Cyrus the Anointed
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Isaiah 44:24–48:22 (with Philippians 2:9–11; John 3:14–17)
Before this session, read Isaiah 44:24 through 48. Watch God name Cyrus as His shepherd and His anointed long before his birth (44:28; 45:1); hear the great worldwide invitation, “Turn to me so you can be delivered, all you who live in the earth’s remote regions!” (45:22); and notice the idols of Babylon that have to be carried away on tired animals (46:1–2), set against the God who carries His people from birth to old age (46:3–4).
Turn to me so you can be delivered, all you who live in the earth’s remote regions! For I am God, and I have no peer.
Isaiah 45:22
A Pagan King, Named
We come now to one of the most astonishing things in all of prophecy. God, declaring what He will do for His exiled people, names the man who will set them free, and He names him by name, more than a century before the man was born. He is the Lord who commissions Cyrus, the one I appointed as shepherd to carry out all my wishes and to decree concerning Jerusalem, ‘She will be rebuilt’ (44:28). Cyrus, the Persian emperor who would one day conquer Babylon and in 538 BC issue the decree that let the Jewish exiles go home and rebuild, is named here by Isaiah generations before he ever drew a breath. It is as if a prophet in colonial America had named, in advance, the general who would win a war generations later.
And God does not merely name him; He lays upon him a staggering title. This is what the LORD says to his chosen one, to Cyrus, whose right hand I hold (45:1). The NET renders the title “chosen one,” but the Hebrew word behind it is mashiach: anointed one, messiah. The word set apart for kings and priests consecrated by God, the word that would come to mean the great Deliverer Himself, is here laid upon a pagan emperor who did not even submit to the Lord: I call you by name and give you a title of respect, even though you do not submit to me (45:4). God takes hold of this unbelieving king’s right hand, goes before him, levels his path, and uses him, without his ever knowing it, as the chosen instrument of His own people’s salvation.
There is something in this that ought to enlarge our whole picture of how God works. We are inclined to imagine that God can only use the obviously religious, that His instruments must be believers and His agents praying men. But here He reaches clean past the whole household of faith and lays His hand on a Persian emperor who worshiped other gods entirely, and makes him the deliverer of His people. God is not confined to working through the devout. He commandeers kings who never pray to Him, governments that do not acknowledge Him, employers and neighbors and strangers who have no idea they are doing His will, and He bends them all to the good of those He loves. This is no small comfort when the people who hold power over our lives seem to care nothing for God: the God of Cyrus is perfectly able to accomplish His purposes through hands that have never once been folded in prayer.
Now why does God make such a point of naming Cyrus so far in advance? Isaiah has told us already, again and again through these chapters: it is the proof that the Lord alone is God. The idols can predict nothing; they sit there mute, unable to tell you what will happen next week, let alone in a century and more. But the living God announces the end from the beginning (46:10), names the deliverer before his grandparents are born, and then brings it to pass exactly as He said. He does it so you may recognize that I am the LORD, the one who calls you by name, the God of Israel (45:3). Fulfilled prophecy is God’s own signature, and the naming of Cyrus is one of the boldest signatures He ever wrote.
Indeed, it is so bold a signature that critics have long tried to explain it away, insisting the passage must have been written after Cyrus had already come, by some later hand using Isaiah’s name; for surely, they reason, no one could really have known. But that response only proves how much weight the prophecy carries, for it quietly concedes that if Isaiah truly wrote these words, they can only be the voice of God. And the text itself stakes everything on exactly this point: God is not offering a lucky guess but flinging down a challenge to the idols. Tell us what is to come, if you can; I have, and here is the very name. For the believer there is a quiet strength in this. The God who kept this word, down to the deliverer’s own name, across more than a century, is the same God who has made us promises that are still unkept. And a God who keeps His word that precisely, over so long a stretch, is a God upon whose other promises we may rest our whole weight.
And there is comfort in it deeper than the mere display of foreknowledge. If God can name and raise up and direct a pagan emperor more than a century early, then the great tides of history (the rise of empires, the fall of cities, the decrees of kings who have never so much as heard of Him) are not running loose. They are in His hand. He says exactly that, in words that have troubled some readers but ought to steady us: I am the one who forms light and creates darkness; the one who brings about peace and creates calamity. I am the LORD, who accomplishes all these things (45:7). The Hebrew word the NET rightly renders “calamity” is a broad one, and here it stands opposite “peace.” It does not mean moral evil, or sin; God is never the author of sin (AC XIX). It means disaster, the dark turns of history. God is telling His frightened people that nothing, not even the catastrophes, lies outside His governing hand. The exile itself, the fall of Babylon, the rise of Cyrus: all of it is being woven by the one God toward the salvation of His people. That is not a cold doctrine. It is a pillow for a frightened head.
A God Who Keeps Hidden
There is a phrase tucked into this section that the reformers loved, and that Luther in particular built much upon. As the prophet contemplates this God who works through a pagan king and behind the scenes of history, he suddenly exclaims: Yes, you are a God who keeps hidden, O God of Israel, deliverer! (45:15). A God who keeps hidden. Not a God who is absent (He is present, working, saving), but a God who is hidden, His hand not plainly visible, His purposes not obvious to the watching eye. The exiles in Babylon, seeing the armies of Cyrus on the march, would have seen only the ordinary churn of empires; they would not have seen the hand of their God in any of it. But it was there.
This hiddenness reaches its very deepest at the cross, and a Christian cannot read of the God who keeps hidden without thinking of it. There has never been a moment when God’s hand was more hidden, and at the same time more at work, than when His own Son hung dying between two thieves. To every eye that watched, it looked like the total defeat of everything God had ever promised: a failed teacher, executed, abandoned, the darkest turn imaginable. And it was, in that very hour, the salvation of the world being accomplished. If God could be most powerfully at work in the moment He looked most utterly defeated, then we dare not read His apparent absence from our own dark hours as proof that He has gone away. The God who saved the world while looking for all the world as though He had lost it is well able to be saving us, too, in the hours when we can see nothing at all but loss.
Luther had a vivid way of putting this. He spoke of the masks of God: the truth that God works His good purposes in the world not usually by dramatic miracle, but behind ordinary means, behind people and events that serve as His masks, His disguises. Cyrus is exactly such a mask. The Persian king thought he was building his own empire, pursuing his own ambitions, writing his own story; he had not the faintest idea that he was the hand of the God of Israel, called and named and held fast by a God he did not know, in order to carry out that God’s wishes. And this is how God most often works still. He feeds us through the farmer and the baker; He governs us through magistrates who may not fear Him at all; He shapes our lives through circumstances and people who have no notion that they are serving His purposes. The hand of God is rarely labeled. It nearly always works behind a mask.
This truth asks two things of us, and gives two great gifts in return. It asks patience: because God keeps hidden, we will very often not see what He is doing, and we must learn to trust the hand we cannot see. The exiles had to wait out a long generation in Babylon before Cyrus ever appeared; the hidden God is also, often, the slow God, and faith must hold on through the long stretch when nothing at all seems to be happening. But it gives a deep comfort in exchange: that even when we cannot trace His hand, He is at work. In the very events that look most like chaos, or defeat, in the rise and fall of things that seem to have nothing to do with Him, He is quietly, steadily working out the salvation of His people. The God who keeps hidden is not the God who has abandoned us. He is the God who is doing far more than we can see.
Turn to Me and Be Delivered
In the very midst of all this (the naming of Cyrus, the polemic against the idols, the great declarations that He alone is God), God lifts His voice and issues an invitation so wide and so simple that it has become, for many a soul, the very doorway into faith. Turn to me so you can be delivered, all you who live in the earth’s remote regions! For I am God, and I have no peer (45:22). Notice first how wide it is. Not “turn to me, O Israel,” but all you who live in the earth’s remote regions: every nation, every people, the farthest and most foreign and least likely of them. The invitation is flung out to the whole world. And notice next how simple it is. The command is not “work for me,” or “climb up to me,” or “make yourself worthy of me.” It is turn to me. The Hebrew verb means to turn and face someone.
There is a whole theology of salvation folded into that one little word. To turn and face someone is the least and easiest thing a person can do. It costs nothing, achieves nothing, contributes nothing; it merely turns the eyes toward something outside oneself and receives what is there. And that is exactly what faith is. Faith is not a great work we perform in order to earn salvation; it is the empty, receiving gaze of a helpless person toward the only One who can save. Nor is even the turning our own achievement: the God who says “turn to me” gives by His word the very turning He asks for, for conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit through the word and not of our own powers (FC SD II). A drowning man does not save himself by the strength of his own grip; he is saved by the strength of the One who grips him. Turn to me so you can be delivered. The turning saves no one; the One turned to saves everyone who turns to Him.
There is enormous relief in that for anyone who has ever worried whether his faith is good enough. We are forever trying to turn faith back into a work, to make it strong enough, sincere enough, steady enough, as though we were to be saved by the sheer quality of our looking. But a look has no quality to speak of; it is the barest, weakest thing a person can do. The man dying of snakebite did not have to look well, or look with great feeling, or look without once wavering; he had only to look, and even a dim and desperate glance toward the bronze snake was enough, because the healing was never in the looking but in the thing he looked at. And so it is with faith. A trembling, half-blind, barely-there look toward the One lifted up saves just as surely as the strongest gaze, because the power was never once in our looking. It was always, only, in Him.
The picture behind it reaches back to the wilderness. When Israel was dying of snakebite, God told Moses to set a snake of bronze upon a pole, and the promise was breathtakingly simple: When anyone who is bitten looks at it, he will live (Numbers 21:8). Not climb the pole, not touch it, not do anything at all; only look, and live. And the Lord Jesus took that very picture and said plainly that it was about Himself: Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life (John 3:14–15). The “me” that Isaiah says to turn to was lifted up on a cross, so that the dying ends of the earth might look to Him and live. The whole gospel is in the look: not what we do, but where we look, to the One lifted up for us.
And the God who invites the whole world to turn to Him and be delivered makes a solemn oath about how that whole world will one day respond. I solemnly make this oath … ‘Surely every knee will bow to me, every tongue will solemnly affirm’ (45:23). Every knee, in the end, will bow to the Lord. And the apostle Paul takes that very oath, the oath that every knee bows to the Lord, and applies it to the Lord Jesus, declaring that at His name every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that He is Lord (Philippians 2:10–11). Once again the honor that belongs to the Lord alone is laid upon the Lord Jesus, and we find ourselves standing on His deity. The One to whom every knee will bow is the One lifted up to be looked to, and the One in whom, as the chapter ends, all the descendants of Israel will be vindicated (45:25). Turn to Him now, in faith, and be delivered; or bow to Him at the last whether you will or no. But every knee will bow.
The God Who Carries vs. the Gods You Carry
Chapter 46 opens with a scene of humiliation, and it is the perfect culmination of everything these chapters have been saying about idols. Babylon is falling, and her great gods are being evacuated. Bel kneels down, Nebo bends low. … Your heavy images are burdensome to tired animals (46:1). Picture it: the proud gods of Babylon, who could not lift a finger to save their own city, now strapped onto the backs of pack animals and hauled off into captivity, dead weight, a burden so heavy that the poor beasts stagger under it. They are unable to rescue the images; they themselves head off into captivity (46:2). The gods that were supposed to carry their people end up being carried off, and cannot so much as save themselves.
And against that pathetic procession, God sets Himself, in one of the tenderest contrasts in all of Scripture. Listen to me, O family of Jacob … you who have been carried from birth, you who have been supported from the time you left the womb. Even when you are old, I will take care of you, even when you have gray hair, I will carry you. I made you and I will support you; I will carry you and rescue you (46:3–4). There is the whole difference between the false gods and the true one, set down in a single image. The idol is a god you carry (They put it on their shoulder and carry it, 46:7); the Lord is a God who carries you. Babylon’s gods are a burden upon the backs of tired animals; Israel’s God bears His people upon His own arm. And see how far the carrying reaches: from birth to gray hair, from the first day of life clear to the last gray hair of it. He carried you before you could do a single thing for yourself, and He will carry you again when you can do nothing for yourself at all.
This is not only a contrast between the Lord and the idols of Babylon; it is a contrast between two whole ways of being religious, and we feel it to this day. There is a religion that is a burden you carry: a load of rules and performances and anxious self-justification that you must heave along on your own back, a god you must keep propped upright by your own efforts, and who gives you nothing in return but ashes and weight. Every false religion, and every counterfeit version of the true one, works in just this way: it straps a god onto your shoulders and tells you to carry it. And then there is the gospel, which works the exact opposite way: a God who lifts you onto His shoulders and carries you. Luther knew the difference in his own bones, having nearly broken his back beneath a religion of carrying before he ever discovered the God who carries. The one question to ask of any faith is the simplest one: who is carrying whom?
And the sobering thing is how easily even those who have known the God who carries slip back, almost without noticing, into carrying again. We come to Christ empty-handed, looking and carried, and then, somewhere along the way, we quietly take the load back up onto our own shoulders. We begin measuring our standing with God by how well we are performing, how disciplined our devotions have been lately, how much we feel we have given Him this week. The god on our back returns, and the old ache returns with it. The gospel has to be heard again and again, and not merely once, precisely because we are such persistent self-loaders. Every time we find ourselves bent over once more beneath the weight of our own religion, the word of these chapters comes to straighten us back up: set it down; you were never meant to carry Him; He carries you.
And there is a particular comfort here for two kinds of people. For the very old (those who have come to gray hair, who can no longer do the things they once did for God or for anyone, and who fear they have become useless, a burden to be borne), here is the word for them: even when you have gray hair, I will carry you. You were never carrying Him; He was always carrying you, and He does not set His old ones down. And for the very weak (those who feel they have nothing whatever to offer, no strength, no usefulness, nothing to contribute), here is the same word: you do not need to be strong enough to carry your God, because your God is strong enough to carry you, and always has been, since before you ever drew breath. The whole of the Christian life, from the womb to the grave, turns out to be one long being-carried by the God who made us and will not put us down.
For My Sake Alone
The God who carries His people brings down the city that carried its idols. Chapter 47 is Babylon’s funeral song. The proud “Queen of kingdoms” (47:5), who said to herself, I am unique! No one can compare to me! (47:8, an arrogant counterfeit of God’s own words, I am God, and there is none like me, 46:9, stolen and worn like a borrowed crown), is brought down at last to sit in the dirt. Her stargazers, in whom she had placed all her trust, cannot rescue her from the disaster that overtakes her (47:13). The mightiest city in the world, the one that had swallowed God’s people whole, falls, because no power that sets itself against the living God stands forever. We have watched this before, with Babylon back in chapter 13, and the lesson is always the same: the proud are brought low.
But the most striking words come in chapter 48, and they are addressed not to Babylon but to God’s own stubborn people. God does not pretend that Israel has deserved her deliverance; He calls them stubborn, their neck muscles … like iron (48:4). And yet He saves them, and He tells them plainly why. Look, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have purified you in the furnace of misery. For my sake alone I will act (48:10–11). Two things shine out here. First, the exile was a furnace: not a wreckage but a refining. God did not throw His people away in Babylon; He purified them there, as a smith purifies his metal in the fire. And second, the reason He saves them is not their worth but His own name: for my sake alone. In the Hebrew He says it twice, “for my sake, for my sake,” lest they somehow miss it. We have met this before, and we never tire of it: God forgives and saves for His own sake, by sheer grace, and not because we have managed to earn it.
It is worth lingering on that image of the furnace, for so much depends on how we read our afflictions. A fire can destroy, or a fire can refine, and the two can look very much alike from inside the flames. The whole difference lies in the hand that lit it and the purpose behind it. When a refiner puts silver into the fire, he is not trying to ruin it; he is burning away the dross so that the pure metal may come out brighter than it went in, and he watches it the entire time, and draws it out the very moment it is ready. God says the exile was that kind of fire. He was not discarding His people in Babylon; He was purifying them there, burning off the idolatry and the easy self-reliance that comfort had let grow up in them, refining a stubborn people into a humbler one. This does not make affliction pleasant, and Scripture never once pretends it does. But it means that for the people of God, even the furnace is not waste. The fire that feels like ruin may be, in the hand of the Refiner, the very making of us.
And there is a sigh in the middle of it, one of the most poignant lines God ever speaks. If only you had obeyed my commandments, prosperity would have flowed to you like a river (48:18). It is the grief of God over a people who chose the hard road when He had held out to them a river of blessing: the lament of a Father who watched His children forfeit, by their own stubbornness, the very rest He longed to give them. And yet even over such a people the gospel sounds its summons: Leave Babylon! Flee from the Babylonians! (48:20). The exile is ending; Cyrus is at the gate; the prison door stands open; come out. It is the same call the Lord would sound near the very end of the Bible, over a far greater Babylon: Come out of her, my people (Revelation 18:4). The God who refined them in the furnace now flings the door wide and calls them home.
That picture lingers: prosperity would have flowed to you like a river. The Hebrew word is shalom, full peace and well-being. A river is not a pond that may dry up in a drought; it is fed from the hills, flowing, deep, unfailing, going on and on. That is the kind of peace God had longed to give His people, and that their stubbornness had cost them: not a thin trickle of calm between troubles, but a steady, deep, ever-flowing peace. And the grief in God’s voice is real; He is not indifferent to what their sin threw away. Yet the wonder of it is that the offer is not, in the end, withdrawn. The river of peace that Israel forfeited is held out once more, before the book is done, to all who will come. For the Servant we are about to meet would be wounded precisely to purchase it, and the peace that He won flows like a river still, to everyone who will at last stop their striving and simply receive it.
And so we end where we began, with Cyrus, but able now to see him for what he was. Cyrus was God’s anointed, raised up to break open the prison of Babylon and set the captives free, to say of a ruined Jerusalem, She will be rebuilt. But Cyrus, for all his greatness, could only free bodies from an earthly captivity; he could do nothing about the deeper bondage, the iron neck of the stubborn heart, the sin that had sent the people to Babylon in the first place. Cyrus was a shadow, and the substance was still to come. There was a greater Anointed One on the way: the true Messiah, the Lord Jesus, the Christ, whose very title means the Anointed, who would be raised up not to conquer an earthly Babylon, but to break open the prison of sin and death itself, and to say to ruined sinners, you too will be rebuilt. Cyrus freed one nation from one city. The true Anointed has redeemed the whole world, and His voice will open every grave.
Gathering the Threads
Look back over these chapters and see the God they reveal. He is the God who announces the end from the beginning, naming a deliverer more than a century before his birth, so that we may know He alone is God and the idols are nothing at all. He is the God who keeps hidden, working out His salvation behind the masks of ordinary history, through a pagan king who never once knew he was being used. He is the God who flings open His arms to all the ends of the earth and says, with heartbreaking simplicity, turn to me so you can be delivered. He is the God before whom every knee will finally bow, and that God, Paul tells us, is the Lord Jesus. And above all, in this stretch of the book, He is the God who carries: not a dead weight strapped to our aching backs, but a living God who bears us upon His own arm from birth to gray hair and home.
And every thread runs to the same place. The anointed Cyrus, who could only free bodies from Babylon, points clean past himself to the true Anointed, who frees souls from sin and death. The turning that saves is a look to the One lifted up upon a cross for us. The knee that bows, bows to the Lord Jesus. And the God who carries His people all their days carried our sins to the tree, and carries us still. So the word of these chapters to every weary, exiled, stubborn one of us is finally very simple. Stop trying to carry a god who only weighs you down. Turn to the One who was lifted up, and be delivered. And then let yourself be carried, for that is what He has been doing all along, since before you were born, and what He will keep doing, to the last gray hair, all the way home.
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.
God names Cyrus, by name, more than a century before his birth, and appoints him as shepherd and calls him His chosen one, His anointed (44:28; 45:1). Why does God make such a point of naming him so far in advance? How is fulfilled prophecy God’s “signature,” proving He alone is God against the silent idols?
The prophet exclaims, you are a God who keeps hidden (45:15), and God works His salvation through a pagan king who does not submit to Him (45:4). What does it mean that God works behind “masks,” through ordinary people and events that do not know they serve Him? How does this call for patience, and how is it a comfort when we cannot trace His hand?
The invitation is flung to all you who live in the earth’s remote regions, and the command is simply turn to me (45:22). Why does it matter that we are told to turn and face Him rather than to work or to climb? How does the bronze snake (Numbers 21:8–9), which the Lord Jesus applied to His own lifting up (John 3:14), show that faith is a look and not a work, and that even our turning is His gift?
God swears, Surely every knee will bow to me (45:23), and Paul says this very thing of the Lord Jesus (Philippians 2:10–11). How does this testify to the deity of Christ? What is the difference between bowing to Him now in faith and bowing to Him at the last whether we will or no?
Babylon’s idols must be carried off on tired animals (46:1–2), but God says, even when you have gray hair, I will carry you (46:3–4). What is the difference between a religion that is a god you carry and the gospel of a God who carries you? What comfort is there in this for the very old and the very weak?
God calls the exile a furnace of misery and says, For my sake alone I will act (48:10–11). How is it a comfort that affliction can be a refining furnace rather than destruction? Why does it matter that God saves for His own sake and not because we deserve it?
Looking Ahead
Back in our seventeenth session we deliberately stepped over a short passage at the opening of chapter 42, promising to return to it, and now we do, for it is the first of the four great Servant Songs, and these songs are very near the heart of why a Lutheran loves the book of Isaiah. In the next session we take up that first song, where God draws back the curtain on a figure called simply His Servant. Here is my servant whom I support, my chosen one in whom I take pleasure. I have placed my Spirit on him; he will make just decrees for the nations (42:1). Those are very nearly the words the Father would one day speak from heaven over the Lord Jesus at His baptism. We will meet a Servant who brings justice to the nations, and yet does it so gently that a crushed reed he will not break, a dim wick he will not extinguish (42:3); a Servant given as a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, to release prisoners from dungeons (42:6–7). The deliverer of these chapters was a pagan king who freed bodies from Babylon; the Servant of the next is the One who came to free the world.
Before the next session, read Isaiah 42:1–9 slowly; it is the first of the four Servant Songs, the passage we set aside earlier. Hear the Father’s pleasure in His Servant (42:1, the words echoed over the Lord Jesus at His baptism); find the gentleness that will not break a crushed reed nor extinguish a dim wick (42:3); and see the Servant given as a light to the nations, to open blind eyes and to release the prisoners from the dungeons (42:6–7).
Closing Prayer
O Lord our God, who announces the end from the beginning and holds the hearts of kings in Your hand, we worship You as the only God, beside whom there is no other. We thank You that nothing in all our history runs loose of Your governing hand: that even in the events we cannot understand, and the long seasons when You seem most hidden, You are working out the salvation of Your people behind the masks of an ordinary world.
We bless You for the simplest and the widest of all invitations, “Turn to me so you can be delivered,” and for Your Son, lifted up upon a cross, that the dying ends of the earth might look to Him and live. Turn us to Yourself by Your word. Teach us to stop carrying gods that only weigh us down, and to let ourselves be carried by You, who have borne us from birth and will bear us to the last gray hair. And as every knee shall one day bow to Him, let ours bow gladly now, in faith and not in dread; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Anointed One, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.