The Song of Salvation
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Isaiah 12 (with Exodus 15:1–2; John 7:37–39)
Before this session, read Isaiah 12. It is short, so read it twice, and if you can, read it aloud. Count how many times the words deliverer and deliverance ring out across these six verses, and notice that the song is something we are told to say and to sing. Ask what it means to draw water, joyfully, from the springs of deliverance.
Look, God is my deliverer! I will trust in him and not fear. For the LORD gives me strength and protects me; he has become my deliverer.
Isaiah 12:2
A Song at the End of the Storm
We come now to a short chapter, only six verses, but it is the chapter the whole first movement of the book has been climbing toward. Chapters 1 through 12 form a single great arc, and chapter 12 is its summit. The arc began in a courtroom, with a holy God arraigning a faithless people (ch. 1); it passed through the throne room, where the thrice-holy Lord undid the prophet (ch. 6); it heard the promise of Immanuel (ch. 7), the birth of the child (ch. 9), the rise of the Branch and his peaceable kingdom (ch. 11). And now, having seen all of that, the redeemed do the only thing there is left to do. They sing.
And notice that the song is given to them. Twice the chapter says you will say (12:1, 12:4). He does not merely permit the praise; He scripts it, putting the very words into the mouths of the redeemed. This is how God deals with His people all through Scripture: He gives us our words to pray and to sing (in the Psalms, here, and in the church’s liturgy) because a heart fresh from the storm often does not know what to say. Left to ourselves we might manage only a stunned silence, or a stammer. So God hands us the song, here is what to say, and we find, as we say it, that it becomes true in us. The gospel does not only save us; it teaches us how to sing about it.
Twice the chapter says at that time (12:1, 12:4), and the time it means is the day of salvation just described, the day of the Branch. It is, in other words, our day; for the Branch has come, the salvation has dawned, and we are the people who live at that time. Isaiah is handing the church her song, the song she will sing once the One promised across eleven chapters has arrived. This is not a song reserved for some far-off future. It is the song of everyone, in any age, who has come through the storm of God’s law into the calm of His salvation.
And notice what this teaches about the shape of the Christian life. It does not end in the courtroom; it does not end on Woe to me! I am destroyed. Every true dealing with the living God, however terrifying it may begin, is meant to end here, in song. The law does its hard and necessary work; the wrath is felt; the sinner is undone. But the destination is not the undoing. The destination is the doxology. God arraigns in order, finally, to absolve; He wounds in order to heal; He brings us through the storm in order to set a new song in our mouths on the far side of it. Chapter 12 is the far side. It is what the gospel sounds like when it has finished its work in a person: praise.
And it is worth saying, before we go a line further, what kind of praise this is and is not. It is not the nervous flattery of people trying to get on the good side of a powerful being, nor the anxious performance of worshippers hoping to earn what they do not yet have. It is the praise of people who already have everything, whose anger is already turned away, whose salvation is already won. The redeemed do not sing in order to be saved; they sing because they are. That order is the whole difference between the song of the gospel and the song of every religion of works, and Isaiah 12 sings it in the right order from its very first line: I praise you, O LORD comes with, and only because of, your anger subsided.
Your Anger Subsided
The song opens not by forgetting the storm but by naming it. I praise you, O LORD, for even though you were angry with me, your anger subsided, and you consoled me (12:1). The redeemed do not sing as though God had never been angry. They sing precisely because the anger that was once so real has now subsided. Hear both halves of it: you were angry with me (that was true, and the first eleven chapters have left us in no doubt of it); and your anger subsided (that is now also true, and it is the whole reason for the song).
We must not soften the first half, for the gospel is only ever as sweet as the wrath is real. The God of Isaiah is not a tame deity who could never be angry at anything; the chapters behind us have thundered with His anger: the arraignment, the six woes, the day of the Lord against pride, the hand stretched out still. The wrath of God against sin is not a primitive notion the church has outgrown; it is the dark backdrop without which grace is merely sentiment. The song says you were angry with me, with me, personally, and means every word of it. The singer was, by every right, under the wrath of God.
Our own age finds the wrath of God an embarrassment, and would gladly trade it for a deity of unbroken approval who is pleased with everyone exactly as they are. But such a god, however comfortable, can offer no real comfort at all; for a god who was never angry at our sin is a god who never took our sin seriously, and a god who does not take our evil seriously is, in the end, simply indifferent to whether it devours us. The God whose anger can subside is precisely the God whose anger meant something, who looked at the ruin of His good world and was not unmoved by it. We do not, in fact, want a god too mild to be angry. We want exactly this God: angry enough at our sin to deal with it once and for all, and loving enough to deal with it in His own Son.
And then the turn that makes it a song: your anger subsided. Not ignored. Not pretended out of existence. Not the comfortable discovery that God was never really angry after all. The Hebrew verb is a word of turning: the anger turned back, spent itself, fell somewhere other than upon the singer. And here our Christ-centered reading must say what Isaiah has not yet said, but is moving toward with every chapter: the anger turned away from us because it was turned toward Another. Forty-one chapters on, Isaiah will show us the Servant of whom he says the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (53:6), the One wounded because of our rebellious deeds (53:5). That is how the anger subsides: not by God deciding that sin does not matter, but by God bearing His own wrath in the person of His Son. The hand that was stretched out still through chapters 5 and 9 and 10 (the arm raised to strike and never lowered) comes down at last, and falls upon the Lord Jesus, so that it need never fall upon us. The song of the subsided anger is sung at the foot of a cross.
And it has subsided the way a storm subsides: because it is spent, not because it has merely been turned down. This matters enormously for the troubled conscience, which is forever suspecting that some portion of God’s anger must still be smoldering somewhere, held in reserve. If the wrath had fallen upon the Lord Jesus only in part, we might reasonably fear that the remainder was being kept back for us. But Isaiah’s word is whole and final: the anger has subsided; the raised hand is down, the storm is spent, the account is closed. There is not a drop of wrath left over for the one who is in Christ, because there was not a drop withheld from Him. The conscience may rest its whole weight on that. The anger is not being carefully managed; it is gone.
And in the place where the wrath had been: comfort. You consoled me. This is the first faint sounding of a note that will swell into the great theme of the second half of the book: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God (40:1). The Hebrew verb is the same in both places. The God whose anger has subsided does not merely leave us un-struck; He consoles us, draws near, comforts. The opposite of His wrath is not His indifference but His comfort. To the sinner who dreaded the raised hand, He becomes the One who wipes away the tears. That is the gospel pressed into a single line: the anger subsided, and consolation put in its place.
Hold that word, comfort, for it is about to become the master theme of everything still ahead. The first half of Isaiah has been dominated by the word holy; the second half, which begins not many chapters from now, will be dominated by the word comfort: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God (40:1). This little song stands at the hinge between the two. Here, for the very first time, the holiness that has thundered and arraigned and undone speaks tenderly: you consoled me. It is the sound of the storm at last breaking up and the sun coming through, the first taste of all the comfort the rest of the book will pour out. The God of the throne room turns out to be, in the end, the God of the comforted heart.
God Is My Deliverer
The song’s great confession comes in the second verse, and it rings with a single word. Look, God is my deliverer! I will trust in him and not fear. For the LORD gives me strength and protects me; he has become my deliverer (12:2). Three times across these verses the song reaches for one Hebrew word, yeshuah, which our translation renders deliverer and deliverance and which Moses’ song, as we shall see, renders salvation. That word is the most important in the chapter, for it carries, hidden in the Hebrew, a name. The name the angel would one day command for the child of Bethlehem (the name that means the Lord saves, for He would save His people from their sins) is built from the same Hebrew root. When Isaiah’s redeemed sing God is my deliverer, they are singing, without yet knowing it, the name of the Savior. The whole song is, in the end, His name set to music.
Count the soundings, as the reading invited you to: God is my deliverer … he has become my deliverer … you will draw water from the springs of deliverance. Three times in two verses the word tolls like a bell, and it is no accident. A chapter that means to be the song of the saved cannot say salvation too often. And every time it rings, it rings with the Savior’s own name buried inside it, for the Hebrew tongue could not say salvation without all but speaking the Savior’s name. When the angel later told a carpenter to name the child the Lord saves, heaven was simply making explicit what Isaiah’s song had been humming all along. The name above every name was hidden in plain sight, in the most-repeated word of the song.
And do not miss the little word my. Not God is deliverance in the abstract (a true but cold proposition) but God is my deliverer. Faith is the hand that closes on that my. It is one thing to know that there is a Savior, that He has saved a great many people; it is another thing, and it is everything, to say my. Luther taught the church to press hard on the personal pronouns of the gospel, that Christ was given for me, that He is my salvation; for the devil is perfectly content to let us believe every true thing about Christ in general, so long as we never quite dare to say mine. The song dares. God is my deliverer. The whole of faith is folded into that one small word.
And that little word becomes a weapon the moment the accuser comes. The devil’s whole work is to make us doubt the my: to grant us every general truth about Christ while whispering that surely it cannot apply to someone like us, not after what we have done. Faith’s answer is not to argue but to cling the harder to the pronoun: He is my deliverer. Luther counseled exactly this: that when the devil throws our sins in our face, we are to answer that yes, they are ours, but Christ is ours too, and He is the greater; that we hide ourselves inside the my and let the accuser break against it. God is my deliverer is not only a song to sing in the sunshine. It is a shield to lift in the dark.
And out of that my comes the very thing that poor Ahaz could not manage: I will trust in him and not fear. We met Ahaz only a few sessions ago, shaking like wind-blown trees, unwilling to trust, reaching out for Assyria. Here is his exact opposite: the redeemed heart that has learned to say I will trust in him and not fear, because the anger has subsided and God Himself has become its deliverer. Fear is the native tongue of a heart that suspects God is still against it. Trust is the song of a heart that knows the anger has been turned away. The saved are not people who have stopped facing frightening things; they are people who have learned to face them singing.
And we should be clear about why they can. The redeemed are not braver by temperament than Ahaz was; many a saint has been a worrier by nature. The difference is not nerve but knowledge: the settled knowledge that the very worst thing that could ever befall them has already been faced and finished at the cross. The wrath of God was the one danger truly worth dreading, and it has subsided; and once that is dealt with, every lesser fear is, in the end, only a lesser fear. I will trust in him and not fear is not the boast of a strong personality. It is the quiet logic of a forgiven one: if God is for us, and His anger is spent, who or what is left that we should finally be afraid of?
And there is an echo in this verse that every Israelite would have caught at once, for it reaches back to the oldest song in the Bible. When Israel came up out of the sea, with Pharaoh’s army drowned behind them, Moses and all the people sang: The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation (Exodus 15:2). In the Hebrew, Isaiah puts those very words into the mouth of the redeemed (our translation words them the LORD gives me strength and protects me; he has become my deliverer), because the salvation of the Branch is a new and greater exodus. As God once brought His people through the sea out of bondage to Pharaoh, so He brings them through the cross out of bondage to sin and death. And so the song of the sea is sung again, on the far side of the greater deliverance. John would hear it one final time, when the redeemed in glory sang the song of Moses the servant of God and the song of the Lamb (Revelation 15:3). It is all, in the end, one song: the song of the saved, in every age, who have been brought through.
The Springs of Deliverance
Then comes the loveliest line in the chapter, and one of the most quietly joyful in all the prophets. Joyfully you will draw water from the springs of deliverance (12:3). In a dry and thirsty land, where water meant life and a spring was a treasure, Isaiah pictures the redeemed coming with their buckets to springs that never run dry, the springs of deliverance, and drawing, joyfully, all that they could ever need. It is a picture of inexhaustible supply met by unembarrassed gladness. The saved are not rationing out a trickle; they are drawing, joyfully, from springs that simply cannot be emptied.
The mercy of the image is sharper still if we remember what we are forever prone to do instead. Through another prophet the Lord would charge His people with a double wrong: They have rejected me, the fountain of life-giving water, and they have dug cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that cannot even hold water (Jeremiah 2:13). That is the human story in a single sentence: we walk straight past the spring that never fails and spend our strength digging holes that cannot keep a cupful. The cistern of money, of reputation, of pleasure, of our own goodness: every one of them cracked, and dry by the time we are thirstiest. Isaiah’s invitation is the cure for all that frantic digging. The spring that never runs dry stands already open. Put down the spade, and come and draw.
This verse came to hold a special place in Israel’s worship. By the time of the Second Temple, at the Feast of Tabernacles each year, a priest would carry water in a golden pitcher from the pool of Siloam up to the temple and pour it out beside the altar, in one of the most joyful ceremonies of the year; and the Jewish tradition itself ties that water-drawing to these very words, joyfully you will draw water from the springs of deliverance. And it was at that feast, on the last day of the feast, the greatest day, with the water-drawing fresh in every memory, that the Lord Jesus stood up in the temple and shouted out: If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Just as the scripture says, ‘From within him will flow rivers of living water’ (John 7:37–38). He was saying, in effect: the springs of deliverance that Isaiah sang of are Myself. Come, and draw. The thirst of every dry soul is answered at one source, and that source is the Lord Jesus.
And John adds a detail we must not miss: Now he said this about the Spirit (John 7:39). The living water the Lord Jesus gives is the Holy Spirit Himself, the very Spirit who rested upon the Branch, now poured into the thirsty who come to Him. And note where the rivers run: from within. The Lord Jesus is Himself the fountainhead, and many read him of Christ; but the water that flows from Him does not stop at the believer who drinks. The one who comes thirsty and drinks does not become a sealed reservoir, hoarding his draught; he becomes a channel, a spring, the water running out of him toward other thirsty people. This is the same movement the whole chapter is built upon: we drink in private, and the water runs out in public. The spring of deliverance, once it has filled us, makes us into little springs for our neighbors.
So we know now where the springs of deliverance are, and we know how we are to draw from them. They are Christ Himself; and He has opened them, as it were, in particular places where we may come with our buckets and never once find them dry: in the water of baptism, where He joined us to His death and rising; in the bread and the cup of His Supper, where He gives us His own body and blood; in His word, read and preached and spoken over us in the absolution. These are the springs of deliverance for a thirsty people, the very means by which the living water of Christ is brought up to us, again and again. And mark the manner Isaiah commands: joyfully. Not with the grim duty of people fetching water because they have to, but with the gladness of the rescued. We come to the word, the font, and the table not to earn anything (the anger has already subsided) but to draw, joyfully, from springs that will never, ever run dry.
And we draw not once but daily, for the thirst returns daily. This is the rhythm of the whole Christian life: not a single dramatic drink long ago that must somehow last a lifetime, but a coming again and again to the same springs: morning by morning to the word, week by week to the table, returning every day to our baptism in daily contrition and faith. We do not graduate from the springs of deliverance. The saints furthest along the road are simply the ones who have learned to come back most often, and most gladly, knowing the water will be there. A faith that stops drawing soon dries out. But the spring itself never does.
Cry Out and Shout
The chapter has a second song folded into it, and it begins the same way: At that time you will say (12:4). But notice the change. In the Hebrew, the first song was addressed to one person, you singular, God is my deliverer. The second is addressed to many, you plural, and it turns outward. Praise the LORD! Ask him for help! Publicize his mighty acts among the nations. Make it known that he is unique. (12:4). The private song of my deliverer cannot stay private. It rises into the praise of the whole congregation, and then it spills past the congregation’s walls into proclamation, publicize his mighty acts among the nations, out to the nations, the very nations we have watched streaming to the mountain and rallying to the Branch’s banner.
This is simply what salvation does. A heart that has truly sung God is my deliverer cannot hold its peace; the joy is far too large to keep. The saved sinner becomes, almost helplessly, a herald: telling what God has done, making it known that He is unique, until it is known throughout the earth (12:5). The personal and the public are no rivals here; the one becomes the other. Faith that begins as the lonely grasp of a single my grows up into the church’s full-throated Sing to the LORD, and then into the missionary’s word carried to the ends of the earth. The springs of deliverance, once we have drawn from them joyfully, send us straight out to tell the thirsty where the water is.
There is gentle encouragement here for the believer who feels he is no evangelist, who would not know how to argue anyone into the kingdom, and dreads the very thought of trying. Notice that Isaiah does not command the redeemed to win debates or to master techniques. He commands them to publicize his mighty acts, simply to tell what God has done. The song of the saved is not an argument; it is a testimony, the glad report of a rescued person pointing back over his shoulder at the spring where he found water. Anyone who has truly drawn from the springs of deliverance has something to declare, and needs no special gift to declare it: this is what the Lord has done for me. The most reluctant Christian alive can still say that, and it is exactly that, and not our cleverness, that the Lord uses to make Himself known throughout the earth.
And the chapter (and with it the whole first movement of the book) ends on a note that might well have stopped Isaiah’s own breath. Cry out and shout for joy, O citizens of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel acts mightily among you! (12:6). The Holy One of Israel: that is the title from the throne room, the thrice-holy Lord whose holiness had once filled the temple with smoke and left the prophet crying Woe to me! I am destroyed (6:5). That same Holy One is here: not far off upon a high, elevated throne now, but among you, dwelling among His people. And the response is no longer I am destroyed. It is Cry out and shout for joy. Trace that arc, for it is the very arc of the gospel: from Woe to me! I am destroyed in the presence of the Holy One, to Cry out and shout for joy, for the Holy One of Israel acts mightily among you. What changed between the two cries? The anger subsided. The holiness that once undid the sinner now dwells with him, and he is glad. The Holy One among us is none other than Immanuel, God with us, and where He dwells, the only fitting sound is a shout of joy.
And the Holy One is among His people still, in ways even more intimate than Isaiah could have known. The Lord Jesus promised, where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them (Matthew 18:20); and He is most surely among us when His people come to His table, where the Holy One gives Himself to be not only among us but within us. We do not have to be caught up to a high, elevated throne to find Him, as Isaiah once was. He has come down into the midst of the smallest congregation, the plainest sanctuary, the humblest rail: the same thrice-holy Lord, now our gladness and not our terror. Wherever His word is preached and His Supper is given, there the Holy One of Israel is among His people, and there the only fitting sound is still a shout of joy.
Gathering the Threads
So the first great movement of Isaiah ends, as every true encounter with God is meant to end: in a song. Look back at the arc it completes. It began with a holy God’s anger against a faithless people and a prophet undone by holiness; it ends with that anger subsided, that holiness dwelling among His people, and that prophet’s people told to cry out and shout for joy. In between stands everything that made the difference: Immanuel, the child, the Branch, the salvation of God. Chapter 12 is what it sounds like when grace has finished its work: the redeemed drawing joyfully from inexhaustible springs, singing the old song of the sea on the far side of a greater exodus, and pressing their private God is my deliverer outward until it is known throughout the earth.
And it is our song. We are the people of that time, upon whom the salvation has dawned. The anger that our sin deserved has been turned away, turned toward the Lord Jesus on the cross, so that for us there is now only comfort. He is the spring of deliverance; come and draw, joyfully, and never find Him dry. He is the Holy One now among His church, no longer a terror but a treasure. We began this volume in a throne room that left a man crying Woe to me! I am destroyed. We have come, by the grace of God in His Son, to the place where the only thing left to say is the very thing this little chapter says: Cry out and shout for joy, O citizens of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel acts mightily among you!
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
The song begins, even though you were angry with me, your anger subsided (12:1). Why does the gospel lose its sweetness if we soften the reality that God was truly angry at sin? How did the anger subside, rather than being merely ignored, and where, finally, did it fall?
The song says not merely that God delivers, but God is my deliverer (12:2). Why did Luther press so hard on the little word my? What is the difference between believing true things about Christ in general and daring to say that He is my salvation?
I will trust in him and not fear (12:2) is precisely what Ahaz could not say a few chapters earlier. What is the root difference between a heart that fears and a heart that trusts? Why can the redeemed face frightening things singing?
At the Feast of Tabernacles, whose water-drawing Jewish tradition tied to joyfully you will draw water from the springs of deliverance (12:3), the Lord Jesus shouted, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me (John 7:37). Where are the springs of deliverance for us today, and what does it mean to draw from them joyfully rather than as a grim duty?
The personal song of verse 2 becomes the corporate, outward-facing song of verses 4–6: Publicize his mighty acts among the nations (12:4). Why can a heart that has truly sung God is my deliverer not keep it quiet? How does private faith naturally grow into the church’s praise and the proclamation to the nations?
The volume’s throne room left Isaiah crying Woe to me! I am destroyed before the Holy One (6:5); this chapter has the redeemed cry out and shout for joy because the Holy One acts mightily among you (12:6). What changed between those two cries? How is the Holy One among us a comfort rather than a terror, and how does this connect to the name Immanuel?
Looking Ahead
With chapter 12 the first movement of the book closes, and Isaiah’s gaze now lifts from Judah to the whole map of the ancient world. In the next session we take up a long stretch, chapters 13 through 23, a series of burdens, oracles of judgment laid one after another upon the surrounding nations (Babylon and Assyria, Moab and Damascus, Egypt and Tyre and the rest). We will move through them at varying depth, because the point is not finally any single nation but the great truth they make together: that the Holy One among His people in Zion is also the Lord of all the earth, sovereign over every empire that ever swaggered across the stage of history. We will pause at the haunting fall of the shining one, son of the dawn, in chapter 14 (the proud one cast down from the sky), and at the astonishing moment in chapter 19 where the Lord calls even Egypt and Assyria, Israel’s great oppressors, His own: Blessed be my people, Egypt. From the song of the saved, to the judgment (and the surprising mercy) of the nations.
Before the next session, read Isaiah 13 and 14 (the oracle about Babylon and the fall of the shining one), and Isaiah 19 (the oracle about Egypt, with its astonishing ending). Skim chapters 15 through 23 to feel the sheer sweep of it. As you read, watch how the Lord humbles the pride of the nations, and where, against all expectation, mercy breaks through to them.
Closing Prayer
O Lord our God, You were angry with us, and rightly so, for our sin; and yet in Your Son You have turned Your anger away and put comfort in its place. We praise You with the song of all the redeemed: that You have become our deliverer, our strength, and our song. Teach us to say, with the boldness of faith, not merely that there is a Savior, but that He is ours: God is my deliverer; I will trust in Him and not fear.
Bring us daily, and joyfully, to the springs of deliverance You have opened for us in Your Son (to His word, His font, and His table) and let us never find them dry. Fill our mouths so full of His praise that it overflows our private hearts into the song of Your whole church and the telling of Your mighty acts among the nations. And dwell among us, O Holy One in our midst, no longer our terror but our gladness, that we who once cried Woe to me may now cry out and shout for joy; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.