Isaiah 65:17-25

To read the book of Isaiah well is to read it in the imagination of a desolate, captive people. The book is housed in the story of a people nurtured on the promise of a God who had chosen them—and in choosing them had made them unique among all nations, God’s beloved child. This is the story of a people nonetheless enslaved by a pagan empire, tempted at every turn to accommodate to it. The book of Isaiah is to be read as the story of a faithful few who have refused to shake off its hope in the promise of God , who have refused to throw in with their neighbors who have curried favor with the wielders of ephemeral power. The question that looms over this book is, “Does not faithfulness to God make an already hard life unbearably harder?” Or more insidiously, “Does not the God who loves us want us to be happy? Isn’t Babylon God’s agent and aren’t we to trust that God has ordained it to wield the sword and subdue chaos?” To read the book of Isaiah well is to imagine that our brothers and sisters, heirs of Israel, have already traded their inheritance for the extortionist favor of a nation holding them hostage, have already begun to sacrifice and sing praises to pagan gods, have already begun to substitute the nation’s offer of bankable safety for the elusive, unperceived promise of Yahweh. In this desolation, held tightly in the grip of Babylon, Yahweh’s faithfulness seemed null and void, a darkness that devoured the land and the sky. And, of course, it makes no difference if the image before which apostate children of God bow is a golden calf or fabric in red, white, and blue.

And yet Isaiah hopes and calls upon those also to hope who teeter on the cusp of despair. The hope of Isaiah does not rest on an optimistic forecast from current affairs. It is spoken in the darkness of an internment, of a bondage, of a slavery with no exit. It is spoken in spite of current affairs. Current affairs could only prompt lament—or apostasy. “We are prisoners in the clenched fist of Babylon, the mightiest empire in the world! Who could possibly save us?!” Isaiah’s response is that Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of promise, is mightier than any empire of the earth, mightier than a coalition of all the empires of the earth. Yahweh is the God mighty to gather all the fragments, all the shattered stones and other rubble of the defeated Promised Land, and make Israel anew. The hope of Isaiah’s declaration is a hope that from all appearances comes out of nowhere, out of insider tips odds-makers could hold in their calculative grip. It is a hope that rests on nothing more and nothing less than God’s good pleasure, trusting that it is God’s good pleasure to be faithful to Israel, even as Israel threatened to be fractured into anonymity.

That is why Isaiah in this passage speaks of “creation.” When there is no possibility in the world as it is, hope comes from the outside. When the heavens and the earth as they stand crush us, only new heavens and a new earth, a new sky and new land, will open the future to us. The heavens and the earth, the sky and the land, as they stand, have nothing in them but violence for the children of Israel. Hope demands new heavens and a new earth, a new sky, generous with sun and rain, and a new land, abundant with rich soil and wildlife.

Indeed, the hopeful doxologies of Isaiah predate the opening of the book of Genesis. The testimony that God is the creator in both books is to be understood in terms of the calamities that befall the poor. That “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is in this sense Isaianic. Neither Genesis 1 nor Isaiah 65 articulates a strictly cosmological doctrine. Neither gazes backward into a distant past event, but looks forward to a new way when there seems to be no way. “What kind of God could possibly liberate Israel from the grip if Babylon?,” the doubter asks. “Why, the God who creates the heavens and the earth, the God who creates the sky and the land!,” the prophet replies. Trust in this God is the meat of the doctrine of creation.

When the New Testament takes up these words and announces that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor 5:17), when it shouts, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Rev 21:1), it announces and shouts that not even the two-headed beast, death and damnation, obstructs the future of God. Both Isaiah and the Apostles hope in an outside just as there is no immanent hope. The difference is that what Isaiah, the prophet of audacious hope, dared only obliquely to hope for is proclaimed by the Apostles to have occurred. God reaches into the bleakest desperation—where by definition God cannot reach, cannot contact, cannot endure—and there is pleased to dwell! Though both Isaiah and later Genesis speak boldly of God as the creator, the first unambiguous articulation of the doctrine that God created all things out of nothing comes only in the shadow of the good news of resurrection of the dead. “What kind of God creates all things out of nothing?,” the sceptic asks. “Why, the God who raised the mutilated body of Jesus from the dead!,” the church replies.