Isaiah 46:1 - Meaning and Application

We are told here, first, that false gods will certainly fail the people who trust them when help is needed most, in Isaiah 46:1-2. Bel and Nebo were two famous idols in Babylon. Some think Bel was a shortened form of Baal, but others think it was Belus, one of their early kings, who was later worshiped as a god. Some also think Nebo was a false god tied to prophecy, since the name can mean prophet, so these two may have been like the Babylonians’ Jupiter and Mercury or Apollo.

These idols had long been honored, and their worshipers praised them in their feasts for their victories, as seen in Daniel 5:4. They also mocked Israel, as if Bel and Nebo were stronger than the Lord and could keep God’s people in captivity. To keep the captives from losing heart, God told them what would happen to these idols. When Cyrus conquered Babylon, the idols would fall. Conquerors often destroyed the gods of the lands they took and replaced them with their own, as in Isaiah 37:19. Cyrus would do this too.

Bel and Nebo, once set up high and made to look grand, would bend down at the feet of the soldiers who plundered their temples. They had much gold and silver on them, meant to honor them, but that only made them easy spoil. The idols would be loaded onto beasts of burden and carried off to Persia with the rest of the plunder. They were so far from helping their worshipers that they became a heavy load for tired animals. The idols could not even help one another, as Isaiah 46:2 says: they stoop and bow down together. They are all weak and shaky things, and their day has come to fall.

Their worshipers also could not save them. They could not rescue the burden from the enemy’s hand, and both idols and idolaters went into captivity together. So God’s people should not be afraid of either. When the Philistines captured the ark of God, it became a burden, not to the beasts, but to the conquerors, who had to send it back. But when Bel and Nebo go into captivity, their worshipers may go with them in silence, because those gods will never recover themselves.

Second, the true God will never fail those who trust him. “Listen to me, house of Jacob,” he says in Isaiah 46:3-4. “You have seen what happened to Bel and Nebo. Am I like those gods? No. Even if you are brought low, and the house of Israel is only a remnant, your God has been, is, and always will be your strong and faithful protector.”

God asks Israel to do him justice by admitting how kind he has always been to them. He formed them into a people from the start. He made them, and gave them their place and life as a nation. Every good person is what God makes him or her to be. He also carried them along all the way. They were borne by him from birth and carried from the womb. God began doing them good very early, when they were still few and strangers. He took them under special care and did not let anyone harm them (Psalm 105:12-14). In their national childhood, when they were helpless and often stubborn, God carried them in the arms of his power and love, like on eagles’ wings (Exodus 19:4; Deuteronomy 32:11). Moses could not bear them as a nursing father carries a baby (Numbers 11:12), but God bore them and put up with them (Acts 13:18).

God began early, and he kept on doing good. He had carried them from the womb to that very day. We can say the same of ourselves: if God had not borne us from the womb, we would have perished at birth. We have been under the steady care of his kind providence, carried by his power and held in his love and pity. The new life God gives is like that too. Everything in us that is born of God is kept up by him, or it would soon fail. Our spiritual life is sustained by his grace just as surely as our natural life is sustained by his providence. The saints have often spoken this way, and they have comforted themselves with this truth in their hardest troubles (Psalm 22:9-10; Psalm 71:5-6, 17).

God will also promise that he will never leave them. He who was their beginning will be their end. He who started their well-being will bring it to completion. “You have been carried by me from birth, and nursed when you were children,” he says in Isaiah 46:4. “Even to your old age I am the same. When your strength fades, you will need help just as much as you did in childhood.” Israel was growing old, and so was the covenant that joined them together (Hebrews 8:13). Their gray hairs were already showing (Hosea 7:9), and they had brought on that old age and its troubles by their own sins. But God will not cast them off now. He will not fail them when their strength fails. He is still their God, and he will still carry them in the same everlasting arms that supported them in Moses’ day (Deuteronomy 33:27).

He made them, and he still owns them. So he will bear them up, bear with their weaknesses, and carry them through their troubles. “Even I will carry them and rescue them,” he says. “I will now bear them on eagles’ wings out of Babylon, as I once bore them out of Egypt.” This promise to old Israel fits every aging believer too. God has promised to support and comfort his faithful servants even in old age. “Even to your old age,” he says, “when you are no longer fit for work, when you are surrounded by weakness, and when others may grow tired of caring for you, I am still he, the same God you have known all along. You change, but I do not. I am the God I have promised to be, the God you have found me to be, and the God you want me to be. I will carry you, bear you, uphold you, and bring you safely home at last.”