw near with their mouths and honor him with their lips, but their worship is not sincere. To worship God is to come near to him as people with business before him, seeking to honor him. We do this with our mouth and lips, by speaking about him and speaking to him, offering him the “calves of our lips” (Hosea 14:2). If the heart is full of love and fear for God, the mouth will speak from that fullness. But many people offer only lip service.

They speak in a way that sounds like prayer and worship, but it is only outward show. Their lips are active, yet their minds are elsewhere. When they pretend to speak to God, they are thinking about many unrelated things, because they have pushed their hearts far from him. That keeps their hearts from being used in prayer and keeps God’s word from reaching them.

They also do not make God’s word the rule for their worship, or his will their reason for it. Instead, their worship is “taught by the command of men,” meaning it is shaped by human rules and inventions. They worshiped the God of Israel, but not according to his appointment. They followed their own ideas, the directions of false prophets or ungodly kings, or the customs of the nations around them. Even when they used a form of worship that matched God’s law in the days of Hezekiah, a great reforming king of Judah, they paid more attention to the king’s command than to God’s command.

Our Lord later applied this to the Jews in his own day. They were formal in worship and attached to their own inventions, and he said they worshiped in vain (Matthew 15:8-9). This is a warning that empty religion, even when it looks serious, is no true worship if it leaves God’s word behind.

God threatens to punish their spiritual sin with a spiritual judgment. He says, “I will proceed to do a marvelous work,” meaning a work that will astonish people. They had done one strange thing already, they had stripped sincerity from their hearts. Now God would do another, he would take wisdom from their minds. The wisdom of their wise men would perish.

They had acted like hypocrites, trying to fool God. Now God would leave them to themselves, and they would act like fools, not only deceiving themselves but also being easily deceived by others. People who use religion only as a cover for their own purposes are often foolish in politics and public affairs too. God is right to take away understanding from those who give up honesty. This came true in the sad confusion that came on the Jewish nation after they rejected the gospel of Christ. They turned their hearts away from God, and God justly hid from them what belonged even to their peace and safety. This is a marvelous and shocking judgment, because wise people can suddenly lose wisdom and be handed over to strong delusions. Judgments on the mind are often the least noticed, but they are among the most surprising.

The prophet then shows the folly of people who try to act in secret, as if they could plan apart from God and hide their schemes from his eye. Their policy is described like this: they work hard to conceal their plans from the Lord, as if he could not know what they do or even what they intend. They say, “Who sees us?” They mean, “No one sees us, so God does not either.” They keep their plans for their own safety to themselves and never ask God for counsel. Worse still, they know their plans displease him, yet they think they can hide them from him. If he does not know, they think, he cannot stop them.

What a useless effort sinners make in their sinful ways. They dig deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, while he sits in heaven and laughs at them. A working disbelief in God’s complete knowledge lies behind both the false worship and the false security of hypocrites (Psalm 94:7; Ezekiel 8:12; Ezekiel 9:9).

The prophet then shows how absurd this thinking is. All their turning things upside down, all their shifting plans back and forth to make them fit their own desires, is like clay trying to direct the potter. It is as if they think God’s providence, his wise rule over all things, should simply wait on their schemes. They act as if God must know only what they choose to reveal. That is turning everything upside down and starting from the wrong end. But God will handle them and all their plans as easily as a potter shapes clay.

We should see how little reason there is to fear plans made without God, especially plans made against him. Those who think they can hide their counsel from God are, in effect, denying that he made them. It is as if the thing made said of its maker, “He did not make me; I made myself.” If God made us, then he certainly knows us, as the psalmist says (Psalm 139:1, Psalm 139:13-16). So those who say he does not see them might as well say he did not create them. Much wickedness grows from forgetting that God formed us (Deuteronomy 32:18).

Or, which comes to the same thing, they are denying that he is a wise Creator. It is as if something made were to say of its maker, “He had no understanding.” But if God had enough understanding to make us so wonderfully, especially to make us thinking beings and put understanding within us (Job 38:36), then surely he has understanding to know us and all we say and do. So those who argue with God, and those who try to hide from him, are really accusing him of foolishness. But the one who formed the eye, surely he can see (Psalm 94:9).