The Highway of Holiness

Isaiah 34–35 (with Matthew 11:2–6; John 14:1–6)

Before this session, read Isaiah 34 and 35 together, letting the darkness of 34 set off the glory of 35. Watch the desert bloom (35:1), the blind and the deaf and the lame healed (35:5–6), and find the Highway of Holiness on which the ransomed of the Lord come home to Zion with unending joy (35:8–10).

And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.

Isaiah 35:8 (ESV)

Two Days, One Lord

Chapters 34 and 35 belong together, and they are meant to be read as a matched pair: two panels of a single picture, one painted in the blackest colors, the other in the brightest. Chapter 34 is as dark as anything in the whole book: the day of the Lord’s vengeance poured out upon the nations, and upon Edom in particular. The sky will roll up like a scroll (34:4); the Lord’s sword, having slaughtered the heavenly powers, now descends on Edom (34:5); the land of Edom is turned to burning pitch, its smoke ascending continually, until the place is fit only for owls and jackals and wild animals (34:9–15). It is desolation without end.

Why Edom? Edom was the nation descended from Esau, Jacob’s own brother: the near kinsman who became the perennial enemy, the one who stood by and gloated on the day Jerusalem fell. In the prophets Edom comes to stand for all who set themselves against God and against His people, the whole proud, gloating, God-opposing world. So the desolation of Edom in chapter 34 is the end of all that ranges itself against the Lord, the same end we already watched fall upon Babylon, the final undoing of every power that lifts itself up. Chapter 34 is the day of the Lord as terror.

We are tempted to wish chapter 34 away, to keep the lilies of chapter 35 and quietly skip past the burning pitch, but the two cannot be pried apart without losing both. A salvation that rescues us from nothing in particular is no salvation worth singing about. The joy of chapter 35 is real precisely because the danger of chapter 34 is real; the homecoming means something only because there was a genuine terror to be brought home from. And there is a further mercy folded into the judgment itself: the desolation of Edom is good news to everyone Edom ever trampled. A God who never finally dealt with the proud and the cruel, who let every Edom go on gloating forever, would not be a God of love at all. The day of vengeance is the day the victims are vindicated and the bullies are stopped for good. We should not be so quick to wish it away.

And then, with the mere turn of a page, comes chapter 35. The same day of the Lord that is desolation to Edom is springtime for the redeemed. This is something we must hold onto as we read the prophets: the day of the Lord has two faces, two outcomes, depending entirely on which side of it a person stands. To the enemies of God it is the day the sky rolls up and the sword comes down; to the people of God it is the day the desert blooms and the ransomed come home singing. The very same coming of God that means the end of Edom means the homecoming of Zion. The darkness of chapter 34 is not there for its own sake; it is the black velvet on which the diamond of chapter 35 is laid, so that the diamond’s brightness can be seen for what it truly is.

The Desert Blooms

So turn to chapter 35, and feel the very air change. Chapter 34 left us in a wasteland of burning pitch and thorns and the cries of desert birds; chapter 35 opens with that same wasteland breaking into flower. Let the wilderness and desert be happy; let the arid rift valley rejoice and bloom like a lily! (35:1). The desert, the place of death, of barrenness, of the curse, does the one thing a desert is never supposed to do: it blooms. Not grudgingly, not sparsely, but abundantly: Let it richly bloom; let it rejoice and shout with delight! (35:2). The ground that could grow nothing but thorns is suddenly carpeted in lilies.

This is the reversal of the curse, the new creation breaking in. Ever since Eden the ground has been cursed because of us, producing thorns and thistles (Genesis 3:18), the whole creation groaning under a kind of perpetual drought. Here Isaiah sees the drought broken and the curse rolled back: the wilderness made a garden, the desert made glad. We have met this hope before in the book: in the peaceable kingdom of chapter 11, where the wolf lives with the lamb, and in chapter 32, where the Spirit poured out from on high makes the wilderness a fruitful field. It is the same vision each time: the world remade, the barren places turned green, the desert in full bloom. And it is not a hope for the soil only. The God who makes deserts bloom is the God who makes barren lives bloom, who takes the dry, dead, thorny places in a person and, by His Spirit, brings up flowers where nothing had grown for years.

And it is worth saying again, because the heart forgets it so quickly: the desert does not bloom by trying harder to be fertile. A desert cannot water itself; the bloom comes down from outside, from the rain God sends, from the Spirit poured out from on high. So it is with the barren places in us. We are forever attempting to force some life up out of dry ground by our own effort (resolving, striving, gritting our teeth to be more fruitful), and it is only Egypt all over again, the frantic self-help the last chapters exposed. The flowers Isaiah promises are a gift and not an achievement; they come up under the rain of God’s grace, through His word and His Spirit, on ground that could never once have greened itself. Our part is simply to lie open to the rain.

And the blooming desert is given a glory not its own: It is given the grandeur of Lebanon, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon. They will see the grandeur of the LORD, the splendor of our God (35:2). Lebanon was famous for its towering cedars, Carmel and Sharon for their fertility; the bare desert is clothed in the splendor of the most beautiful places in the land. But the deepest glory is saved for the last clause: they will see the grandeur of the LORD. The blooming is not finally about better scenery; it is that God Himself will at last be seen. And we know when the glory of the Lord was seen in its fullest sense: when the Word became flesh and took up residence among us, and we saw his glory (John 1:14). The desert blooms, in the end, because God is coming to be seen in it.

And in a quiet way the desert is already blooming wherever that coming God is preached. We do not yet see the full glory with our eyes; the world around us still looks a great deal more like chapter 34 than chapter 35, with its thorns and its wild animals and its long stretches of barren ground. But wherever the word of Christ goes out, flowers come up in the wasteland: a hard heart softens, a dead conscience stirs, a barren life begins, against all the odds, to bear fruit. The full springtime is still ahead of us, and we wait for it; but the first blossoms are already breaking through, in every place where the glory of the Lord is seen by faith in the gospel. The desert has begun to bloom. One day it will be all in flower.

Your God Comes to Deliver You

The next word is spoken to people in no condition to enjoy a blooming desert, because they are far too weak and too frightened to lift their heads and look at it. Strengthen the hands that have gone limp, steady the knees that shake. Tell those who panic, “Be strong! Do not fear!” (35:3–4). Here are the people of God as they so often actually are: hands gone limp, knees shaking under them, hearts full of panic. This is not the language of the victorious and the strong; it is a word for the exhausted, the discouraged, the ones who can barely stand upright. And to exactly those people comes the command: be strong, do not fear.

There is great kindness in the realism of this. The Bible does not picture the people of God as a column of unshakable heroes marching in step; it pictures them, again and again, exactly like this: limp-handed, weak-kneed, and afraid. That is what the saints actually look like a good deal of the time, and Scripture does not scold them for it, nor pretend otherwise. If you have read this far feeling that your own hands hang limp and your own knees are none too steady, you are not standing outside the company of God’s people; you are squarely inside it, and this verse is addressed straight to you. The word be strong is not spoken to the strong, who would have no need of it. It is spoken to the trembling, and it comes with a reason attached that has nothing whatever to do with how much fight is left in them.

But notice (and this is everything) where the strength is meant to come from. Isaiah does not say, be strong, because you have it in you; he does not tell the feeble to dig a little deeper and find some hidden reserve of inner grit. He says, “Be strong! Do not fear! Look, your God comes to avenge; with divine retribution he comes to deliver you” (35:4). The reason to be strong is not anything in the weak ones at all; it is that your God … comes to deliver you. The strength comes from outside them entirely, from the coming of God. This is the very shape of gospel comfort: it never once tells the frightened to manufacture courage out of their own insides, but points them clean away from themselves to the God who is coming to save. Shaking knees are steadied not by a lecture on willpower but by an announcement: He is coming. He will deliver you. Be strong because of Him.

And He did come. Your God … comes to deliver you is, at the bottom of it, the promise of Immanuel, God with us, the promise that runs through this whole book and is kept at last in a manger in Bethlehem. The God who said He would come to save came in our own flesh, came to the limp-handed and the panic-stricken, and saved them. The writer to the Hebrews reaches back and lays this very verse on weary Christians: strengthen your listless hands and your weak knees (Hebrews 12:12). For the same coming God who steadied Israel steadies us, and the courage of the church has never been a courage drawn up out of her own strength, but a courage drawn from the certainty that her God has come, and is coming still, and will come at the last to save.

There is, in truth, a threefold coming hidden inside that promise, and the weak have need of all three. He came once, in the flesh, to a manger and a cross, and saved us. He comes still, today, in His word and at His table, to steady the shaking knees of His people week by week with the very strength of His own presence. And He will come once more, in glory, to finish the saving and to wipe away every last tear. The trembling believer does not have to wait for the last of these to take his comfort; the same God who came at Bethlehem comes this very morning in the gospel, bending down to the limp-handed and the fearful-hearted right where they sit, saying again what He has always said: be strong; do not fear; I have come, and I am coming, and I will come to deliver you.

Blind Eyes Will Open

When God comes to save, Isaiah says, certain things will happen, and they are unmistakable. Then blind eyes will open, deaf ears will hear. Then the lame will leap like a deer, the mute tongue will shout for joy (35:5–6). The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will not merely walk but leap like a deer, and the mute will not merely speak but shout for joy. These are the signs of the coming of God, the very credentials of the day of salvation: the undoing, one body at a time, of all the brokenness that sin and death had laid upon us.

And we should not be too quick to spiritualize these signs into mere metaphors for an inward awakening, as though the only blindness that ever mattered were a blindness of the soul. Isaiah means real eyes, real ears, real legs, real tongues. The salvation God brings is not the rescue of souls out of bodies; it is the redemption of the whole person, the body included, the very conviction that runs through the resurrection hope of this book. God made our bodies, and He is not finished with them. The day of salvation is not a day when bodies are left behind like so much discarded clay; it is a day when blind eyes open and lame legs leap, when the body itself is healed and made glorious. The brokenness we carry around in our flesh is squarely on the list of things God has come to undo.

And these signs came true, in flesh and blood, in a single life. When John the Baptist sat in Herod’s prison and began to wonder whether he had been wrong about his own relative, whether the Lord Jesus really was the One who should come, he sent messengers to ask Him outright. And the Lord Jesus did not answer them with an argument; He answered with Isaiah 35. Go tell John what you hear and see: The blind see, the lame walk … the deaf hear (Matthew 11:4–5). He was saying, in effect: open your Isaiah; read chapter 35; the promised signs of the coming of God are happening before your very eyes; I am the One you have been waiting for. The healings of the Lord Jesus were never merely acts of kindness, though they were surely that; they were the credentials of the King, the new creation breaking visibly into the old.

And they were a foretaste of something larger still. Every blind eye the Lord Jesus opened, every deaf ear unstopped, every lame leg made to leap, was a small down payment on the day when all of it would be undone forever, when, in the resurrection, every infirmity that sin and death ever laid upon the human body will be lifted away, and the redeemed will see and hear and leap and sing in bodies that can never again go blind, or deaf, or lame. The healings were previews of the resurrection morning. So a believer who still cannot see well, or hear well, or walk well, who carries any of the body’s thousand brokennesses down to the grave, may hold onto this chapter with both hands: blind eyes will open. The day is surely coming when the leaping and the singing will belong to everyone, and forever.

The Way of Holiness

Through the blooming, watered desert, God casts up a road. And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray (Isaiah 35:8, ESV). After the desert blooms and the lame man leaps, there is somewhere for him to go: a highway home, a raised and ready road for the redeemed to travel. And Isaiah tells us several wonderful things about this road.

It is called the Way of Holiness, and the unclean shall not pass over it. It is a holy road, a clean road, for a cleansed people. Now that might sound, at first hearing, like a closed gate: a road open only to those already holy enough to qualify, which would leave most of us standing in the ditch watching the traffic go by. But hear it the other way round. The road is holy because the God who made it makes its travelers holy; the unclean do not walk it, but the unclean are the very ones God cleanses so that they may. The holiness of the highway is not a toll we must pay at the entrance; it is the gift given to everyone who is brought onto it. We do not make ourselves clean enough for the road. We are washed, and set upon it, and so the road is holy and we are holy on it, not by any achievement of ours, but by His cleansing.

And we may well ask how the unclean are ever made clean enough to walk a holy road, for it is no small step from the ditch to the highway. The answer is the one the whole book keeps pointing us toward: not by scrubbing ourselves up, but by being washed in Another’s purity. We met the very question already in chapter 33, Who among us can coexist with destructive fire?, and the answer there was that only the righteous may, but that the righteousness is not our own. The unclean are made fit for the Way of Holiness in just the same manner they are made fit to live with the holy fire: clothed in the righteousness of Christ, washed in His blood, claimed in the waters of baptism. The cleanness that lets us walk the road is a borrowed cleanness, a given cleanness, His, put upon us. And that is precisely why even the unclean may have hope of this highway: because the One who built the road also washes the travelers at its gate.

And then comes the line that ought to make every ordinary, un-clever believer breathe out in sheer relief: even if they are fools, they shall not go astray. Even fools will not lose their way on this road. Consider what that means. The way home to God is not some subtle and treacherous path that only the wise, the learned, and the spiritually sophisticated can hope to follow without going astray. It is a plain, well-marked, unmistakable highway, laid out so clearly by God that the simplest traveler, even one the world would write off as a fool, cannot lose his way upon it. We watched the scoffers in chapter 28 sneer at God’s word as too plain, too childish, mere babbling, a syllable here, a syllable there; here is the hidden glory of that plainness. The gospel road is plain enough for a child, for a fool, for the least clever person in the whole parish, because God did not mark it out for the wise to navigate by their wits, but for sinners to walk home on by simple faith. No one was ever too simple to be saved. The only travelers who lose this road are the ones too clever to stoop down and walk it.

There is deep comfort in this for the anxious believer who fears that he does not understand enough to be safe. You do not have to be a theologian to be saved; you do not have to untangle every hard doctrine, or win every argument, or feel that you have grasped the whole of it. The road home was never built for the clever to navigate by their wits, but for sinners to walk by faith, and a simple trust that clings to Christ stands on exactly as sure a footing as the most learned faith in the church. Assurance does not rest on the strength of our understanding; it rests on the plainness of the road and the faithfulness of the One who laid it. The simplest soul in the pew, who could not explain justification in a single sentence but who truly trusts the Savior, will arrive home just as surely as any doctor of the church. The road sees to that. Even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.

And in the end the road has a name, and the name is a Person. When the Lord Jesus said, I am the way, and the truth, and the life (John 14:6), He was telling us what the Way of Holiness finally is: not a path we discover and follow, but Himself. He is the way home to the Father; the road of holiness is the road that is Christ, walked by faith in Him. The letter to the Hebrews calls it the fresh and living way that he inaugurated for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh (Hebrews 10:20): a road opened through His own body, His own death. The earliest Christians did not at first call themselves Christians at all; they spoke of belonging simply to the Way (Acts 9:2), because they knew that to be on the road home was to be in Him. And on that road, Isaiah promises, there is no danger left: No lions will be there, no ferocious wild animals will be on it … Those delivered from bondage will travel on it (35:9). The road home, opened through the flesh of Christ, is kept safe by Him at every step of the way.

The Ransomed Come Home

And the road leads home. The last verse of the chapter is among the most beautiful in the whole book, the destination toward which the entire highway runs. Those whom the LORD has ransomed will return that way. They will enter Zion with a happy shout. Unending joy will crown them, happiness and joy will overwhelm them; grief and suffering will disappear (35:10). The travelers reach the city; the exiles come home; and they come home with a happy shout, with unending joy crowning their heads like a garland. This is the homecoming the whole book has been straining toward: the redeemed gathered to Zion, the long journey over at last, the gladness unending.

There are, as so often in Isaiah, two horizons inside this one homecoming. The nearer one was the return from Babylon, still a long way off when Isaiah wrote: the exiles who would one day come back up the road from captivity to a rebuilt Jerusalem, singing as they came. But the road runs a great deal further than that. The deeper homecoming is the one every believer is still walking toward: the gathering of all the ransomed, out of every captivity there is, to the Zion that is above, the heavenly city, the home we have never yet seen and somehow always knew we were made for. The first return was a true and living picture of the second; and we who are still on the road travel it knowing that the singing at journey’s end is not a poet’s wishful flourish but a promise, secured by a ransom already paid.

Notice the word Isaiah chooses for the travelers: they are those whom the LORD has ransomed. A ransom is a price paid to set a captive free; to be ransomed is to be bought back out of bondage at a cost. The ones coming home up the highway are not adventurers who found the road by their own cleverness; they are captives who were bought back. And the New Testament tells us plainly what the price was. The Lord Jesus came, He said, to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28); He gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Timothy 2:6). The ransomed of the Lord who come singing up the highway are the people purchased by His own blood, and that is why the road is called the Way of Holiness, and why it was opened through His flesh, and why even fools may walk it safely. It was paid for. The whole homecoming rests upon a ransom already paid in full.

And a ransom paid in full cannot be charged a second time. This is the quiet security lying underneath the whole homecoming: the captives walking up the road are not out on parole, nor released on bail, nor anxiously hoping the price will somehow hold; they are bought, finished, free, with the receipt written in blood. No enemy can undo that purchase or drag the ransomed back into the captivity they were bought out of. No one will snatch them from my hand, says the Good Shepherd (John 10:28–29), and nothing else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38–39). The only danger Scripture warns of is that we should ourselves turn away from Him and cast off the faith by which we hold Him, as some have done and so have suffered shipwreck in regard to the faith (1 Timothy 1:19; see also Galatians 5:4; Hebrews 3:12). So keep near the word that keeps you. The redeemed walk the highway not as fugitives glancing back over their shoulders, but as free people going home, held by the One who paid so dearly to redeem them. That is why the joy at the end of the road is called unending, and not merely long: it rests upon a ransom that can never be undone.

And the last clause is the sweetest of all: grief and suffering will disappear. Not merely lessened, not merely borne a little more bravely, but gone, chased clean off the field for good. We have heard this promise before, when the Lord swallowed up death and wiped away the tears from every face in chapter 25; and we will hear it once more when John sees the new Jerusalem, where there is no more mourning, or crying, or pain (Revelation 21:4). Here it stands again: at the end of the Way of Holiness, in the city of the ransomed, grief and suffering simply disappear, and never once come back. Unending joy is a crown that is never taken off again. That is where the road goes; that is where it ends; that is home.

Gathering the Threads

Two chapters, a black panel and a bright one. In chapter 34 the day of the Lord falls as terror upon Edom and upon all that opposes God; in chapter 35 the very same day breaks as springtime over the redeemed. The desert blooms; the limp-handed and weak-kneed are told to be strong, because their God is coming to deliver them; the blind see and the deaf hear and the lame leap as the King’s healing breaks in; and through it all runs a Way of Holiness, a clean, safe, plain road on which even fools cannot lose their way, that carries the ransomed home to Zion with unending joy, while grief and suffering disappear forever.

And every step of that road is the Lord Jesus. He is the God who came to save the fearful-hearted; He is the One whose healings were the credentials of the kingdom and the foretaste of the resurrection; He is the Way itself, the road home opened through His own flesh, on which the simplest sinner walks safely by faith; He is the ransom by whose blood the ransomed were bought back. The Way of Holiness is not a standard we must somehow climb up to, but a road He laid down to us and opened for us; and He Himself sets the weak, and the foolish, and the heavy-laden upon it, and walks them home. Those whom the LORD has ransomed will return that way. They will enter Zion with a happy shout.

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.

1. Chapters 34 and 35 are a matched pair: the day of the Lord as terror upon Edom, and as springtime for the redeemed. Why does it matter to see that the same day of the Lord has two outcomes, depending on which side of it we stand? How does the darkness of chapter 34 make the glory of chapter 35 shine the brighter?

2. The cursed wasteland of chapter 34 bursts into bloom in chapter 35, the reversal of the curse, the new creation breaking in (35:1–2). How is this the same hope we met in the peaceable kingdom of chapter 11? What does it mean that the God who makes deserts bloom can make a barren life bloom too?

3. To those who panic Isaiah says, Be strong! Do not fear! … he comes to deliver you (35:3–4): strength from God’s coming, not from within. Why does the gospel never tell the frightened to manufacture courage out of themselves? Where does the church’s real courage actually come from?

4. The Lord Jesus answered John the Baptist’s doubt by pointing to the signs of Isaiah 35: The blind see … the deaf hear (Matthew 11:4–5). Why were His healings the credentials of the King, and not merely acts of kindness? How are they a foretaste of the resurrection for everyone who carries the body’s brokenness down to the grave?

5. The Way of Holiness is marked out so plainly that even if they are fools, they shall not go astray (Isaiah 35:8, ESV). Why is it such good news that the road home is plain enough for the simple, and not only for the wise? Who are the only travelers who manage to lose this road?

6. The travelers are those whom the LORD has ransomed (35:10), captives bought back at a price, the price the Lord Jesus named as His own life (Matthew 20:28). How does it change the way we walk the road to know that it was paid for? And what does it mean that, at the end of it, grief and suffering will disappear?

Looking Ahead

With chapter 35 the first great half of Isaiah comes to a close, and the book pauses to tell a story. Chapters 36 through 39 step out of the world of poetry and oracle into plain narrative: four chapters about one king, Hezekiah, standing at the hinge of the whole book. We will watch him face the very test these last sessions have been preparing us for: the Assyrian army at the gates of Jerusalem, the Lord’s enemy mocking the Lord’s people, and a king who must decide whether to run to Egypt or to trust the Holy One of Israel. We will see his magnificent faith: how he spread the enemy’s blasphemous letter open before the Lord and prayed, and how God delivered the whole city by a single angel in a single night. But we will also see his folly, when the danger had passed and pride crept in, and he threw open his treasure-house to envoys from a rising power called Babylon, sowing the seeds of an exile still a hundred years away. Hezekiah is a study in the saint who is, at one and the same time, faithful and foolish, righteous and sinner, and the hinge on which the whole book turns, from Assyria to Babylon, from threat to the great comfort that is coming.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 36 through 39. They read like a story, so read them as one. Watch Hezekiah’s faith under the Assyrian siege, especially his prayer in chapter 37; then watch his folly before the Babylonian envoys in chapter 39. Ask how the same man could show both, and notice how these chapters turn the book from Assyria toward Babylon.

Closing Prayer

O Lord our God, whose coming is terror to all that opposes You and springtime to all who are Yours, we bless You that You have not left us in the wilderness, but have made the desert bloom and cast up a highway home. When our hands hang limp, and our knees shake, and our hearts are afraid, You do not say to us, Be strong in yourselves; You say, Your God comes to deliver you. And You came.

We thank You for Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who opened the eyes of the blind and made the lame to leap, and who is Himself the Way home, the road of holiness opened through His own flesh, on which even fools like us shall not go astray. We bless You that He gave His life a ransom to buy us back, and that the road He paid for leads all the way home to Zion. Strengthen our limp hands, steady our shaking knees, and keep us walking the Way of Holiness until we come at last to the city with singing and unending joy, where grief and suffering will disappear; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.