Comfort, Comfort My People

Isaiah 40 (with Mark 1:1–8; John 10:11–18)

Before this session, read Isaiah 40 slowly, for it is the turning of the whole book. Hear God say, “Comfort, comfort my people” (40:1); find the voice that cries out to clear a way in the wilderness (40:3) and the herald’s cry, Here is your God! (40:9); watch the Shepherd gather His lambs (40:11); and let the incomparable God of the chapter’s close give strength to your own weariness (40:28–31).

“Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God. “Speak kindly to Jerusalem and tell her that her time of warfare is over, that her punishment is completed. For the LORD has made her pay double for all her sins.”

Isaiah 40:1–2

Comfort, Comfort

Something changes at chapter 40, and you can feel it the moment you cross the line from chapter 39. For thirty-nine chapters the dominant note has been judgment: woe after woe, the Assyrian at the gate, the exile foretold, the long indictment of a people who would not trust their God. And then, with no transition at all, the tone breaks open like sunlight through cloud: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God (40:1). It is as if a different voice has begun to speak. This is the overture of the whole second half of Isaiah, chapters 40 through 66, the Book of Comfort, and it opens with the one word that will set the key for everything that follows: comfort.

Notice that the command is doubled, comfort, comfort, and in Hebrew that doubling is the language of urgency and emphasis. God is not making a mild suggestion; He is pressing it, repeating it, almost insisting upon it. And notice to whom it is addressed: not directly to the people, but to messengers. God is commanding His heralds to go and comfort His people, to speak kindly to Jerusalem. That phrase, “speak kindly,” is in the Hebrew literally “speak to the heart”: the tender, intimate speech of a husband to a wife, of a friend who leans in close. God wants His people not merely informed but consoled, spoken to in the very heart. After all the thunder of the woes, He bends down to whisper.

But here is the thing we must not miss, for it is the whole difference between the gospel and mere reassurance. God does not comfort His people by telling them their troubles are not really so bad, or that things are sure to improve, or that they ought to look on the bright side. He comforts them on a specific ground, and He names it: her time of warfare is over, … her punishment is completed (40:2). Her hard term of service is over; her sin has been dealt with. The Hebrew phrase behind “her punishment is completed” speaks of her iniquity itself as accepted as paid off, and so pardoned. The comfort is the comfort of forgiveness. And this is the only comfort that finally reaches the bottom of a troubled soul: not the lifting of circumstances, which may not lift at all, but the pardon of sin, which changes everything. A conscience can be at peace in the worst of circumstances if it knows its iniquity is pardoned; and a conscience cannot truly be at peace in the best of circumstances if it does not.

This is worth pausing over, for it is exactly here that the comfort of God parts company with every comfort the world knows how to give. The world’s comfort works by minimizing: it tells the troubled that the problem is smaller than they fear, that they are being too hard on themselves, that a little time and a brighter outlook will set things right. But that kind of comfort cannot touch a guilty conscience, because a guilty conscience knows better. It knows the problem is not too small but too large, and that no amount of looking on the bright side will make a real debt simply go away. God’s comfort works the opposite way around. It does not minimize the sin; it deals with it. It does not say the debt was never so big after all; it says the debt is paid. And that is why it reaches all the way down to where the trouble actually lives, down to where no cheerful reassurance has ever once managed to go.

There is a striking phrase at the end of the verse: the LORD has made her pay double for all her sins. It does not mean that God punished her twice as much as she deserved, which would be a strange comfort and no justice at all. It means the debt has been fully paid: paid in full and overflowing measure, the account settled, nothing whatever left owing. And the Christian cannot read that without thinking of how the debt was finally paid: not by the sinner’s own suffering, but by Another’s. The full payment for all our sins was received from the Lord’s hand on a cross, where the Son bore the whole measure of what we owed, so that to us the word can come at last: it is finished; the warfare is over; your sin is pardoned. That is the comfort God commands His heralds to speak to the heart. It is the gospel itself.

A Voice in the Wilderness

Then a voice cries out, and it is one of the most famous voices in all of Scripture. A voice cries out, “In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD; build a level road through the rift valley for our God” (40:3). In the ancient world, when a great king was to travel, heralds went on ahead to prepare the road: filling in the potholes, leveling the bumps, clearing the way, so that the king could come in state. The voice in the wilderness is just such a herald, and the King whose road he prepares is the LORD Himself: build a level road through the rift valley for our God.

And we are not left to guess who this voice was, because all four Gospels tell us plainly. When John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, calling Israel to repent and be baptized, and the people pressed him to say who he was, he answered in the words of this very verse: I am the voice of one shouting in the wilderness, “Make straight the way for the Lord” (John 1:23). John was the herald; he came to prepare the way. But to prepare the way for whom? Isaiah said the road was being made ready for the LORD, for our God, and the One who came walking up that road, the One John pointed to, was the Lord Jesus. Read those two facts together and you are standing on the deity of Christ. The way that was prepared for God was the way the Lord Jesus came; the coming of the Lord Jesus was the coming of God Himself. Mark knew it, and opened his whole Gospel with this verse (joined to a line from Malachi), announcing the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ as the long-promised coming of the LORD.

We can grow so used to this that we stop feeling the wonder of it, so let us feel it for a moment. The God this very chapter will go on to describe, the God who measures the waters in His palm and weighs the mountains on scales and calls the numberless stars each one by name, that God came up a road that a man in camel’s hair had to prepare for Him. The Creator of the whole earth was born, and grew, and walked the dusty roads of a small province at the ragged edge of an empire. The coming of God for which Isaiah’s herald cried was not God sending down a message, or a representative, or even an angel; it was God Himself, come in person, in flesh that could be touched. The whole weight of the deity of Christ is folded into that single fact, and the whole comfort of the chapter rests upon it, for the One who came to save us was no less than God.

And how is the way prepared? Every valley must be elevated, and every mountain and hill leveled. The rough terrain will become a level plain, the rugged landscape a wide valley (40:4). The road is leveled: the low places filled in, the high places brought down. There is a picture here of what must happen in a human heart for the King to come: the valleys of despair lifted up, and (harder by far) the mountains of pride brought low. John’s preaching did exactly this; it was a leveling work, calling the proud down and the despairing up, making a straight road through repentance for the King to enter. And the way of the Lord is still prepared in us in the same manner: the law brings down our heights, and the gospel fills up our emptiness, and so a road is made for Christ to come in.

And the goal of all of it: The splendor of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it at the same time (40:5). When the King comes up the prepared road, His glory will be seen, and not by Israel only, but by all people, every nation upon the earth. And we know when that glory was most fully revealed. John the evangelist, who records the Baptist taking up this very text, would write of the coming of the Lord Jesus: the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We saw his glory (John 1:14). The splendor Isaiah promised would be revealed was the glory of God shining in the face of the incarnate Son, and it has been shown, exactly as Isaiah said it would be, for all people to see.

The Grass Withers, the Word Stands

The voice speaks again, and commands another cry: A voice says, “Cry out!” Another asks, “What should I cry out?” The first voice responds: “All people are like grass, and all their promises are like the flowers in the field” (40:6). It is a sobering thing to be told to proclaim in the middle of a chapter of comfort, and yet it belongs here. All people, all human life, all human strength, all human glory, are grass. The grass dries up, the flowers wither (40:7). Anyone who has watched a field of wildflowers blaze in the spring and then brown and collapse in the summer heat knows exactly what the prophet means. We are like that. Our strength, our beauty, our achievements, our very lives spring up green and lovely, and then they wither, and the wind passes over the place of them, and they are gone.

But the sentence does not end in the withered field. The grass dries up, the flowers wither, but the decree of our God is forever reliable (40:8). Over against everything that withers stands one thing that does not: the word God has spoken. Empires rise and fall like grass; the strong man’s vigor fades; our own little span runs swiftly out. But what our God has decreed stands forever: unwithering, unfailing, as fresh and as firm a thousand years on as the day it was first spoken. And this is precisely why the comfort of this chapter can be trusted. If the comfort rested on anything that withers (on our resolve, on our circumstances, on the strength of our own faith), it would wither right along with them. But it rests on the word of God, which does not wither.

And there is a particular comfort in that for anyone whose inner life runs hot and cold, which is to say, for everyone. Our feelings about God are grass; they are green and warm on a good Sunday and brown and cold by Wednesday afternoon. If our assurance rose and fell with our feelings, we would be saved on the days we felt it and lost on the days we did not, which is no assurance at all. But the word of God does not rise and fall with our moods. What it declared when we felt it, it still declares when we do not; the warfare is over and the sin pardoned whether the heart happens to be warm or cold that particular morning. This is why faith learns, over time, to lean less on the changeable weather of its own feelings and more on the word that stands: to believe what God has plainly said even on the days it cannot feel a thing, because the word does not wither when the feeling does.

And the apostle Peter, quoting this very passage, tells us which word Isaiah means. After repeating that all flesh is like grass and that the word of the Lord endures forever, Peter adds a line that opens the whole thing wide: And this is the word that was proclaimed to you (1 Peter 1:25). The word that stands forever, when the grass has long since withered, is the gospel: the good news of the comfort God commanded, the announcement that the warfare is over and the sin pardoned. So when a believer’s own strength fails, when his feelings wither and his circumstances collapse and even his grip on his own faith feels like dry grass crumbling in his hand, he has something to stand on that is not himself and does not wither: the word of the gospel, spoken to him from outside, standing firm when everything inside him is failing. The reformers loved this truth and staked everything on it, and we may lean our whole weight on it too: the word will remain.

Here Is Your God

Now the chapter turns Zion herself into a herald. Go up on a high mountain, O herald Zion. Shout out loudly, O herald Jerusalem! Shout, don’t be afraid! Say to the towns of Judah, “Here is your God!” (40:9). The Hebrew word behind “herald” means one who brings good news, and it is the word the Greek translators rendered with the verb from which the New Testament gets its word for gospel: the proclaiming of good news. Zion is to climb the high hill, fill her lungs, and shout the best news there is; and here is the news she is to shout: Here is your God! Not “here are your improved circumstances,” not “here are your better prospects,” but here is your God. The content of the good news is the coming of God Himself to His people.

And how does this God come? Isaiah gives us two pictures in two breaths, and we are meant to hold them tightly together. First, with power: Look, the Sovereign LORD comes as a victorious warrior; his military power establishes his rule (40:10). He comes as a mighty King, His strong arm ruling. But then, in the very next breath: Like a shepherd he tends his flock; he gathers up the lambs with his arm; he carries them close to his heart; he leads the ewes along (40:11). The strong arm that rules the world is the same arm that scoops up the lambs and holds them against His chest. The God who comes as a victorious warrior stoops to be a shepherd, and not a hard-driving one, but the tenderest imaginable, gathering the little lambs into the crook of His arm, carrying them where they cannot yet walk, and slowing His own pace to the pace of the nursing ewes.

Sit with that picture, for it is the gospel in miniature. The God of all power does not drive His weak ones along from behind; He gathers them up and carries them. The lamb held close to the shepherd’s heart is not walking under its own strength. It is being carried, held against the shepherd’s own heartbeat, borne along where it could never go on its own little legs. That is how the strong God deals with the weak ones of His flock. And we know His name, for He told us Himself: I am the good shepherd, said the Lord Jesus. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11). The Shepherd of Isaiah 40, who gathers the lambs and carries them close to His heart, is the Lord Jesus, and the carrying cost Him His very life. He did not merely lead the flock; He laid down His life for it, and gathers it still, and carries close to His heart every weak and stumbling lamb that cannot make the journey on its own.

And notice which lambs it is that get carried. Not the strong ones, bounding on ahead of the flock; those the shepherd lets walk. It is the newborn, the weak, the footsore, the ones who simply cannot keep up: those are the ones gathered into his arms. The very thing that disqualifies a lamb from walking is the thing that qualifies it to be carried. And this turns our instinct exactly upside down. We assume that the weak, the slow, the ones forever falling behind in the Christian life are the ones with the least claim on the Shepherd, when in fact they are precisely the ones He stoops to carry. If you feel that you cannot keep up with the flock, that you are always lagging, always the one slowing everyone down, that is not a reason to fear you are no lamb of His. It may be the very reason you will find yourself, before long, carried close to His heart.

To Whom Can You Compare God?

At this point the chapter does something that might, at first, seem like a change of subject. For fifteen verses it piles up the incomparable majesty of God in image after staggering image. Who has measured out the waters in the hollow of his hand, or carefully measured the sky, or carefully weighed the soil of the earth, or weighed the mountains in a balance, or the hills on scales? (40:12). The God of this chapter holds all the oceans of the world in His cupped palm, measures the sky, and weighs the mountains as a grocer weighs out his produce. Look, the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales (40:15). All the mighty nations of the earth, the very empires that terrified Judah, are to Him no more than a single drop clinging to the rim of a bucket, a speck of dust on the scales.

And against all this the prophet sets the idols, with biting scorn. To whom can you compare God? To what image can you liken him? (40:18). A craftsman casts an idol, a metalsmith overlays it with gold; and one who can offer only a small contribution picks out a block of wood that will not rot, and seeks a skilled craftsman to make for him a god that will at least not fall over (40:19–20). It is absurd, and Isaiah fully means it to sound absurd. Then he lifts our eyes up to the night sky: Look up at the sky! Who created all these heavenly lights? He is the one who leads out their ranks; he calls them all by name. … not one of them is missing (40:26). The God who is beyond all comparison counts the numberless stars and knows every single one of them by name, and not one of all those ranks goes missing.

The idol-making Isaiah mocks can look quaint to us (who now bows down to a carved log?), but the folly underneath it is perennial, and very much our own. The essence of an idol is that it is something we make, and then serve: something we produce with our own hands or our own minds, and then look to for the security that God alone can give. We may not carve images out of firewood, but we are tireless idol-makers still. We build a reputation and then live in terror of losing it; we accumulate a savings and then trust it to do what no amount of money can do; we craft an identity out of our work, or our family, or our success, and then quietly bow down before the thing we have made. And it is always the same folly Isaiah names here: looking for life from a thing that has no life in it, asking a creature of our own making to carry a weight that only the Creator can bear. The cure is the one the whole chapter keeps pressing on us: to lift up our eyes from the thing we have made to the God who made us.

Now, why does a chapter of comfort spend so long on the sheer bigness of God? Because comfort is only ever as good as the One who gives it. A promise to carry you is worth precisely as much as the strength of the arms that make it. If the God who says comfort, comfort, and here is your God, and he carries them close to his heart, were a small god, a local deity who might be outmatched by Babylon, or worn down by the passing years, then His comfort would be a frail and uncertain thing. But He is nothing of the kind. The God who promises to gather you as a lamb is the God who holds the oceans in His hand and names the stars; the arms that would carry you are the very arms that stretched out the sky like a thin curtain (40:22). The majesty is not a detour away from the comfort. It is the foundation underneath it. We are comforted not by a kind but feeble well-wisher, but by the Almighty, and that makes all the difference in the world to whether the comfort will hold when we lean on it.

On Eagles’ Wings

And now the chapter comes down, at last, to the weary: to the people who have heard all of this and somehow still feel forgotten. Isaiah voices their complaint with great tenderness: Why do you say, Jacob, Why do you say, Israel, “The LORD is not aware of what is happening to me; My God is not concerned with my vindication”? (40:27). Here is the quiet despair of the long-discouraged: God does not see me. My case has slipped right past Him. He has the oceans in His hand and the stars by name, yes, but somewhere along the way He has overlooked me. It is the feeling of every believer who has waited long in the dark and begun to wonder whether the God of all that majesty has simply lost track of one small, struggling life.

It is worth noticing that Scripture lets this complaint be spoken at all. God does not strike the words from the record, or scold His people for feeling forgotten; He puts their very complaint into the prophet’s mouth, so that it can be heard and answered. The Psalms are full of the same honesty (How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me? Psalm 13:1), and it is a great mercy that they are, for it means the believer who feels overlooked is not thereby a bad believer, or a faithless one. The feeling that God has forgotten us is not a sin to be hidden away in shame; it is a wound to be brought to Him and answered by Him. And the answer, when it comes here, is not you should not feel that way. The answer is a fresh sight of who God actually is, for the cure for feeling forgotten is never to be told to cheer up, but to be shown the God who does not forget.

And to that, Isaiah answers, not with a rebuke, but with a question that is really a comfort in disguise. Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is an eternal God, the Creator of the whole earth. He does not get tired or weary (40:28). The very God they fear has grown tired of them is the God who never grows tired at all. We tire; we run down; our attention flags and our strength gives out, and so we quietly project our own weariness onto God, and assume He must have wearied of us as we would have wearied of ourselves. But the eternal God does not get tired. He has not nodded off; He has not lost the thread; He is not unaware of what is happening to you. There is no limit to his wisdom. He has not overlooked you, because there is nothing whatever that He overlooks.

And then the promise that has carried more weary saints, perhaps, than any other single verse in the book. He gives strength to those who are tired; to the ones who lack power, he gives renewed energy (40:29). Notice carefully who the gift is for: those who are tired, and the ones who lack power. Not the strong, but the spent. God’s strength is given precisely to those who have run clean out of their own. And lest we miss the point, Isaiah drives the contrast home: Even youths get tired and weary; even strong young men clumsily stumble (40:30). The strongest human strength there is, the vigor of the young, tires and stumbles in the end. Human strength is grass; we are back at verse six. If our hope is in our own vigor, then our hope will surely collapse, because the strongest among us collapses.

But those who wait for the LORD’s help find renewed strength; they rise up as if they had eagles’ wings, they run without growing weary, they walk without getting tired (40:31). There is the climax of the whole chapter, and the secret of it lies in the very first phrase: those who wait for the LORD’s help. The strength is not summoned up from within; we have just been told that the strength within fails and falls. It is renewed by waiting for the LORD, by the expectant, dependent looking to God that is the very posture of faith. The strength comes from outside us, from Him, received by waiting. And notice the curious order of what that waiting gives: first the soaring, as if they had eagles’ wings, then the running, and last of all, almost as an anticlimax, the walking. We might have expected the list to climb; instead it comes down to earth. But the prophet knows exactly where strength is most needed. Anyone can feel strong on the soaring days. It is the long, ordinary, plodding walk, day after unremarkable day, that quietly wears the saints down. And the promise reaches all the way down to that: they walk without getting tired. The God who never tires gives, to those who wait for Him, the strength even for the ordinary Tuesday: to keep walking, and not give out.

And we should be clear about what this “waiting for the LORD” actually is, since it is the hinge on which the whole promise turns. It is not a technique, not some special spiritual exercise we perform in order to unlock a hidden reserve of power. To wait for the Lord is simply to keep looking to Him in dependence: to come back, again and again, to the word and the prayer and the table where He gives Himself to His people, and there to receive what we do not have in ourselves. It is the very posture this whole half of the book commends: not running off to Egypt, not straining up strength from within, but returning and resting, looking expectantly to God to supply what He has promised to supply. The strength is real, but it is always borrowed, always being received afresh, which is exactly why the waiting never ends this side of glory. We do not wait for the Lord once and then stride off self-sufficient. We wait, and are strengthened, and wait again, and so we are carried, a day at a time, all the way home.

Gathering the Threads

Stand back and see what this overture has done. It opens the whole second half of the book by changing the subject from judgment to comfort, and it grounds that comfort not in better circumstances but in pardoned sin, the warfare over and the debt paid in full. It announces a voice in the wilderness preparing the way for God to come, and the God who came walking up that road was the Lord Jesus, His glory revealed for all people to see. It sets the withering grass of all human strength against the one word that stands forever, the gospel. It turns Zion into a herald with a single thing to shout, Here is your God!, and shows that God coming as a victorious warrior to rule and with a gentle arm to carry the lambs. It piles up the incomparable majesty of the Creator, not to overwhelm us but to assure us that the One who promises to carry us is abundantly able to do it. And it lands, at the last, on the weary, with the promise that those who wait for the Lord will never run out, because He never does.

And every line of it points to the same place. The comfort is the comfort of the cross, where the sin was pardoned and the debt paid in overflowing measure. The coming God is the Lord Jesus, whose way the Baptist prepared in the wilderness. The word that stands forever is the gospel, proclaimed to us still. The Shepherd who gathers and carries the lambs is the One who laid down His life for the sheep. So when our own strength withers like grass (and it surely will), we are not thrown back upon ourselves. We are pointed away to the God who does not get tired, told to wait for Him, and promised a strength that is not our own. This is the comfort God commanded His heralds to speak to the heart, and it is spoken now to ours: your warfare is over; your sin is pardoned; here is your God; He will carry you; wait for Him, and you will not run out.

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. God comforts His people not by promising better circumstances but by announcing that her time of warfare is over, that her punishment is completed (40:1–2), her sin paid for and pardoned. Why is the pardon of sin a deeper comfort than the lifting of our troubles? How is this different from mere reassurance that things will improve?

2. All four Gospels identify the voice preparing the way of the LORD (40:3) as John the Baptist, and the One whose way he prepared was the Lord Jesus. How does this testify to the deity of Christ? What does it mean that valleys are elevated and mountains leveled to prepare the way in a human heart?

3. All human strength is grass that withers, but the decree of our God is forever reliable (40:8), and Peter says this enduring word is the gospel proclaimed to us (1 Peter 1:25). What happens to our comfort if it rests on anything that withers: our resolve, our feelings, our circumstances? Why is it such relief that the word comes to us from outside ourselves?

4. The God who comes as a victorious warrior (40:10) is the same God who gathers the lambs and carries them close to His heart (40:11): the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for the sheep (John 10:11). What does it mean that God’s power is exercised in such tenderness? What is the difference between a lamb being merely led and a lamb being carried?

5. The chapter piles up God’s majesty: He holds the waters in the hollow of His hand and calls the stars by name (40:12, 26). Why is this majesty placed right in the middle of a chapter of comfort? How is the sheer bigness of God the ground of the bigness of His comfort?

6. Even strong young men stumble, but those who wait for the LORD’s help find renewed strength (40:30–31). Why is the strength said to come from waiting for the Lord rather than from within us? Why do you think the promise descends from rising up on eagles’ wings, to running, to merely walking, and why might “walk without getting tired” be the hardest and most needed of the three?

Looking Ahead

Having heard God command comfort and announce His own coming, we will watch in the next session how He comforts: by taking His frightened people firmly by the hand. Chapters 41 through 44 are full of the tenderest “don’t be afraid” promises in all of Scripture, spoken by a God who simply will not let go. Don’t be afraid, for I am with you! … I strengthen you—yes, I help you—yes, I uphold you with my victorious right hand! (41:10); For I am the LORD your God, the one who takes hold of your right hand, who says to you, “Don’t be afraid, I am helping you” (41:13); I call you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I am with you (43:1–2). And set against this living God who holds His people by the hand is the great mockery of the idols: the gods that men carve out of their own firewood, burning half a log to cook the dinner and bowing down to worship the rest (44:14–17). We will weigh the God who holds your hand against the gods that cannot so much as lift their own. (We will save the first of the great Servant Songs, which begins in chapter 42, for a session of its own a little further on.)

Before the next session, read Isaiah 41 through 44, setting aside the opening of chapter 42, the first Servant Song, for a later session of its own. Find the “don’t be afraid” promises and the God who holds your right hand (41:10, 13); hear Him say, I call you by name, you are mine, and When you pass through the waters, I am with you (43:1–2); and do not miss the biting mockery of the man who makes himself a god out of his own leftover firewood (44:14–20).

Closing Prayer

O God of all comfort, we bless You that after all our long seasons of judgment and fear You bend down to speak to our very hearts; that You do not merely tell us our troubles will pass, but declare that our warfare is over and our sin pardoned, the whole debt paid in full by the hand of Your Son. We thank You for the voice that prepared His way, and for the glory of God revealed in the face of the Lord Jesus, our coming King.

We confess that our own strength is grass, springing up green and then withering in the heat; teach us to rest, not on anything in ourselves that fades, but on Your word that stands forever. Gather us as lambs into the arms of the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for us, and carry us where we cannot walk. And when we are tired and ready to fall, and tempted to think our way is hidden from You, remind us that You never weary and never overlook us; renew our strength as we wait for You, that we may rise up, and run, and, on the long ordinary days, walk, and not grow tired; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.